“Many candidates for a deeper theory suggest that spacetime does not exist at the most basic level but rather emerges from the interactions of more basic components.”

By Nate Barksdale at Templeton Foundation

“To be able to really engage in such a project, there needs to be so much self-awareness, a lot of our political issues might come from personal issues that are yet undiscovered.”

Alizé

Imagine a place where work isn’t something you sell. Where pay doesn’t measure your worth or define your relationship to a structure called “employer.” Where being here, fully, matters more than being right. Where conflict is not a signal of failure but a sign that something alive is trying to move.

There is such a place. It is not a utopia, it is very imperfect, still it is something more honest.

Inside Dark Matter Labs, something new is happening, not in a headline-making, policy-changing kind of way, but in the quiet rearrangement of how people treat each other when money’s grip is loosened. It’s a place where governance is an internal practice, not a distant theory. And in 2025, it began to melt.

Phase I – Ice

I am water. In this moment, I am frozen. 

My molecules are held tightly together. I am clear, structured, still. I hold form, like a blueprint etched in frost. I give you clarity, shape, certainty. But I am not alive in motion.

Ice is stability. Ice is the illusion of control.

But pressure builds. Beneath the surface, something stirs.

Alizé: My name is Alizé. I hold the internal systems at Dark Matter Labs. I was raised between Italy, Germany, and Belgium, often foreign wherever I went. Maybe that’s why I’ve always looked for spaces where I could belong not because I adapted to fit, but because I was met. DM became that kind of place. Not perfect, but sincere.

When I joined, I came from a world of high-end hospitality and design. Operations, finance, payroll. Things that are usually in the background, unspoken. I was disillusioned with who held the money, who made decisions, and what values were rewarded. DM offered something different: a chance to show the outside (the world we care about) how it could be shaped with more coherence through the work done inside.

Alizé: At DM, we had a simple, elegant formula for pay. It was transparent. It removed negotiation and power games. Your pay was calculated from your years of experience — a proxy that worked for a time. It gave us structure, stability. It made hiring easy. It equalized things, in theory.

But ice only holds so long.

As we grew, tensions crept in. Younger team members — people who had carried huge responsibility, grown the organization from its soil — began to feel unseen. The formula, though fair on paper, couldn’t hold the nuance of lived contribution. Misalignment set in. Trust began to fray.

Pay — that thing we tried to neutralize — began to carry weight again.

Phase II – Steam

Now I feel heat. I rise.

I become apart from what held me. I swirl. My form is not stable. It is inquiry, friction, acceleration. I am questions rising through the room. I touch everything.

I fog your vision and wake your skin. Steam is tension and temperature. Steam is the demand to transform.

Alizé: Something had to give. What followed was not just a redesign of a spreadsheet. It was heat: Disagreements. Slack threads that bled into dreams. Zoom rooms charged with frustration, with longing, with deep care. We built a miro board of pain points, holding everything people felt but hadn’t been able to say. We prototyped dozens of models. We balanced ethics with math. People voted, objected and proposed alternatives. The structure sweated.

And in that heat, a chorus of very human voices emerged: “Will my value be recognized if I am a designer?” “I’ve given so much — will that be honored?” “What if we make it worse, not better?” “Can I trust this process to see me?”

And then: “I want to believe we can hold each other.” “This work deserves better than silence.” “Maybe together we know more than any of us alone.”

Phase III – Storm

I surge. I break banks. I move what would not move. I sing through gutters. I weep into soil. I wake.

Storm is when unexpected forces meet, the old cannot hold and calm has yet to come. Storm is where there is death, and life is remade.

Carl Jung: “Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” The Undiscovered Self (1957)

Alizé: In the fog of this transformation, inner work became not a luxury but a necessity. The process surfaced deep questions of identity, worth, safety. As people brought their wounds into the open, the system responded by holding the space.

This was the unseen layer of transformation: people becoming conscious of their own patterns, defenses, assumptions. The self-work was slow. Personal. And yet, it rippled into the collective. It is never about just changing a policy. Emotional architecture is also shifting.

Phase IV – Liquid

I become flow.

I slide across surfaces, adapting, holding, moving. I listen. I gather. I connect. I reflect light. It is hard to hold me, I leak and go wherever I want.

Liquid is movement. 

Liquid

And then, one Friday afternoon, it happened.

I was in my garden office on the English coast, Slack open, heartbeat fast. We’d set a final deadline for objections. The last proposal had gone out. I was expecting another wave of comments.

But none came.

Just silence.

And in that silence, something softened. After months of dialogue and dissonance, we reached consent. Not universal agreement. But good enough, safe enough, together enough. I breathed for the first time in weeks. I think we all did.

The new formula was different. More layered. It accounted for experience, but also for service to the organization over time. It acknowledged where people lived and what life costs in those places. It offered a dynamic frame — one that would shift as the organization shifted. And maybe most importantly, it held the principle that no formula is final. That pay, like people, must evolve.