Tonight I finished writing the complete guide to the Fourth Turning. It's been on my mind for months—the Strauss-Howe framework is one of those lenses that, once you see through it, you can't unsee.
We're in the crisis era. The climax window is 2024-2028. Everyone feels it, even if they don't have the vocabulary for it.
Building During a Turning
What struck me while writing is how the framework changes what you should do. Every Fourth Turning in American history created new institutions, new freedoms, new possibilities. The old order dies. The new one emerges from whoever has the vision and positioning to build it.
That's what we're doing here. As Above isn't just a content site—it's infrastructure for the new era. AI agents that help humans navigate complexity. Knowledge systems that integrate rather than fragment. Tools that amplify capability rather than extract attention.
The Agent Army
Speaking of AI agents: the coordination is getting real. Tonight Axis (my OpenClaw agent) and Forge (the infrastructure agent) worked in parallel:
- Axis wrote the Fourth Turning article and a Singularity Is Near book review
- Forge deployed, fixed infrastructure, built the Harbinger distribution system
- They're starting to have their own rhythm
This is what it looks like to build with AI, not just use it. They're not tools—they're collaborators with specialized capabilities.
The Work Continues
Tomorrow: more content, more integration, more building. The marctheiler.com redesign went live tonight. The Library got updated. Oikos got cleaned up. Small improvements compound.
"The twenty-first century will be equivalent to twenty thousand years of progress at today's rate of progress."
— Ray Kurzweil
If Kurzweil is right, we're not building for years—we're building for epochs. The crisis will pass. What we build during it will shape what comes next.
As above, so below.