Tl;dr: We’re running out of time. We need to make better faster. SuperBenefit exists to embed universal abundance into our deepest systems, and to accelerate the arrival of a better future. Read on if that’s for you, or jump straight to the six unique invitations to participate down below.
These limited editions by the wildly talented Brazilian artist Roberlan Paresqui express our hope and opportunity for the future. Each edition is an emblem of your commitment to that future and your role in creating it. In addition to the NFT, collectors will also receive an allocation of $SPRB*, and unique, enduring status in SuperBenefit’s history. All proceeds will go to a shared treasury, governed by the community, for the purposes of advancing our mission.
Here We Are
Humanity's greatest strength is our ability to collaborate and coordinate with each other.
From the earliest hunter-gatherer communities, to city and nation states, to networked global economies, it's collaboration and coordination that's lifted us from the savannah to the very stars.
Over the millennia humans have developed systems to enable, restrict, and shape that collaboration and coordination. Systems of language, systems of power, systems of government, systems of trade, systems of education, systems of culture, systems of production, and systems of technology... Systems upon systems, inheriting the values of the systems they are built on top of. Often these are values of control, of power, of profit maximization, of privileging one group of people at the expense of others and maintaining the status quo.
As technology has supercharged these systems, they have given us a greater and greater ability to influence our world. Right now our current systems of collaboration and coordination are taking us beyond our planetary boundaries and our society to the brink of disaster. Our greatest strength threatens our very existence.
These systems are so enmeshed in our lives that we do not even recognize them. Not because they are hidden, but because they are ubiquitous. They are water and we are fish. And like water to fish, these systems shape us.
And yet, our history is littered with systems we've outgrown. Often it's a new technology that enables transition.. Something better is developed – the wheel, the arrow, the printing press, the telephone – and old systems fail, sometimes peacefully, sometimes not. Changing systems is what we humans do.
So here we are, in 2022, with an opportunity to make deep and radical change.
Web3 is a socio-technical transition and is creating powerful new infrastructures. These new operating systems are enabling people to reimagine how they organize, create, and act, and to privilege different values. However, this opportunity is emergent, and the nature of its evolution will be contingent on many factors, influences, and choices.
We have a rare chance to reframe and do better. A rare invitation to change the paradigm.
We Need to Make Better Faster
SuperBenefit exists to embed better values into society’s deepest systems, and to accelerate the arrival of a better future.
To understand the significance of the change that web3 offers, it is helpful to look at Donella Meadows’ outline of places to intervene in a system:
Optimizing the parameters of an existing system
When it comes to change, most of our established institutional world focuses on tweaking the parameters of an existing system: the things that can be adjusted by policymakers, like taxes, subsidies, and standards. These are safe moves that are simple optimizations but avoid changing the inherent characteristics or design of the system they govern. In web3, these kinds of changes are like adjusting the reward rate in an OHM fork: simple optimizations of the existing system.
Changing the dynamics of existing systems
One level down are changes to interactions between elements of the system in ways that change the dynamics of that system. In the established world, this might be adding real-time financial data and machine learning to small business loan approvals and ratings, opening up new categories of who might be eligible and how quickly they can receive a loan. In web3, this is like what Klima (in collaboration with Toucan) did by applying an OHM fork to the voluntary carbon offset market to drive both the demand and price of carbon credits.
Designing new systems
Going deeper, we start tapping into the opportunity to design new systems. In the established, institutional world, this is uncomfortable territory because it invites change. This might be a structural innovation like universal childcare or universal basic income. In web3 we start to get at the more profound opportunities that arise from the ability to design new information flows, systems, and the power to enable self-organization. The ability to use tokens to enable and prove ownership, and incentivize participation, simultaneously at scales of a few people in a team to a global community of thousands, has opened entirely new possibilities.
Examples of this include communities like KrauseHouse that reimagine entire industries from a perspective of collective ownership and governance. In their case, what started as an idea to pool together to buy an NBA team has spread to reimagining how professional sport could be managed by bringing together fans, players, and other stakeholders, fundamentally changing the flows of value and control. If players deliver the value and fans provide the revenue, now that collectives can pool capital together from around the world, what is the value that individual owners bring? What could scouting and player development look like if every person at every local basketball court, game, and tournament could stake a bet on the brightest stars they see for the chance to prove “I knew them when…”? Once we glimpse how one component of the system might change for the better, everything becomes open to reimagination. And that attracts a talent pool unrivaled by any organization.
Changing the paradigm from which new systems emerge
Finally, the most powerful places to intervene are at the level of intent: the goals of the system, the mindset out of which the system arises, and the power to transcend paradigms. This gets us to the core implications and promise of web3.
The potential to intervene at this level arises from the technology itself - distributed ledger technology (DLT). A core feature of public DLTs are transparency and a verifiable history of transactions and ownership. When people come together to do something it often involves pooling, allocating, and governing resources. For the first time, on DLTs like Ethereum, every transaction related to those resources is visible and everyone who holds that resource can be included in deciding how those resources are governed. These fundamental properties unlock whole worlds of possibility.
This simple change has profound implications for how we make decisions around resources. It’s like making an organization’s bank account public. Recognizing that every transaction is open to scrutiny translates into pressure for transparent governance from the beginning. And when core infrastructures are governed by those who use them, those users can ensure their values and interests are served.
Another feature of web3 is the default to and dependency on open source licensing. While seeing the code is essential to building trust in the underlying ledger itself, allowing code to be copied is essential to demonstrating commitment to community and permissionless evolution of the ecosystem.
