worlding at institutional scale

We regularly think of worlds operating with specific external boundaries, which contain relative internal coherency despite the occasional leak.(1) The Victorian fascination with terrariums demonstrates this well. But what if the opposite were true, and unstable boundaries are precisely what constitutes worldness?

The sweet spot for startups is seeing 24 months into the future. This is a stone’s throw into the adjacent possible. It’s far-out enough to be asymmetric, familiar enough to be pitchable, and time enough to build.

T hinking thought usually amounts to withdrawing into a dimensionless place in which the idea of thought alone persists. But thought in reality spaces itself out into the world. It informs the imaginary of peoPles, their varied poetics, which it then transforms, meaning, in them its risk becomes realized. Culture is the precaution of those who clai... See more

Worlding is the art of devising a World: by choosing its dysfunctional present, maintaining its habitable past, aiming at its transformative future, and ultimately, letting it outlive your authorial control.

A World is a reality you can believe in: one that promises to bring about habitable structure from the potential of chaos, and aim toward a future transformative enough to metabolize the pain and pleasure of its dysfunction.

To think about beginnings, we have to go back to the moment before a World is born, to the moment of a curious creator looking at Reality — chaotic, meaningless, scary, but latent with potential — and wondering what to do with it. Philip K Dick said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” A World is conceived when ... See more

What is a World?

We could say a World is something like a gated garden. A World has borders. A World has laws. A World has values. A World has dysfunction. A World can grow up. A World has members who live in it. A World gives its members permission to act differently than outside of it. A World incentivizes its members to keep it alive, often with ... See more

[Willed introversion] cannot be described, quite, as an answer to any specific call. Rather, it is a deliberate, terrific refusal to respond to anything but the deepest, highest, richest answer to the as yet unknown demand of some waiting void within

A cathedral is something we want to make perfect — intricately carve it over time. To make a cathedral, we lock ourselves away until the work is just right, then pull back the curtain to show the world what we’ve been working on. The dream of the cathedral is that after working in isolation, the world will celebrate the work and see us in whatever ... See more