Let a thousand societies bloom

2025 Dec 17 See all posts


Let a thousand societies bloom

Special thanks to Zachary Williamson, Afra Wang, Mark Lutter, Balaji Srinivasan and Primavera di Filippi for feedback and review

One of the recurring ideological themes of the last few decades has been the idea of creating entire new communities, cultures, cities and even countries. Instead of having a fixed number of these, all slowly changing, we can "let a thousand nations bloom" (where "nation" can cover the full spectrum from a glorified internet forum to a literal country), giving people more choice and opening up space for more pluralistic independent innovation. Instead of your membership in one being an accident of birth, each person can choose to gravitate to the communities that best fit their values.

Some strands of this thought include:

These ideas are diverse. Some of them are explicitly about getting as much legal autonomy as possible, and using that platform to create new laws from the ground up. Others value a more gradualist approach, and a more long-term closer connection to existing groups and institutions rather than re-building everything from zero. Some focus on countries, others on cities, and others on cultures. Some are more left-leaning in ideology, others are more right-leaning. In many ways, it's like where the crypto space was five to ten years ago.


Left: magic internet money. Right: magic internet society.


In 2023, seeing all of these ideas mature inspired me to run Zuzalu, an experimental "popup city" in Montenegro: bring ~200 people, from multiple communities - Ethereum, longevity, rationalism, AI - together in one place for two months, and see what happens. Zuzalu succeeded as an experiment, and in my visits to various other "new city" projects I often heard the feedback that it inspired them to take culture and community building more seriously. But the experiment left unanswered a key question: what happens next?

In this post, I give my updated picture of this space. I will first review what I think we have learned since 2023, when the space moved from vibes and whitepapers to real-world experimentation. I will then sketch out a concrete world that this movement could be driving towards, what new types of entities will emerge, and what concrete value they can provide.

Table of contents

What have we learned from Zuzalu?


Zuzalu, 2023


Zuzalu in 2023 was an experiment: bring ~200 people, from multiple communities -Ethereum, longevity, rationalism, AI - together in one place for two months, and see what happens. This was the first time something like this had happened in this way - almost all events are either much smaller in scale, much shorter, or both - and the closest other historical examples are in spheres far removed from the kind of frontier technology that Zuzalu was built around.

I enjoyed my experience at Zuzalu - though sometimes the socialization did get to the point where it was too much for me. I learned a lot about different people's interests, and got to know many warm and friendly and interesting people. There are a lot of "little things" that we learned about how to organize a popup well. For example:

After the original Zuzalu in Montenegro, we kept going organizing "popups", and it feels like popups seem to have found "product market fit" within their niche. One of the Zu spinoffs, Edge City, has perfected a pipeline of organizing them, and I have heard that they are at this point a cash-flow-positive business. And popups - like-minded people living together for medium durations - have proven themselves as a stepping stone toward a more full-fledged community.


A panel on cryptography at ZuConnect and the ZuSocial hacker house, Istanbul 2023.


It also became abundantly clear that there are limits to what popups can do:

  1. Popups are expensive: short-term rental is always more expensive than long term, and you easily get ripped off negotiating in a new location for the first time. Edge City is not cheap to attend.
  2. It's difficult to truly have depth when customizing. ShanhaiWoo is one of the "Zu spinoffs" that impresses me deeply because it actually tries to create a culturally unique immersive environment, making its physical zones "feel like ShanhaiWoo". But when it's only in one place for 40 days, the best that it can do is often paper and cardboard.
  3. Bringing that many people together is hard. The most sustainable approach that I have discovered is what we did in Chiang Mai, where 5-10 popups, each independently bringing 30-300 people, co-located in the same city around the same time.
  4. Involving locals in a non-superficial way is hard. A common goal that people doing popups have is to involve local people from the region, in a way deeper than buying food and rent from them (though I would argue even buying food and rent can be a meaningful contribution to an economy, especially if you come during off-peak season, as the original Zuzalu did, so you're stabilizing load rather than overcrowding it). But involving locals non-superficially is hard: if you have a niche interest that only a few people care about, and you're in a country with 1-5 million people, the intersection will be very tiny. Realistically, my main conclusions so far are (i) reach out to diasporas of the country, and not just already-in-country locals, and (ii) effective local community building requires coming back to a place for years, and not just doing a one-off.

Another pattern I have noticed is that two things core to the early ideology often fall away over time: novel governance designs, and a search for legal autonomy. Within the context of popups, this makes total sense. If a popup is short-duration, then "forking as governance" works perfectly fine. Each popup can be run by a founder or core team, and if anyone is unhappy, they can make their own version and try to attract people over. The longevity-focused Zu spinoff Vitalia already split into two forks. And if a popup only lasts 30 days, then there is not much interesting that could be done that would benefit from legal innovation.

