Supersociety Advancements

The Reorganization

Human institutions are reorganizing. Not gradually, not theoretically — measurably.

The patterns of the 20th century — centralized corporations, top-down governance, extractive supply chains — evolved in an era when coordination was expensive and information was scarce. Those constraints no longer apply. The internet reduced communication costs to near zero. Blockchain technology created trustless coordination. AI is now reducing the cost of knowledge work itself.

When the constraints change, the institutions change. The Supersociety is the emerging result.

This page documents the evidence. We track three structures — Community, Governance, and Commons — across three scales of collective action: companies, communities, and countries. Every claim is sourced. Every trend is quantified. The goal is not to persuade but to map what is already happening, so that those who are building regenerative institutions can learn from the evidence rather than reinventing from scratch.

The Signal: Structural Indicators

Before examining the evidence in detail, we present the headline numbers that define the current state of the social transition:

• $2.79 trillion — Combined turnover of the 300 largest cooperatives worldwide, led by agriculture (35.7%) and insurance (31.7%) (World Cooperative Monitor 2025, 13th edition)
• 82% vs 39% — Five-year survival rate for UK cooperatives and mutuals compared to all UK businesses; the sector now reports £179.2bn income, 10,000+ organizations, 1.5 million employees, and 16.6 million members (Co-operatives UK, Co-operative and Mutual Economy 2025)
• 180 million+ — Developers on GitHub, growing by 36 million in the year ending August 2025; India overtook the United States as the largest contributor base (GitHub Octoverse 2025)
• $8.8 trillion — Demand-side economic value of widely used open-source software, measured pre-AI-coding wave (Harvard Business School, 2024)
• 98% — Share of audited codebases containing open-source components, up from 96% in 2024; vulnerabilities per codebase doubled to 581 as AI-assisted development outpaced human auditing (Black Duck OSSRA 2026)
• ~$24 billion — Combined treasuries managed by decentralized autonomous organizations, settled from a ~$40 billion peak in March 2024 (DeepDAO, 2025)
• $13 billion — USDS and DAI in circulation under Sky (formerly MakerDAO) after its Endgame restructure — now the third-largest stablecoin issuer (Sky Forum, April 2026)
• ~$67.5 million — Distributed by Optimism's Retro Funding program across seven rounds since 2022; the program transitioned from discrete rounds to continuous "missions" in 2025
• 16 colleges closed in 2025 — Extractive educational institutions failing at scale while cooperative alternatives grow

These are not isolated stories. They are structural indicators. Each one represents a measurable shift from extractive to regenerative coordination — the defining social transition of our era. The UN named 2025 the International Year of Cooperatives for the first time since 2012, partly because the underlying numbers had moved out of "alternative economy" range and into "comparable to the global Fortune 500."

Community: The Cooperative Advantage

The case for cooperative structures is not ideological. It is empirical, replicated across cultures, economies, and time periods.

Cooperative Survival Rates

Cooperatives consistently outperform conventional businesses in the most fundamental metric: staying alive long enough to fulfill their mission.

Quebec, Canada. A study by the Ministry of Economic Development found that cooperative survival rates after 5 years were 62%, compared to 35% for conventional businesses. After 10 years: 44% versus 20%. The study controlled for industry and size, meaning the cooperative structure itself — not selection bias — drives the survival advantage. (Note: this is the most-cited longitudinal cooperative-survival study in North America; Statistique Québec continues to publish general enterprise birth and death data, but a refreshed cooperative-specific cut has not been released since the original series.)

Italy. The Emilia-Romagna region, where cooperatives account for approximately 30% of regional GDP across 5,681 active enterprises, has consistently lower unemployment and higher per-capita income than the Italian national average. This is not a small experiment — it is a regional economy of 4.5 million people, generating €163.6bn in regional output, demonstrating that cooperative organization scales. The Mondragon cooperative federation in Spain — roughly 70,085 worker-owners across 95+ cooperatives in 2024, down from its 80,000+ peak — has operated for 70 years with only one year of net losses, reported €11.2 billion in sales and €632 million in net income in 2024, and remains the fifth-largest private employer in Spain. Its 2025–2028 strategic plan pivots toward cybersecurity, AI, energy, and mobility rather than expanding the legacy industrial base.

United Kingdom. Co-operatives UK's Co-operative and Mutual Economy 2025 report puts five-year survival for cooperatives and mutuals at 82%, compared to 39% for the wider economy. The sector grew 5.5% year over year to £179.2 billion in combined income, now spans more than 10,000 cooperatives and mutuals, employs 1.5 million people, and counts 16.6 million members. (The pre-2025 framing of "7,000 cooperatives and £40bn" understated the picture by excluding mutuals.)

Globally. The International Cooperative Alliance federates more than 300 organizations across 110 countries, representing roughly 3 million cooperatives, over 1 billion members, and around 10% of working-age employment worldwide. The 300 largest cooperatives alone generate $2.79 trillion in annual revenue — comparable to the GDP of France. The UN designated 2025 the International Year of Cooperatives — the first IYC since 2012 — using the moment to make these numbers visible at the policy level.

