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Literacies That Matter

The AI one gets the attention. The full picture is bigger. A starting list of the domains worth being literate in to flourish and stay sovereign.

The Question​

The world is changing on more than one axis at once. Being sovereign and flourishing inside that change takes more than literacy in one thing. It takes enough literacy across multiple domains that you can see clearly, act well, and protect what matters.

The list below is not exhaustive. It is a prompt. The real exercise is to ask yourself: what are the domains of the future I actually need to be literate in to flourish, stay free, and live a good life?

A Starting List​

Applied AI literacy​

The ability to wield the supercomputational power of AI to advance your will in the world. This is the one Applied AI Society is organized around. It is not optional in 2026, and it compounds rapidly for the people who invest in it. If you are new, start with Get Jarvised.

New financial literacy​

The rules of money are changing. A multipolar fiat world. Programmable assets on public chains. Stablecoins routing around banks. Sovereign wealth in motion. Inflation that behaves differently at different tiers. Classical personal finance advice (index funds, 401k, high-yield savings) is still useful. It is no longer the complete picture. You want to understand enough about crypto, self-custody, stablecoins, sovereign debt, and monetary regimes to read the landscape and position yourself, instead of trusting that last decade's playbook keeps working.

Sociopolitical literacy​

Power is real, and most people consume a simulation of it through the news cycle. Real power dynamics operate at different holonic scales: the family, the community, the city, the state, the nation, the civilizational bloc. What is true at one scale does not automatically hold at the next. Being literate here means being able to read the actual forces moving in your life, your city, and your civilization, instead of the cable-news caricature. Most people are profoundly illiterate here, which is why their will gets routed by forces they cannot see.

Spiritual literacy​

The material world is not all there is. Different traditions describe this in different languages (God, the ground of being, the Tao, the higher realms), and the common thread is that there are orders of reality above the merely material. A life that ignores them tends to flatten out. Spiritual literacy is the capacity to relate honestly to that layer: prayer, contemplation, liturgy, scripture, silence, community, whatever form it takes in your tradition. You do not have to be religious to take this seriously. You do have to take it seriously if you want to be whole.

And beyond​

The list keeps going. Health literacy (sovereignty over your own body). Relational literacy (the skill of knowing and being known). Ecological literacy (how actual land, water, food, and energy move). Legal and civic literacy. Artistic literacy. Ritual literacy. The point is not to check every box. The point is to see that a full human life in 2026 requires more than one kind of seeing.

Why This Matters​

The Applied AI Society north star is human flourishing, not AI adoption. Applied AI literacy is load-bearing for that flourishing, and only when it sits inside a broader picture. A superhuman Jarvis in the hands of someone who cannot read power, cannot read markets, cannot read their own soul, and cannot read the people closest to them will amplify the same blindness at higher resolution.

Sovereignty follows the same logic. You can own every layer of the digital stack and still be controlled by a belief you never examined, a financial system you never understood, or a political narrative you inherited without knowing. Sovereignty over the infrastructure is necessary. It is not sufficient.

The practical exercise: take your current situation and ask, honestly, where the literacies are that, if improved by even one grade, would change how you move through the world. Then go.

Further Reading​