As a result of all this, I have noticed a worrying pattern: over time, popups would get shorter in duration, smaller in scope, and more generic in substance, to the point where in the limit they approach being simply a few more conferences and hackerspaces. Outside the Zuzalu-verse, I saw Praxis aspiring to big dreams of a new Mediterranean renaissance, but in practice mostly delivering parties in upscale cities in the United States. (Since then, they seem to have switched to pursuing the American military dynamism topic)

For all of these reasons, I have started advocating for Zuzalu-inspired communities to start having permanent nodes. There already are a few: Frontier Tower, Crecimiento, and 4seas' two nodes (one city, one mountain) in Chiang Mai, with others under construction (additionally, of course, there is Balaji's Network School). But even with these, in the back of my mind I always fear the "regression to the mean" that they will turn into glorified coworkingspaces, and lose all of their cultural or experimental interestingness. Making sure that this does not happen is an ongoing challenge, and indeed it is a primary goal of this post to paint a clearer picture of what alternative future these projects could be driving toward.

Now, let's get into actually explaining what I think this future can be.

Tribes


The 4seas mountain venue features flags of many of the communities that it sees itself as connected with: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Plancker, 706


One common critique of modern society is that it is at the same time atomistic and authoritarian: there is a lack of intermediate institutions, in between individuals and states, that give people needed services and community. In the critics' story, this makes society:

All three problems stem from the fact that we have too much of a two-level structure: individuals, very powerful large-scale actors like states, and nothing else.

Historically, these "intermediate institutions" included local governments, clubs, churches, small businesses and various other associations. Today, we still have many of those, but they are inherently local in scale, and so they are failing to capture the most meaningful communities today, which are increasingly continental and global. We have corporations, including very big corporations, and we also have social media. But these are impersonal, homogenizing forces: the profit motive drives them to appeal to as many people as possible, reducing their diversity and uniqueness toward zero. Startups are small and diverse, but according to the standard playbook, encouraged by venture-capital profit motives, a startup is a group of people attempting to become a new megacorporation, not some reliable third sector of society.

So what would a successful "intermediate institution" of this type, adapted for the needs of the 21ˢᵗ century, look like? I will propose my answer. It needs to be some kind of neo-tribe or other institution that focuses, and meaningfully innovates, on the thing that humans do that isn't generic: culture.

What is culture, and how should it evolve?


Left: gym at Balaji's Network School. Right: Town hall at ShanhaiWoo Chiang Mai.


The Wiktionary definition of "culture" begins as follows:

  1. The arts, customs, lifestyles, background and habits that characterize humankind, or a particular society or nation.
  2. The beliefs, values, behaviour and material objects that constitute a people's way of life.
  3. The conventional conducts and ideologies of a community; the system comprising the accepted norms and values of a society.

In short, culture is the patterns of human behavior in a particular community. It covers everything from the food you eat, the language you speak, dance, music, architecture, to much "deeper" things like how people conceive the stories of their own lives, their relationships with their families, business, politics, and how people resolve conflicts in all of these spheres.

Many people make the mistake of thinking culture is something that can be explicitly laid down by mission statements and top-down edicts. Let's take, for example, the corporate culture of Enron (explanation for younger readers: Enron was the FTX of your parents' era).



On paper, Enron valued "integrity, communication, respect and excellence". In practice, Enron clearly valued some very different things. But this is only the most egregious example; the inevitable wide divergence between "organizational culture" written on paper and an organization's culture in practice is very easy to see anywhere.

Another problem with top-down attempts to shape culture, especially more coercive ones, is that the whole strategy has very low galaxy-brain resistance. While declaring top-down "the culture I wrote down in this document is better than what you have now, so I will impose it" may at times be the right thing to do (see: the anti-smoking push, federally-driven anti-segregation in the 1960s USA, etc), the problem is that it's too easy for someone to get convinced that their own culture, as they understand it, is great, and then use it as an excuse to dominate others.

On the other hand, many people make the mistake of over-identifying culture with the purely aesthetic, subjective and group-identity-oriented parts of culture: food, music, dance, dress, architecture styles, and ignore the parts that are functional, whose success or failure drives the success and failure of civilizations. This can lead to an over-egalitarian and stagnant "culture as museum" mentality: every culture is equally as good as every other culture because aesthetics are ultimately subjective, and so there is no such thing as cultural improvement - instead, the only goal is preservation.

