Metacrisis Action Lab #5 · Cleaned Transcript
August 11, 2026 · Lightning Lofts, Brooklyn, NY
A cleaned and condensed transcript: filler trimmed, crosstalk smoothed, the shape of the night kept intact. It is not verbatim. Attendees who spoke from the room are unnamed.
Download as .txtBen · I should explain what this place is. It used to be a button factory, and it was renovated into a seventeen-room community house across two floors. There are bathrooms out there, and the guest Wi-Fi is on the wall.
Josh · I'm grateful everybody is here. This is an experiment, the first time we've run a workshop like this on this issue. We'll spend the first twenty-five minutes getting to know who's in the room. Then I'll describe what I mean by collective capital, the specific phenomenon and the kinds of intervention that might be possible. On the back half we'll break into working groups. There are ideas already alive in this room that are real live applications of this, and there might be ideas people come up with on the way to the breakout. We'll workshop them, come back together, and report out. We stop at 9:30. I'll be around after.
MCK · We've all come here from somewhere else. It took time and effort, and you're giving that time tonight. So first, let's slow down. Second, think about what's important about being here. Three questions to write on for three minutes: what brought you here tonight; something you'd want to change that isn't about more money; and if you had tens of millions of dollars in service of a cause you care about, what would you do?
Pairs talked, then the room went around: name, neighborhood, and in three words or one sentence, what brought you here. Thirty people, ten minutes, and the room landed it on time.
MCK · It's almost a mini example of collective action.
Where the room came from. Brooklyn: Bushwick, East Williamsburg, Bed-Stuy, Crown Heights, Prospect Heights, Prospect Lefferts Gardens, Flatbush, Ditmas Park, Kensington, Sunset Park, Greenpoint, and the house itself. Queens: Astoria, Ridgewood, and Queens broadly. The Bronx: Kingsbridge and St. James Park, twice. Manhattan: the Lower East Side, the East Village, the West Village, Gramercy, and the Upper West Side. Plus Long Island, someone hunting for a Brooklyn or Queens apartment by September 1, someone between homes while buying a building with thirteen friends, one digital nomad, and one person in Brooklyn by way of Beijing and London.
What drew people.
The most common reason given, by a distance: dinner, coffee, or lunch with Josh.
Josh · The things I'm going to talk about, I have no ownership over. There are people in this room with far more lived experience of actually trying this than I have. What I'll talk about is a specific angle that excites me, and the reason I wanted to open it up is that there's so much experience and creativity in this room. That's the whole point.
The germ of this, for me, was an acute feeling that as a planet we're hurtling off a cliff. What I feel in my gut is what's happening to the living world, and that our system inexorably extracts, and it seems to be accelerating. And that makes sense given the system we operate under. The most extractive activity makes more money from an investment standpoint than regenerative alternatives, almost by definition. So capital is going to flow there. We look at the shortfall of what we'd need to jump-start a regenerative economy, and we'll keep having that shortfall until we figure out how to break that ledger.
The moment that hit the nail on the head for me: I was part of a working group with the Sustainable Economies Law Center called Next Egg, trying to build a regenerative retirement scheme. It went on for a year and a half and then it stopped, because there was no way to figure it out. The logic of our retirement system is that the economy keeps growing, and regenerative systems don't necessarily grow at the same rate.
What gives me hope is that when we ask who actually owns the economy, we kind of collectively own it. Look at the Fortune 500, the mutual funds and pension funds, and follow who bottom-lines that capital flow. About sixty percent of it is the savings and retirement accounts of everyday people. That's astonishing. Not billionaires. More distributed than that. So if we can figure out more regenerative ways to move this capital, maybe that paints a picture of how this could happen.
Josh · Over the last five years there have been spontaneous moments of mass pooling of capital for what I'd argue are mission-based things.
