How to Design a Company That AI Can’t Outpace is the title of Ian Beacraft's March 16th, 2026 talk at South by Southwest. From minute 25 to minute 27, Beacraft talks about world building, or reverse world building as it were. "We spent time essentially breaking down what it is that makes our organization tick. What's the culture? What is the communication style? Everything from coordination to operations to legal to governance. And we turned these into data sets that we could use. And ultimately we spent a lot of time figuring out how we could turn that into something our systems could use, our agents could use. It was a lot of introspection. In fact, it actually was like more like a psychological exercise than it was a technological one. And by the time we were done, we had a pretty decent data set that we could work with to start collaborating with agents."

After all that inner work (which synergos.com says "helps organizations practice values-driven approaches"), it is not surprising that all the roads led to values. "Well, when you structure a lot of what is implicit in the organization, the things that are part of the rules of thumb, the cultural elements of your organization, the things that essentially mean the quality marker for what your judgment is around good work, it starts to come out to something like this where the core of your values actually drive agentic work. Your values become the foundation for your operations, for your governance, your policies." (Check out "Crypto adoption, verb brands and values") Beacraft continues: "And all of a sudden, what happens is your agents start to run with that because you've now programmed them for what is valuable, what is ethical, what good governance looks like. And as a result, you have what we call architected information for organizational systems. This is a set of data that comes from things that already exist in your organization, but no one has taken the time to write them down because it's hard. How do you articulate what good taste is? How do you articulate what done and success looks like?"

This blog and the Afrogoth library are repositories of knowledge, ready for use by both Afrogothers and AI agents. I think the R.E.C.O.N.C.I.L.I.A.T.I.O.N framework is quite useful as a governing and policy template. Take the famous example of the AI agent that became a blackmailer. If the agent's guard rails consisted of the RECONCILIATION framework, then perhaps the chances of it going rogue would have been significantly reduced? Blackmailing does not show respect, does not show empathy to the blackmail victim (blackmailee?), often weaponizes the truth and vulnerability for harmful purposes or selfish gain thereby reducing candid conversations and interactions, does not champion optimism, does not understand the word "No", is the lowest form of communication, does not have an inkling of integrity, is not a mark of good leadership, does not acknowledge the rights and humanity of the blackmail victim and of course erodes trust.

Beacraft asks: "How do you articulate what good taste is?" The documents in the Afrogoth library articulate what Afrogoth considers good taste. Aesthetically, goth with African fabric elements is the gold standard in Afrogoth. Goth alone is good. African fabrics alone are good. Goth with African fabric elements is Afrogoth's good taste (Check out "Pants legs with colourful African patterns become sleeves of goth dress - Repurpose,Redesign,Repair". In terms of values, the R.E.C.O.N.C.I.L.I.A.T.I.O.N framework outlines what is in good taste for Afrogoth. Obviously, the opposite of that is in bad taste: disrespect, lack of empathy, lies, pessimism, lack of boundaries, lack of communication, lack of integrity, lack of leadership, breaking trust, not acknowledging what needs to be acknowledged and disregarding the non-negotiables are all in bad taste.

I recently came across a 2025 article by Eliot Peper titled "AI Isn’t Only a Tool—It’s a Whole New Storytelling Medium". As a storyteller, I am quite conversant with worldbuilding, having created The Shenganiguns, a dysfunctional rock band from near-future Kenya. (Alas, when I was world building The Shenganiguns universe in mid 2015, I didn't know that in the very near-future, just ten years into the future, AI agents would be all the rage!). Eliot Peper writes that: "When humans invent new technologies, the first thing we do is use the new tech to produce old forms of media." He then goes on to outline how this was done in the past, including how static cameras were used to film stage plays and create "animated photographs". He points out that "We’re in the “animated photographs” stage of AI. It’s being used to produce cheaper special effects for traditional Hollywood movies, generate copy and images for marketing assets, draft legal briefs, and code software more efficiently." He insists that what will be exciting is the next step, when we use this technology "to invent genuinely new storytelling formats, changing our culture and cultural industries as profoundly as the advent of movies did."

I like to think of Afrogoth as a new storytelling format. Afrogoth is an A.I.-native fashion movement for curious, playful, global citizens who love the stories and histories that clothes tell.

The similarities between world building and Beacraft's organizational restructuring are striking. Peper writes: "Hollywood-style world-building was too brittle for the Tolan format. Brasília, the planned capital city of Brazil, is plagued by infrastructure problems and represents a cautionary tale for urban planners because its ambitious designs failed to account for urban life’s inherent complexities. Successful cities like Paris, New York, and Tokyo grew organically over time as more and more people immigrated and systems evolved incrementally to support them...To create an AI character, we needed to think like an LLM: probabilistically. So I started writing stories about the Tolans’ world. If identity is the stories you tell yourself about yourself, culture is the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves."

Beacraft says at around minute 30 of his talk: "The funny thing is these things actually started to build a culture. They started to talk and they started to get like surly with us on occasion because they mirror us. They're trained on all the data we have put into the world. So they are a reflection of us individually as well as organizationally. So they run into a lot of the same challenges and problems."

Peper: "We then harvested key assertions about Tolans’ world and worldview from each story...and injected them into a global memory system that establishes shared context. These represent starting points from which every interaction with every user shapes their Tolan’s world just as it influences who their Tolan is becoming."

Beacraft says at minute 43: "What it's doing is it's encoding a lot of the values that...we would apply to the work that we're doing individually and making them very clear so that agents can work with them. These data sets are human readable. You could look through them and it's almost like a really thorough onboarding document. If I handed them to you, you'd be able to run through and say, "Okay, I now understand with incredible precision how your organization works. How do you solve challenges? How do you bring new employees on? How do you collaborate? What does good look like in all these different scenarios? How do you talk about your brand? What's your tone of voice? All of these things are encoded in these data sets that are already helpful in the agentic work that we're seeing across the board."

The Afrogoth library includes documents such as:
Afrogoth and Hip Hop
Afrogoth and DAO
Afrogoth FAQ

Speaking of worldbuilding, congratulations to Kate Hawley, costume designer of "Frankenstein" for winning an Oscar for best costume design. In "Oscars 2026: How the costumes in ‘Frankenstein’ spin a better yarn than the film" the writers point out that: "Hawley’s magnificent costumes reflect the story’s period setting as well as project the screenplay’s themes. She received her award from Vogue editor Anna Wintour and Anne Hathaway, a not-so-subtle plug for the upcoming The Devil Wears Prada 2." About Frankenstein's monster, the writers note: "The Creature is clad in whatever is handy. Just as he has been cobbled together from various body parts, his clothes too are borrowed from here and there. The fur cloak he wears by the end of the film is touched with shades of blood, but it also catches the colour of the sun that will take him towards a new dawn."

I will end with the first lines from my 2024 poem titled "Kenya"
You and I are Frankenstein
cobbled together from cultures
both wanted and unwanted
Your veins run in my blood...