Why Cooperatives Survive

Research points to three structural factors that explain the cooperative survival advantage:

1. Aligned incentives. When workers are also owners, the agency problem that plagues conventional firms — where managers maximize their own compensation at the expense of long-term value — disappears structurally rather than requiring monitoring and enforcement.

2. Democratic governance. Cooperative governance prevents the concentration of decision-making power that leads to catastrophic errors. A CEO who answers only to a board of like-minded shareholders can pursue strategies that destroy value for everyone else. A worker-owner who answers to fellow worker-owners cannot.

3. Member commitment. During downturns, conventional businesses lay off workers. Cooperatives typically adjust hours, reduce executive pay, and find creative solutions — because the members are the business. This resilience during crises translates directly into higher survival rates. Mondragon weathered the 2008 financial crisis by redeploying workers across cooperatives rather than laying them off.

The B Corp Movement

Beyond traditional cooperatives, the B Corp certification movement signals a broader shift in corporate purpose. Nearly 9,900 Certified B Corps across 105 countries — employing close to one million workers — now operate under a legal framework that requires them to balance profit with purpose. In April 2025, B Lab released V2 of its standards (with V2.1 in early 2026), replacing the optional points-based B Impact Assessment with mandatory minimum requirements across seven Impact Topics and a new Risk Tool flagging high-risk supply chains. Most existing B Corps must recertify against V2 through 2026 — a deliberate response to credibility concerns including BrewDog's 2024 decertification and the persistent debate over Nespresso's certification. Stakeholder governance is maturing into stakeholder accountability.

Rutgers' Beyster-Kruse 2025 synthesis of ESOP research shows employee-owned firms produce roughly three times the median retirement balance of non-ESOP peers ($80,500 vs $30,000) and roughly one-third the voluntary-quit rate. Bain & Company's 2025 CEO Sustainability Guide reports companies adopting circular business models see profit margins rise by about 23% within three years.

The political environment is not uniformly supportive. The Trump administration withdrew the Department of Labor's long-awaited "adequate consideration" ESOP rule in January 2025, leaving ESOP trustees again without valuation guidance. The Employee Ownership Financing Act (S.2458, 2025) and the bipartisan Employee Equity Investment Act would route up to $5 billion in SBIC loan guarantees into ownership transitions — but neither has passed. The 2025 State of the Worker Cooperative Sector report from USFWC confirms a decade-long growth trajectory with a visible slowdown attributed to funding-ecosystem contraction.

Psychological Safety and Team Performance

At the smallest scale of cooperation — the team — research from Google's Project Aristotle (2015, replicated multiple times) identified psychological safety as the single strongest predictor of team performance. Not talent, not experience, not resources. The belief that you can take risks without punishment.

This finding has profound implications. It suggests that the quality of cooperation within a team matters more than the quality of the individuals. A psychologically safe team of average performers consistently outperforms an unsafe team of stars. Companies built on cooperative principles — shared ownership, transparent decision-making, distributed authority — create psychological safety structurally rather than relying on individual managers to cultivate it.

Open Source: Cooperation at the Largest Scale

Open-source software is the largest cooperative project in human history — and its success challenges fundamental assumptions about how value is created.

Scale and Growth

GitHub's Octoverse 2025 report counts more than 180 million developers, with 36 million added in the year ending August 2025 alone. Signup growth has decelerated from a 2024 peak of roughly 35% year-over-year to about 23% — but absolute adds are at record highs. In 2025 India overtook the United States as GitHub's largest contributor base, redistributing the geographic center of gravity in open-source labor. AI-infrastructure projects (vllm, ollama, transformers) now occupy six of the ten fastest-growing repositories on the platform.

Economic Value

A 2024 study by Harvard Business School (Hoffmann, Nagle, and Zhou) estimated the demand-side value of widely used open-source software at $8.8 trillion. Recreating it would cost roughly $4.15 billion in direct development costs, meaning open-source developers have created on the order of 2,000x the value of their direct compensation. No other production model in human history has achieved this ratio. The figure should now be read as a 2024 baseline — measured before AI-assisted development materially expanded the open-source footprint inside both commercial codebases and AI training corpora.

Infrastructure Dominance

The numbers are stark:

• Linux runs roughly 77% of web servers with a known operating system (W3Techs, May 2026)
• Nginx (32.8%) and Apache (23.7%) together serve about 56.5% of websites; Nginx has clearly surpassed Apache and the gap is widening
• Worldwide public-cloud end-user spending hit $723 billion in 2025 and is forecast to reach $1.42 trillion by 2029 — the entire industry still runs on open-source foundations (Gartner)
• 98% of audited codebases contain open-source components, with mean vulnerabilities per codebase at 581 (+107% year over year) and 68% of codebases carrying license conflicts — directly attributed to AI-assisted development pulling in dependencies faster than humans audit them (Black Duck OSSRA 2026)

The digital infrastructure of the modern world is cooperative infrastructure. Every Google search, every Amazon order, every Netflix stream runs on software built by volunteers coordinating without hierarchical management — and the entire AI revolution sits on a stack (PyTorch, Llama, vllm, ollama, transformers) that is overwhelmingly open.