That is the sort of thing that Thomas Sowell rails against:

Cultures are not museum pieces. They are the working machinery of everyday life. Unlike objects of aesthetic contemplation, working machinery is judged by how well it works, compared to the alternatives.

Cultures are there to serve their people, not touristic onlookers appreciating their existence from far away. Some cultures do this much better than others, and all cultures could do much better still. There are just too many examples of traditional culture being pathological (here's the latest I just happened to see while writing this) for preservation to be the only goal. And even if it were not, technology - growing wealth, digital communications, birth control, education, the list goes on - has changed the world so much that any lessons from our collective memory in the past millennium need to be radically adapted to be relevant in the next.

On the third hand, some make the mistake of acknowledging that culture is functional, but over-emphasizing very small-scale individual decisions as a vehicle of change. This is what Scott Alexander calls "universal culture":

Universal culture is the collection of the most competitive ideas and products. Coca-Cola spreads because it tastes better than whatever people were drinking before. Egalitarian gender norms spread because they're more popular and likeable than their predecessors. If there was something that outcompeted Coca-Cola, then that would be the official soda of universal culture and Coca-Cola would be consigned to the scrapheap of history.

Instead of keeping culture the way it is, or reforming it from the top down, why not embrace the wisdom of accumulated individual choice and freedom?

Here is how I would argue the case against an overly purist version of this approach. There are many things that require "immersion" to succeed: lifestyle habits, local public goods such as air quality, work habits, lifetime learning habits, limitations on use of technology, etc. Doing anything truly interesting and unique requires "depth", and substantial collective investment and effort to create an entire environment oriented around better serving those needs. These things cannot easily be done by an individual, or even by a corporation, because corporations face too much pressure to "meet users where they are" - and so we get everyone drinking Coca Cola (or getting addicted to outrage-driven social media, or ...)


As we see clearly with architecture styles (but happens in every sphere), relying too much on market incentives leads to global monoculture.


So what's going on here? And if we want to avoid these three pitfalls, what might cultural evolution done well look like?

The social philosopher Charles Taylor talks about culture as being underpinned by moral orders and social imaginaries. Taylor defines a "social imaginary" as:

the ways in which [people] imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations which are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images which underlie these expectations

For example:

Take our practice of choosing governments through general elections ... Essential to our understanding what is involved in this kind of macro-decision is our ability to identify what would constitute a foul: certain kinds of influence, buying votes, threats, and the like. This kind of macro-decision has, in other words, to meet certain norms, if it is to be what it is meant to be ... And beyond the ideal stands some notion of a moral or metaphysical order, in the context of which the norms and ideals make sense.

An important point that Taylor makes is that social imaginaries are often transformed when "what start off as theories held by a few people may come to infiltrate the social imaginary, first of elites perhaps, and then of the whole society". Taylor talks at length about how modern European liberal democratic norms emerged in the 17áµ—Ê° century as a result of this process transforming the European "moral order". However, Taylor cautions, this process of transformation is organic and complicated:

What exactly is involved when a theory penetrates and transforms the social imaginary? For the most part, people take up, improvise, or are inducted into new practices. These are made sense of by the new outlook, the one first articulated in the theory; this outlook is the context that gives sense to the practices ... But this process isn't just one sides, a theory making over a social imaginary. In coming to make sense of the action the theory is glossed, as it were, given a particular shape as the context of these practices ... Nor need the process end here. The new practice, with the implicit understanding it generates, can be the basis for modifications of theory, which in turn can inflect practice, and so on.

In short, culture is a big complicated blob where actions, consequences, statements by leaders and theories by intellectuals all influence each other in every direction. If a culture officially says to do one thing, but actually people do something else, then the latter is more decisive. Culture is shaped by incentives, but then incentives are themselves implemented by people, who are guided by culture. Culture is housed in a community, which is held together because people feel affinity for each other, and that affinity is itself shaped by shared rituals.

I remember experiencing some of this (ok fine, the solitary parts of this) myself with my experiences as a teenager attempting to build constructed languages - like Esperanto, but better. I easily recognized how English is pathological with its horribly broken and irregular spelling system (and many other issues), and how centuries of organic evolution has only made the problem worse. But when I tried to create an "ideal language" from scratch, I ended up creating something that can make beautiful logical and compact sentences in the specific cases I designed it around, but which takes three times longer than English to express any other thought that I needed to express in everyday life.

This shows why all three of the above approaches to culture are insufficient:


Notice how "top-down culture", "cultural traditionalism" and "cultural individualism" map really nicely to the three corners of "the d/acc triangle", which also argues that all three are insufficient and we need to do something else.


