The word ‘extitutions’ is a neologism that plays on our collective unease with institutions and their penchant to categorize and reduce each of us down to our roles and the rules by which they function.
Instead of roles and rules, an extitution looks to identities and relationships, beckoning a more holistic self into coherence with other complex selves. As extitutional theory emerges as a formal theory, and extitutional praxis is played and practiced out, my aim here is to articulate the multifarious collectives that I have been drawn into and helped to nurture.
Co-living communities and related ways of living feature strongly, yet I hope here also to discern and share other lines of flight and planes of collective consciousness that you might recognize, resonating to these subtler, social harmonics of being. Let me know if you hear the music and feel like joining the jams!
Feytopia is “an extitutional community rethinking the world of tomorrow”, based around Château du Feÿ, in Burgundy, France, where we gathered during the COVID lockdown and continue to welcome friends and co-conspirators to explore possibilities adjacent to nature and collective autopoiesis in the ways we live, work, and play.
The Embassy Network is a network of place-based communities experimenting with new forms of governance and solidarity. I co-lived with fourteen other full-time residents and a flow of short and medium term guests over the course of seven years at the San Francisco HQ of the Embassy Network, and joined the board of the non-profit, District Commons, to support the gathering and distribution of learnings from the various projects this extitution has nurtured.
CodeX is an academic research center sitting at the intersection of the law school and computer science department at Stanford University, which has also nurtured an extitutional community of scholars, entrepreneurs, professionals, and practitioners, including via the Blockchain research group I established to bridge to the coming wave of decentralized futures.
StartX is a Stanford-affiliated startup accelerator, which grew out of a deep focus on community and peer support between some of the top entrepreneurs coming out of Stanford. As part of the founding team, then an Entrepreneur-in-Residence, and now an alumni advisor and application judge, I offer support to the extitution around legal and social innovation.
EHF, the Edmund Hillary Fellowship, is an impact fellowship supported by the New Zealand government, dedicated to incubating solutions to global problems. I was selected to join the 7th cohort of EHF and look forward to continuing my work around climate, computational law, and regulatory/policy-coordination in cahoots with the other 500+ Fellows in this extitution.
Glitch is a hyperstitional extitution of NFT artists and developers that gathered at Feÿ for a residency in 2021, out of which a series of collaborations and constellations are emerging at the intersection of art, music, metaverse, blockchain, AI, biodiversity, impact, and legal innovation.
The Foresight Institute, where I was a Fellow in 2020, builds scaffolding to support an interdisciplinary extitution of high-impact technologists working to make great futures more likely, with a focus on areas that are too early-stage or interdisciplinary for legacy institutions to support.