Friends with Benefits is a worldwide network of culture creators, thinkers and builders with a mission to build the cultural and technical infrastructure for digitally-native communities through creative experimentation, collective coordination, and new forms of networked belonging.
As a community-owned and community-governed new cultural institution, FWB produces global events and digital experiences —including product launches, IP, audience building, multi-media campaigns, and our own large-scale festival.
Becoming a Certified Friend unlocks access to our community, events, programming, and shared digital infrastructure.
→ Join FWB
FWB FEST returns for a fourth year. It is our annual summit in the mountains to examine how we optimistically move forward at the junction of seemingly oppositional forces.
We’re embracing a technological and cultural tension: data-driven predictions and unquantifiable human experience, technological precision and chaotic reality, algorithms that map our past and the uncharted territories of our shared futures.
→ Idyllwild, CA · August 1–3, 2025
Each year, FWB FEST explores a central question shaping networked culture.
In collaboration with longtime FWB member and FEST mainstage alum, Ruby Justice Thelot, we developed the narrative driving our FEST25 programming Syzygy: Predictive Models, Unpredictable Futures.
