TL;DR

Innovation in the way we learn is long overdue, so we’re building a hyperstructure for learning–a collection of crypto protocols that can run for free and forever and enable anyone to run novel, permissionless experiments in education. To do that, we’ll build learning experiences, identify shared primitives, protocolize them, rinse, and repeat. Our first experiment is to build a community of educators and domain experts to rapidly author web3-native self-guided and cohort-based learning around timely topics. We’ll funnel the resultant bootstrapped insights and treasury into developing protocols and generating new experiments.

Synthesizing Solutions

We’re in the first .01% of humanity’s history. The vast majority of human meaning, experience, and beauty lies ahead. The future may promise not only trillions more lives, but better ones. An order of magnitude better.

Yet we face an inflection point. The complex interconnected challenges confronting us represent risks ranging from existential to dystopic to stagnant. Potential bottlenecks to flourishing and thriving are layered, simultaneous, and mutually reinforcing. They will not resolve themselves.

While solvable, the situation requires, more than anything, sophisticated coordination. Luckily, this is our species’ major evolutionary advantage. It’s innovation around collaboration that enabled our exponential arc of progress. Language got us past blood ties, culture and memetics past immediate geography, division of labor past individual production.

Just as homo sapiens is nascent, so is the latest in this lineage of tools for coordinated action: digital networks. The internet may feel mature, but in this longtermist framing, it’s embryonic. And for the web to sufficiently augment our capacity to work together in time, it needs to develop more features fast. Ideally, functionality for both generating solutions and deploying them.

As it stands currently, our digital lives are highly fractured monolithic silos disconnected from large swaths of meatspace existence. But the advent of distributed public ledger technology promises to bring things into greater alignment. It allows for internet native infrastructure.

That is, we can build unstoppable, open, interoperable, & trust-less protocols on a unified civilizational data layer. Just like undersea cables laid in the 90s were the base layer of connectivity for the modern internet, development of blockchain ecosystems happening right now is pouring the foundation for coordinating against this century’s latent crises.

But deployment capacity is one thing, what about generating solutions? What sort of protocols do we need for that? How do we solve the meta-problem of solving for the creation of solutions? We may not yet know much about the mechanics of ideation or consciousness, but we do know about the conditions. To put it simply: solutions follow understanding, understanding follows learning, and diversity is an accelerant. There is no public good greater than education; it is the public good that begets public goods.

And yet despite the abundance of free and near universally available information, learning quality is low and the quantity of innovation is embarrassing. We face a problem not of limited resources, but of disorganized abundance. We face a scarcity of structure.

This should come as no surprise: the design space of effective learning structures is as broad as learning styles are varied. To solve this problem, educational tooling needs a structure of structures—a hyperstructure: crypto protocols that can run for free and forever, without maintenance, interruption or intermediaries. Good education evolves, good minds grow, tools improve; for the first time in history, we have the materials to support this breadth of need and pace of evolution on a shared public ledger—for enabling the ultimate playground for synthesis, for genuine and urgent learning at scale, for crafting a generational solution engine and, more importantly (more hopefully), the many, many more to come.

Pinning Proteus

When Homeric Menaleus seeks out Proteus to finally learn the way home from Troy, he must grapple with the ancient sea god to extract that information. Proetus is a shapeshifter who uses his skill to elude capture and coercion and sharing privileged data downloaded via the vast mycelial network of global waterways. But eventually he’s bested by the Mycenaean and forced to comply. Menaleus comes away with a mental model for achieving his goal, but also a bit of intelligence he’s able to transmit years later when Odysseus' son Telemachus arrives hoping to discover his father’s fate.

Learning is often like this. The solution to each pedagogical problem requires new tactics in the wrestling match of wisdom. What works once may not work again. And the success or failure at one time and place sets the stage for later knowledge experiments.

So educational projects must take an opinion informed by their context. They're faced with a set of goals and variables, then develop a thesis about the best way to solve the problem of learning. Experiments win or lose by a diverse collection of time horizons and metrics. But all make judgments, trade-offs, and suppositions and are thereby definitionally limited in scope. They can't solve for everything.