The first was GameStop in 2021. A retailer beloved by the internet, dropping in value, with hedge funds short-selling it. A movement started on Reddit, investors took the other side, drove the price up, and one of the largest hedge funds in the world was driven out of business, at least temporarily, before it was saved. What was interesting to me, coming from social movements and organizing, is that it operated the way social movements operate. Truly distributed. Lots of people participating for all sorts of reasons, including getting rich quick. But I don't think it would have happened had it not also been a message to Wall Street. At the peak, across GameStop and other meme stocks, about seventy billion dollars was mobilized by retail investors.
Same year: seventeen copies of the U.S. Constitution exist, about half privately held. One went up for auction at Sotheby's, and somebody tweeted that there should be a people's bid. In about a week, seventeen thousand five hundred people contributed, average contribution under a thousand dollars, and they raised forty-seven million dollars. They lost to Ken Griffin of Citadel, who was also the villain of the first story.
And then Spirit Airlines. The day it went bankrupt, a TikToker said there should be a people's bid, structured like the Green Bay Packers, a community-owned airline. In a week they had three hundred thirty-seven million dollars in commitments from about half a million people. They pulled in the flight attendants' union and people from the cooperative movement, and they put together an actual bid. They didn't get it. But three hundred thirty-seven million in a week, happening spontaneously. That gives me tremendous excitement about what's possible.
Josh · These moments have momentum, and they each ran into similar obstacles. With GameStop, Robinhood shut off the ability to purchase, which meant people could only sell. With the Constitution and with Spirit, they ran smack into regulatory challenges right away, around how ownership would work and around raising from accredited investors, so the pledges had to be redone at a much smaller scale.
The other thing: the most exciting moment to me about the Constitution would not have been winning. It would have been the day after, when people said, holy shit, we just bought the Constitution, what else could we do? What becomes possible when you actually have a success? And that requires thinking long-term about what we might be able to do if we build the capacity and the vision to mobilize capital this way in service of the movements we care about.
So the Collective Capital Lab is loosely pursuing two things. Research: can we create the legal templates and do the work required so that the next time something like this happens spontaneously, there are toolkits and resources ready to throw underneath it. And live pilots: actually finding places to try this, go out into the world, learn from it, and hopefully achieve the thing.
Josh · The first is what I'm calling an activist investment trust. Take palm oil. As an industry it drives deforestation in the global South and has instances of forced labour and destroyed habitat. But it isn't universal: among five major incumbents, two are doing a lot of the explicit damage. It would be a more sustainable system if the three better players captured the market share. So: stand up a fund any of us could buy in a brokerage that strategically bets against the bad actors, invests in the better ones, and takes the profits that would typically go to a firm as management fees and carry, and uses that to pay the attorneys and campaigners who enforce the legislation limiting imports from the deforesting companies. That's happening in Europe right now. It creates a flywheel, and generates a return for people invested in the fund. Then apply that pattern anywhere there's a bad actor on one side, a better alternative on the other, and a regulatory or campaign lever to pull. We had a first soft pilot of this that was successful.
Second, from a collaborator networked into sports, and not something I'd ever have thought of: the WNBA is the only professional league that still allows for community and collective ownership. So the idea is a multi-year campaign to put together a community ownership group and bid for an expansion team.
Third, opportunities here in New York around space and land. And fourth, whatever ideas exist in this room, which is why we're doing this.
The room offered its own examples: a real estate investment cooperative in New York City pooling money to buy space; a crowdfunded co-living building downtown that a participant lived in with their kids and still misses; a wildlife drawing auctioned for a million dollars, with the collector now interested in fractional shared ownership of an old master; a plan for a thirty-five-year-old organic restaurant to become an evolution center; the community bid for the Kingsbridge Armory in the Bronx, five hundred thousand square feet, where the community negotiated for part of the site; a global community collaboration platform that funded youth-led solutions in Africa until the funding ran out; and Cards Against Humanity buying a plot of border land to obstruct the wall.
Josh · On Spirit, they pivoted. They were able to raise enough to put in a leading bid once they moved off accredited-investor-only, and now they're in negotiation over taking an equity stake in an existing airline. The community is deciding whether that's right for them. It's an example of a big boom of interest hitting the regulatory wall, participation waning, and something real still happening.