Tribes as innovators in culture

And so I think we need a different path. What we want is a better "world game" for cultural evolution: an environment where cultures improve and compete, but not on the basis of violent force, and also not exclusively on low-level forms of memetic fitness (eg. virality of individual posts on social media, moment-by-moment enjoyment and convenience), but rather on some kind of fair playing field that creates sufficient space to showcase the longer-term benefits that a thriving culture provides.

One early modern version of this idea is the notion of "prefigurational cultures". A seminal work is Margaret Mead's Culture and Commitment from 1970:

In the past, in configurational cultures, the elderly were gradually cut off from limiting the future of their children. Now, as I see it, the development of prefigurational cultures will depend on the existence of a continuing dialogue in which the young, free to act on their own initiative, can lead their elders in the direction of the unknown.

What might a prefigurational culture in the real world look like? Here, there are many possible different answers. To show one end of the spectrum, let me re-paste Balaji's example from years ago:

Keto Kosher, the sugar-free society

Start with a history of the horrible USDA Food Pyramid, the grain-heavy monstrosity that gave cover to the corporate sugarification of the globe and the obesity epidemic. ... Organize a community online that crowdfunds properties around the world, like apartment buildings and gyms, and perhaps eventually even culdesacs and small towns. You might take an extreme sugar teeotaler approach, literally banning processed foods and sugar at the border, thereby implementing a kind of "Keto Kosher".

You can imagine variants of this startup society that are like "Carnivory Communities" or "Paleo People". These would be competing startup societies in the same broad area, iterations on a theme. If successful, such a society might not stop at sugar. It could get into setting cultural defaults for fitness and exercise. Or perhaps it could bulk purchase continuous glucose meters for all members, or orders of metformin.

But cultural innovation does not have to be "legible" in the way that Keto Kosher is. In fact, as we have seen, over-indexing on legibility and on explicit ideology often leads to problems. Cultural innovation works better when it arises out of a collection of habits, attitudes and goals that are shared by a particular group, and adapted to the group's needs. The group's goal might be realistically a 50/50 mix of being "about a set of values" and being "about the group" - it's not attempting to expand to unlimited size, rather, it's a group of people with shared history and shared identity trying to do their thing and make the best of it.

The Zuzalu-verse is actually one of the better proto-examples of this. It is organized around a particular set of values: the "Ethereum canon" of open source, freedom, decentralization and a positive-sum attitude toward humanity, idealistic hacker culture, concern about health, etc. The Zuzalu identity is demonstrably not universal. Many people who frequent the Zuzalu-verse reported finding themselves out of place at Network School, which is organized around principles that are similar on paper, but very different in their "vibes" - and undoubtedly others feel the same way in the other direction. But there isn't a fixed "One Commandment", or even any specific written-down mission and vision statement. Aspects of it could be described as "Keto Kosher but for education", attempting to integrate constant learning into week-by-week life (a very important thing for us to get right in the 21ˢᵗ century!), but even this is done in a very organic style. Just as much as the goals, the community is organized around its people.

Eventually, I also expect tribes to get back to innovating in governance: using a combination of culture and technological means (blockchains, LLMs, ZK...) to have better collective conversation and decision-making. Currently, this part of the space is in somewhat of a "trough of disillusionment", as we have realized the downfalls of formalizing governance too early. However, I would argue that we have not yet properly tried to integrate AI and ZK tech into voting processes, which could solve their two biggest problems: attention overload and fatigue, and collapse into social games where people vote based on how their vote will be perceived (if not outright bribery), rather than their genuine convictions. I expect this to pick back up at some point, as it will be necessary for tribes to be long-term sustainable without having the same pitfalls as corporations. I also think tribes may be a better ground for this kind of governance experimentation than eg. blockchain-based DAOs, because tribes' capabilities and needs are more complex.

Hubs


4seas Nimman in Chiang Mai. Visibly a "regen" space, visibly an "Ethereum-ish" space, visibly not your average cowork.


Truly instantiating a culture with any level of depth requires not just talking about the culture's themes, but actually living them. This requires deep immersion, instantiating the culture's values and aesthetics and practices at a level that goes far beyond a few decorations and posters. For example:

This is all why I think it is a critical part of digital tribes to have long-lasting physical spaces. Physical spaces allow a culture's values and habits to be instantiated in a much deeper way.

