A saga in seven acts of diminishing dignity
The Neverending Quest for Funz
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
Yeet funz. Receive funz. Question everything you thought you knew about coordination mechanisms. Forget to eat lunch again.