A “fractal” – aka a “neighborhood campus” – is a social template (like a “church,” “college,” or “kibbutz”). In particular, it’s the social template of Fractal NYC.
The focus of a fractal is on integrating all the aspects of a healthy adult life: work, hobbies, family life, learning, partying, and friendship. This isn’t anything new. In our grandparents’ time it was called civic society. It was extremely common to be a part of voluntary organizations with overlapping members like trade unions, service clubs, churches, neighborhood associations, and so on. A fractal is just a trellis for revitalizing this sort of active community living.
If you want to build one, we recommend taking one of our future accelerators!
Pillars of a Fractal
But what is a fractal? It’s a community built on the pillars of campus, village, & ✨v i b e s✨:
🏛️ Campus
There is a scene of intellectual, creative, and practical activity. Friends build and explore fields together through classes, startups, research groups, clubs, & nonprofits.
Examples:
🏘️ Village
People live within a five-minute walk, raise kids together, share common spaces, host weekly potlucks, bring soup when someone is sick, & dance at each other’s weddings.
Examples:
✨ Vibes
If the vibes are off, it’s not a fractal! Also: the primary binding force between members of a fractal is vibes aka natural chemistry – NOT identity. A fractal is friendship infrastructure, helping beautiful relationships form and sustain themselves.
Example: Fractal vibes reel
Things a fractal is not:
🚫 Ideological: like a friend group, fractals are based on relationships, not on ideas or political alignments. No “shoulds!” This is for fun & realizing the good life! In this way, a fractal is fundamentally unlike a commune or most intentional communities. A fractal is ideologically pluralist. It is not an enclave for only one subculture (such as: effective altruists, Game B people, leftists, cottagecore conservatives, meditators, authentic relaters, etc). You can, eg, use your community of neo-post-Marxists as a jumping off point for a fractal, but there is no such thing as a neo-post-Marxist fractal. In sociology speak, fractals are “affinity-based” communities rather than “identity-based.”
🚫 Centralized: like a neighborhood, there are no formal roles, rules, or boards. Formal structure can (and probably should) exist for organizations within the fractal, but the fractal itself is just a name for an informal collection of friends, family, and colleagues, as well as the projects that they collaborate on.
🚫 Separatist: like a civic society, a fractal is not a commune that breaks away from civilization. A fractal is a scene that integrates and contributes into an existing municipality. Relatedly, fractals are multicultural. They should be able to integrate everyone from your mom to your college best friend without too much friction.
Resources to build one
Below highlighted the resources we think are the most important in each category in case your time is short.
If you want to take our full bootcamp for starting a fractal, go here: fractalcampus.com
🚀 Getting started
- Tweet on the founding of Fractal NYC
- Tweet on sending invitations – be high touch!
- Tweet on finding your people (helpful for assembling the network to start a fractal)
- Ones and Tens
- Have Less Acquaintances, More Friends
🥘 Dinner party
- If you’re a brand new host, I recommend the following:
- What I Don’t Do (Hosting Edition)
- you should host a party
- Hosting 101: The Picnic
- twitter thread on hosting
- How To Host Gatherings Successfully Even If You're Scared (banger thread!)
- Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths
🏘️ Co-living and neighborhood building
- How to Live Near Your Friends
- All posts on Supernuclear but especially:
🛋️ Third space
🏛️ Starting a school (FractalU)
- How to Start a School With Your Friends
- Tweet on how starting a network university isn’t as hard as you think
🧑🍼 Parenthood in community
- Tweet on how community makes it possible to raise a kid while still having a life (please forgive the tone, I used to tweet in this overbold manner)
- Tweet on baby coworking
✨ Ethos/vibes
- Video talk from Tyler and info page on rebuilding civic society (also covers the evolution of Fractal NYC and the vision)
- Tweet on small-scale utopia
- Tweet thread on “Community is not an outcome, it’s a side-effect”
- Tweet: “You aren’t a good community member”
- Tweet on friendquaintances vs tight bonds
- Essay: The Tyranny of Structurelessness
- Spaceship Earth: a documentary covering the Synergists, a crew that started with a theatre company that went on to build their own seafaring ship, sail it around the world forming businesses and communities, and then build a giant $200 million vivarium with a self-contained ecosystem designed to create habitats for the moon and Mars. Great inspiration for any small crew looking to do great things – it will have your jaw on the floor.
