If you were to ask an ordinary person if they could personally fix the economy, stop a pandemic, or prevent famine, they probably wouldn’t even know where to begin. So we gave the players a specific place to start: in their own communities, groups, and social networks, using whatever they knew best as a foundation for suggesting solutions.
Finally, this mission gave us some concrete data about our players. We asked players to tell us, confidentially, a little bit about who they were in 2008, to help us put their forecasts and ideas into context. This 2008 data didn’t appear on their public profile; it was only to help during the research process, so we could cross-reference their future ideas by real-life age, location, and occupation. We wanted to find out more about how SEHIs think of themselves and what kinds of projects they are most likely to tackle.
So who superstructs? Here’s what we found out.
Out of just under nine thousand forecasters who joined the effort, the vast majority were between the ages of twenty and forty, with the rest spread out like a bell curve. Our youngest player was ten (he was particularly interested in the future of food, especially “lab-grown meat,” which is in fact an emerging food technology). Our oldest player was ninety (she was interested in the future of education).
We had players from forty-nine out of fifty U.S. states and more than one hundred countries worldwide. We had a startlingly diverse group of professionals, including chief engineers, chief technical officers, chief creative officers; longshoremen, hotel concierges, and museum curators; astrophysicists, atmospheric scientists, mathematicians; nurses, plumbers, and photographers. There were also numerous college and graduate students, senior executives, members of the armed forces, and public servants.
What expertise did these diverse participants bring to the game? Players identified expertise in areas as wide as labor activism, transportation and logistics, and robotics; specialty coffee, the comic book industry, the steel industry; immigration, forestry, and fashion; tourism, health care, and journalism ; chemical engineering, caregiving, and e-commerce; consulting, defense, and human resources; forensics, human rights, and nanotechnology.
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These were among the skills and resources we asked players to bring to bear on the five superthreats. And we asked them to tackle the superthreats in a very specific way: by inventing superstructures.
HOW TO INVENT A SUPERSTRUCTURE
This is a game of survival, and we need you to survive.
We’re facing superthreats, and we need to adapt.
The existing structures of human civilization just aren’t enough. We need a new set of superstructures to rise above, to take humans to the next stage.
You can help. Superstruct now. It’s your legacy to the human race.
Q: WHAT’S A SUPERSTRUCTURE?
A: A superstructure is a highly collaborative network that’s built on top of existing groups and organizations.
THERE ARE FOUR TRAITS THAT DEFINE A SUPERSTRUCTURE:
1. A superstructure brings together two or more different communities that don’t already work together.
2. A superstructure is designed to help solve a big, complex problem that no single existing organization can solve alone.
3. A superstructure harnesses the unique resources, skills, and activities of each of its subgroups. Everyone contributes something different, and together they create a solution.
4. A superstructure is fundamentally new. It should sound like an idea that no one’s tried before.
Q: WHAT KINDS OF GROUPS CAN COME TOGETHER TO FORM SUPERSTRUCTURES?
A: Any kind of group at all. For profit and not-for-profit, professional and amateur, local and global, religious and secular, online and offline, fun and serious, big and small.
ANY EXISTING COMMUNITY CAN BE ADDED TO A SUPERSTRUCTURE ! HERE ARE SOME EXAMPLES:
• Companies
• Families
• People who live in the same building or neighborhood
• Industry and trade organizations
• Nonprofits and NGOs
• Annual conferences or festivals
• Churches
• Local or national governments
• Online communities
• Social network groups
• Fan groups
• Clubs
• Teams
Q: HOW DO I CREATE A NEW SUPERSTRUCTURE?
A: Start by picking a community that you already belong to. What could your community uniquely contribute to solving one or more of the superthreats? And who else do you want to work with to make it happen?
When you’re ready to share your idea, create a new wiki article. Use the wiki fields (name, motto, mission, who we need, how we work, and what we can accomplish) to describe your new superstructure.
Q: I’VE MADE A SUPERSTRUCTURE. WHAT NEXT?
A: When you have a basic description of your superstructure in place, invite other SEHIs and your own friends, colleagues, neighbors, and networks to join.
If you’ve made your superstructure public, keep an eye on your wiki to welcome new members and to see how the superstructure evolves. If you’ve made your superstructure private, be sure to check back often to approve new members so they can help you build your superstructure.
Together, your Superstruct members can keep editing the wiki until it describes exactly the way you think your superstructure should work.
DON’T STOP NOW!
Once you’ve created your first superstructure, there’s lots more to do. You can create superstructures for other superthreats. Or you can design spin-off superstructures from your original superstructure. You can invent competing superstructures, or bigger superstructures to swallow up superstructures that are already existing.
Keep superstructing, and surprise us with your big ideas!
The most important rule for inventing a superstructure was that it should be unlike any existing organization. It should be a fundamentally new combination of people, skills, and scales of work. But it also had to be a plausible approach to a problem—a way to give people who don’t ordinarily work on challenges like hunger, pandemic, climate change, economic collapse, or network security a way to make a difference.
Inventing a superstructure was the core element of gameplay; it was how players earned survivability points (up to one hundred), which tallied into a total survivability score. The more thoughtful, clearly explained, creative, and surprising the superstructure, the more points a player earned. A player could also earn points by joining and contributing ideas to other players’ superstructures.
What, exactly, is a survivability score? We described it to players as follows:
Your Survivability Score is a number between 0 and 100 that appears in your Survival Profile. When you first join, you have a score of 0. Any score higher than 0 means you personally are becoming more and more important to the survival of the species. If you achieve a score of 100, you personally are absolutely central to the future of the human race.
In other words, our scoring system wasn’t meant to be competitive, but simply to represent your personal progress.
