If energy, compute, and atoms are the material pillars of abundance, coordination is the pillar that decides what we do with them. Without legitimate institutions, open protocols, and verifiable identity, cheap electrons and trained models turn into centralized rents. Coordination abundance asks whether the governance layer can scale at the same pace as the underlying capacity.
Why coordination is the bottleneck
Historically, technological capacity has outrun our ability to agree on how to use it. Nuclear power, the internet, and ML systems each demonstrate the pattern: the scientific problem is solved decades before the governance problem is. If the Age of Abundance is shipped without coordination, it arrives as unequal concentration rather than shared flourishing.
Open protocols as public infrastructure
Open, credibly neutral protocols — for identity, payments, attestation, and composable services — function as the public infrastructure layer of coordination abundance. They lower the cost of cooperation across trust boundaries and reduce dependency on any single provider. They are to the 2020s what standardized shipping containers were to the 1960s: a boring-sounding primitive that quietly reshapes what is possible.
Legitimacy and participation
Coordination abundance is not primarily a technical problem. It is a legitimacy problem: who decides, on what evidence, with what recourse. Mechanisms such as citizens' assemblies, participatory budgeting, and verifiable public deliberation are early experiments in closing that gap. The wiki treats them as peer technologies to solar cells and transformer models, not as soft add-ons.