Substrate Dynamics Lab

The Substrate Dynamics Lab studies the collective dynamics that emerge when populations of humans and AI agents share a knowledge substrate. As they repeatedly read from and write back to the same medium, their traces shape what others encounter and act on next, enabling stigmergic coordination. The Lab develops theory and instruments to make these dynamics legible and uses multi-agent simulations to test whether and how interventions in the substrate itself can shape collective behaviour and sustain healthy information ecologies: plural, adaptive, and resistant to collapse into monoculture or misalignment.

Biography

Julian Fleck is an AI systems designer and researcher working on epistemic infrastructure and its implications for collective intelligence. His work explores how shared knowledge environments shape coordination between humans and AI, and how such environments can preserve provenance, a plurality of perspectives, and human agency as they become more interconnected. He leads the Substrate Dynamics Lab and is developing membranes.network, a protocol for selective, attributable context exchange between locally governed systems through federated, dynamic membranes.