Combined, this creates the conditions that any community that comes together does so with the expectation of transparency and democratic governance. Inherent in this is the recognition that if those expectations are violated, community members could simply copy the code and move on. Now, what gets built by one, can be built on by others, layering and evolving new foundations for collective benefit at an accelerating pace.
With the foundations in place for a radical shift in power toward the collective instead of the few, we have the opportunity to reimagine society. What that society looks like is up to us. What will we choose?
Embedding Universal Abundance Into the Foundations of Our Future
The combination of these enabling technologies and values hold promise for a new set of societal systems, infrastructure, and institutions. As a socio-technical transition, they present the opportunity to flip our civilization onto a new path, abandoning the limitations of our old paradigm for new ones fit for the complexity of the world we live in today.
For those of us in SuperBenefit, it is clear that a transition is underway. How it happens and where we end up though, is far from certain.
SuperBenefit’s purpose is to embed universal abundance into the core infrastructure of the future.
For us, universal abundance includes and requires the interdependence and interplay of the following properties:
- Equitable access to opportunity, support, services, and resources.
- Regenerative and distributive economies.
- Self-determination, rights, and sovereignty of identity.
- Care and conservation of all life, ecosystems, knowledge, and cultures.
More specifically, our mission is to develop the social and financial flywheels that enable invention, investment, and acceleration of a better world.
Over the past several months, we’ve been mapping potential pathways towards these goals. This is where you come in.
The Invitations to Act
Artists, information and communication designers, developers, governance pros, process experts, systems designers, defi architects and engineers, facilitators, sense-makers, story-tellers, and futures explorers – welcome!
There is much to do, and we’re ready. SuperBenefit’s governance structure, community onboarding, and project squads are already at work. We invite you to join, in one or more of the following ways.
Invitation 1: Mapping pathways to the future
When we talk about better futures, the transformational potential of web3, and the systems we need to change, what do we really mean? Building on our Theory of Change, we’ll co-create landscapes which help:
- Imagine and illustrate the futures we believe are possible.
- Explore the ideas and inventions that can shift trajectories towards those futures.
- Make sense of the greatest opportunities and priorities for change.
- Design how SuperBenefit develops its flywheels.
This first invitation focuses on creating a landscape for where we want to go - ‘Map 1: imagining better futures’. This first map will also help us learn how to design and coordinate subsequent map-making rounds. You can see the initial thinking on the work we’re preparing here. Let’s get mapping, together.
Invitation 2: Building capacity and interdependence through governance
The design of systems of governance that enable self-management and organization are themselves critical infrastructure for the world ahead and our role in it. In this critical moment, how can we leverage this budding infrastructure to strengthen our common bonds, resource our interdependence, and build our collective influence? We have fertile ground to work with. Let’s plant new seeds for what we all need.
Invitation 3: Creating a soul-bound portal to a better future
Let’s go beyond basic NFTs and design a soul-bound portal to creating this future together. Let’s imagine ways to use this portal to bring us together, engage our talents and skills, swarm and adventure together in ways that get the new flywheels of our future spinning. What if we, as a collective, shared a contract that we could use to build our networks, and design and inspire action. What if we combined the idea of FWB’s Membership Portal, with dhof’s Corruptions? Let’s make better faster. (LMBF, *OK)!
Invitation 4: A metacurrency for metagovernance, values, and acceleration
We are in a pivotal moment where our core infrastructures and the values they adopt and enact are in play. What if we had a metacurrency that made it easier for anyone to be invested in our future? What if we used it to build our collective influence over that future coming to be? What protocols and primitives can we employ and create to accelerate the shift in power, resources, and values that we are collectively working to build and bring to life. What if applied the spirit of (3,3) and the power of BTRFLY to the assets of the future? If the future we want is more valuable for everyone, let’s unlock that value to help us build it faster.
Invitation 5: A commitment to bridging old into better
We can’t just rely on the new; we have to build a bridge to welcome the old. Let’s build that bridge to engage companies, institutions, and endowments that want to be part of this future, but who are still accountable to the old world they created. While they may be slow to change themselves, let’s give them a way to meaningfully demonstrate and contribute to the new future emerging here. What if we expanded on our soul-bound portal above but designed it for institutions? Let’s make it easy for them to commit their resources and take actions that unblock and accelerate the transition to a better future. We are all, after all, in this together.
Invitation 6: The look, feel, and story of a better future.
Designers and illustrators, video makers and motion artists, the story, voice and character of SuperBenefit are waiting to be defined. To communicate the seriousness of our intent and the joy with which we're pursuing it, we need to establish a brand language and identity that's uniquely of this movement. Opportunities for design and storytelling abound, from the Theory of Change, to identity design, to web design, to NFTs, and so much more. This is an invitation to help design and tell the story of a global movement.
Over the last several months we’ve been preparing the foundations to extend these invitations and welcome you as part of this journey. If an invitation appeals, you belong.
It’s time.
Let’s make better faster.
If you’ve read this far, come and check us out. Our governance structure is clearly defined and open. Projects and squads are underway.
Come, let’s make better faster.
* $SPRB is governance token with a 10M supply. NFT collectors will receive an allocation after the collections have sold out in the following amounts: 1,000 $SPRB per Fast NFT; 2,500 $SPRB per Faster NFT; 10,000 $SPRB per Fastest NFT. $SPRB is purely a governance token and has no financial value. Join us in discord to learn more.