What Exactly is Sudo-Intellectual?
Building the Bridge Between Pseudo-Utopia and Sudo-Reality by Catching Falling and Bringing Them Back to Life
As I’ve been presenting Sudo-intellectual to some colleagues and potential collaborators, a common constructive criticism I’ve received is that I’m describing it overly cryptically. I thought about it for a little and realized they are absolutely correct, so today I wanted to provide a selection of explanation of what the sudo-intellectual process is and how you might relate to it, starting with the pseudo-sudo wordplay.
Explaining the Pseudo-Sudo Joke
This blog relies heavily on the word play between "pseudo" and "sudo" throughout the framework we creates. This provides multiple layers of meaning on which we base the conceptual framework. Let me give you the definitions and then I’ll explain what the pseudo-sudo divide means for us here at Sudo-intellectual.
"Pseudo" comes from Greek, meaning "false" or "pretend," and is commonly used in academic contexts to indicate something that approximates or simulates the genuine article without fully being it. For example, pseudo-science resembles science, but fails to follow proper scientific methodology.
"Sudo" is a command in Unix/Linux operating systems (short for "superuser do") that temporarily grants administrative privileges to execute commands that would otherwise be restricted. It provides authorized, limited, targeted access to system functions.
The joke of pairing these terms is how they capture the essence of this problem-solving approach: "pseudo" elements fuel the outside-the-box, unrestrained thinking and exploration of ideas that may or may not work in the real world while "sudo" elements the process heavy steps for making new ideas into practical and authorized interventions that are highly like to create actual, beneficial change within existing systems.
The pairing creates a deliberate contrast:
"Pseudo" elements (scholarship, espionage, activism, command) represent the theoretical, aspirational side that exists somewhat outside conventional frameworks—the idealistic vision.
"Sudo" elements (apprenticeship, intelligence, collaborators, control) represent the practical implementation—the concrete actions that create actual change within existing systems.
This wordplay communicates the framework's essence: utilizing temporary, authorized access to existing systems (sudo) to implement changes inspired by unconventional thinking (pseudo) that wouldn't be possible through traditional channels alone. It also creates what the physicists call a superposition, or two contradictory aspects of an unobserved phenomena being true at the same time, like Schrodinger’s Cat being both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box.
For sudo-Intellectual, whether what we produce is idealistic and, frankly dumb, fantasy thinking or highly thought out and actionable societal emergency planning won’t be clear until you read through what we write as an observer. We hope you like what you find enough to join us as being one of the cats.
One Short Sentence
Sudo-intellectual collaborates across fields to solve complex problems by combining playful ideation with serious implementation, using nudges or root cause solutions.
One Tweet
Sudo-intellectual is a process of making idealistic societal systems a reality by playfully generating and practically refining fantastical solutions to societal dysfunction that either nudge toward improvement through their development or prime society to implement them securely if radical action is ever necessary.
One Pararagaph
Sudo-intellectuals playfully generate and refine solutions to societal dysfunction, either nudging improvement through their development or preparing society to implement them when necessary. They create a sandbox for open-ended ideation, exploring what societal systems could become without artificial constraints. They imagine the ideal mix of people, technology, organizations, and institutions needed for an optimal solution and then work backward to identify what must change today to make it feasible. They network with professionals in relevant fields, share ideas for feedback, and build relationships with potential implementers. Sudo-intellectuals succeed when they either inspire professionals to adopt their ideas and create improvements or gain enough trust from stakeholders to implement the solution themselves in collaboration with stakeholders.
In One Page
Sudo-intellectual is a balanced approach to problem-solving that combines abstract theoretical thinking with concrete pragmatic action. This methodology oscillates between intuitive and analytical thinking, allowing practitioners to effectively navigate between different cognitive modes as needed. By metaphorically "catching falling stars," sudo-intellectuals attempt to harness idealistic energy for practical good, despite the challenges involved.
The process begins with imagining a "pseudo-utopia" - an idealized vision that addresses societal dysfunction. This vision is then grounded through expert connections to design a "sudo-reality" that makes tangible progress toward the idealized state. This forms the "sudo-solution cycle" of imagining, developing, testing, sustaining, and executing potential solutions.
Pseudo-scholarship - Sudo-apprenticeship: The journey starts with learning outside traditional institutions through various media that define the contours of the pseudo-utopia. This learning connects to a sudo-apprenticeship - a work role or side project outside traditional scope but valuable for creating sudo-reality when stakeholders are prepared. This traditional role anchors the sudo-intellectual to reality and provides a testing ground for ideas at small scale.
