The Multiverse School · Pathway edition📊 The AI CitizenOne of nine paths
For people who want to know whether it is actually true
Somebody is going to hand you a number that is true and still wrong.
This path is a liberal-arts education rebuilt around AI, and it is organised around one
stubborn habit: go and look at where the claim came from. Four classes, 34
capabilities, 38 pieces of working software you keep — and, at the top of it,
the ability to take somebody else's chart apart in public without getting it wrong yourself.
The persona in one line: locate a claim in its primary
source. That is a real capability with a real name in the curriculum, and
Data Activism is where it gets taught.
Before you buy
There are 22.4 hours of recorded class here, in 10 clips.
All of it belongs to one of the four classes.
Practical Propaganda, Data Activism and the Interactive Fiction Intensive have no archive
at all — you attend those live, or you work through their apps.
So this is not a video course. What it is, is the densest app surface the school has:
38 student tools across four classes, 2 of them fully guided
end to end, plus the recurring Research & Activism hour.
Below is one small dataset, invented for teaching. Nobody falsifies it. Every headline you
can produce from it is arithmetically correct. Change the presentation choices and watch the
story change while the numbers sit still.
Presentation choices
District
Measure
Y axis
Years shown
Baseline year (% change only)
The illustrative gazette · district safety desk
Incidents in Northgate more than double since 2020
Every word of that is true.
The axis starts at 174, not zero. On screen the 2025 mark stands 17.7× as tall as the
2020 mark. In the data it is 2.4× as large. It also pins 2020 to the floor of the chart,
so 190 incidents reads as nothing at all. You are looking at 6 of the 10 years in the
table.
What the whole table contains: between 2016 and 2025 Northgate went from 412
incidents to 462, while its population went from 84,000 to 121,000. Per 1,000 residents
that is 4.90 → 3.82. The count went up. The rate went down.
Illustrative dataset — invented for teaching
Reported incidents and resident population, two neighbouring districts, 2016–2025.
These are not real districts and not real figures. Every headline above is computed
from exactly these rows.
Year
Northgate incidents
Northgate residents
Riverside incidents
Riverside residents
2016
412
84,000
168
62,000
2017
398
88,200
175
62,300
2018
421
92,600
171
62,600
2019
405
97,300
190
62,900
2020
190
101,900
96
63,100
2021
268
106,400
128
63,400
2022
341
110,700
158
63,700
2023
402
114,600
176
64,000
2024
447
118,000
190
64,300
2025
462
121,000
214
64,500
The trick is not that somebody lied. The trick is that four defensible choices —
which years, which denominator, which baseline, where the axis starts — each licenses a
different true sentence, and only one of them is the one you would have written if you had
no stake in the answer.
Data Activism: Turn Data Into Power is the class that teaches you to run
this in reverse on somebody else's chart, and then to build one of your own you can defend.
It ships /tools/campaign-workbench, a guided app
that walks a campaign from claim to evidence to ask, and
/tools/method-picker, which makes you choose the method
before you choose the picture. The capability behind all of it has a name:
locate a claim in its primary source.
What you take, and what each one leaves you able to do
The order is curated rather than chronological — it runs from reading, to making persuasion,
to checking it, to building a machine that tests your own logic. Class dates below are the
next scheduled sitting.
01
Critical Thinking and Creativity with AI
17 capabilities
21 exercises
10 recordings · 22.4h
2 apps · companion
next sitting 11 September
≈29.6h of work
Where the reading habits get built. You work on style, voice and the gap between what an
institution says it values and what it actually optimises for — then you make something and
have to say which parts of it are defensibly yours. It is also the only class on this path
with an archive behind it.
Leaves you able to
construct a multi agent conversation with turn taking · system-construction
falsify a blended voice by looking for its sources · distribution-and-influence
characterise a plans weaknesses with adversarial review · evidence-and-verification
characterise what of a generated artifact you can defend as yours · interaction-and-interface
How persuasion is engineered, taught by making you engineer some. Name an audience and what
would count as success for it, build the campaign, then watch the claim degrade as it gets
retold by people who did not read it. The guided app walks the whole sequence; the decks
behind it cover the fuel hierarchy, the persona stack, the platform ecosystem and cross-aisle
reframing, in English and in Spanish.
Leaves you able to
design a channel that reaches people who are not looking for you · distribution-and-influence
measure whether an explanation changed what people did · distribution-and-influence
characterise how a claim degrades as it is retold · distribution-and-influence
produce an explanation that survives a hostile reading · distribution-and-influence
name an audience and its success criterion · audience-and-market
The class this whole path leans on. A dataset and a grievance go in; something that moves
people comes out. You run a model's analysis against a hand check, write an explanation
built to survive a hostile reading, and — the habit that outlives the class — go and find
the primary source before you repeat the claim.
Leaves you able to
measure whether an explanation changed what people did · distribution-and-influence
produce an explanation that survives a hostile reading · distribution-and-influence
run a model analysis against a hand check · data-shaping
locate a claim in its primary source · evidence-and-verification
name an audience and its success criterion · audience-and-market
A critical-thinking class wearing a craft class's clothes. Branching stories are a machine
for stress-testing your own logic: you find out what your program does on the paths you did
not plan for, and you have to decide, shape by shape, where a model may fill something in
and where it must not be the one choosing.
