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In what appears to be a textbook application of punitive bureaucracy, Balaji’s Network School project in Forest City, Johor, Malaysia, had its business license revoked by the Iskandar Puteri City Council and was ordered to cease all operations last week. The council’s shutdown order followed a dodgy series of punishment-is-the-process-type events, including an intrusive inspection of the immigration documents of all 200+ Network School residents by Malaysian authorities. This series of events was apparently sparked by a shadowy activist group that accused Balaji of breaking Malaysia’s immigration laws by accepting Israeli passport holders into Network School (Malaysia does not formally recognize the state of Israel and bars most of its passport holders from the country). Although this was proven false, the government scrutiny continued. Network School was eventually cited for minor regulatory infractions* that would ordinarily merit a warning letter or a small fine, but instead led to the above-mentioned business license revocation.

As of today, it does not appear that Balaji intends to appeal the Iskandar Puteri City Council's decision; instead, he has petitioned Malaysia’s Prime Minister directly for redress. However, hearing nothing but crickets from Kuala Lumpur, Balaji appears to have decided to pop smoke and search for greener pastures in Central Asia.

In a blindingly fast turnaround, he signed a five-year MoU with Kazakh authorities on 21 July. The final location isn’t fully nailed down, but according to regional reporting, the plan being floated would put Network School in Kazakhstan’s Akmola region, as part of a jointly-developed “Network City” in the Burabay resort area (a three-hour drive north of Astana), with a later expansion toward the planned “smart city” of Alatau, outside Almaty.

Mistakes Made All Around

Balaji’s a smart guy surrounded by smart people, so I expect him and Network School to survive this kerfuffle with Malaysia. But will they thrive in Kazakhstan? This is a bigger question, because mistakes were made with the Malaysian model.

Did the Johor state government and Malaysia in general bungle this excellent opportunity to attract talent and investment? Absolutely. Did Balaji and Network School follow the rules and comply with all Malaysian regulations? Sure looks that way. But, while I hate to say this, Balaji and Network School are victims of their own planning shortfalls, not bad luck. And if they don’t recognize that fact, then they face another expensive mistake in Kazakhstan. Chalking up the Malaysia episode to simply being unlucky means their model doesn’t need tweaking. But it does. And here’s why.

Predictably Unpredictable

There’s a raging debate among startup societies about which jurisdiction to choose as a physical base. Do you choose a locality with higher barriers to entry (higher cost of living, tighter visa requirements, stricter regulatory environment, etc.), or one that provides more operational flexibility but considerable regulatory uncertainty?

If you choose option B, you are opting for predictable levels of unpredictability and must plan accordingly for a much wider array of potential risks. It is no secret that (aside from Singapore) foreign businesses run a range of political, regulatory, legal, and financial risks when operating in Southeast Asia. These risks are not immeasurable. Political risk analysis, stakeholder mapping, and cultural sensitivity assessments are mature disciplines with decades of method behind them and are standard practice in extractives, infrastructure, and humanitarian work, among other industries. With the right tools and planning in place, predicting the unpredictable simply becomes part of the operating process. AI-driven automation makes the risk management process of identifying, assessing, and treating risks even easier to integrate into an organization’s decision-making.

Ultimately, it appears that Balaji based Network School in Malaysia because Forest City’s emptiness offered a great opportunity to grow, while the location was close to Singapore but without Singapore prices — a perfectly rational business decision. But the additional pitfalls and risks of working in Malaysia’s unpredictable jurisdiction, compared with Singapore’s more stable one, require extensive risk management planning to achieve long-term success; I’m not sure Balaji recognized this until it was too late in the game. But he will need to adjust before the venture in Kazakhstan, as he will find the same challenges in Central Asia as in Southeast Asia (and almost certainly more).