Pseudo-espionage - Sudo-intelligence: While pseudo-scholarship is general, pseudo-espionage involves targeted information gathering directly relevant to a specific solution. This overt, consensual process resembles networking and consultation. Sudo-intelligence generation occurs when this information is organized under relevant questions to determine solution design and implementation, creating insights that are both inspired by pseudo-utopia and grounded in expert opinion.
Pseudo-conspirators - Sudo-collaborators: The intelligence-gathering process naturally identifies pseudo-conspirators (aligned but unofficial allies) and recruits sudo-collaborators (highly aligned individuals strategically positioned to shepherd solutions into reality). Effective sudo-intelligence makes potential collaborators eager to join because the vision aligns with their own mission and the nudges and solutions we propose are often the very ideas they’ve though of periodically in their own work.
Pseudo-activism - Sudo-sustainment: In this phase, solutions are presented to diverse stakeholders across organizational boundaries to gauge interest, acceptance, support, and willingness to sustain action. This approach relies on the merits of the idea rather than forceful advocacy, presenting implementable concepts with broad benefits for a win-win-win-win situation. This process conveys the solution clearly and openly enough that stakeholders may well feel nudged to just apply it themselves. This is a preferred outcome for Sudo-Intellectual
Pseudo-command - Sudo-control: If direct implementation ever becomes necessary, pseudo-command identifies responsible parties for implementing it from Sudo-intellectual and through stakeholder analysis and common consent. Sudo-control represents authorized, temporary, targeted, and transparent intervention to implement changes that wouldn't otherwise be possible, analogous to the sudo process in Linux.
The culmination of this methodology is transforming idealistic visions into practical reality. While the approach may sometimes seem quixotic, the potential to create meaningful change through collaborative effort remains powerful. The sudo-intellectual project exists in a superposition between "chasing windmills" and "slaying giants," with the outcome determined by trust and collaboration among stakeholders. We hope you’ll join us and imagine what we can do together bringing those stars back to life.
In An Essay
The Sudo-Intellectual Approach: Building the Bridge Between Pseudo-Utopia Sudo-Reality
Catching Fallen Stars
In the night sky of human innovation, ideas streak across the darkness like brilliant, fleeting, and often unreachable meteors. Most observers simply wish upon these stars from afar, content to marvel at their beauty before they fade from view. The sudo-intellectual, however, takes a different approach. They attempt to catch these falling stars, to harness their energy despite the risk of being burned in the process. This encapsulates the essence of the sudo-intellectual mode of exploration as a methodology that is simultaneously highly abstract and theoretical yet fiercely concrete and pragmatic in catching and harnessing the falling stars and unlocking the societal wishes contained within.
A sudo-intellectual maintains this delicate balance by oscillating between cognitive modes: right-brain intuitive and holistic thinking, left-brain logical and analytical reasoning, System 2 slow and effortful deliberation, and System 1 fast and automatic processing. This cognitive flexibility enables us to pivot between modes as circumstances require, creating a dynamic intellectual framework that can adapt to complex challenges that defy conventional approaches.
The Sudo-Solution Cycle
The sudo-solution cycle represents a structured approach to transformative change that bridges theoretical concepts and practical implementation. This framework enables sudo-intellectuals to move from abstract ideals to concrete improvements through five distinct phases:
The imagination phase begins by identifying societal dysfunctions and envisioning alternative futures. In this phase, the sudo-intellectual conceptualizes a pseudo-utopia—an idealized vision of a world free from specific dysfunctions—that serves as an aspirational target rather than an immediately achievable goal.
The development phase translates these visionary concepts into concrete proposals through pseudo-scholarship and sudo-intelligence gathering. This involves learning outside traditional academic frameworks and synthesizing this knowledge into actionable insights that can guide implementation efforts.
The testing phase evaluates proposed solutions in limited contexts through sudo-apprenticeship roles. These controlled experiments provide empirical evidence about the effectiveness of proposed approaches and identify necessary refinements before broader implementation.
The sustainment phase builds essential support among stakeholders through pseudo-activism and the recruitment of sudo-collaborators. This network-building activity creates the coalition necessary for successful implementation across organizational boundaries.
