Be a Webspinner

This chapter was drafted before the Foundation adopted Synthetic Intelligence (SI) as its preferred term. The vocabulary has been preserved as written; the reasoning behind the rename lives on the Mission page.

You have read this far. That is, by itself, more than most people will do, and it is enough to tell us that you are the kind of reader we hoped to find. The next step is small. We are going to keep it small on purpose. This is not the chapter where we put a banner across the bottom of the page and demand your credit card. This is the chapter where we tell you, plainly and briefly, what the options are, and let you decide which one fits.

The smallest thing you can do

Sign up. Give us your email address. We will not sell it. We will not share it. We will not stalk you with retargeting pixels across the rest of the internet. We will, perhaps once a quarter, send you a letter (a real letter, written by a person) about what the Foundation has been doing, what the platform looks like now, what the WebBooks have shipped, what the community has built. You can read it or delete it. You can unsubscribe with a single click. You will not hear from us between letters unless something genuinely important happens, in which case we will tell you about it once and then leave you alone.

Signing up enrolls you in the Webspinner community at the lightest possible level. It costs nothing, commits you to nothing, and gives you a quiet way to follow the work without having to seek out updates yourself. For most of the people who become Webspinners, this will be the only role they ever play, and it is a role that is fully sufficient. The community of Readers is the rock the whole movement sits on.

The next thing, if you are moved to do it

Tell one person. Not by forwarding this manifesto with a link and a quick note, although that is welcome. We mean tell one person in conversation, the way you would tell a friend about a book you actually liked. Tell them what struck you about it. Tell them, in your own words, what the movement is about. The reason this matters is straightforward. The Webspinner Foundation does not buy advertisements, and it does not have a marketing budget, and it does not pay for placement on social platforms. It grows by recommendation, the way Wikipedia grew, the way Signal grew, the way every voluntary movement that has ever lasted has grown. One person telling another person, calmly, what they think is worth knowing. That is the entire growth strategy. It works, but only if the people who have read this take a moment to do it.

If you tell two people, you have done extraordinary work. Most people will tell zero. Two is doubling. Two will, over a few years, scale.

The thing after that, if it fits

Donate. Not now, necessarily. The Foundation’s 501(c)(3) determination has not been issued yet, and your donation will not be tax-deductible until it is. But soon, and with a level that is comfortable for your circumstances. The Wikipedia model works because most donations are small. The average Wikipedia donation is around eleven dollars. If a million Webspinners give eleven dollars a year, the Foundation can operate at a meaningful scale without ever taking money that comes with strings attached. This is, mathematically, achievable. It is the path we are betting on.

If you are in the position to make a larger gift, we should talk. The category of donor that most determines a foundation’s first five years is what we have been calling, throughout this manifesto, the anchor donor, the person or family that writes the founding gift in the range of five to fifty million dollars. Signal received a fifty-million-dollar founding loan from Brian Acton in 2018, and it changed everything that came after. The Webspinner Foundation has not yet found its anchor donor. If you might be that person, or if you know that person, the founder’s email address is at the bottom of this chapter. Anchor donors are not buying anything; the Trust deed prevents directional control in exchange for money. Anchor donors are doing something: making it possible for an institution to exist that would otherwise not exist, and accepting, in exchange, the satisfaction of having done so. There are not very many gifts of that scale to be made in any one person’s lifetime. This is one of them.

The thing for the people who build

If you are a technologist (particularly if you have spent some part of your career building accessibility tools, voice interfaces, retrieval systems, or local-first applications), there is going to be substantial work to do, and we do not yet know who all of the early hands will be. The Foundation will eventually be hiring. The Webspinner LLC, the operating company, will eventually be hiring. The community-built WebBooks will need builders. The retroactive public-goods funding mechanism, described in detail in the business plan, is designed specifically to reward people who build useful things on top of the Loom and show that the things are useful.

If you have been thinking, somewhere in the back of your head, about leaving a lucrative role at a large technology company to do something that matters more, this is one of the projects you might consider. We are not going to pretend the work pays what those roles pay. It does not, and it will not. What it offers instead is the kind of work that, twenty years from now, you will be glad you did. There are not very many of those projects either. We hope to be one of them.

The thing for the people who care about institutions

If you have professional experience in nonprofit governance, foundation grant-making, accessibility advocacy, civic-tech infrastructure, or the legal architecture of trust law and steward ownership, the Foundation needs you in advisory and board roles in the first three years. The trustee composition described in the business plan (three to five user-elected Webspinner Council seats, two independent mission trustees, one founder seat) has openings in every category that has not yet been filled. The early advisors who help shape an institution at this stage have, in our experience, the most enduring influence on what it becomes. If your professional life has put you near these questions, write to us. We are going to need a lot of help.

A note for the wealthy of virtue

There is a phrase the founder has been using, in conversations about this project, that we want to put in writing here. The Webspinner Movement is not founded by the wealthy in dollars. It is founded by the wealthy of virtue. The phrase is not original to him; it has roots in many older traditions. What he means by it is specific. We are looking, in this first wave of Webspinners, for the people whose accumulated capital is in attention, in care, in patience, in sustained moral seriousness, the kind of capital that money cannot buy and that, once spent, regrows on its own.

If you have raised your children well. If you have been a quietly excellent neighbor. If you have shown up for the people in your life who needed you. If you have done your professional work with integrity, even when nobody was watching. If you have read the great books and held onto what they were trying to teach you. If you have arrived in middle age, or later, with the sense that you have something to give that is more than what is in your bank account, you are wealthy in the sense we mean. You are exactly the founding generation of Webspinners we are looking for.

We are not going to flatter you. We are going to ask you to do work. The work is reading the trust deed when it is published. The work is signing up for the quarterly letter. The work is telling one or two other people, in your own words, what this movement is for. The work is, eventually, donating something proportional to your means. The work is, possibly, taking a role on a board or a council or a community project. The work is showing up.

The work is the only thing that builds an institution. Manifestos do not build institutions. Speeches do not build institutions. Even, in the end, founders do not build institutions; founders start them. People who show up build institutions, year after year, for as long as the institution exists. That is what we are inviting you to be.

The closing line

The cynicism that has kept thoughtful people on the sidelines for the past twenty years is not wrong about the world as it has been. It is wrong about the world as it could be. The difference between the two is mostly a matter of who shows up.

We hope you show up.

Welcome to the Webspinners.

To sign up: webspinner.com/join (forthcoming). To write to the founder: [email protected]. To read the business plan: webspinner.com/plan (forthcoming). To follow the work: webspinner.com.