You can fight the establishment. Or you can replace it.
“You can’t do it alone” is the story of every extractive deal ever signed. But a new generation of entrepreneurs are realising that not alone doesn’t have to mean selling out.
With non-traditional funding, DIY distribution and more tools at their disposal than ever, the household names of our future have already decided they don’t want institutions. They want to be the institution.
The counter-culture paradox
Extraction triggers a counter-culture movement to “take back the power”. The movement goes mainstream and triggers more extraction. The creator’s dilemma: build something cool and watch it get commercialised by someone with more capital and less soul. The fan’s paradox: invest emotional, cultural and economic energy into something you can never actually own. The culture death: meaning is created through grassroots, repackaged by industry and diluted by scale, with minimal value returning to those grassroots participants.
We’ve been stuck in this cycle forever. Every counter-culture movement trying to fix it eventually becomes part of it. It might seem hopeless, but maybe we’ve just been solving the right problem from the wrong angle. We’ve been building anti-institutions when we need to build new institutions.
Anti-institutions are defined by what they’re against and that’s their fatal flaw. ‘Against’ is a position that the incumbent can simply wait out, buy out, or absorb.
A new institution - or a post-institution - is defined by a different set of rules, ones that make extraction structurally harder than participation and protect the world and the community, alongside the product.
The world contains the product, the product doesn’t contain the world
No cultural movement has started with a PowerPoint. We’ve tried to make a science out of community building: define who they are, how to attract them, how to keep them engaged. When you treat community as a product metric rather than as the builders of your product’s world, you optimise for the wrong things.
K-pop artists understand that nothing matters more to their success than their fans, and that nothing matters more to their fans than being recognised. Fan service is a huge part of their day to day work. The fans, galvanised by personalised care, take it upon themselves to build worlds around their favourite artists. The world becomes the culture, the economy and the moat.
The community, the product and the world are three different things. The community are the people, the product serves the community, the world defines what the community stand for. If another product that could theoretically serve the community better comes along, the world makes the social and emotional cost of switching impossibly high. If all your friends hang out in Fortnite and you’ve bought and earned years worth of skins, it would take a lot for you to delete your account and start playing Call of Duty instead.
So why is it, when it’s pretty obvious the product and the world should be treated as separate entities, that only the product has a clear legal ownership structure? The world doesn’t, and so ownership usually defaults to the product owners rather than the world-builders. This becomes extractive, the world-builders leave and the world collapses.
The architecture of world ownership
We often think about worlds in the Disney sense, community driven lore and fan creations; or the Roblox sense, immersive, virtual environments. But a world can also be a codebase (Linux), distributed research (Wikipedia), a collection of datasets (community AI models).
So what does world ownership actually need to look like? When world-builders lose out, the value extraction usually falls into one of four categories:
The distribution platform gets too powerful and worlds are controlled by algorithms not participants (YouTube, X, Instagram)
The platform or IP is a walled garden from the start, limiting meaningful community ownership (Roblox, Disney)
The community gets co-opted and the value extracted through acquisition (Tumblr, Reddit) or appropriation (streetwear, rave)
The community are incentivised to speculate rather than build, with early participants extracting from later ones (NFTs, creator coins)
But if someone wanted to prioritise the world-builders, the solutions are pretty simple.
Quality should be measurable without being centrally defined. Rather than measuring engagement (algorithms) or usually a narrowly centralised criteria (walled gardens), we need distributed curation, where evaluators have actual skin in the game. Their reputation and equity depend on surfacing quality. This preserves thick culture: cultural gatekeepers earn their position by demonstrating judgment over time, they aren’t appointed.
The world should be extensible without being ownable by any single party. Institutions can still appropriate but they can’t buy out the world or the rights of its builders. The value of a world isn’t in its defensibility but its extensibility: how much can be built on top of it and how incentivised are people to attribute rather than imitate. Participating in the world should always offer more opportunity than ripping it off.
Early participation should be rewarded without enabling extraction. Speculation models encourage extraction: buy early and cheap, wait for others to build value, sell. This is a quick fix: set vesting periods before assets are tradable, and only reward being early when that person has also been meaningfully contributing to the project. This might make raising short-term capital harder, but wins on long-term community participation and brand reputation.
The post-institution
Traditional institutions rely on sunk cost: university fees, mortgages, pensions, health insurance tied to employment. The longer you’re in the system, the harder it is to leave.
Post-institutions use layered stakes: financial, social, emotional and operational. Each layer compounds the last. Financial investment, on top of social status, on top of emotional investment, on top of labour, isn’t something you can simulate or shortcut (I’ve written more about this here). Leaving means leaving a world and a community you co-created.
In post-institutions, the system continually resets to ensure fairness. Ongoing world-building matters significantly more than when you joined or how many shares you hold. You’ll keep getting rewarded for as long as your contributions are valuable. There are no passive dividends.
Gen Z knows the current systems are broken. They are actively rejecting them while looking for and building alternatives. For Gen Alpha, these systems won’t even form part of their template for how the world works (see Michael Dempsey’s excellent essay on how this plays out in venture capital). The post-institution is hard for us to conceptualise right now, but it’ll be second nature to them.
Webs, worldwide
WEB is a system for the post-institution: community-owned networks (“Webs”). These are collaborative companies, where contribution determines ownership. A Web is the collective intelligence of a product and its world: everything that’s been built and iterated on, its cultural evolution, its community, with detailed attribution for who did what.
To make this work, we need a tangible way to measure value in a distributed system. How do you ensure rewards are fair, proportionate and driven by community consensus rather than farmable numbers? How do you score something as subjective as value? We need a new approach to the algorithm.
Part 2: Why aren’t you being paid to curate?
WEB is in its first phase of world-building. See it in action or build a world of your own at betterasaweb.com
This essay is part of an ongoing series. Previous essays explored why open source IP wins in the attention economy, how culture actually survives the internet, the infrastructure of authentic movements, why slop isn’t an AI problem, and how we can use AI to preserve human creativity.
What she said... "We’ve been building anti-institutions when we need to build new institutions."