The good news about a hub is that you need a surprisingly small size to be viable. If a hub is located inside a city, they can be arbitrarily small, because residents can take advantage of the surrounding infrastructure of a city. If a hub is located outside a city, then it's basically building a new city. But even here, there is good news. For a conventional city to play a significant role at the frontier of anything, you need to have a population of at least a million; that is the level at which it's possible to have effective network effects within any particular niche. But if you are specialized to one or a few niches (I think a novel combination of a few niches is better than being overly focused on one), the minimum size is much smaller. Here are some examples of viable cities I've visited that are quite small:

2,600 is a great size: Longyearbyen is able to sustain ~10 restaurants, an airport, a hospital and a school (2,600 total ~= 26 per year of age).

But 100 people is probably not enough. I recently visited Prospera in Honduras (population ~100), and while the physical venue was beautiful, surprisingly strong on cultural uniqueness, and even strong on engagement with locals (a Honduran was on the core leadership team, many were in the core community, and at least one of the medical businesses was run by Hondurans), the place I was staying had one restaurant with limited food options and no other amenities within walking distance. Hence I think one or two further steps of growth and maturity beyond the 100-person level is ideal.

I expect getting hubs right to be the next important step for these kinds of "tribes" to succeed, and an important training ground for them to figure out culture, governance and other issues at a much deeper level.

Zones


From top left to bottom right: (i) the micronation Liberland, (ii) Prospera, a zone in Honduras, (iii) artist's drawing of the under-construction California Forever, (iv) artist's drawing of Bhutan's government-initiated under-construction Gelephu Mindfulness City. All are what I call "zones", but represent very different points on the spectrum of engagement with governments.


So far, we have talked about innovating in culture. The more radical part of the free cities and network states space started by asking a different question: how do we get more innovation in rules - that is, the regulations, laws, and political systems that govern the physical spaces that we are in?

In my observation, there are three schools of thought here:


One view of a social technology perspective on governance.


Often, the three perspectives merge. Some social technologists are interested in governance ideas in a libertarian-ish direction, because they see ideal forms of governance is being precisely those forms that try to align incentives and beyond that point minimize arbitrary constraints. Some libertarians believe in freedom because they see it as critical for economic development.


My attempt at creating a political compass of some of the projects I am more familiar with.


Why would countries want to host zones?

Basically, for a country, it's a way of participating in the rapid and accelerating economic and technological revolution of the 21ˢᵗ century. In particular, it lets you go beyond tourism, which imports individuals but not the networks between those individuals, and instead actually import parts of the networks themselves, opening up the opportunity to capture a larger share of the value.

Quoting Noah Smith:

Under British rule, and then for the first two decades of Chinese rule, Hong Kong served as a crucial entrepot — the world's gateway to China. It facilitated the inflow of foreign capital, which was absolutely crucial to China's early industrialization. It was a major hub for goods to move into and out of China. It provided services for foreigners to do business on the mainland. And it imported foreign know-how into China, teaching locals how to build high-quality infrastructure, set up factories, and do business overseas.

So I thought about Hong Kong, and wondered: What if every country had a quasi-independent city like that?

Imagine a Hong Kong in India. A Hong Kong or two in Europe. A Hong Kong in Brazil, Japan, Indonesia, the United States, and so on. Each city would formally be a part of the host country, subject to the laws and authority of the central government there. But in practice, each city would be granted a degree of autonomy.

This sounds like social science fiction, but Bhutan's Gelephu Mindfulness City is an attempt to do pretty much exactly this. The problem that GMC is trying to solve is, as described to me by the Bhutan government, is twofold:

  1. Give Bhutan a foothold in globalized techno-modernity, and help it get the economic benefits (including giving Bhutanese themselves better opportunities staying in Bhutan)
  2. Do so in a way that minimizes risks to the existing culture

Basically, let the expats come and the thirty-storey towers go up, at least in one corner of the country along the border with India, but don't let the next generation of the whole country get hooked on Coca Cola.

Incidentally, this is all why I am expecting "zones" to be the bulk of the future of jurisdictional innovation, and not new "countries". Countries are very unwilling to literally give up their sovereignty over even small patches of their land. Liberland has found a hack: take over one of the very small pieces of land that, by pure accident of how the lines were drawn, no country claims as its own. But there are not many opportunities like that, and even that is far from a guarantee of safety. To really have a country, you have to either get approval from your new neighbors, or figure out your own military. Zones, on the other hand, are much more palatable for politicians, and also enable a government to actually get ongoing upside in the networks that it attracts, rather than just a one-time deal (eg. Prospera pays 12% of its tax revenue to the government of Honduras).

What are examples of policies zones could try?