Leaves you able to
characterise how your program behaves on paths you did not plan for · system-construction
generalise a worked example into something you reuse · system-construction
parameterise an agent persona · model-behavior
classify where ai can fill a shape and where it must not choose one · interaction-and-interface
Why an interactive fiction class sits on a path about understanding the world
Because it is a critical-thinking class at least as much as a craft one. A branching story
is a small formal system you have to hold in your head, and the workshops exist to break it:
what does your logic do on the paths you did not plan for, what happens when two strands
surface at once, where does a recorded decision stop mattering.
And it asks the question this whole path is about, in the only place where you can actually
answer it by hand. One of its capabilities is literally
classify where AI can fill a shape and where it must not
choose one. You can argue about that in the abstract forever. Here you have to
make the call, shape by shape, and then play the result and see what your call did.
It runs as one all-day studio. There are no recordings; you go, or you work the workbook
and the shape catalogue.
The ledger
What you actually get, counted
Every figure here is measured off the curriculum rather than estimated, which is why some of
them are unflattering.
Recorded video
22.4 hours in 10 clips — and all of it from
Critical Thinking and Creativity with AI. The other three classes have no archive.
If watching on your own schedule is the thing you are buying, that is the one class it buys.
The live hour
The Research & Activism hour, led by Thomas, and the weekly
Mutual Aid Hour, led by Megs. Both are the recurring, unrecorded part — which on
this path is most of it.
Student apps
38 across the four classes, 2 of them fully
guided: /tools/campaign-workbench and
/tools/propaganda both walk you from a blank page to a
finished thing. Data Activism alone ships 11, including eight explainer decks — the
coalition map, the numbers game, the rule of one, the scoping funnel, the three paths,
the analysis workflow, the escalation ladder and the method selection map — plus
/tools/method-picker.
Exercises
82, the largest single block being Data Activism's 25.
Total load
About 51 hours end to end: the recordings, plus the
exercises at a quarter of an hour each, plus two live hours per class.
Ceiling
Complexity order 12 — Systematic. The two
capabilities at that ceiling are design a channel that reaches people who are not
looking for you and construct a multi-agent conversation with turn taking.
Thinnest app surface
Critical Thinking and Creativity with AI — a companion and a reference document, and
nothing guided. It is also the class carrying every recorded hour on the path, which is
roughly the trade it makes.
The index · 34 capabilities
Everything this path claims to teach
In complexity order, lowest first. These are the school's own capability names, not marketing
copy written afterwards — the same strings the curriculum is assessed against.
8locate a claim in its primary sourceevidence-and-verification
8run a model analysis against a hand checkdata-shaping
8name an audience and its success criterionaudience-and-market
8locate the devices a passage uses on youdistribution-and-influence
9produce a rubric a model can applyevidence-and-verification
9configure an assistants memory and outside connectionsinteraction-and-interface
9produce an explanation that survives a hostile readingdistribution-and-influence
9operate concurrent strands that surface at the right timesystem-construction
9operate a recorded decision so a later branch depends on itsystem-construction
9operate a model as a first pass editormodel-behavior
9operate state so a branching story neither explodes nor railsinteraction-and-interface
9produce a function whose result depends on program statesystem-construction
9produce a reusable system promptmodel-behavior
9produce a playable story from a running skeletoninteraction-and-interface
9produce combinations that clash on purposeinteraction-and-interface
9publish a story to a public shelf and get it playeddistribution-and-influence
9elicit output from a modelmodel-behavior
9transform a linear story into chained diamondsinteraction-and-interface
9operate named states instead of magic numberssystem-construction
9produce an account of the gap between ideals and operating valuesalignment
9segment text into tokens and cost itmodel-behavior
10characterise how your program behaves on paths you did not plan forsystem-construction
10generalise a worked example into something you reusesystem-construction
10characterise what of a generated artifact you can defend as yoursinteraction-and-interface
10characterise a plans weaknesses with adversarial reviewevidence-and-verification
10generalise a reasoning prompt patternmodel-behavior
10classify where ai can fill a shape and where it must not choose oneinteraction-and-interface
10characterise how a claim degrades as it is retolddistribution-and-influence
10parameterise an agent personamodel-behavior
10characterise how a style works on a readerdistribution-and-influence
11falsify a blended voice by looking for its sourcesdistribution-and-influence
11measure whether an explanation changed what people diddistribution-and-influence
12design a channel that reaches people who are not looking for youdistribution-and-influence
12construct a multi agent conversation with turn takingsystem-construction
Highlighted: the one that defines the persona. Taught in Data Activism, and again in
Critical Thinking and Creativity with AI.
Disqualification
Who this is not for
Two people read this page, decide it is them, and are wrong. Here is how to tell.
You want to build the systems
If the interesting part of the chart above was "how would I write the thing that draws
it", you want the engineering sequence, not the citizenship one. This path teaches you to
interrogate a system; that one teaches you to ship one.
You want to run the campaign, not check the numbers
There is real overlap — Practical Propaganda and the Research & Activism hour serve
both — but if your instinct is to launch the thing and see what it does to people rather
than to go and verify what it claims, you will be happier one path over.
Data Activism sits next on the next sitting,
and it is the class the rest of this path arranges itself around. Pay what you can from
$100; the suggested price is $250 and it covers the whole
path — all four classes, all 38 apps, the recordings that exist, and the recurring
hour. Any single class on its own is $60.