Metacrisis Fund for Positive-Sum Interventions

Seeking positive-sum projects that address the generator functions of the metacrisis

Climate breakdown, AI risk, ecological collapse, institutional distrust, the loneliness epidemic — these look like separate emergencies competing for attention. They aren't. They're symptoms produced by a shared set of generator functions: rivalrous dynamics multiplied by exponential technology, economies that reward externalizing harm onto the commons and the future, and a collapse in our shared capacity to make sense of the world well enough to choose within it. Solve any one symptom while the generator functions keep running and they simply produce the next one. This fund exists to support work on the generator functions themselves. We back projects that make cooperation more rational than defection, that internalize externalities rather than displace them, that widen the circle of what participants are able to consider, and that increase our collective capacity for sensemaking and choice-making. That includes tools and infrastructure for collective sensemaking, media and art that build the perceptual and emotional capacities these problems demand, research on institutional and economic redesign, closed-loop material practices, and community-scale experiments in governance and care. We're explicitly interested in the third attractor: a path between civilizational catastrophe on one side and stability purchased through surveillance and centralized control on the other. That path has to be built, and it will be built out of many small, legible, replicable experiments long before it looks like a system. Most funding in this space goes to symptom management, because symptoms are measurable and generator functions are not. This fund accepts that tradeoff deliberately. We're matching support for the harder, slower, more upstream work.

Eligibility

Projects must meet the following criteria:
1. Upstream orientation. The project must name which generator function it engages — rivalrous dynamics, externality-producing economics, degraded sensemaking, or another you can argue for — and show the causal chain from that dynamic to the harm you're addressing. Symptom-level work is valuable, but it isn't what this fund is for.
2. Positive-sum by design. The project's success must not depend on another group's loss. We're looking for work where the benefit compounds outward — to the commons, to future participants, to people who never asked for it. Zero-sum advocacy, adversarial campaigning, and "our side wins" framings are out of scope regardless of merit.
3. Non-coercive. Interventions that achieve coordination through centralized control, compulsion, censorship, or concentration of power are ineligible. The problem and the proposed cure have to be distinguishable.
4. Second-order awareness. Applicants must show they've considered how their project could be misused, captured, or produce harms at scale. We weight honest failure analysis heavily. A project that names its own risks is more fundable here than one that claims none.
5. Open and replicable. Outputs — research, tools, media, curricula, designs — should be openly licensed or otherwise freely available, and documented well enough for others to build on. We fund things that want to be copied.
6. Demonstrable capacity. A real team or individual with relevant experience and evidence of prior work or progress. Early stage is fine; vaporware is not.
7. Artizen platform requirements. Projects must meet Artizen's own eligibility and verification standards.
Not eligible: partisan electoral work; speculative financial instruments or token launches; pure doom-media without a corresponding contribution to agency or capacity; single-issue advocacy that treats one crisis in isolation from the others; projects whose primary output is critique without construction.

Projects (20)

17 submitted · 3 curated

Project	Status	Raised
The Vision Guide	curated	$181
The Civilisational Map	curated	$423
Technological Metamodernism	curated	$179,970
Anti Krisis	submitted	$0
Rifai Sicilia DAO	submitted	$0
Stacks	submitted	$1,052
Landscapes of Opportunity	submitted	$1,373
Uganda's Web3 Revolution:From crypto to conservation, poverty to prosperity	submitted	$3,507
Sky Commons - Low Water (SC)	submitted	$0
:: DeBolso :: a response to a relational crisis	submitted	$28,852
Fashion For Hope	submitted	$10,409
Metta Tropical Fellowship Launch	submitted	$5,718
Redefining the Future of Compassionate Care & Community	submitted	$9,718
Autobot Future Makers	submitted	$0
Bwiti Fang Temples	submitted	$577,043
Kimiya Mag: Meaning & purpose in East Asia via AI transformation	submitted	$193
GarageStacks: A History That Stays With the Car	submitted	$0
FROM MINE TO CLINIC NIGERIA	submitted	$612
Mental Health Reformation: A Civil Rights Moviement for the Soul	submitted	$30,429
Strolling	submitted	$0