I will give a few examples that I personally find interesting, on a scale from "boring" to "experimental".

Do urbanism right


Image from Culdesac Tempe


In many developed countries, a major challenge is that housing construction is very difficult for legal reasons. Some have estimated that fixing this could make cities much more affordable, and improve GDP by as much as 36%. But changing laws in an existing city is hard, in large part because of existing stakeholders. So what if you can create a new city?

This is a big part of the pitch for California Forever. The other part of the pitch is all the other problems that urban economists have consistently railed about for decades. One that California Forever, and others like Culdesac, focus on is walkability (and bikeability). A third is attracting business including heavy industry that people can work in. A fourth and more experimental option is friendliness to new technologies (eg. drone delivery). There is a whole list of ideas that policy thinkers have basically agreed on for decades, that many are frustrated that they cannot implement in existing cities because things are hard to change. With a new city, you can - and it only requires city-level autonomy, which is in many places quite easy to get, and not anything national-scale.

Let people in


Left: where a Singaporean can go (for short-term visit) without a visa. Right: where an Indian can go without a visa.


One problem that many people have in the 21ˢᵗ century: where do you go to live? Whether it's because of lack of economic opportunity, political instability, a culture unforgiving to people who are different, or a government unfriendly to their business aspirations or even their way of life (or, for the luckier among us, a simple thirst for adventure), for many people around the world, the country of their birth does not suit them.

Attracting these people is a massive economic opportunity. Many countries around the world are becoming more restrictive (or even hostile) to both long-term and short-term immigration, but the number of people who need more options for where to be is only increasing. Better serving such people also fosters global redistribution of talent: creating a future where the most important technological and economic work is done from everywhere, and its proceeds more widely shared, instead of being concentrated in a few superstar cities in a few very powerful countries.

There is also a social technology angle to this. Many people have concerns about inviting more people: the risk that they will stay longer than expected and become illegal immigrants (including running to neighboring countries), risks related to safety, cultural incompatibility, etc. Today, we use "which country are you from?" as a filter to determine who is high-risk and who is low-risk. But this is incredibly inefficient and unjust - it's the exact opposite of "judging people not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character". In a modern digitized society, we have many kinds of filters to identify people who might be low-risk: work history, education, people vouching for them, etc. I expect that whichever country or zone creates an easy user-friendly mechanism for talented people from everywhere to easily be able to come (eg. to work for a local company, or for a conference, or for a popup) will gain a lot of benefits.

Vouching as general-purpose substitute for regulation

One idea that some economists like Robin Hanson support as a substitute for much of our regulation is vouching (aka mandatory liability insurance): you can do what you want, as long as you find someone (eg. an insurance company) with enough capital who agrees to pay potentially large fines and compensate any victims if you create a problem.

This addresses a key problem with a libertarian approach to law: if you only punish people when they actually create a problem, then the cost of the harm can easily be so great that there's no way to penalize someone enough to adequately incentivize caution. If the only regulation on driving were that if you cause an accident you go to jail, it would deter drunk driving (or driving without a license, or flying in unsafe versions of weird newfangled 3D aircraft) too little.

It also addresses a problem with the current approach of creating application-specific rules for everything: the rules do not adapt well to new technology, and easily get corrupted and twisted into goals that have nothing to do with safety, like protecting incumbent businesses. Here, the rules that people follow would be created by vouchers, incentivized by their need to balance between attracting customers and managing risks, rather than by politicians. The political lever is indirect, and more compatible with a free society: it sets the objective, but not how you get there.

If successful, this is a really cool idea that could improve a lot of things. But to see if it works, we have to try it somewhere, at a sufficient scale and level of realism. This is actually what Prospera, the autonomous zone in Honduras (see website, review by Scott Alexander) is trying to do. Currently, the experiment is still very young, and there is only one insurance company (run by the zone itself), but this is exactly the kind of thing that a self-contained zone is the ideal place to try.

Crazy democracy ideas

One of the core political challenges of the 21ˢᵗ century is how to improve democracy. Here's Eliezer Yudkowsky way of stating the problem:



Eliezer's proposed solution is a new twist on liquid democracy. Approximately:

Again, this is a really cool idea: it biases for sophistication (because each level would end up more sophisticated than the previous) and guards against populism (because a delegate can't amass extreme power by gaining a huge following directly) but in a way that avoids empowering pre-selected aristocracies. But to see how well it works, we need to try it somewhere.

Crazy urban governance ideas

Here I'll quote myself:



Again, you don't have to believe in this exact idea, just that there are things of this level of craziness that are at least worthy trying in a serious way, somewhere.

