Thank you for this interesting piece. A few disorganized questions I have to stimulate the conversation: There seems to be a difference between top down models and bottom up models, right? Morazán is sort of a top down model with a benevolent dictator property owner who designs the framework and makes the key governance decisions and then people opt into this. Maybe California Forever is the same? Then the network state is more bottom up, with people forming a group in the cloud based on shared values and goals and then descending on and co-creating a physical manifestation of this community. Both would seem to have some underlying economic rationale in the sense that both rely on individuals making their own decisions to join, but then they have different governance structures. Also, to what extent is the network state just like the back to the land communes of the 1960s and 70s? I suppose those were focused on a few issues whereas network states can be organized around many more issues. But it seems like that earlier movement might hold some lessons. And finally, to what extent does digital nomadism scramble the earlier economic rationales of city building. You don’t always have to have an underlying economic engine or rationale if you can import wages thru digital nomadism. And if so, does this free up the city to focus on more ephemeral concepts?
Hey Mike, thanks for questions - I'll try to answer each in turn, but feel free to turn this into a conversation.
I hear what you're getting at with "top down" re: Ciudad Morazán, and I think that's a fair description. That project is very much on a mission to provide a better place for people to live and their success will be proved out by demand to live in that place.
California Forever is more of a typical planned community (a la the Woodlands in Texas, but with walkable urban design and mixed use zoning). If that fits your definition of top down, then sure, but it's not anymore "planned" than communities built by Lennar or KB (they're just providing a very different product).
Re: the Network State...
Well, I've read most of the Network State book and listened to a couple hours of BS on podcasts and, conceptually, it feels like grasping at smoke. Sometimes he's talking about taking over parts of San Francisco, sometimes he's talking about establishing a network of places like Próspera...but the through line is the idea that people form communities online and then take collective political action to do...various things.
Being candid, I have a hard time taking it all very seriously. Listening to him talk, he kind of just reinvents the idea of basic political organizing but then drives to odd conclusions (there is not a meaningful constituency of people in sF who identify as Y Combinator alumni and are interested in doing politics on the basis of that identity).
Re: your comment about the back to the land communes — 100%. The Network State is cribbing off a bunch of prior decentralizationist movements (some of which I find very interesting and include people I respect quite a bit). It's most proximal intellectual predecessor, though, was probably the competitive governance folks who were themselves melding burner culture as understood by Bay Area tech folks in the early 2000s and the insights from New Institutional Economics.
As to your last (excellent question), I don't believe digital nomadism impacts the labor market basis for cities. Most people aren't digital nomads (and I say this as someone who sometimes is). Even the many folks who work remote typically have the rest of their non-economic life rooted in place somewhere.
It’s interesting BS is launching network state 2.0 just outside of Singapore and it seems like the thrust of it is to gather people together in one spot who will be doing their day jobs remotely (coworking) but their focus with their “heads up” time in this network state will be to co-create something (not sure what), earning crypto, learning how to be network state “pioneers” so you can set up your own network state, and eat healthy and burn calories together (basically surround yourself with others who lead a healthier lifestyle you want to lead). I don’t see much talk of creating a new governance structure, unless that is subsumed in the goal of taking some of the economy onto the blockchain…but it seems like there is significant demand from applicants who want to be part of something like this.
Regarding the digital nomad thing, I see your point. I have never been one myself (yet?) but I have a primary job as a lawyer that would allow for it, and another job as a coworking space owner that requires at least someone to be at the coworking space, and since I also have teenage kids and a wife who works, there is no real way to go nomad now. I think you are hitting on something in your own experience too, which is that people may want to be nomadic during parts of the year and/or parts of their lives. It would be great if there were cities or towns in the u.s that could cater to this (airbnbs are too expensive and you would want more of a community infrastructure).
To your broader point about new cities needing to be anchored in an economic activity, I largely agree but I think there are important exceptions or countercurrents: early settlements built around grave sites and religious sites, people fleeing religious or political persecution who came to the new world and did basic subsistence farming, the tidewater plantation economy where most economic activity happened on plantations that had direct trade connections and the resulting stunted towns that didn’t serve much of an economic purpose (does Amazon and fedex allow for this to proliferate everywhere now?) and then of course suburbs where land was decoupled from economic productivity and instead people were moving to the suburbs for cultural, political, social reasons (but also building wealth through home ownership).
Is the thing outside of Singapore his "Network School" deal? I read about that and it's very much in the vein of these things Vitalik Buterin(sp?) does where people do just what you described. Nothing against it (I could imagine parts of it being super fun depending on the crowd), I just still haven't seen anything that makes me think it's moving the practice of governance or city building forward in some profound way (which you, ofc point out). But, you're right, whatever they actually are, enough people seem to be in to the them to keep them going.
