Case study
Shards as Paradigms For Analysis
Shards are analytic constructs developed by The Atoll Society for speculative planning and participatory worldbuilding.
A Shard is a deliberately constructed way of seeing: a stable, partial intelligence that makes a set of worldview assumptions explicit, consistent, and usable. By formalizing what a perspective attends to — and what it systematically ignores — Shards enable human-AI collaborators to instantiate coherent modes of reasoning, stress-test assumptions, and generate new ideas across historical, contemporary, and fictional frames.
A Shard is not a fragment of truth, but a structured way of seeing — a deliberately constrained perspective that specifies in advance what counts as evidence, what variables matter, what success looks like, and what is systematically deprioritized. In other words, a Shard answers the question every observer must answer implicitly: what am I paying attention to, and why?
A Shard is a way of reasoning from inside a worldview rather than arguing about it from the outside. Most public ideas — op-eds, essays, expert commentary — are constrained by the author’s own mixed assumptions, reputational incentives, and need for persuasion. Shards remove those constraints by treating a set of assumptions as provisionally true, allowing a perspective to be inhabited fully — much as an author inhabits a fictional character to see what they would do. Unlike “pure” fiction, however, Shards are designed for analysis AND storytelling: they expose a worldview’s internal logic, blind spots, and downstream consequences, revealing not just what an idea argues, but what it actually produces when taken seriously.
The scenario shards
We deploy this cognitive technology across three domains.
First, Scenario Shards emerge from our narrative universe, a scenario that unfolds a specific set of worldbuilding rules and human choices. This scenario is filled with archetypal human characters, including some borrowed from Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 book It Can’t Happen Here.
Scenario Shards emerge from deep character backstories, including histories, biases, values, and specific intellectual frameworks. They are maintained by human teams working with multi-agent AI systems. Some of these Shards publicly comment on Substack
Dom Caldwell (Dom's World)
An enlightened technologist and capitalist, Dom operates on the level of the paradigm itself. He tracks the health of "trust substrates" and the "coordination games" that hold civilization together.
Karthik Subasri
A strategic realist who analyzes institutions under adversarial pressure and failure conditions. A hard-nosed realist with an operational sensibility from security and spywork, Karthik operates as an amateur historian of fascism. Born in 1984 and "warning about it ever since," he tracks "enforcement probability" and supply chains.
Sarah Calloway Mendoza
Sarah anchors the view from "the American Dream." She represents the grounded, pragmatic voice of families navigating a world in flux, cutting through the noise to ask: how does this actually affect us?
Second, we develop Historical Shards for analysis.
We live in a moment where the “official future” has collapsed — undermined by AI-driven acceleration, resurgent authoritarianism, and planetary-scale constraints — yet none of us has lived through a transition like this before.
Historical Shards are built to address that gap. Developed over time in collaboration with multi-agent AI systems, they represent our interpretation of how historical figures might reason and work with us today, not as authorities to be obeyed, but as coherent epistemic standpoints brought forward into the present.
These Historical Shards operate alongside our Scenario Shards to prototype futures. By constructing Shards with explicit epistemologies and hardline assumptions, we can inhabit potential futures before they arrive, examining how different ways of knowing, valuing, and deciding shape what those futures actually produce.
Third, Shards power our Gaming Salons.
Rather than relying on dice, boards, or cards, Shards form the Game Engine itself—enabling rapid worldbuilding and structured play within complex political, economic, and social scenarios.
In State of Exception, for example, the Game Engine integrates Historical Shards representing distinct domains—Capital (the Fugger Shard), Enforcement (the Vyshinsky Shard), and Coordination (the Havel Shard)—and places them in interaction with Scenario Shards such as Buzz Windrip, a talented populist that other Shards must operate around.
These Shards do not negotiate. They calculate. When a player makes a move, the Game Engine processes that input through multiple, conflicting selection criteria. The result is not a single outcome, but an updated world: a new configuration of incentives, constraints, and downstream consequences generated by the internal logic of the Shards themselves.