Protecting Local Buy-In

As part of the risk management process, we always recommend prioritizing relations with local communities. One of our key focus areas at Polis Labs is to protect local buy-in: "Network states, charter cities, and intentional communities almost always land somewhere. That somewhere already has people in it. A parallel society that imposes itself on the locals it arrived among has reproduced the failure mode it claimed to escape. We help founders build the relationships, agreements, and shared institutions that make the people already living in the territory genuine participants in the governance, not subjects of it.” Over the long term, this also prevents the development of colonial attitudes and the enactment of coercive measures against local and nonlocal populations. Polis Labs prides itself on providing advisory and preventative measures to steer longterm communities away from activities that embrace failed legacy governance structures.

With that throat-clearing aside, below are a few of our “iron rules” for relations with local communities.

Iron Rule 1: You will not stay a guest

In the post below, we examined the four categories of visitor: expat, immigrant, missionary, and guest. A key point we made was that the host community of any startup society gets a hand in determining this category, based on how the newcomers actually behave once they show up. One thing we didn’t note in that previous post is that a visitor’s status is also affected by the time horizon.

This time horizon will dictate how the new community is perceived locally, and for the newcomers, managing local perceptions should be a core planning function.

Because in the eyes of the locals, any guest becomes a resident within a particular timeframe. And a resident with a gated compound closed off to most locals becomes an expatriate enclave. And an enclave whose founder has written a book about detaching technology from national sovereignty, and once called that strategy “tech Zionism,” becomes a missionary to outside observers, whatever he or anyone inside the walls believes.

For a startup society to last, it must plan in year zero how it wants to be perceived by the local community in year five and build towards that outcome continuously. Language, local hiring, local capital participation, and civic presence are Day 1 agenda items that need a budget and a named owner.

A major potential failure we have observed in this movement is a mismatch in scale. You are not going to gain local buy-in by pairing what will be perceived as immigrant-scale commitments (buildings, five-year agreements, permanent campuses) with guest-scale investment in the host relationship. Locals watch leases get signed, foreign money move in, and other marks of a permanent arrival, often before anyone from the project has bothered to introduce themselves or explain their intended time horizon.

Iron Rule 2: Ignore local stakeholders at your peril

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After working out what it wants to become, and before it commits to a jurisdiction, any startup society needs to understand who’s who in the zoo, so to speak. If the first iron rule is about time, then the second is about power: who holds it, and who can either make or break you. And this is where stakeholder mapping becomes essential. Stakeholder mapping needs to be conducted at all levels, from the local to the national and even the supra-national. Ask: Who has the power to stop our operations, and have we met them yet?

From what I can tell, Malaysia seems a clear illustration of this rule in action. Balaji’s public appeal to Prime Minister Anwar, with a threat to freeze investment attached, was received by Malaysians as a demand that the federal government intervene in what was a state administrative matter. Johor is a sultanate that guards its prerogatives, and its relationship with Putrajaya is sensitive. A stakeholder map would have shown on one page that the entity holding the “off” switch was probably at the state level, and that friendly cabinet-level ministers and agencies at the national level weren’t going to be much help given local political realities, especially given this year’s contentious state elections.

Iron Rule 3: Compliance is not legitimacy

The second iron rule gives you the roster of people who can close you down. The third decides whether anyone in the community will champion your cause and work to keep you around. In jurisdictions with regulatory and governance opacity, you can comply with every law and still run into trouble if you haven't built local legitimacy.

A prospective investor in a network-state-type project once asked me what would prevent a new community from simply buying a chunk of land in the middle of nowhere, where it could just mind its own business and be left alone. I gave two reasons why the invisible approach always backfires.

First, there is no piece of land on the entire big blue Earth that isn't claimed by somebody. The concept of "blank slate" territory is appealing in theory and nonexistent in practice. Inside Network School, the working assumption appeared to be that Forest City is an artificial island*, largely empty, so no Malaysian could feel any attachment to it.

