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A piece and video documenting the origins of a format for releasing creative work.

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Published in collaboration with Zora Zine, “The Onchain Era” theorizes that the Ethereum Merge marks a meaningful and historic shift in the utility of blockchains.

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New release from Metalabel: a zine edited by Austin Robey (Metalabel) and Severin Matusek (co—matter) exploring constructive alternatives to how people create, share, and collaborate online.

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Published in collaboration with Metalabel’s Public Record, this piece explores how the Royal Society, Dischord Records, and the Guerrilla Girls used the metalabel form to promote their cultural ideals.

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Documenting a tool Metalabel uses internally to asynchronously communicate and collaborate. Since posting, this practice has been adopted by other teams.

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Published in collaboration with Friends With Benefits’s Works in Progress, “After Crypto” is an essay exploring what blockchain-based projects beyond crypto may look like. The piece was inspired by the economist Carlotta Perez’s book Technological Innovations and Financial Capital, which explores how financial bubbles and technological changes are interrelated.

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Metalabels are release clubs where groups of people who share the same interest support and release work together.

The Metalabel universe is a series of releases providing tools, resources, and experiences to support collaborative creative projects.

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Held on the anniversary of the creation of the Bento, Bento Day invites the public to take actions to fulfill the needs of each dimension of the self, from self-care to being with others to community service to making space for their future. Participants made Bentos of where they wanted to be in one year, which were added to a time capsule to be opened in one year.

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The Library of Economic Possibility is a publication and resource exploring the real-world impact of alternative economic models, with a starting focus on basic income, codetermination, and land value taxation. The Bento Society Future Us grant was the first funding for the project.

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A $1500 micro-grant for projects exploring the frontiers of value and a wider lens for the self. The first grant was given to the Library of Economic Possibility in April 2021.

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A podcast exploring ideas, values, and the self hosted by Yancey Strickler. Season One guests included authors John Higgs, Heather McGhee, and David Wallace Wells; economists Marianna Mazzucatto and Kate Raworth; and more.

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A tool for setting priorities and goals for the Bento self on an annual basis, with quarterly check-ins to track progress and make adjustments.

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A series of essays and interviews exploring how we can harness the potential of data while limiting its dangers, featuring roundtables and conversations with leading data practitioners and academics.

Links: Data is Fire, Roundtable #1, Roundtable #2, Doughnut Economics, Jeff Hammerbacher

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A series of scripted journeys for ten strangers to embark on together. In three seasons and 18 episodes, participants explored themselves, connected with others, and role-played to experience how to navigate conflict and group disagreement.

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A series of collaborative experiments with the Bento Society during the summer of 2020. Each Wednesday, a group of 20-30 strangers met to explore themselves and the world around them in designed scenarios that provoked decision-making, conflict resolution, and role-playing.

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The same way software technology is built on a “stack” of interlinking technologies, our values are similarly stacked. This series explores how morals, values, and beliefs are “stacked,” and what a post-capitalist world for realists might look like.

Links: The Values Stack, The Values Stack IRL, Post-capitalism for realists

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A digital version of the Bento built by a high school student named Asher Weintraub.

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The Bento Society is a global community of people who come together to explore Bentoism. Members come from all around the world and every walk of life. 

In its first year, the Bento Society hosted more than 100 events for thousands of people from around the world to help them set priorities, share challenges and perspectives, and explore potential futures together.

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A simple priority-setting process that invites a person to prioritize their time from four perspectives: Now Me, Now Us, Future Me, and Future Us.

The Weekly Bento is also a group experience, with a video call hosted every Sunday for 18 straight months, with attendees from around the world.

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Bentoism.org was created with artist Laurel Schwulst and software developer Taichi Aritomo. The site combines a simple hand-drawn slideshow experience with a moving sky.

The creative brief for the site was: “Bentoism should not be mistaken for a product. It should feel like it’s own category of thing.”

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Published by Viking/Penguin, this nonfiction book makes the case for an expansion of values and an expansion of self in the 21st century. In its first two years after being published, the book has been published in five countries and languages.

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The first in a series of experimental workshops where people were taught the form of the Bento and guided through a group experience of building and sharing their own. These Experiments took place in living rooms in Los Angeles throughout 2019.

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A series of essays that introduce an idea called The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet: a thesis that people were no longer sharing their real thoughts online in the open spaces of the web, and instead we had retreated to “dark forests” less visible from the prying eyes of others. This creates a hollowing out of the common spaces, and introduces new forms of conspiracy and coordination.

Links: The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet, Beyond the Dark Forest Theory of the Internet, The Blessing and the Thirst

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A tool for making decisions that take into account the near and long-term, and ourselves as individuals and the communities around us.

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A newsletter exploring ideas, with a focus on values, data, the self, and interviews with leading thinkers on these same topics.

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