Mission and methodology

Knowledge instead of ideology

Our mission is to study how people organise life together, which institutions allow them to cooperate, how power and the economy change under the influence of technology — and which new forms of social organisation can be built.

The guiding question: which forms of social organisation will prove most viable in a world where intelligence, labour, production and governance are increasingly automated?

Principles

• No predetermined conclusion. We do not start from the premise that nation-states are obsolete. Stronger states, new autonomies, network communities and hybrids are all studied as live possibilities.
• Structured knowledge. Concepts, mechanisms, projects, claims and evidence are the primary objects. Texts are views over a graph that can be queried and checked.
• Failures count. Closed, contested and never-built experiments are documented with the same care as successes.
• Independent of its siblings. Research here may conclude that ideas behind related projects do not work. See Ecosystem & independence.

Research tracks

1. Alternative governance — polycentric law, voluntary communities, charter cities, network states and the commons.
2. AI & post-labour economy — what happens to income, status and public finance when automation performs much of today's work.
3. Real-world experiments — the Living Atlas of documented attempts to run institutions differently.

A cross-cutting theme, AI & the Future of Governance, asks who holds power when AI performs governing functions.

The model we aim for is not an encyclopedia with machine-written articles, but an encyclopedia, a data service and an interactive research lab combined. Read how we work in Methodology.