This doesn't mean we need fewer attempts though. In fact, we need orders of magnitude more if we're to sufficiently innovate—a rich plurality. But the state space is heavily constrained by stubborn incumbents and extractive incentives. Our current pedagogical status quo represents a massive manufactured position on how an entire centralized civilization should learn, and even radical non-luddite outliers tend skeuomorphic. Not optimal for progress.

Yet hyperstructures take no opinion. Instead, they're public goods that sit below the experiments, permissionlessly empowering their creativity and recording it all on-chain. A hyperstructure for learning protocolizes educational primitives to create a free suite of composable tools any project can employ. What might educators build with an internet-native, programmable design kit for learning? Might this birth a massive diversity of approaches that triggers an explosion in interoperable learning innovation?

Decentralized and therefore censorship resistant hyperstrucutres are being built for the storage and accessibility of human knowledge, but what about a hyperstructure for absorbing, understanding, and teaching that information? How about perpetual protocols to let anyone design sophisticated learning spaces and compose their cultures?

It's our mission to build them.

Building Hyperstructure

So what are the educational primitives we’ll build open, opinion-less protocols around? Do they concern incentives, attention, social graphs, credentials, intelligence, synthesis, dialectics, what? Well, we’re at least wise in the Socratic sense here, i.e. we don’t know. That’s because this is the bleeding edge. And that’s good. We need to run more experiments and gather more data. Unlike much of current academia, we need to fail fast and iterate. We need to learn by doing. And we need community.

A typical path to protocol development goes something like this: have idea, raise funds, shout opinions, tokenize, cash out, watch community move to the next thing. If we’re to leverage blockchain technologies to effect meaningful long-term change in our civilizational learning landscape, this simply won’t work.

Sustainable internet-native organizations form first around shared values (vibes). They scale on the success of their narratives (lore), and they persist when they solve real problems for real people (product). Any attempt at building learning solutions, protocolizing primitives, and constructing real hyperstructure for learning needs to nurture community authentically.

Needs don’t wait for the tools to meet them; the right tools emerge from the meeting of needs. Nowhere is this more true than in the web3 education space, which represents a confluence of novel technological and social changes all proceeding at an unprecedented pace. And it’s a space with consistent hunger for more substantive treatment of important emerging subjects. So to iterate in a manner that will allow primitives for hyperstructure to appear, our inaugural experiment will leverage community expertise and pedagogical knowhow to rapidly create robust learning experiences on trending topics.

Using crowdfund mechanics to identify demand, we'll facilitate learning raids for guerilla-style cohorts to organize, deploy capital, develop a course of study in realtime, then hibernate or disband. These flash conferences are temporary learning sprints to go way deeper than typical "current thing" discourse and produce open-source, updatable artifacts publicly available for self-directed inquiry.  Think superfluid learning squads harnessing the energy of collective curiosity to swiftly fund and build first proximal, then distributed proficiency as a public good.  They’ll leverage web3 tooling to build community, gather resources, pay educators, play games, self-govern, and create value. Unique peer-to-peer experiments like this aren’t possible without blockchains and have the potential to surface primitives that should be incorporated into a hyperstructure, scaled, and ultimately computed over and optimized.

Setting Sail

Whether your lens falls on the developing metacrisis and humanity's clear failure to coordinate at the scale necessary to secure a longterm safe future, the rising costs and sinking outcomes of traditional education, the political divisions that cause and are caused by that failure in the status quo, the growth of misinformation and censorship targeting those least likely to survive them, the current erosion of professional opportunity for our most talented educators, or all of the above—the need for change, for conscious optimism, and for tinkering in our educational systems could not be more clear, or more urgent.

We’re co-discovering the future of education and erecting a hyperstructure for learning to tackle some of the largest coordination failures and public goods challenges that exist. You can follow our journey here on Mirror, on Twitter, and in Discord. Join us.