What we found in greater Johor was the reverse. Although nobody in late 2024 knew what Network School was, they definitely had opinions about Forest City. It functioned locally as a monument to how the original Chinese development deal went against Malaysia in general and, if you’ll forgive the term, “majorly screwed us,” in the words of one Johor area business owner. Other Malaysians we spoke with described the island as cursed, and anyone familiar with Malay culture can tell you that word isn't used lightly. Man-made or not, the island represented a huge outlay of both private and public money, and it seemed a blow to their Malaysian national pride that the government would even contemplate selling it off cheaply to foreign investors.

Second, I repeat that, as foreigners, you need a strong reputation-management game from year zero, and invisibility entirely prevents this. Again, with Network School, located on the “island near Singapore,” almost nobody in Johor knew what it was. The vast majority of local Johor residents and Malaysians in general first heard about it in the context of an activist’s highly inflammatory social media post.

A smear campaign is the absolutely worst way for anyone to learn about your project, and this is the whole trouble with invisibility: when the accusation broke, not one person in Johor had a reason to speak up for Network School, because Network School had given too few people in the local area reasons to care whether it stayed or left.

Legitimacy is built from the ground up. It accrues to projects that both ordinary local people and local-level community leadership (e.g., business community, civil society, and the like) have a stake in defending; these types of local defenders are often worth far more than any friendly signature you collect at the national level.

What’s Next for Network School in Kazakhstan?

First, credit where it’s due. The early signals out of Kazakhstan suggest that at least a few of these lessons may be sinking in. In late July, Balaji met Prime Minister Olzhas Bektenov directly, and the plan they described seems like a promising start. The proposed “Network City” near Burabay is explicitly pitched as a partnership with local authorities and the local community; it is meant to be built using modular infrastructure designed to fit the existing landscape (important for preserving the region's pristine nature). Balaji also went out of his way to stress that the whole thing runs on private investment, with no public funds, potentially heading off one of the most dependable sources of local resentment before it even starts. That is what applying the three iron rules from Day 1 looks like.

However, a warm reception from the Prime Minister is precisely the kind of top-level embrace Malaysia extended to Network School, too. So, what should the project keep an eye on? Three risks stand out, each with a recent local precedent.

Land rights. Foreign control of land is one of the most flammable issues in Kazakh politics. In 2016, proposed amendments letting foreigners lease farmland set off nationwide protests (driven largely by fear of Chinese acquisition) and forced the government to shelve the reform entirely. Any campus that takes up real ground is likely to touch on this nerve. Additionally, the Burabay area is one of Kazakhstan’s most beloved natural retreats, so a new “city” going up in it (however modular) invites exactly the kind of scrutiny now trained on foreign developments in protected landscapes elsewhere (also see Albania’s recent “Flamingo Revolution” situation).

Regulatory reversal. Kazakhstan has run the welcome-then-eject cycle for a tech project at least once already. It rolled out the red carpet for bitcoin miners in 2021, and when they strained the grid, the government throttled their power, taxed them, and pushed them out within a year. The lesson here is that a welcome extended by decree can be withdrawn by decree.

Political instability. In January 2022, protests over fuel prices quickly escalated into riots amid what the government called an attempted coup, which required a military intervention of Russian-led CSTO troops, and ended with over 200 dead after Kazakh security forces were given “shoot to kill” orders. Local grievances in Kazakhstan can escalate from zero to a nationwide crisis very quickly, and such political instability puts a visible foreign enclave at elevated risk.

Conclusion

Nobody should take Network School’s exit from Malaysia as a reason to stop building parallel societies, stop iterating, or stop attempting strange and ambitious things in unfamiliar places. In fact, the parallel society movement greatly benefits from more Network School-type experiments, provided they are conducted ethically, which, in this context, means remembering that the host community consists of stakeholders who must not be ignored. As explained at length above, this is for both moral and pragmatic reasons.

Although its first attempt didn’t work out, Network School’s experience in Malaysia should be viewed as the invaluable learning opportunity it is. This is exactly why Polis Labs exists: to research and experiment, knowing that every real experiment carries the risk of failure. After all, the only way to truly waste a failure is to refuse to study it.

