Idea Machines
Description
Nadia Asparouhova:
"An Idea Machine is a self-sustaining organism that contains all the parts needed to turn ideas into outcomes:
- It starts with a distinct ideology, which becomes a memetic engine that drives the formation of a community
- The community’s members start generating ideas amongst themselves
- Eventually, they form an agenda, which articulates how the ideology will be brought into the world. (Communities need agendas to become idea machines; otherwise, they’re just a group of likeminded people, without a directed purpose.)
- The agenda is capitalized by one or several major funders, whose presence ensures that the community’s ideas can move from theory to practice – both in terms of financing, as well as lending operational skills to the effort. (Without funding, an idea machine is just that: an inert system that needs fuel to turn the crank and get it moving.)
- As community members move from ideas to action, they might become scene builders, who help sustain the community, develop the agenda, and attract new members; or operators, who drive the operating initiatives that lead to outcomes – the ultimate purpose of the entire machine. Both types might also lend a hand to create support organizations, whose purpose is to strengthen the values and best practices of the idea machine."
(https://nadia.xyz/idea-machines)
Status
Nadia Asparouhova:
"A flurry of liquidity in the last five years, as well as a strong bull market, meant that idea capital became cheaper and more plentiful, even with the current downturn. [6] What’s more, that wealth has also become much more widely distributed, thanks to new financial innovations (i.e. employee equity grants, which have only gotten bigger, and crypto). Yes, the number of people who are extremely wealthy in the world is still small, relative to the general population. But there are also way more of them than ever before, and they don’t all fit a typical founder-or-executive profile anymore, either.
In a world where there are many wealthy people, then, and many more types of wealthy people, there are also more idea machines, and a more liquid idea marketplace. [7] If you’re an “idea operator”, instead of having to beg one of two funders to take your idea seriously, you now have many more potential options to shop around to. (This evolution is not dissimilar to what happened to startups, as venture capital became more widely available.)
Here are a few examples of movements that were helped or hindered by the availability of idea machines. Note that it’s possible for one idea to exist across multiple idea machines, and that machines can and frequently do collaborate with one another:
- Charter cities previously lived in Thiel’s idea machine under the label of seasteading (they failed to gain buy-in from EA), then languished for a few years without a home. More recently, they’ve found a new home under the banner of progress, and arguably could find an even better home in the network state, if it ever becomes an idea machine.
- Metascience (i.e. “how do we improve science”) had a community, but no funding, so it languished for years in the realm of “good idea, but what would we actually do about it”. Since finding a home in Schmidt Futures and progress studies, metascience has moved much more quickly towards outcomes.
- Tools for thought still suffers from insufficient funding (perhaps best encapsulated by Dynamicland’s history). It has a community, talent, and philosophy attached to it, but until it finds an idea machine, it will be unable to realize its full potential."
(https://nadia.xyz/idea-machines)
History
Idea Machines in previous historical forms
Nadia Asparouhova:
"Idea machines are not new, but the form in which they appear is changing. For most of the 20th century, the home for idea machines was foundations, first popularized by John D. Rockefeller in the 1910s.
Foundations took several more decades to incubate, as a newly minted class of professionals built an industry around the business of translating ideas into action. Rockefeller firmly believed that foundations would “attract the brains of the best men we have in our commercial affairs, as great business opportunities attract them now.”
By the mid-20th century, foundations had reached the height of their power and influence, triggering a congressional investigation into whether foundations were manipulating public opinion and thought. The lawyer Rene Wormser, who wrote the final report, described foundations as a “cartel” that threatened to direct our entire intellectual and cultural life. Large foundations like the Ford Foundation, Commonwealth Fund, Russell Sage Foundation, and various Rockefeller and Carnegie initiatives were investigated for developing and promoting their own agendas, spreading “propaganda” with political aims, and influencing public policy.
It took another nearly two decades for the United States government to successfully hamstring foundations, but they finally did, with the 1969 Tax Reform Act that introduced all the paperwork we associate with foundations today: public reporting requirements; minimum 5% annual endowment spend; and strict limitations on political influence, among other stipulations.
The federal regulation of foundations didn’t mean the death of idea machines, however. It just meant that that foundations were no longer the best place to house them. It’d be like if the government decided to heavily regulate Delaware C Corps: if it were bad enough, founders would stop using them for startups, but they’d eventually find some other way of accomplishing the same thing.
How are today’s idea machines different?
The modern Idea Machine better reflects how people self-organize today. They are decentralized, more closely intertwined with public dialogue, and work symbiotically with a community that anyone can join: many individual nodes operating in a loosely-organized network, instead of a monolithic organization.
In today’s idea machines, an ideology serves as the coordination mechanism for ideas – as foundations once did – making it easier for both sides to find each other. It attracts operators who resonate with its ethos and have ideas for how to bring it into fruition. On the other end, it also attracts (or is even initialized by) funders who want to bring that vision into the world. Funders have varying levels of involvement with their own machines; in some cases, the underlying ideology takes hold as a meme, and influences the machine’s direction more than the funders themselves.
The traditional foundation has its advantages: namely, the ability to build institutional memory and commit to long-term agendas, thanks especially to an endowment structure, which obviates the need to continuously fundraise.
However, foundations also suffer from high overhead and organizational decay over time. They are prone to principal-agent problems, where the goals and interests of foundation professionals don’t always align with the original donor’s intent. Because foundations can exist into perpetuity [4], they can even be usurped and weaponized towards other goals. Foundations in the 1950s and 1960s epitomized this problem: the activities undertaken by major foundations took place well after their original donors were no longer living.
With a more decentralized structure, modern idea machines can “arm the rebels” right where they are, instead of hiring them into a foundation. The popularity of so-called regrantor programs (i.e. scout programs) reflects this trend, where talented individuals are given funding to make grants on behalf of the grantmaking organization. And because idea machines are built upon the strength of their ideology, they only last as long as the ideology lasts.
While idea machines with a single wealthy benefactor get most of the attention, they can theoretically be capitalized in different ways. (This is equally true of foundations: private foundations are capitalized by a single source of wealth, but there are also corporate and community foundations.)
DAOs are an example of idea machines that can be initialized by a community. It may require more work to raise the funds and awareness to capitalize an idea machine without a major funder, but once they are initialized, DAOs must adopt similar tactics – develop an agenda, spin up and fund support organizations, invest into scene building, attract operational talent – in order to be effective.
It’s hard to know whether the current, loosely-organized form of idea machines is its terminal state, or an inchoate form of something else (like DAOs), not unlike Rockefeller’s vision for “Benevolent Trusts,” which were a precursor to modern foundations. It has already become common for philanthropic funds in tech to operate as LLCs instead of 501c3 foundations, and it’s possible that a new legal vehicle will emerge.
Regardless of its ultimate form, modern idea machines feel like a clear evolution away from 501c3 foundations. They are more focused on narratives and scene building, on attracting talent by spreading ideas, and on doing so in a public forum rather than within the walls of an organization."