Josh · In all instances of collective ownership this is hard. People in this room have battle scars. There's initial excitement, or you need to catalyze the excitement, and then you need to figure out all the component pieces of actually making it work. I want us to have gigantic visions and also hold the reality of what it takes to do this well.
So for any project: what is the larger purpose you're trying to serve? I'm not a sports person, but a three-year campaign that calls the question of collective ownership and juxtaposes it against how teams are held now, and who benefits, plays into a larger conversation about the commons. That's what interests me.
Then, what's the target, and why that one? It would be symbolic to collectively acquire the Statue of Liberty. We probably shouldn't, because it's not for sale.
What has to be figured out? Listing what we know we don't know is incredibly important, and then: who knows more about this and can tell us what we don't even know we don't know?
How do we get people into this, and who? A lot of people here have expertise in campaigning and storytelling. Why is this a compelling story? Why would this be an attractive adventure to be part of?
And what happens the day after we win, or lose? If we win a WNBA bid, we have to run a WNBA team, so there needs to be a set of people in place who are excited to do that with their lives, identified before we decide to do it. And if we lose, which is highly probable with anything like this, how do we keep the bigger purpose and channel the energy forward, so that losing isn't actually losing?
Question from the room: sometimes it's better to start a competitor to the thing you want than to buy it. How do you think about that?
Josh · That's a really exciting way to pivot. Spirit moving in that direction is a good example. It goes into the process.
The room split roughly evenly between playing with the market and community acquisition, spread across the house for about forty minutes, and came back with three minutes each.
The krill campaign. A participant is incubating a campaign on industrial krill fishing in the Antarctic. Krill is the bedrock of that ocean, feeding whales, penguins and seals, and most of what's taken is fished by a single company's fleet and sold as pet food and omega-3 supplements. There are algae-based alternatives. The group worked the financial layer under a consumer campaign: what a fund structure adds to the pressure, and what governance keeps people in past the first news cycle. People join because they care about penguins; something has to hold them through to the end. Message testing so far says penguins move people.
The evolution center. Caravan of Dreams has served organic food for thirty-five years, and its owner never wanted it to be only a restaurant. He wants a place where people grow: food, music, art, teaching. Food is a low-margin business, so the group landed on membership before ownership. A few hundred people at fifty dollars a month, credited back as food, buying access to programming that makes the space legible as more than a restaurant. The real work is storytelling and building a community around the actual vision. And it generalizes: there are aging founders all over the city with no succession plan, whose spaces get bought out and turned into something else.
The restaurant's owner, speaking to the room:
We are owners of nothing. We are vehicles for each other. I'm not interested in being an owner under this system anymore. Something has to be a different system that we can create together.
A boat village on Newtown Creek. Eco-restoration villages exist all over the world: communities living together in service of land they're restoring. New York has Superfund sites to spare. Boats are the way in, because live-aboards count as crew, which is how people already live on the water legally. Ecotourism and community gardens fund restoration work in the creek. The group listed its unknowns: survey the shoreline, find who owns which buildings, learn the zoning, get a council member on side. Their day-after answer held either way. Win, and the water and the land are better and there's a place where people are in relationship with both. Lose, and the idea is out in the world and useful to someone.
A museum of flourishing. A space designed around neuroaesthetics, architecture that settles the nervous system, doubling as a community venue and a mental-health resource. The group's open questions outnumbered its answers, and the two at the top were the capital stack and the governance structure that follows from it. Their day-after answer: even without the building, they'd have proof the demand exists and a record of what works for whoever tries next.
MCK · In the spirit of not letting this scatter, there's a form. Tell us if you want to stay involved, what worked and what didn't, any ideas you had that you didn't get to say, and whether you want to be connected to other people here.
Josh · It's so inspiring to hear the ideas. I want there to be a museum of flourishing now. And there are very real obstacles: the legal work, mobilizing the capital, the governance around it. The invitation of the meta-project is to help make that legible for people, so they can assess whether something is worth pursuing and how to pursue it. Thank you for showing up and spending three hours on this.
The room finished at 9:30, as promised.