...is currently in the planning stages. IoWI will be an incubator of social entrepreneurial projects, some commercial (merchandise, services), some purely artistic/educational.
The Institute of What If aims to be self-sustaining, without having to rely on investors who want ownership. Why?
We aim to address very "big picture" topics, and don't want to be compromised by any one party or agenda. For instance, we make the following observation:
The internet has ravaged every sector of society since the beginning of mass adoption ca 1995, with one notable exception: governance.
We ask: "Shouldn’t there be better interfaces for question asking, deliberation, consensus, and policy formulation?"
Rather than assume we are all stuck with this very dumb paradigm of two obsolete, low resolution media with which to allocate public knowledge and resources (the democratic and republican parties), why not look at this massive, universal disconnect between the will of the people and the current interface responsible for public decision-making as an absolutely historic design opportunity? After all, the legacy assumptions underpinning the balance struck between representative and direct democracy paradigms are 300ish years old. Perhaps some of these assumptions are worth revisiting? In the words of the visionary thinker Buckminster Fuller:
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
If any of this excites you, please get in touch:
instituteofwhatif@gmail.com