Designing an Unstitution: Founders’ Brainstorm

Posted: May 22, 2025 | Author: Dr. Ernie | Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: design, institutions, rethinkcali, transformation |1 Comment

Pick three relevant experts to design the minimal viable unstitution — a foundational, paradigm-neutral, layered substrate that enables generative collaboration across potentially antagonistic, self-organizing communities.

ChatGPT Prompt (condensed)

1. Design Brief

Objective:

Constraints:

• Must not embed a single ideology.
• Should support “diaphoric” relationships: generative, fractal “I-Thou” bonds.
• Should be spiritually resonant but technologically robust.
• Must work under conditions of mutual antagonism and fragmented trust.

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2. Design Team

Vitalik Buterin

• Creator of Ethereum
• Thinker on legitimacy, governance minimalism, and crypto-pluralism.

Audrey Tang

• Taiwan’s Digital Minister.
• Architect of radical democratic tools like vTaiwan and use of Pol.is.

John Vervaeke

• Cognitive scientist and philosopher at the University of Toronto.
• Creator of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, a comprehensive series on the science of wisdom, meaning, and spirituality.

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3. Brainstorming Highlights

Facilitator Prompt (by Ernie Prabhakar):

“How do we create a foundational system that enables dynamic self-organization across communities that don’t agree, but want to flourish together? What would an ‘unstitution’ that protects and promotes transfigurative yield look like?”

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Vitalik:

• Proposes a “spiritual blockchain”: verifiable, public, not prescriptive.
• Emphasizes modular governance and anti-capture design.
• Cautions against gamified incentive systems.

Audrey:

• Highlights design as public service infrastructure, not platform.
• Cites Taiwan’s use of Pol.is for structured pluralism.
• Suggests AI-assisted deliberation scaffolds and gratitude loops for civic coherence.

Vervaeke:

• Anchors the system in wisdom cultivation through dialogic practice.
• Introduces idea of ritualized transformation and transfigurative yield.
• Suggests the unstitution function as a noetic mycelium: a distributed network of meaning-making.

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4. Foundational Design Principles

1. Substrate of Transparency

• Immutable, verifiable, but ideology-neutral. Similar to layer-0 blockchain.

1. Ritualizable Interfaces

• UX designed around participatory meaning-making and communal practices.

1. Plurality-First Governance

• Inspired by plurality.xyz, emphasizing deliberative systems and mechanism diversity.

1. Gratitude-Driven Reputation

• No quant scores, only attestations and acknowledgments.

1. Ontological Negotiation Zones

• Inspired by metamodern and religion-as-metaphor frameworks, enabling layered interaction between paradigms.

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5. Suggested Name

Unstitution – The minimum viable sacred: a structure that hosts transformation without prescribing form.

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6. Summary

“The unstitution is not a fixed container. It is a living lattice: flexible enough to adapt, strong enough to hold difference, and sacred enough to invite transformation.”

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7. Next Steps

• Formalize architecture as a Decentralized Autonomous Institution (DAI).
• Prototype on a zk-rollup with minimal attestation schema.
• Convene an interdisciplinary council for participatory testing.

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Curated by Ernest Prabhakar, Ph.D.
Contact: ernie@diaphora.org

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