The execution phase implements changes either through stakeholder adoption or through direct intervention via pseudo-command and sudo-control mechanisms. This implementation includes continuous feedback loops that allow for adaptation and refinement of the approach over time.
The Traditional OODA Loop Framework
The OODA loop, developed by military strategist John Boyd, provides a comprehensive model of effective decision-making that applies across diverse organizational contexts. This cyclical framework consists of four interconnected elements:
Observe: This initial phase involves collecting data and intelligence from various sources to develop situational awareness. Organizations gather information by monitoring their environment, collecting feedback, and identifying relevant facts about current conditions and emerging trends.
Orient: In this analytical phase, decision-makers process and interpret collected information through the lens of their cultural traditions, previous experiences, and existing knowledge. This cognitive process shapes how information is understood and determines which potential actions are considered viable options.
Decide: Based on the oriented understanding of the situation, this phase involves selecting the most appropriate response from available options. This requires evaluating alternatives against objectives, constraints, and potential consequences to determine the optimal course of action.
Act: The final phase involves executing the chosen course of action in the real world. This implementation tests the validity of the preceding observations, orientations, and decisions while potentially generating new information that restarts the cycle, creating a continuous learning loop.
Integration of the Sudo-Solution Cycle and the OODA Loop
The sudo-solution cycle and OODA loop interact synergistically, creating powerful opportunities for organizational transformation when properly aligned. Understanding these intersection points enables sudo-intellectuals to introduce innovative concepts at optimal moments in organizational decision processes:
During the Observe phase, the sudo-intellectual's imagination phase enriches organizational awareness by introducing alternative perspectives on what information is valuable. By sharing insights from pseudo-scholarship, sudo-intellectuals help organizations expand their information-gathering beyond established channels, identifying emerging trends and weak signals that traditional monitoring might miss. This improves input data quality and diversity, enabling more robust decision-making.
In the Orient phase, the development work of sudo-intellectuals provides organizations with new analytical frameworks derived from sudo-intelligence. By introducing these frameworks as optional tools rather than mandates, sudo-intellectuals help decision-makers voluntarily expand their interpretive capabilities, developing more nuanced understandings of complex situations while respecting existing knowledge structures.
During the Decide phase, the testing activities conducted by sudo-intellectuals generate concrete evidence from small-scale experiments that organizations can incorporate into their evaluation processes. This empirical data reduces perceived risk and uncertainty, enabling organizations to confidently select more innovative solutions through their established decision mechanisms.
In the Act phase, the sustainment work of sudo-intellectuals builds networks of sudo-collaborators across organizational boundaries who can support implementation through their own authority and influence. This distributed approach to change management reduces dependence on external coordination and builds internal capacity for executing complex, multi-stakeholder initiatives.
Through this systematic integration, sudo-intellectuals create conditions where transformative change can emerge organically from within existing organizational structures rather than being imposed from outside. This approach respects organizational autonomy while introducing novel perspectives that expand the range of possibilities considered viable, ultimately building organizational capacity for self-directed innovation and adaptation.
Pseudo-Scholarship and Sudo-Apprenticeship
Once a sudo-reality candidate for implementation is defined, the process of creating it begins with pseudo-scholarship,or learning that occurs outside traditional academic and institutional frameworks. This may take various forms: books, music, podcasts, tutorials, lectures, films, fiction, poetry, or any other medium that helps define the contours of the pseudo-utopia being pursued. This broad-based learning provides the foundational knowledge required to envision alternatives to existing systems.
Pseudo-scholarship is typically paired with sudo-apprenticeship, an internship, work role, or side project that exists outside traditional professional boundaries while being connected enough to it to stay grounded. This practical engagement anchors the sudo-intellectual to existing reality, providing a context for testing ideas at manageable scales before wider implementation. The traditional role serves as both grounding and laboratory, preventing purely theoretical constructs from becoming disconnected from practical realities and providing a space with traditional organizations for introducing new ideas where they are isolated from critical processes and systems.
Pseudo-Espionage and Sudo-Intelligence
As the sudo-intellectual develops a clearer picture of the sudo-reality they wish to create, they engage in pseudo-espionage. Unlike pseudo-scholarship, which is general and broadly focused, pseudo-espionage involves targeted information gathering directly relevant to specific solutions. This might include attending lectures, reading specialized books, taking courses, or engaging in conversations (both formal and informal) that directly inform the development and implementation of particular approaches.