Your second point is getting at something really interesting (and I think it dovetails with the previous point about these "pop up cities"). The idea of a physical place being a point of gathering place for a community on a seasonal basis has some historical precedent in pre-contact native cultures. David Graeber did a bunch of work on it (although you have to take his stuff with a grain of salt, there are apparently some issues with his research); but it kinda starts looking something akin to burning man or ephemerisle. But yeah, I think I hear you getting at the idea of being able to post of in a city 3-6 months out of the year which is an awkward amount of time cost wise.
This last point is great. I'm always dropping the line about cities being (built on) labor markets, but that's like the urbanism 101 level stuff. You're getting into what I think of as the 301 lv material :)
So, all of that is valid. The religious community fleeing persecution is, to me, the exception that proves the rule. A fully instantiated community with values and customs such that members are unable to fully participate in the larger society in which they find themselves is certainly a thing. The early Mormon settlement of Utah is the example of this that spring to mind for me, but obv there are countless examples. Interestingly, if you think about what BS is describing, it's basically this; a community that exists around some shared values and worldview such that they can go instantiate a physical place (though, again, I don't believe anyone who think a particular venture firm is super cool have internalized that as part of their identity to the degree that they want to co-create a new society on that basis).
I don't know much about tidewater plantations, but what you're describing sounds like the pattern for old Imperial spanish mining towns in S. America; extractive industries on the periphery that never fully urbanized and dies out after the mines ran dry. If I'm hearing you correctly, though, this all still scans. Cities spring up around (value added, positive sum) economic activity; extractive, rentier activities might make people rich, but they don't cultivate self reinforcing economic growth.
Oh, and the suburbs. think about it this way. We didn't build places totally separate from economic activity; it's just that personal car ownership, federally subsidized highway development (and federally subsidized SFH construction) made it temporally and financially feasible to live way farther out from the economic cores of urban cities than even the old street car suburbs ever allowed.
Check out Edge Esmeralda too. It is a pop up city for one month. It is like a tech incubator / hackathon but for lifestyles and stimulating cross disciplinary innovation and collaboration, not just for developing tech or tech based companies. It’s almost like in the Information Age the goal is to bring together diverse creative people for more than just a few days who are aligned in the goal of collaborating, innovating and creating and then (in theory) the economic output will come next.
Thank you for this interesting piece. A few disorganized questions I have to stimulate the conversation: There seems to be a difference between top down models and bottom up models, right? Morazán is sort of a top down model with a benevolent dictator property owner who designs the framework and makes the key governance decisions and then people opt into this. Maybe California Forever is the same? Then the network state is more bottom up, with people forming a group in the cloud based on shared values and goals and then descending on and co-creating a physical manifestation of this community. Both would seem to have some underlying economic rationale in the sense that both rely on individuals making their own decisions to join, but then they have different governance structures. Also, to what extent is the network state just like the back to the land communes of the 1960s and 70s? I suppose those were focused on a few issues whereas network states can be organized around many more issues. But it seems like that earlier movement might hold some lessons. And finally, to what extent does digital nomadism scramble the earlier economic rationales of city building. You don’t always have to have an underlying economic engine or rationale if you can import wages thru digital nomadism. And if so, does this free up the city to focus on more ephemeral concepts?
Hey Mike, thanks for questions - I'll try to answer each in turn, but feel free to turn this into a conversation.
I hear what you're getting at with "top down" re: Ciudad Morazán, and I think that's a fair description. That project is very much on a mission to provide a better place for people to live and their success will be proved out by demand to live in that place.
California Forever is more of a typical planned community (a la the Woodlands in Texas, but with walkable urban design and mixed use zoning). If that fits your definition of top down, then sure, but it's not anymore "planned" than communities built by Lennar or KB (they're just providing a very different product).
Re: the Network State...
Well, I've read most of the Network State book and listened to a couple hours of BS on podcasts and, conceptually, it feels like grasping at smoke. Sometimes he's talking about taking over parts of San Francisco, sometimes he's talking about establishing a network of places like Próspera...but the through line is the idea that people form communities online and then take collective political action to do...various things.
Being candid, I have a hard time taking it all very seriously. Listening to him talk, he kind of just reinvents the idea of basic political organizing but then drives to odd conclusions (there is not a meaningful constituency of people in sF who identify as Y Combinator alumni and are interested in doing politics on the basis of that identity).
Re: your comment about the back to the land communes — 100%. The Network State is cribbing off a bunch of prior decentralizationist movements (some of which I find very interesting and include people I respect quite a bit). It's most proximal intellectual predecessor, though, was probably the competitive governance folks who were themselves melding burner culture as understood by Bay Area tech folks in the early 2000s and the insights from New Institutional Economics.
