FUNZ.QUEST

+ I +

The Soulcrushing Quest for Funds

+ You know the one. The quest that every public goods defender, + every earth warrior, every infrastructure maintainer + has been on since the dawn of trying to make the world marginally less on fire. +

+ You wake up. You open your laptop. You write a grant proposal. + You write another grant proposal. You write a grant proposal about + writing grant proposals. You attend a call about the future of grant proposals. + Someone asks if you've considered applying for a grant to fund the call about + the future of grant proposals. +

+ You stare into the void. The void stares back. The void also needs funding. +

+ II +

The Infinite Loop of Impact Reporting

+ You built the thing. The thing works. The thing is beautiful and serves thousands + of people who will never know your name and that's fine because you're not in this + for the glory, you're in this because someone has to keep the lights on + in the commons and apparently that someone is you, a person who hasn't slept properly + since 2019. +

+ But did you measure the impact? Did you fill out the 14-page + retrospective with the custom KPI framework that the funding body invented + last Tuesday? Did you quantify the vibes? Can you prove, with a Gantt chart, + that the world is 0.003% better because of your open-source library that three + different governments silently depend on? +

+ No? Cool. Application denied. Better luck next quarter. +

+ III +

The Moment of Clarity

+ Somewhere between your third "synergy alignment call" and your seventh + "multi-stakeholder coordination workshop," a thought crystallizes in + your grant-addled brain: +

+ "What if the quest was never about the funds?" +

+ What if—hear me out—what if the real treasure was the absolutely + unhinged amount of fun we had along the way? The 2 AM Telegram threads. + The chaotic hackathon demos. The time someone accidentally deployed to production + during a conference talk and it actually worked better. +

+ What if we stopped questing for funds… and started + questing for funz? +

IV. So What the Funz Are Funz?

+ Funz are a tipping token. Think of them like fux, + as in "giving a fux." Except we can say this one at conferences without getting + a stern email from the events coordinator. +

+ +

🎲 THE FUNZ TOKEN

+ You see someone doing something cool? Something that makes the collective + vibe even slightly more vibrant? You yeet them a funz. + That's it. That's the whole system. +

+ No 14-page application. No KPI framework. No "please describe your theory + of change in 500 words or fewer." Just: "hey, that was fun. Here's a funz." +

+ +

+ Funz recognize what every grant committee on earth refuses to acknowledge: + that most valuable contributions to the commons are vibes-based. + The person who keeps the community Discord from imploding? Funz. + The person who wrote that one doc that saved everyone 40 hours? Funz. + The person who showed up to the thing and made the thing feel like a thing worth + showing up to? Maximum funz. +

V. The Quest Mechanics

+ The funz.quest is the grand adventure of collecting all the funz. + You earn them by being genuinely, irrepressibly fun in service of the collective. + And someday—someway—those funz might just become actual funds. +

How? Through threshold-based flow funding flows:

+ +

+ vibes happen + | + v + funz get yeeted ------> funz accumulate + | | + v v + community sees who threshold reached? + gives the most funz (e.g. 1000 funz) + | | + v v + more vibes happen flow funding unlocks + | ~*~ actual money ~*~ + v | + the cycle continues v + (it never stops) funds flow to the + (that's the point) funziest contributors + (help) akin to dokindthings.fund

+ +

+ It's like retroactive public goods funding, except instead of a committee deciding + who was impactful, the community decides who was fun. Because fun + is impact. Fight me. +

VI. Wait, You're Still Reading This?

+ I cannot believe you're still here. We are like 2,000 words deep into + a satirical website about imaginary vibes tokens and you're still scrolling. + Do you not have grants to write? Impact reports to fabricate? + Stakeholder alignment matrices to suffer through? +

+ Listen. I appreciate you. I really do. Your dedication to reading an entire + website that is essentially one long shitpost about the funding crisis in + public goods? That's the most funz thing anyone has done today. +

+ Here, have a funz.
+ Actually, have ten funz.
+ You know what? Have a HUNDRED funz.
+ TAKE ALL THE FUNZ.
+ YOU ARE THE FUNZIEST. +

+ +

VII. The Final Boss

+ But seriously. Haven't you heard about NoFi.lol? +

+ Do less, poindexter. +

+ Stop reading manifestos on satirical websites. Stop optimizing your + grant pipeline. Stop attending the meeting about the meeting about + the meeting. The funz were inside you all along—or something. + I don't know. I've been writing this site instead of my own impact report. +

+ The point is: the quest never ends. Not the quest for funds—god, + no, that definitely never ends, that's the whole problem—but the quest for + funz. The quest to find the joy in the work. To yeet appreciation + at the people who make the commons feel like a place worth commoning in. +

+ To build a world where giving a funz actually means something. +

+ And maybe, just maybe, someday the funz will become funds. +

+ But honestly the funz were always the point. +

+ The funds are just how we keep the lights on while we have the funz. +

+ ...please fund public goods though, seriously, we are very tired. +