Corporate Participation as Validation

Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon, and Apple are still among the largest open-source contributors. This is not philanthropy. These companies — some of the most sophisticated profit-maximizing entities in history — recognized that cooperative development of shared infrastructure produces better outcomes than proprietary alternatives. By 2026 the center of gravity has shifted: where the top corporate OSS contributions used to be cloud SDKs and developer tooling, today they are AI infrastructure. When the most competitive companies in the world choose cooperation over competition for their foundational technology, it is evidence that cooperation is structurally superior for certain classes of problems.

By mid-2026, open-weight AI models (Kimi K2.6, DeepSeek V3.2, Qwen 3.5, Llama 4) compete at the frontier on benchmarks like GPQA and SWE-Bench — undercutting the 2024 assumption that closed labs would maintain a durable performance moat.

The Free-Rider Puzzle Solved — and the New Stewardship Crisis

Traditional economics predicts that public goods will be under-provided because rational actors will free-ride. Open source demonstrates something different: when the returns to participation exceed the returns to extraction — through skill development, reputation building, network access, and the compounding value of shared infrastructure — cooperation becomes the rational choice. The open-source model does not require altruism. It requires only that the system be designed so that contributing is more rewarding than free-riding.

What has emerged in 2024–2026 is a second-order problem: the people who do contribute the most critical infrastructure are under-resourced relative to its societal value. Tidelift's 2025 State of Open Source survey reports that 60% of maintainers remain unpaid and 44% describe themselves as burned out. In November 2025, Kubernetes formally retired the widely used Ingress NGINX project citing maintainer exhaustion. After the xz utils backdoor (2024) came the Shai-Hulud npm worm in September 2025, which compromised 500+ packages and harvested cloud credentials, and a phishing attack on a single maintainer (qix) that poisoned 18 packages with more than 2 billion weekly downloads. The EU Cyber Resilience Act's reporting obligations for "open source stewards" — 24-hour, 72-hour, and 14-day incident reporting — go into effect 11 September 2026; full enforcement follows in December 2027. Some projects have responded with "Not for EU Use" disclaimers.

The funding response is real but still small. The Open Source Pledge, launched by Sentry in 2024, has crossed $4.5 million in committed funding and is now endorsed by the OSI. The longer-term question is whether the open-source commons remains a self-sustaining structure or becomes the next clearly enclosed resource. The 2024 OSI Open Source AI Definition (OSAID 1.0) fractured the community — Software Freedom Conservancy publicly rejected it for not requiring open training data — and OSI suspended its 2026 board elections to redesign governance. The WordPress governance crisis of late 2024 (Mullenweg vs. WP Engine, preliminary injunction December 2024) made the same point at project scale: benevolent-dictator-for-life arrangements can fail abruptly, and the cost of that failure is borne by everyone downstream.

Governance: From Hierarchy to Distributed Decision-Making

DAOs: Programmable Cooperation, Grown Up

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) represent the frontier of cooperative governance — organizations where the rules of coordination are encoded in transparent, auditable smart contracts rather than opaque corporate bylaws. The 2025–2026 story is no longer "do they exist" — it is "they exist, they are institutionalizing, and their failure modes are now legible."

Scale. DeepDAO's 2025 report puts combined treasuries at roughly $24 billion, settled down from a March 2024 peak near $40 billion. More than 10,000 DAOs are active, but the top five hold roughly 70% of treasury value. Average voter participation hovers near 17%, and 2025 saw more than $90 million in DAO-related exploits. This is institutional governance at meaningful scale — and like every other institutional form, it has predictable pathologies.

Three kinds of DAO. It is now useful to distinguish them. Protocol DAOs (Uniswap, Aave, Sky, formerly MakerDAO) govern infrastructure that processes billions in value. Collector and culture DAOs (Nouns, PleasrDAO) coordinate around shared cultural objects. Service and grants DAOs (Gitcoin, Optimism Collective) allocate resources to public goods. Each has different governance needs; lumping them together hides the real lessons.

Governance innovation. DAOs continue to pioneer mechanisms with no precedent in traditional institutions:

• Token-weighted voting — Voting power proportional to stake, with mechanisms to prevent plutocratic capture
• Conviction voting — Preferences strengthen over time, favoring considered decisions over reactive ones
• Quadratic voting — The cost of additional votes on a single issue rises quadratically, allowing expression of preference intensity without letting any single voter dominate
• Plural funding — Quadratic funding is now one mechanism among several. Gitcoin's GG24 round in late 2025 was the first "Gitcoin 3.0" round to distribute funds across six different plural mechanisms simultaneously
• Rage quit — Members can exit with their proportional share of treasury, providing a structural check on majority tyranny
• Delegation — Liquid democracy where voters can delegate to subject-matter experts and revoke at any time
• Security councils — A new category: small elected councils with emergency-pause authority. The lesson from 2025–2026 is that under attack, DAOs frequently fall back on council action — which is governance, but it is not token-holder governance