Bounding the risks

Projects building zones, especially those leaning more libertarian or not initiated by governments, often get criticized - for being havens for billionaires, unregulated zones where things will inevitably go very wrong, or for being neo-colonial. These criticisms sometimes apply to tribes and hubs too. I can understand the sentiment behind these critiques, and I think there are important risks worth worrying about. However, I disagree with many of the stronger criticisms - and it is worth explaining why.

At heart, I am a pluralist. I believe that when different people disagree about how things should be done, it's healthy to have a bias toward solutions where both versions exist at least somewhere, and people can freely choose between them. If a powerful (commercial or political or cultural) actor wants to see their culture or economic or political ideology implemented, the most productive and least risky imaginable way for them to do it is to peacefully make something small in a corner somewhere, and see how it plays out. By building a whole new zone from scratch, you are taking on a huge inconvenience, and a huge tax in terms of forgoing all kinds of network effects. And since you are growing not by amassing a country-sized blog or podcast audience, but instead entering the real world at a much earlier stage, we all gain valuable rapid feedback about whether or not the whole idea is crazy. This all feels like the sort of role you want semi-influential radical mavericks to be playing in our society.

What's the role we don't want them to play? One strategy I deeply fear is what many in the so-called Silicon Valley Tech Right have recently pivoted to: stop trying to route around the government, and instead just take over the government. This is deeply scary: instead of corporations and the state serving as a healthy check and balance against each other, the two collude against everyone else. It also means that ideas go straight from being twelve-thousand-word screeds or five hour podcasts to running entire countries.

And in my experience, these two modes of action are substitutes: people who start working on tribes and zones suddenly get visibly more positive-sum and less interested in country takeovers.


Lots of people on the internet lately seem to pine for a world (or a nation) where we force everyone to be more like Durmstrang. I'd rather let someone enthusiastic about that approach make the best of it, and have to inspire people to come voluntarily, than pontificate on the internet and build up a large political movement based on how appealing that idea sounds written in words, with no feedback from how it works in reality. Long small-scale voluntary attempts at Durmstrang, short Gilead.


In general, business and politics are the scariest at scale: monopolizing industries, overwriting entire societies, or recklessly building superintelligent AI (which eventually anyone will be able to build, but in any realistic universe the global centers of power will get to long before everyone else). Zones are the opposite of scale. Whatever you say about CHAZ, its downsides were far lower than what you would get if the same people took over an entire country or even city government.

In an ideal world, zones can be a tool that can help countries and states get more integrated into a global economy, and can give their brightest people a path to frontier science and technology and business that does not involve disappearing to a university and then a corporate ecosystem in a country halfway across the world. Creating opportunities for frontier tech and business to happen locally instead of entirely depending on powerful nations abroad can be a far more meaningful gain to national sovereignty than full uniformity of rules across the entire country without even a few otherwise-undeveloped square kilometers of exceptions.

But achieving this outcome requires actively shaping it. I see opportunities for improvement here from both sides. Countries should not be able to suddenly rugpull everyone in a zone if their political mood changes, but they could have have levers of influence to encourage them to behave cooperatively, perhaps privileges defined numerically that each administration can adjust up or down a medium amount. Ideally, there would be ways to more explicitly encourage education and tech transfer to local and regional talent. For "developmentalist" zones that are less radical but need to get access to a larger local population, more limited sector-specific forms of autonomy is worth exploring.

From a zone's perspective, this is another place where bottom-up decentralized governance ideas can shine: they could help people working on zones (or even hubs) are more able to determine what local populations value and want, and try to proactively serve it, rather than waiting for potential political backlash after the fact. Prospera has voluntarily chosen to pay 12% of its taxes to the Honduran government, and passed internal laws to disallow it to expropriate anyone's land, but it could attempt to use newer tools to engage the population on a larger scale to better identify forms of value it could provide, and risks it should avoid.

Should zones and tribes cooperate?

So far, I have told two disjoint stories. One is about smaller-scale community-driven projects, and experimentation in culture. Another is about larger-scale politics and business-driven projects, and experimentation in rules.

It may seem like the story I am going for is that the two will converge. But actually, while some "vertically integrated" zones that combine both will exist, I predict that in general the "market structure" will split tribes and zones into distinct categories, because these are different things that require different specialties that are complementary. Figuring out legal frameworks to make it easy for people from any country around the world to come to one place is one type of skill. Actually building a global community is another: Edge City and ShanhaiWoo have access to great technical talent, but they are not constitutional lawyers.



