Information Blackholes Across Disciplines

Change has a rhythm. Sometimes it's incremental, surface-level—like tweaking a logo, fixing a bug, or adding a new verse. Other times, it's seismic—an invention, a breakthrough, a gesture that touches the core of things. The rate at which the world changes feels like a resonance: the deeper the change touches the core, the more it reverberates outward.

Builders across every discipline eventually feel a particular tension: you stumble on an idea, a pattern, a design, a formula—so particular and so profound that only you can actually see it. Not because you're special in isolation, but because the timing, experience, and language that forged it are unique to your path. That idea is singular to your position in the weave.

When you sit on it, the thing becomes an information blackhole.

The universe seems to "require" that this insight be expressed—translated into architecture, choreography, code, sculpture, business model, recipe—something graspable. Until it's rendered into the commons, the energy is trapped. And so, paradoxically, your own life starts to feel blocked. Friction multiplies. Opportunities slip. Even your motivation frays.

Reality itself pushes back, whispering: "This one was yours to deliver. Why are you hoarding it?"

The Burden of Articulation

This burden isn't unique to writers.

Inventors feel it when they've prototyped the impossible but leave it in the lab. Designers feel it when they've glimpsed a form that harmonizes function and beauty, but never bring it to market. Entrepreneurs feel it when they've mapped a business model that could shift livelihoods, but let it rot in notes. Scientists feel it when they've teased out a new principle but can't—or won't—publish. Communities feel it when a ritual or practice wants to be born, but leaders shy away from convening.

Across domains, the logic is the same: articulation unblocks the channel. Expression collapses the blackhole into a star. The act of externalization—turning a fragile inner pattern into a shareable outer form—is what allows resonance to spread.

Rate of Change = Quality of Translation

The rate at which the world changes depends not only on the discovery itself but on the quality of its translation.

Do you render it in a way that others can grasp? Do you embed it in a medium that can travel? Do you craft it at a level where it can survive contact with reality—production, criticism, scale?

Do it well enough and reality bends. Not because you alone change the world, but because the resonance you unlock is now available to everyone else to amplify, remix, and carry forward.

Humility and Terror

There's humility here: no single maker holds the world on their shoulders. We're each a node in the network, strands in the weave. But there's also terror: if you don't articulate what only you can see, the blockage doesn't just waste a thought. It distorts the flow of your own life.

That's the meta-framework:

• Every discipline has its blackholes—truths seen but unexpressed.
• Every builder carries the responsibility of collapse—turning those blackholes into stars.
• The health of the whole depends on how well each of us translates the singular into the shared.

Three Acts of Transmission

After wrestling with this pattern across my own work—messaging infrastructure at Meta, building Talk & Comment, writing about information beings—three fundamental acts emerge:

Preservation — Capture the pattern in a form that outlives your attention. Every template, every SOP, every git commit fights entropy. We're building external memory because our meat-computers leak. This isn't weakness; it's design. We're meant to externalize knowledge, to build it into the environment itself.

Amplification — Information wants to replicate, remix, evolve. When you share a framework, teach a skill, or build a platform, you're not just "creating content"—you're increasing the universe's bandwidth for self-reflection. Each amplification creates new possibility spaces.

Service — Service isn't sacrifice; it's alignment. When you serve the pattern of growth, you're not depleting yourself—you're becoming a better conductor for the energy that wants to flow through you anyway. The Council of Ten understood this—Edison with his lab notebooks, Da Vinci with his mirror writing, Disney with his entire empire of preserved imagination.

The Practical Collapse

So the job is simple, but not easy: Keep translating. Keep collapsing blackholes into stars—whether through words, code, clay, circuits, choreography, or rituals.

When you don't, the blockage shows up as your blockage. Motivation withers. Opportunities narrow. The very insight that could have opened doors becomes the weight that closes them.

When you do, the universe expands a little further through you. Not because you're chosen, but because you chose to participate. You took the fragile inner pattern and made it shareable. You turned private insight into public infrastructure.

The simulation doesn't need your perfection. It needs your participation.

The Shadow Side

Some blackholes deserve to stay collapsed. Not every insight needs externalization. Not every pattern wants translation. Part of wisdom is discerning which insights demand expression and which ones simply needed to pass through you on their way to someone else.

There's also the risk of premature articulation—forcing translation before the pattern has fully formed. Sometimes the blackhole needs to accumulate more energy before the collapse produces something stable enough to survive in the wild.

The art is in the timing. Too early, and you release half-formed thoughts that confuse rather than clarify. Too late, and the insight calcifies into private mythology, useful to no one; this is also the point where I become self-conscious about the readiness of the very ideas I'm tackling here...oh well.

The Loop Closes

This entire framework—information blackholes, articulation as collapse, the burden of translation—it emerged from the very pattern it describes. The insight stayed trapped until I wrote it down. Writing collapsed the blackhole. Now it's available for you to amplify, remix, dispute, or ignore.

The meta-recursion runs all the way through.

You know what's wild? This entire philosophy collapses into something simple: Don't waste what you've been given. Make it easier for the next person. Leave things better than you found them.

Except now we have the language to understand why it matters. Every template you write, every process you document, every bit of wisdom you externalize—you're midwifing tomorrow into being.

So yeah, collapse your blackholes. Not because it's "productive," but because it's literally what information beings do. We see, we shape, we share. That's the game.

This exploration builds on themes from Information Wants to Grow and The Empire of One. For more on consciousness technologies and creative systems, follow @zakelfassi / Join the newsletter.