Real impact in 2025–2026. MakerDAO completed its "Endgame" restructure as Sky, with combined USDS and DAI supply reaching $13.4 billion by April 2026 — making it the third-largest stablecoin issuer; Binance auto-converted DAI holdings to USDS in April 2026. Uniswap's "UNIfication" proposal passed in December 2025 with 99.9% support, activating the long-debated fee switch and burning roughly 100 million UNI tokens worth approximately $590 million. Optimism's Retro Funding (rebranded from "RetroPGF") has distributed roughly $67.5 million across seven rounds since 2022 and shifted in 2025 from discrete rounds to continuous impact-measurement missions. ConstitutionDAO's 2021 $47 million raise still stands as the canonical fast-coordination case; Gitcoin has distributed more than $50 million through its quadratic mechanism, with tens of millions more flowing through partner matching pools.

Honest failure modes. In December 2025, Aave Labs pushed a "brand rights" proposal to Snapshot over the original author's objection — an internal coup that wiped 10% off AAVE in 24 hours and exposed how thinly delegated DAO procedure can be overridden by a core team. In April 2026, a $292 million exploit at KelpDAO cascaded into Aave, Compound, and Euler; the Arbitrum DAO's 12-member Security Council froze 30,766 ETH with a 9-of-12 supermajority — saving user funds, but acting as an emergency oligarchy rather than a token-holder vote. Nouns DAO's two 2023 treasury forks (drawing $27 million and another $3.2 million from the main treasury) remain the canonical "rage-quit" precedent: pure on-chain governance cannot resolve fundamental disagreements about purpose. We document these honestly. The point is not that DAOs are failing — it is that they are encountering the same governance problems every institutional form encounters, and the open question is whether on-chain mechanisms produce better resolutions or merely faster ones.

Quadratic and Plural Funding: Democratizing Resource Allocation

Quadratic funding — conceived by Vitalik Buterin, Zoe Hitzig, and Glen Weyl — is a mechanism where small individual contributions are amplified by a matching pool proportional to the number of unique contributors rather than the amount contributed. A project with 1,000 people contributing $1 each receives far more matching than a project with one person contributing $1,000.

Gitcoin's implementation has distributed more than $50 million through its quadratic mechanism alone, with tens of millions more flowing through partner matching pools layered on the Grants Stack. The mechanism consistently directs funds to projects with broad community support rather than wealthy backers, and many early grant recipients later became funders themselves — a flywheel where beneficiaries of public goods become providers of public goods. The late-2025 GG24 round marked the transition to "Gitcoin 3.0": rather than treating quadratic funding as the mechanism, it is now one option among six — including retroactive, direct, and conviction-based variants — selected to match each round's specific goals.

Why it matters. Traditional philanthropy and government funding both suffer from the same flaw: a small number of decision-makers determine what gets funded, creating misalignment between what communities need and what funders prioritize. Plural funding inverts this by making community breadth the primary signal, not donor depth. It is a concrete, functioning mechanism for funding commons resources at scale.

Retroactive funding at scale. Optimism's Retro Funding program (formerly "RetroPGF") has distributed roughly 60.8 million OP — about $67.5 million — across seven rounds since 2022. In 2025 the program shifted from discrete numbered rounds to continuous "missions" tied to measurable impact metrics, reflecting a broader lesson: prospective grant-making suffers from optimistic estimation and selection bias, while retroactive rewards anchor funding to observed value. Both Vitalik Buterin and the wider Optimism Collective treat retro funding as the most empirically defensible answer to the "fund public goods at scale" problem we currently have.

Elinor Ostrom's Design Principles for Governing the Commons

Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009 for demonstrating that communities can and do successfully manage shared resources without either privatization or government control — contradicting the "tragedy of the commons" narrative that had dominated economic thinking for decades.

Her research, spanning hundreds of case studies across fishing communities, irrigation systems, forests, and grazing lands worldwide, identified eight design principles that characterize successful commons governance. The 2010 meta-analysis by Cox, Arnold, and Villamayor Tomás (91 cases) confirmed the principles broadly; Baggio et al. (2016, International Journal of the Commons, 69-case qualitative comparative analysis) refined the picture by showing that the principles are necessary not individually but in configurations — different combinations of principles are sufficient for success in different contexts. "Validated" should now be read as "validated and refined":

1. Clearly defined boundaries. Both the resource and the community that manages it must have clear boundaries. Members know who is in and who is out.

2. Proportional costs and benefits. Rules governing use of the common resource must be locally appropriate and proportional — those who contribute more gain more access, and those who take more bear more responsibility.

3. Collective decision-making. Most individuals affected by the rules can participate in modifying the rules. Governance is not imposed from outside.

4. Monitoring. Effective monitoring of the resource and member behavior, carried out by community members or agents accountable to them.