As to your last (excellent question), I don't believe digital nomadism impacts the labor market basis for cities. Most people aren't digital nomads (and I say this as someone who sometimes is). Even the many folks who work remote typically have the rest of their non-economic life rooted in place somewhere.
It’s interesting BS is launching network state 2.0 just outside of Singapore and it seems like the thrust of it is to gather people together in one spot who will be doing their day jobs remotely (coworking) but their focus with their “heads up” time in this network state will be to co-create something (not sure what), earning crypto, learning how to be network state “pioneers” so you can set up your own network state, and eat healthy and burn calories together (basically surround yourself with others who lead a healthier lifestyle you want to lead). I don’t see much talk of creating a new governance structure, unless that is subsumed in the goal of taking some of the economy onto the blockchain…but it seems like there is significant demand from applicants who want to be part of something like this.
Regarding the digital nomad thing, I see your point. I have never been one myself (yet?) but I have a primary job as a lawyer that would allow for it, and another job as a coworking space owner that requires at least someone to be at the coworking space, and since I also have teenage kids and a wife who works, there is no real way to go nomad now. I think you are hitting on something in your own experience too, which is that people may want to be nomadic during parts of the year and/or parts of their lives. It would be great if there were cities or towns in the u.s that could cater to this (airbnbs are too expensive and you would want more of a community infrastructure).
To your broader point about new cities needing to be anchored in an economic activity, I largely agree but I think there are important exceptions or countercurrents: early settlements built around grave sites and religious sites, people fleeing religious or political persecution who came to the new world and did basic subsistence farming, the tidewater plantation economy where most economic activity happened on plantations that had direct trade connections and the resulting stunted towns that didn’t serve much of an economic purpose (does Amazon and fedex allow for this to proliferate everywhere now?) and then of course suburbs where land was decoupled from economic productivity and instead people were moving to the suburbs for cultural, political, social reasons (but also building wealth through home ownership).
Is the thing outside of Singapore his "Network School" deal? I read about that and it's very much in the vein of these things Vitalik Buterin(sp?) does where people do just what you described. Nothing against it (I could imagine parts of it being super fun depending on the crowd), I just still haven't seen anything that makes me think it's moving the practice of governance or city building forward in some profound way (which you, ofc point out). But, you're right, whatever they actually are, enough people seem to be in to the them to keep them going.
Your second point is getting at something really interesting (and I think it dovetails with the previous point about these "pop up cities"). The idea of a physical place being a point of gathering place for a community on a seasonal basis has some historical precedent in pre-contact native cultures. David Graeber did a bunch of work on it (although you have to take his stuff with a grain of salt, there are apparently some issues with his research); but it kinda starts looking something akin to burning man or ephemerisle. But yeah, I think I hear you getting at the idea of being able to post of in a city 3-6 months out of the year which is an awkward amount of time cost wise.
This last point is great. I'm always dropping the line about cities being (built on) labor markets, but that's like the urbanism 101 level stuff. You're getting into what I think of as the 301 lv material :)
So, all of that is valid. The religious community fleeing persecution is, to me, the exception that proves the rule. A fully instantiated community with values and customs such that members are unable to fully participate in the larger society in which they find themselves is certainly a thing. The early Mormon settlement of Utah is the example of this that spring to mind for me, but obv there are countless examples. Interestingly, if you think about what BS is describing, it's basically this; a community that exists around some shared values and worldview such that they can go instantiate a physical place (though, again, I don't believe anyone who think a particular venture firm is super cool have internalized that as part of their identity to the degree that they want to co-create a new society on that basis).
I don't know much about tidewater plantations, but what you're describing sounds like the pattern for old Imperial spanish mining towns in S. America; extractive industries on the periphery that never fully urbanized and dies out after the mines ran dry. If I'm hearing you correctly, though, this all still scans. Cities spring up around (value added, positive sum) economic activity; extractive, rentier activities might make people rich, but they don't cultivate self reinforcing economic growth.
Oh, and the suburbs. think about it this way. We didn't build places totally separate from economic activity; it's just that personal car ownership, federally subsidized highway development (and federally subsidized SFH construction) made it temporally and financially feasible to live way farther out from the economic cores of urban cities than even the old street car suburbs ever allowed.
Check out Edge Esmeralda too. It is a pop up city for one month. It is like a tech incubator / hackathon but for lifestyles and stimulating cross disciplinary innovation and collaboration, not just for developing tech or tech based companies. It’s almost like in the Information Age the goal is to bring together diverse creative people for more than just a few days who are aligned in the goal of collaborating, innovating and creating and then (in theory) the economic output will come next.
I will check out David Graeber, thanks!