Let’s take a look at some brief descriptions of some of the particularly high-scoring superstructures, and the SEHIs who created them.
WE HAVE THE POWER—ENERGY - HARVESTING CLOTHES
You don’t need to buy power from an energy company. You can make your own power. What you wear every day can help you collect and save energy, which you can use to power your laptop, your cell phone, your MP3 player, or to provide heat.
Think: Jackets with solar panels that collect energy and can be used to provide electric heat when you wear the jacket at night. Headbands with solar-paneled flowers that collect the energy you need to power your iPod. Fringed skirts that harness wind energy and store it in a tiny battery that you can detach and use to power anything at all. A belt with a sound wave collector that turns environmental noise into an energy source.
We’re creating and collecting designs for all kinds of wearable energy sources. We’ll make working prototypes of these designs and present them in a We Have the Power fashion show. We need your help sharing and improving these designs so that as many people as possible can harvest their own energy.
The We Have the Power superstructure was founded by SEHI Solspire, or, in real life, Pauline Sameshima, an assistant professor in the department of teaching and learning at Washington State University. She led her design class in creating a series of real, working prototypes and impromptu campus fashion shows for clothes that incorporated the kinds of wearable energy technologies described above. Their SEHI mission: to use rapid prototyping and design innovation to tackle the Power Struggle superthreat, and help invent the future of energy.
SEEDS ATMS—WITHDRAW YOUR FOOD FOR FREE
Food shouldn’t cost anything. Seeds also shouldn’t cost anything.
That’s why this superstructure has been created: to build a Seeds ATM network, so anyone who needs seeds can easily go to an ATM and get free seeds.
What we want to accomplish: spread the GYO (grow your own) food concept, as well as set the foundations of a bigger free-food network.
We envision a network of secure Seeds ATMs installed at bank locations worldwide. However, as a working prototype, we propose a really simple hack: gumball machines. We will fill them with seeds and set them to not need money, or to simply require a penny. We will install them outside grocery stores and farmers’ markets.
This superstructure was invented by SEHI Jorge Guberte, a twenty-five-year-old digital artist in São Paulo, Brazil. With no direct connection to the food industry or agriculture, he proposed a completely unexpected, extreme-scale solution to the Ravenous superthreat. His SEHI mission: to make access to food a basic civic right, and help invent the future of how we feed ourselves.
THE DEMOCRATIC CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC (DCAR)—THE REFUGEE STATE
DCAR, the Democratic Central African Republic, is a “weakly statelike entity,” or WSLE, a 16 million person quasi-state entity in east central Africa in a contested region where the neighboring countries have largely lost the will to continue fighting but will not allow each other to declare victory.
Humanitarian efforts in this disordered area therefore had to provide many basic functions of the state, such as identity services, issuing what amounted to passports, issuing a basic electronic currency, and generally trying to keep life going until somebody asserted governance over the area.
Eventually, after four or five years of interim governance using electronic democracy software and biometric cell phones, DCAR has begun to have semiofficial, quasi-state status. Like Taiwan, it cannot safely assert full sovereignty, but the shells of the previous governments of the region have technically passed their legitimacy to the refugee councils of DCAR, and as long as nobody raises an army, nobody seems to mind self-organizing refugees trying to manage their lives until the governments settle their territorial disputes.
Anybody can support DCAR. You just have to remember how important it is that refugees get political rights to manage their own lives, just as we do. Being a refugee is hard enough without being oppressed too!
If you want to get more involved, display the DCAR flag wherever you can to let people know that DCAR still matters.
The DCAR superstructure was founded by SEHI Hexayurt, or Vinay Gupta, a noted world expert on disaster relief. He is also the inventor of the Hexayurt, an inexpensive, lightweight shelter designed to provide sustainable housing for refugees. He wanted to address the Generation Exile superthreat in the context of the ongoing African refugee crisis. His SEHI mission: to help invent the future of peace and government.
NONE OF THESE
ideas will reinvent the way the world works on its own. But alongside the more than five hundred other superstructures that players created, they effectively prove a new reality: that problem solving at extreme scales can involve ordinary people; that all scales of human organization can combine and recombine in startling ways; that continuous reinvention is not only possible, it’s an evolutionary imperative for the next decade.
WE RAN SUPERSTRUCT
as a live forecasting experiment for six weeks. So what were the final results?
After the game, our players inventoried and organized their efforts into a catalog of solutions called the Whole Superstructure Catalog (a play on Stewart Brand’s
Whole Earth Catalog
), which you can view online, at Superstruct.
wikia.com
.
In addition to their catalog of 550 superstructures, our players created more than a thousand vivid first-person accounts of the superthreats, told in videos and photos, blogs and Twitter updates, Facebook messages and podcasts. This world lives online as a resource for other forecasters, policy makers, educators, and interested individuals to explore and analyze.
We set up traditional discussion forums to provide players with a sounding board for strategies they wanted to apply in their superstructures. The players held court across more than five hundred different forum topics, such as “Networking the offline world: How do we reach out to people who aren’t online?”; “What can we do with bicycles: Beyond exercise, how can we use bicycles to help solve some big problems?”; and “Art for art’s sake: What is the role of arts in 2019? What role can art play during times of epic crisis?” There’s enough reading material on these forums to comprise dozens of future-forecasting reports—and it’s all saved online for public browsing.
In terms of gameplay, we had nineteen players achieve a survivability score of 100—the equivalent of winning the staff of life in
Spore
, or creating a level 80 character in
World of Warcraft
. We invited these nineteen players to become our “SEHI 19,” and we extended invitations to them to continue collaborating with the Institute for the Future. All of the players, but in particular the SEHI 19, became a kind of superstructure for IFTF itself.