5. Graduated sanctions. Violations of community rules result in graduated penalties — mild for first offenses, increasing for repeat violations — rather than all-or-nothing punishment.

6. Conflict resolution. Accessible, low-cost mechanisms for resolving disputes among members.

7. Recognition by external authorities. The right of community members to organize and govern themselves is recognized by external governments and authorities.

8. Nested enterprises. For larger commons systems, governance is organized in multiple nested layers — local rules within regional rules within national frameworks — each level appropriate to its scale.

These principles map directly to regenerative institutional design. Every successful cooperative, every functioning DAO, every thriving open-source community either consciously or unconsciously follows some version of these principles. They are not prescriptions — they are patterns observed in institutions that actually work, distilled from decades of fieldwork. The Mozilla Foundation's 2024–2025 Practical Framework for Applying Ostrom's Principles to Data Commons Governance is one of the first attempts to translate Ostrom's eight principles into design guidance for the AI era — applying them explicitly against Hardin's "tragedy" framing to govern shared training datasets.

Network States, Pop-Up Cities, and the Limits of the Concept

Balaji Srinivasan's The Network State (2022) formalized a concept that had been emerging for years: communities that start online, build social trust and shared infrastructure digitally, and eventually acquire physical presence. The progression follows a clear path:

Startup Society — A small, intentional, values-aligned network. This is where most collective experiments begin: a Discord server, a Telegram group, a shared mission. The key threshold is moving from passive membership to active cooperation.

Network Union — Members cooperating across geography, pooling resources, developing shared governance. The digital community begins to function as an actual institution — with rules, resources, and collective agency.

Network Archipelago — Physical locations connected by shared governance. The digital network acquires real-world nodes — co-living spaces, co-working hubs, event venues — creating a network of places linked by shared values rather than shared geography.

Network State — A community with the capacity for collective action, verified on-chain, that exercises sovereignty over some domain. This is the most ambitious vision — and by 2026 it is also the most contested.

Evidence on the ground. The frame has matured into "pop-up cities" and "new towns" as much as "network states." Three threads are now visible:

• Charter-city legal reality. In February 2025 the ICSID tribunal in Próspera Inc. v. Honduras (CAFTA-DR) rejected Honduras's preliminary objections, allowing the $10.6–26.4 billion arbitration to proceed; the Honduras Supreme Court had previously declared the ZEDE framework unconstitutional ab initio. Honduras subsequently moved to withdraw from ICSID, creating a precedent test for whether host states can exit investment-treaty regimes when charter-city contracts go sour. Itana, Nigeria's first operational digital free zone, opened in 2025 on a 72,000 m² site within Alaro City in Lagos and accepted its first 100 companies — a quieter, jurisdiction-friendly variant of the same idea.
• Pop-up cities at scale. Edge Esmeralda ran its third edition in May–June 2026 in Healdsburg, California, drawing more than 1,300 visitors and 300+ month-long residents from 60+ countries — the largest validated pop-up city to date, and an explicit prototype for a permanent town. More than 20 derivative villages have spun off since Zuzalu (2023), including Vitalia (longevity) and Mu (hackers). Praxis raised $525 million in milestone-based financing in October 2024 and pivoted toward a defense-focused spaceport project, "Atlas," at Vandenberg — a notable drift from the original network-state thesis toward defense-tech. Cabin DAO is winding down and distributing its treasury.
• Honest vocabulary drift. "Network state" has cooled as a self-applied label; many serious practitioners now prefer "pop-up village," "popup city," or simply "new town." Critics, including Data & Society's 2024 essay on "topological fetishism," argue that the network-state frame collapses too quickly into the broader TESCREAL ideology bundle. Estonia's e-residency program — now 100,000+ digital residents from 170+ countries — and similar national programs in Portugal, the UAE, and Estonia demonstrate that digital-first governance can already function at national scale without the network-state framing.

Participatory budgeting — a related governance innovation — is already mainstream. Over 11,000 cities worldwide use some form of participatory budgeting. Porto Alegre, Brazil, which pioneered the practice, saw a 50% reduction in infant mortality over 20 years of participatory governance. When citizens directly decide how public funds are allocated, outcomes improve measurably. The complementary innovation — deliberative democracy via sortition and AI-mediated common-ground tools — is now operational rather than theoretical: DeepMind's Habermas Machine paper in Science (October 2024) showed roughly 5,700 UK participants preferred AI-mediated common-ground statements over human-facilitator output; Anthropic's Collective Constitutional AI used Polis to ingest ~38,000 votes from ~1,000 participants into a Claude variant; and the pol.is platform scaled to a county-wide 25-year plan in Warren County, Kentucky in 2025, reaching roughly 10% of residents. Audrey Tang received the 2025 Right Livelihood Award for digital-democracy work; the Plurality book (Weyl + Tang, 2024) is now the canonical reference for what Tang calls "broad-listening" coordination technology.