We have already seen this "market structure" in the Zuzalu world: there is at least a partial separation between "hubs", which provide permanent space, and "popups", which are communities that sometimes need space for some period of time. Network School, 4seas and other nodes regularly host popups inside of them. I expect collaboration between zones and tribes (including tribes that expand to permanent hubs) to follow a similar pattern.

I argue that this strategy is ideal for countries that want to maximize the success of their zone. Their goal should not just be to import individuals, rather it should be to import networks. Furthermore, because most of them cannot compete with the world's largest cities at creating generic networks, they need to focus on more focused issue-specific networks. Attracting tribes, including schemes like collective visas (the government approves the tribe, the tribe then provides its list of 100-1000 people who automatically get admitted), can be a very effective way of doing this.

The archipelago

Recently, Francis Fukuyama wrote a post arguing that "liberalism needs community, but it doesn't need a ‘strong god' telling everyone what to do". Scott Alexander wrote a piece commenting on it. Both are good, so I'll quote Scott quoting Fukuyama and replying at length:

According to R. R. Reno, editor of the magazine First Things, the liberal project of the past three generations has sought to weaken the "strong Gods" of populism, nationalism, and religion that were held to be the drivers of the bloody conflicts of the early 20th century. Those gods are now returning, and are present in the politics of both the progressive left and far right—particularly the right, which is characterized today by demands for strong national identities or religious foundations for national communities.

However, there is a cogent liberal response to the charge that liberalism undermines community. The problem is that, just as in the 1930s, that response has not been adequately articulated by the defenders of liberalism. Liberalism is not intrinsically opposed to community; indeed, there is a version of liberalism that encourages the flourishing of strong community and human virtue. That community emerges through the development of a strong and well-organized civil society, where individuals freely choose to bond with other like-minded individuals to seek common ends. People are free to follow "strong Gods"; the only caveat is that there is no single strong god that binds the entire society together.

In other words - yes, part of the good life is participation in a tight-knit community with strong values. Liberalism's shared values are comparatively weak, and its knitting comparatively loose. But that's no argument against the liberal project. Its goal isn't to become this kind of community itself, but to be the platform where communities like this can grow up. So in a liberal democracy, Christians can have their church, Jews their synagogue, Communists their commune, and so on. Everyone gets the tight-knit community they want - which beats illiberalism, where (at most) one group gets the community they want and everyone else gets persecuted.

On a theoretical level, this is a great answer. On a practical level - is it really working? Are we really a nation dotted with tight-knit communities of strong values? The average person has a church they don't attend and a political philosophy that mainly cashes out in Twitter dunks. Otherwise they just consume whatever slop the current year's version of capitalism chooses to throw at them.

Scott then lists a few partial exceptions, and laments that they have not been much more successful. His conclusion is that it's not working yet because we're not wealthy enough, and when we get wealthier and moving people around to custom communities with custom infrastructure becomes cheaper, it will happen.

But I also think there is something different at play: people just have to get off their butts and actually create these alternative cultures and environments, and doing it is hard. Startups are also hard. But startups have had a multi-billion-pdollar capitalist optimization machine figuring out all the most optimized ways of doing them and rapidly growing them to scale, and turned them into cookie-cutter standardized playbooks. Culture does not have the same profit motive, and culture is inherently not easy to scale.


Some argue that NFTs solve this and make culture profitable, but the fact that Zundamon's Theorem was not made as an NFT makes me pessimistic that NFT-driven culture will solve the problems that I want cultural innovation to solve.


A parallel problem exists for progress in economic and political rules, which have also stagnated under supposedly "dynamic" capitalist liberalism. The problem is that development of new and better economic and political rules, whether at city-scale or at country-scale, similarly does not have a strong profit motive. It definitely does not have a rapid experimentation loop that startups have or even that many (but not all) aspects of culture have.

I do not literally expect we are going to see a world where most people live in tribes, or even zones. I definitely do not expect normal people to be plotting themselves on a political compass of "goldbug libertarianism", "hipster socialism", "Durmstrang-ism", "techno-Leninism" etc, and joining whichever community is closest to them on a 2D map. For most people, such grand ideologies are far from primary in their lives. But I do expect a world that is somewhat more dynamic in both economic and political rules and in cultural dimensions, and that gives people more options.

Such a world would be a world where (i) people have more meaningful freedom, both to escape persecution and to choose the kinds of environments that they truly enjoy living in, (ii) we get better innovation both in economic and political rules and in culture, and (iii) instead of the innovation and creativity of the world being concentrated in a few super-centers of global economic and political power, it is globally distributed everywhere across the world. This is a world that I want to live in.