About me

Author, ontologist, and political theorist

My work begins with a simple, unsettling observation: for all our technological wizardry, we remain fundamentally ignorant about ourselves. We can manipulate particles and code algorithms, yet we are baffled by our own capacity for creation and destruction.

This question has been the compass of my life. My formal journey began in the late 1980s at James Cook University—a Skinnerian training camp, as I recall it—which taught me to see the mechanisms beneath human behavior. That foundation led to a decade of practical work as an accredited mediator for the Queensland Attorney General's Department, where I learned firsthand how conflict and cooperation operate at the human level.

But life has a way of diversifying your education. At the dawn of the commercial web, I built (in 1998!) one of China's first online grocery platforms, and later spent 12 years as Web Coordinator for the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority. These experiences across technology, ecology, and human systems converged into a singular obsession.

In 2016, while living in Thailand, I finally decided to drill down to the root cause of humanity's plight. I identified what I call the conference of difference as the fundamental process of existence and its two modes: co-petition (generative) and competition (degenerative). This insight became the foundation for everything that followed.

I wrote Colocracy: An Introduction to Collaborative Government (2017) to offer a viable alternative to anarchy, autocracy, and electoral oligarchy. I spent the next six years developing this further into 70 ontological koans and expositions, published as the Gospel of Being (2024). My goal was to create something of real value for all sentient beings: human or otherwise.

I live in Thailand. I'm married with three adult daughters and three cats. I'm a lapsed photographer, but an eternal thinker. My philosophy is simple: our legacy lies not in heaven, but in what we leave behind for others.

I am currently completing an independent academic treatise, The conference of difference: An ontology of existence (2026), which aims to account for everything from elementary particles to the cosmos—and everything in between.

— John Mackay, 2026