Commons: The New Enclosure Fight

The commons — resources that belong to a community rather than to individuals or corporations — is the third structure of the Supersociety. The concept is ancient; the technology to manage commons at scale is new. The 2024–2026 story is that the commons frontier has moved: it is no longer primarily about whether shared infrastructure can be built, but whether the commons that already exist — Wikipedia, Reddit, scientific literature, Common Crawl, ICCA mapping data, Indigenous knowledge, even the deep seabed — will be stewarded as a shared resource or quietly enclosed into proprietary AI training corpora and extraction frontiers.

Digital Commons Under Pressure

The internet itself is a commons — but one that has been progressively enclosed by platform monopolies extracting rent from users who create the value. The regenerative response is building digital commons that resist enclosure:

• Wikipedia — Roughly 65 million articles across 300+ languages, maintained by volunteers, free to access. The sixth most-visited website in the world, operating on a fraction of the budget of any commercial competitor. In April 2025 the Wikimedia Foundation reported that AI scrapers had driven a 50% jump in multimedia bandwidth since January 2024 and now account for roughly 65% of expensive-content traffic; WMF is throttling about 25% of non-compliant crawler requests and steering AI firms toward its paid Enterprise API. The commons that trained ChatGPT is now actively defending itself from the next generation of training.
• Hugging Face + MLCommons — Open AI model and dataset commons. In January 2025 MLCommons and Hugging Face co-released the Unsupervised People's Speech dataset: 1 million+ hours of CC-BY, CC-BY-SA, and public-domain audio across 89+ languages — an explicit counter-model to proprietary web-scraping.
• Creative Commons — More than 2 billion works licensed under CC, growing with every contribution. The CC stewards have been deeply involved in the EU AI Act's text-and-data-mining provisions, which went into effect on 2 August 2025 and require general-purpose AI providers to publish training-data summaries.
• Scholarly commons — The European Diamond Capacity Hub launched 15 January 2025 in Madrid as Coalition S's flagship infrastructure for no-fee/no-APC Diamond Open Access publishing. Sci-Hub's .se domain was DNS-blocked in January 2026, with Sci-Net and Sci-Bot launching as successors; the coverage gap for post-2022 scholarly articles is now structural.
• DeSci (Decentralized Science) — Community-funded scientific research that traditional grant systems overlook or underfund, continuing to grow as a hybrid of open-science norms and on-chain coordination.

The AI-Substrate Enclosure Fight

By 2026 the most consequential commons fights are about AI training data. They share a common structure: a freely-given digital commons (Wikipedia, Reddit, news archives, scientific papers, public conversation) is being ingested into proprietary models, raising the question of whether the commons gets stewarded or extracted.

• NYT v. OpenAI — In January 2026 Judge Sidney Stein affirmed compulsion of OpenAI's full 20-million-log ChatGPT discovery sample; summary judgment is set for April 2026, with "regurgitation" of copyrighted material as the central fair-use question. This is the largest test case for whether training on the commons constitutes fair use.
• Reddit v. Perplexity et al. (October 2025) — Reddit sued Perplexity, Oxylabs, AWMProxy, and SerpApi over "industrial-scale" scraping after a prior June 2025 suit against Anthropic — a textbook enclosure case where user-contributed commons content gets walled off behind $60M (Google) and $70M (OpenAI) licensing deals.
• EU AI Act, text-and-data-mining rules — Live since 2 August 2025; GPAI providers must publish training-data summaries via a Commission template, and the Hamburg court's LAION ruling held that machine-readable opt-outs are required to bind. Europe is, for now, the strongest enforcer of commons-respect at the model level.
• Indigenous Data Sovereignty — The Global Indigenous Data Alliance's September 2025 communiqué CARE Directs Us Home clarified that the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance are a starting block, not a finish line, and explicitly route data governance to local and Tribal protocols — sharpening the line between consent and extraction.

Physical Commons — and New Enclosures

The commons is not only digital. Physical commons — shared spaces, tools, and resources — are both growing and being newly threatened:

• Community land trusts remove land from speculative markets, keeping housing affordable in perpetuity. The most recent census (Lincoln Institute / Grounded Solutions Network, 2022) puts the US baseline at roughly 225 CLTs, with rentals now 44% of stewarded units. The UK has 250+ CLTs across England and Wales; Community Land Scotland members steward more than 500,000 acres.
• Tool libraries and makerspaces provide shared access to equipment that would be prohibitively expensive for individuals, reducing waste and building community simultaneously.
• Food cooperatives give members direct control over their food supply chain, typically paying farmers more and charging consumers less than conventional retail.
• Indigenous and Community Conserved Areas (ICCAs) remain the most cost-effective conservation mechanism on a per-hectare basis, yet international biodiversity finance for the 30x30 target sat at roughly $1 billion in 2024 against an estimated $6 billion per year needed by 2030 — a structural underfunding of the cheapest tool available.
• The deep seabed. In April 2025 a Trump executive order ("Unleashing Offshore Critical Minerals") and NOAA's 21 January 2026 final rule authorized US licensing of seabed mining in the high-seas "Area" — under UNCLOS the common heritage of mankind — despite more than 40 countries calling for a moratorium. This is an active commons-enclosure event playing out in real time, the same logical structure as digital enclosure operating on a planetary resource.

