Fund the future of media

The Elysian is a collective media ecosystem imagining a better future.

Our audience

  • 150,000+ monthly views // 20,000+ subscribers including:

    • Employees at OpenAI, Stripe, Y Combinator, Disney, Substack, Spotify, Audible, Wattpad

    • VC investors Album VC, Kickstart Fund, Urbanist VC

    • Progress thinkers at Schmidt Futures, Progress Institute, Roots of Progress, Abundance Institute, Progress Ireland

    • Intellectuals like Matthew Yglesias, Judd Legum, Brad DeLong, Bill Bishop, Michael Moore

    • Professors and students at Harvard, Columbia, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, NYU

    • Editors at The Information, The New Atlantis, Every, Penguin Random House, Harper Collins, Hearst

We produce collaborative media projects

We’re a writers’ collective thinking through the most important ideas of our time. Here are some of our upcoming projects:

  • WE SHOULD OWN THE ECONOMY // A multi-year project studying capital and how we can create more owners of it.

  • CITY STATE // An online series and print pamphlet about autonomous government

  • TERRAFORM // An online series and print pamphlet about terraforming our natural environment

  • ANALOG // An online series and offline print pamphlet about how we can get involved in our analog communities

  • RURAL // An online series and print pamphlet about rural development

  • THE DAILY HUMANIST // A one-year newsletter & philosophy book prompting modern readers to make the world a better place through human effort

  • THE NEW REPUBLIC // Modern thinkers recreate Plato’s Republic, imagining the ideal city-state for a podcast and print book

Sponsor one of our projects

We are looking for funding partners interested in sponsoring our projects and being part of what we are creating:

  • Write the foreword to the series

  • Participate in a guest lecture that publishes during the series

  • Participate in a custom case study that publishes during the series

  • Include a custom text ad at the top of our essays

We’d love to come up with a custom collaboration with you. Your contribution will directly fund editorial operations including writers, graphic design and illustration, printing, and shipping. More importantly, you’ll be funding a better media system: A collective of artists imagining a better future.

Email elle@elysian.press for more information.

We’re building a cooperative media ecosystem

Every project we publish is owned by the writers, podcasters, and filmmakers who write, podcast, and film them.

  • Two writers could host a six-part techno-futurism podcast together and share the earnings

  • Three filmmakers could launch an animated solarpunk film series and split the profits

  • Five writers could collaborate on a magazine or book about Cooperatism, Terraforming, or City States and share the earnings

  • 20 writers could host an annual worldbuilding event and split the earnings

Most projects have a creative director or team who earns the bulk of profits, but they could also have any number of collaborators and be organized according to any financial split.

We want to fund projects that better the future

Eventually, we hope to fund even larger projects up front—like protopian video games, sci-fi films, and architectural projects. If we sell hundreds of magazines, books, podcasts, videos, conferences, and events over the next 10 years, we could cumulatively sell hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in media projects. If the Collective earns a share of every sale, it could create a fund that invests in longer-term projects with the expectation that the Collective would earn a percent of the earnings when it’s done and continue to invest in other projects from there.

For more on this idea, read my essays: What if we fund artists the way we fund startups? or I’d rather have an investor than a publishing contract.

About Elle Griffin

I am the founder and editor for The Elysian. For my work in human progress, I was named a Roots of Progress fellow and Substack fellow. My newsletter has been featured by The New York Times, BBC, Business Insider, Fast Company, The Information, Publisher’s Weekly, Means of Creation, and Morning Brew.

I want to see our media ecosystem transformed from doomer sensationalism, partisan journalism, and dystopian thought, to solutions-oriented journalism, speculative brainstorming, and generative thought about how we can create something better. I’d love to see that media ecosystem owned and operated by independent writers and podcasters and filmmakers rather than media moguls with an agenda, an algorithm, and an ad-captured sensationalist bent.

I’m even optimistic enough to believe that by changing our media ecosystem, we could change our outlook on the world. And be inspired to create a better one.

I hope you’ll join us.

“Journalism meets sci-fi.” —Chris Best, CEO Substack

“Elle’s reinterpreting how our civilization is structured from the bottom up and the inside out—I love it, It’s a fantastic project.” —Parag Khanna, author of Move, The Future is Asian

“Elle is doing some of the most important work right now—imagining the future of how we live as technology changes rapidly and distrust continues to grow in legacy systems of power.” —Katie O’Connell, OpenAI