It's important to note that this pseudo-espionage is overt and consensual, more akin to networking and "brain picking" than to clandestine activities. It transitions into sudo-intelligence generation as the collected information is organized under salient questions that determine the design and potential implementation of sudo-solutions. This intelligence emerges as sudo-intellectuals form insights, ideas, and plans inspired by pseudo-utopian thinking but sufficiently grounded in evidence and expert opinion to constitute feasible roadmaps toward sudo-reality in their domain—plans that can withstand scrutiny from subject matter experts.
Pseudo-Conspirators and Sudo-Collaborators
The processes of pseudo-espionage and sudo-intelligence naturally lead to the identification of pseudo-conspirators—individuals aligned with the goals and aims of a project but not yet formal collaborators. Some of these individuals may eventually be recruited as sudo-collaborators: highly aligned and motivated partners strategically positioned to shepherd a sudo-solution, or the incremental changes it generates, into reality.
The ideal scenario is to develop such compelling sudo-intelligence about a solution that when presented to a pseudo-conspirator, they immediately wish to become a sudo-collaborator because the vision resonates powerfully with their own mission and values. This phase depends on thoroughly understanding, through pseudo-espionage and conventional networking, the OODA loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) of potential collaborators or organizations to begin aligning the sudo-solution cycle with their operational paradigms.
Pseudo-Activism and Sudo-Sustainment
The next phase involves engaging in pseudo-activism: presenting the sudo-solution to diverse stakeholders across organizational boundaries, including competitors, to gauge traditional interest, acceptance, support, and willingness to act in accordance with the proposal (what we term "sustainment") among those it would affect. This constitutes pseudo-activism because it does not involve forcibly imposing reforms, but rather presenting potentially transformative ideas that are practically implementable and generate multilateral benefits when collectively adopted.
What persuades in this approach are the intrinsic merits of the idea and the benefits it produces, not the volume or intensity with which it is expressed. Success in this phase depends on articulating clear value propositions that resonate with stakeholders' own interests and concerns.
Pseudo-Command and Sudo-Control
Ideally, the sudo-solution cycle intersecting with traditional OODA loops enables sudo-collaborators to implement elements of the sudo-solutions with minimal direct involvement from the original sudo-intellectual beyond information sharing and consultation. However, if called upon to implement a solution directly, the sudo-intellectual requires guidelines for command and control when using a "sudo-override" to interact with traditional systems.
Pseudo-command involves identifying responsible parties and subordinate actors necessary for implementing a sudo-solution simultaneously across organizations, similar to nuclear command and control protocols, but with much less at stake. This command structure develops through stakeholder analysis and assignment through common consent, transferring to sudo-command if and only if, sustainment reaches sufficient levels among stakeholders to authorize the transfer.
Sudo-control resembles the sudo process in Linux: authorized (by sustainment), temporary (pre-defined duration), targeted (with minimal necessary access at the lowest possible level), and transparent (with logged and public actions) intervention to enable changes that would otherwise be impossible—analogous to coordinated action like OPEC adjusting oil production targets simultaneously across the globe. After implementation, control returns to traditional systems with appropriate safeguards. Ideally, these changes would also be reversible if outcomes prove unfavorable.
Bringing Them Back To Life
The culmination of this process transcends merely catching falling stars. It involves gathering their fragments, breathing new life into them, and sending them back up from whence they came. We must admit that the sudo-intellectual may occasionally mistake some airplanes for shooting stars and get down a rabbit hole they shouldn’t have started, but the process is designed such that a stakeholder will let them know. Sudo-intellectuals are also intellectual humble enough to take that guidance in stride. Despite the risk of wishing on airplanes, if we do all we can to succeed in revitalizing even one falling star and fulfilling the wishes of those who wished on it, our efforts will prove worthwhile.
For those Knights of La Mancha, the sudo-intellectual project exists in a superposition between chasing windmills and slaying giants, with the outcome determined by how well we build trust and foment collaboration among the stakeholders of any one issue. In this, our own reimagining of Do
n Quixote for the information age, the sudo-intellectual tilts at the windmills of entrenched systems and learns which are giants of dysfunction that can be slayed through methodical, collaborative action and which are just windmills to be left alone
In this dance between idealism and pragmatism, between the stars above and the earth below, lies the true power of the sudo-intellectual approach—not merely to wish on stars as they’re falling, but to leverage 1001 Open Hands to Bring them Back to Life.