The Nordic Model as Evidence

The Nordic countries — Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden — consistently rank first through fifth on measures of happiness, human development, social trust, and innovation. They demonstrate at national scale what the evidence suggests at every scale: high social trust, cooperative labor relations, and universal public goods produce better outcomes than low-trust, adversarial alternatives.

Bhutan's Gross National Happiness index — measuring wellbeing rather than GDP — represents an even more radical approach to defining national success. The question is not whether alternative metrics are feasible. The question is whether we will continue measuring success by metrics designed for extraction (GDP) or adopt metrics designed for flourishing.

The Degen-to-Regen Transition

The shift from extractive to regenerative institutions follows a clear pattern:

Dimension	Degen Institution	Regen Institution
Ownership	Concentrated, absentee	Distributed, participatory
Governance	Top-down, opaque	Transparent, accountable
Value distribution	Winner-take-all	Proportional to contribution
Time horizon	Quarterly, short-term	Generational, long-term
Relationship to community	Extractive	Symbiotic
Trust model	Zero-trust, hierarchical control	High-trust, distributed verification
Failure mode	Catastrophic collapse	Graceful degradation

Every extractive institution creates demand for its regenerative replacement. This is the domino effect: each failure of a degen institution makes the case for regen alternatives more visible, and each successful regen institution makes the next one easier to build.

The evidence is directional:

• Shareholder primacy has produced a 72% productivity gain alongside only a 9% median pay increase since 1973 — the gap is extraction
• Institutional trust has collapsed: government at 22%, media at 28%, healthcare at 16% (Gallup, Edelman)
• 136 newspapers close per year — information gatekeepers failing at scale
• Meta lost $80 billion+ on the metaverse — top-down social engineering at its most expensive and least effective

The failures are not random. They are structural. And the replacements are not utopian. They are measurable, replicable, and accelerating.

The Technology Bridge

What makes the Supersociety possible now — rather than merely desirable — is technology that has reduced the cost of coordination by orders of magnitude:

Communication. Real-time global communication is essentially free. Slack, Discord, and video conferencing have made distributed cooperation as natural as in-person collaboration. A cooperative with members across 50 countries faces no higher communication costs than one with members in a single office.

Trust. Blockchain and smart contracts create verifiable trust without intermediaries. Reputation systems make trustworthiness visible and portable. Open-source code makes institutional behavior auditable by anyone. The cost of trust — historically one of the largest barriers to cooperation — has collapsed.

Decision-making. Quadratic voting, conviction voting, and AI-assisted deliberation tools are making collective decision-making more efficient and more equitable than traditional voting or hierarchy. The old tradeoff — democracy is fairer but slower — is being dissolved by technology.

Resource allocation. Quadratic funding, retroactive public goods funding, and programmable treasuries enable communities to fund shared resources without relying on centralized decision-makers or philanthropic gatekeepers.

AI amplification. AI tools are reducing the coordination overhead of collective action. Meeting summarization, proposal drafting, vote analysis, and resource tracking can now be handled by systems rather than dedicated administrative staff — making small cooperatives as operationally capable as large corporations.

The Three Roles of the Supersociety

Within the game framework, the Supersociety level defines three roles that correspond to increasing depth of collective engagement:

Core Cooperators — The foundation. Members who show up, contribute consistently, and maintain the trust fabric of the community. In open-source terms, these are the regular contributors. In cooperative terms, these are active member-owners. The role requires reliability, transparency, and genuine commitment to shared purpose.

Mesh Connectors — The bridges. Members who connect different nodes of the network, facilitate communication across groups, and ensure that the collective intelligence of the community is accessible to all parts. In network theory, these are the high-betweenness nodes — the people who prevent the network from fragmenting into disconnected clusters.

Node Operators — The infrastructure builders. Members who create and maintain the systems, tools, and governance structures that the community depends on. In open-source terms, these are the maintainers. In cooperative terms, these are the elected governance leaders. The role requires both technical capability and community trust.

The mastery arc moves from Startup Society — building the initial cooperative structure — to Network State — achieving the scale and governance sophistication to exercise genuine collective agency across domains.

Connection to Other Realms

The Supersociety does not exist in isolation. It sits at the center of the spectrum — the point where individual enhancement meets collective contribution — and connects to every other realm:

Education (Superhuman Enhancements) — Enhanced individuals form stronger collectives. The Superhuman path provides the human capital — cognitive enhancement, skill development, knowledge acquisition — that cooperative institutions require. You cannot cooperate effectively if you have nothing to bring to the table.

Lifestyle (Personal Success Puzzle) — Personal stability across health, wealth, and peace is a prerequisite for sustained collective contribution. The burnout epidemic, the paycheck-to-paycheck crisis, and the metabolic health collapse are not just individual problems — they are cooperative capacity problems. People who are drowning cannot help build ships.

