Designing Institutions for Belonging: Mark Bonchek on What the Internet Promised

Bonchek opens by asking the audience to take a breath together, feel themselves in their seats, notice the people beside them, and register what it feels like to be in the room. The speaker says they will return to that feeling later, and the talk closes by doing so.

The story begins about 30 years ago, when Bonchek was a PhD student at Harvard writing a dissertation on the Savings and Loan crisis. Sick on Thanksgiving and feeling sorry for themself, Bonchek remembered that they had joined The Well, the online discussion forum Bonchek describes as another Stewart Brand creation.

On that very primitive discussion board, Bonchek had what they call a remarkable experience: a sense of belonging and of being connected, in a way they say they never would have felt just watching TV or a movie. The experience led Bonchek to rethink both the dissertation topic and, in their words, the rest of their life.

Bonchek switched the dissertation to the early internet. According to Bonchek, Harvard didn't know what to do with them, so they connected with the AI Lab at MIT, which gave them a broadband connection in 1994.

During this period Bonchek became interested in Marshall McLuhan's idea that "the medium is the message." Through that lens, Bonchek concluded that the internet would change everything, because it was a fundamentally different medium, comparable to the printing press. Bonchek points out that before the printing press there was no corporation and no nation-state. That is the historical parallel behind the talk: a new medium can give rise to new kinds of institutions. Bonchek saw in the internet the potential to create community and the sense of belonging they had felt that Thanksgiving.

"But we didn't quite get that," Bonchek says. The speaker cites statistics they describe as quite sad. Many people do not feel they belong in their country, their community, or their company, and 20% of people, by Bonchek's figure, do not experience belonging anywhere.

Bonchek then quotes Buckminster Fuller: you don't change things by changing the existing reality; you have to create a new one. Bonchek connects this to the "protopian" future described in another talk that evening. The central claim is that the system isn't broken. In Bonchek's view it is doing exactly what it was designed to do: getting us to buy, to vote, to fight, and to stay disconnected from what matters to us. So the task, Bonchek argues, is to build a different kind of system rather than patch the current one.

Bonchek frames the question as: what are the institutions that create belonging? Returning to the printing-press comparison, the speaker notes that only a few hundred years ago we had an entirely different set of institutions. Bonchek sees no reason new institutions shouldn't emerge from digital technology, and says there is in fact a lot of reason to expect them.

That change, Bonchek says, will require a metamorphosis. Using the image of a caterpillar, which already contains everything the butterfly needs, Bonchek argues that we already have what we need: "the seeds of belonging" are visible all around. Burning Man is the speaker's example of a place where one can glimpse what it would take to create a new kind of society at scale.

Bonchek adds that this will require symbiosis, a symbiotic relationship across humanity and nature, spirit, science, and technology, brought together into something new. The speaker says they have many ideas about what to do but doesn't lay them out in the talk.

Instead of a program, Bonchek returns to the opening exercise and asks the audience to recall the feeling of being in the room, then pictures what institutions built around belonging might feel like:

• An economy of belonging: money that works as a currency of contribution, not a purely transactional exchange that ends a relationship but one that sparks something.
• A government that fosters gratitude: Bonchek admits this is hard to imagine, "and yet we can."
• A company that creates belonging: one that fosters co-creation, where people want to go to work, appreciate each other, and know the organization appreciates them.
• Technology that contributes to connection: technology seen as adding to our sense of connection and belonging.

Bonchek's conclusion is that we can create institutions, since "we've done it before and we can do it again." The talk ends with a play on the host's name: "let's be long now."