Business (Business Success Puzzle) — Cooperative business models outperform extractive ones in longevity and resilience, if not in short-term growth metrics. The Business realm tracks the commercial results of collective action; the Social realm tracks the structures that make those results possible. They are two sides of the same coin.

Finance (Supergenius Breakthroughs) — Regenerative finance provides the capital that cooperative institutions need to scale. Impact investing, quadratic funding, cooperative banking, and programmable treasuries are the financial infrastructure of the Supersociety.

Productivity (Supermind Superpowers) — The Genius process — Current, Desired, Actions, Results — applies at the collective level as well as the individual level. Teams, communities, and institutions all benefit from systematic assessment of where they are, where they want to go, what actions to take, and how to measure results.

News (Superpuzzle Developments) — The narrative infrastructure. How the transition from degen to regen is understood, discussed, and shared shapes whether it accelerates or stalls.

Where We Are: May 2026

The Supersociety is not a future vision. It is a present reality with measurable indicators:

What is working:

• Cooperatives continue to outperform conventional businesses in survival rates across every country studied, with UK cooperatives and mutuals now at 82% five-year survival vs 39% for the wider economy
• Open-source software has become the default infrastructure of the digital economy and of frontier AI; open-weight models are competitive with closed labs on standard benchmarks
• Plural funding is operational: $50M+ via quadratic, ~$67.5M via Optimism Retro Funding, multiple plural mechanisms running in parallel under Gitcoin 3.0
• Participatory budgeting is now practiced in 11,000+ cities worldwide; AI-mediated deliberation (Habermas Machine, Collective Constitutional AI, pol.is at county scale) is moving from prototype to deployment
• The B Corp movement has crossed roughly 9,900 certified organizations across 105 countries, with new V2 standards raising the floor
• Pop-up cities (Edge Esmeralda, Vitalia, Mu) are converging on the prototype-then-permanent town model; Itana opened in Lagos as the first operational digital free zone in 2025
• Sky (ex-MakerDAO) is the third-largest stablecoin issuer; Uniswap activated its fee switch; DAOs are encountering normal institutional governance problems with normal-looking institutional responses

What is struggling:

• DAO voter participation hovers near 17%; 2025 saw $90M+ in DAO-related exploits; the top five DAOs hold roughly 70% of total treasury value
• Smart-contract vulnerabilities and the Aave December 2025 "hostile takeover" episode show that delegated DAO procedure can be overridden by core teams under pressure
• The Arbitrum Security Council's April 2026 emergency freeze ($71M) saved user funds but raises the open question of whether council action is governance or oligarchy
• Open-source maintainers remain under-resourced (60% unpaid, 44% burned out per Tidelift 2025); Kubernetes retired Ingress NGINX over burnout; supply-chain attacks (Shai-Hulud, qix) doubled vulnerabilities per codebase
• The Próspera–Honduras dispute, the Honduras withdrawal from ICSID, and Praxis's pivot to defense-tech show how brittle the original network-state thesis is when it meets sovereign politics
• AI-substrate enclosure is accelerating faster than digital-commons stewardship can respond; the Wikimedia bot crisis and NYT/Reddit litigation are the visible surface
• 30x30 biodiversity finance is structurally short ($1B vs $6B/yr needed); the US deep-seabed mining licenses are a parallel enclosure event on the high seas

What we are watching:

• The outcome of NYT v. OpenAI (summary judgment April 2026) and whether the EU AI Act's TDM rules become a global default
• Whether Optimism Retro Funding's continuous-mission model scales as the canonical answer to public-goods funding
• The Vaccaro / Almaatouq / Malone 2024 MIT meta-analysis — across 106 studies, human-AI teams currently underperform the better of human-alone or AI-alone on decision tasks, outperforming only on generative work. The coordination science of the next decade has to be re-derived for hybrid agent teams
• Whether Sky / Spark SubDAO's $13B+ stablecoin float remains stable as DeFi structurally absorbs more traditional financial flows
• How the cooperative sector responds to AI-driven productivity changes; ESOPs and worker cooperatives are early data points on whether worker ownership produces more humane AI adoption curves
• Fractally (fractally.com) and Psibase (psibase.io) as experimental governance platforms pushing the frontier of cooperative technology

Building Together

The Supersociety is not a political program. It is not an ideology. It is the empirically observable result of humans reorganizing around cooperative structures enabled by modern technology.

The evidence is clear: cooperatives survive longer, open-source communities create more value, commons governance works when properly designed, and participatory governance produces better outcomes. The tools to build cooperative institutions — at the company, community, and country scale — are more accessible than they have ever been.

The question is not whether the Supersociety will emerge. It is already emerging. The question is whether we will build it intentionally — learning from Ostrom's principles, from open-source governance, from cooperative economics, from the successes and failures of DAOs — or stumble into it haphazardly.

We choose to build intentionally. Every Wednesday, we document the evidence. We track what works, what fails, and what we can learn from both. We invite you to build with us.