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What We Learned

Host-community residents of a pop-up city in San Martín de los Andes told us they couldn't understand what the event was until they walked into it. Pre-event communications, however thorough, didn't help. What did help was a community dinner, an informal invitation, or a low-barrier first contact. The implication is that while communication with the local community is important, the primary design challenge for initiatives of this kind is participation architecture, and the most important intervention is lowering the threshold of first contact.

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What host-community residents told us about a pop-up city in their town

In October and November 2025, Edge City Patagonia ran a pop-up community in San Martín de los Andes, Argentina, designed to convene local and international participants around technology, well-being, governance, and social innovation. Hundreds of international participants flew in for the experience, and we wanted to understand how the host community of San Martín de los Andes (SAM) perceived the initiative. During the last week of programming at Edge City Patagonia, we invited 10 local SAM residents to participate in a focus group.

What they told us reflected a clear sequence: pre-engagement confusion (what is this thing?), a threshold moment of first contact (aha!), a strongly positive post-engagement experience (more, please!), and a thoughtful set of conditions for what would have to happen next for a repeat or enduring event (yes, but…). This sequence, from not understanding the point of Edge City to a cautious embrace of future initiatives, forms the core of the study and the framework of this preview.

Before the event: confusion and ambiguity

Nearly every participant initially encountered Edge City, having no clear idea what it was. Where awareness existed, it had reached them through personal networks rather than from organizers directly. For some, the opacity actively generated mistrust before any participation had occurred. One participant recalled:

“Lots of people told me not to go — ‘It’s a Ponzi.’ Information wasn’t available on the web. You could only see the residencies and stuff once you paid... It was like, they want me to pay $2,000 just to see what’s happening. It’s kind of sketchy.”

Financial uncertainty compounded the communications gap, and several participants described an event that, in their view, had not been designed in any visible way with local residents as the intended audience.

First contact: understanding through participation

The most striking finding in the study is what happened when participants crossed the threshold from outside to inside. Comprehension arrived through showing up, often at a community dinner, an informal gathering, or some other low-commitment shared activity. As one participant put it: “I still did not comprehend [what Edge City was] until I attended community dinners and engaged directly with other participants.”

This is one of the study’s most theoretically interesting claims. If the event itself is what makes it comprehensible, then paying particular attention to the participation architecture may be the most important design challenge for initiatives like Edge City. We highlight this finding about the benefits of lowering the threshold of first contact because the data suggest that better messaging about Edge City’s intentions would not, on its own, have moved most of these participants. What moved them toward engagement and subsequent comprehension was signposting that said in effect, "You are welcome to join."

After engagement: a strongly positive experience

Once participants crossed the engagement and comprehension threshold, their accounts became consistently and emphatically positive. They described an interpersonal atmosphere at Edge City that felt egalitarian and socially stimulating:

“It was crazy to know that I have no idea who I’m talking to. Just a cool person on the other side. I didn’t know if he or she was a millionaire or not. First time it doesn’t matter.”

They valued exposure to ideas and conversations rarely available in their local context, from technology to mental health, neurodivergency, and nutrition. For several participants, the experience extended into lasting friendships, professional opportunities, and concrete personal change. Networking, intercultural exchange, and unexpected personal growth were recurring themes.

Looking ahead: aspiration, with conditions

Support for Edge City’s return, or for a similar initiative, was nearly unanimous and expressed with genuine emotional investment. “For me it’s a dream,” one participant said. But that support came coupled with clear conditions. Participants called for local residents to play a more visible role in shaping future iterations of Edge City or similar initiatives, as facilitators, instructors, ambassadors, and contributors rather than as a passive audience. They wanted programming co-created with the community before the event, not adapted around it after the fact.

A concern that deserves its own research

A meaningful minority of participants raised concerns about displacement and social change, specifically the risk that nomadic communities settling into smaller host towns can transform the social and economic character of those places over time, sometimes pushing local residents out. These concerns were not based on vague anxieties either. Many of their observations were grounded in precedent, e.g., participants had witnessed or heard of nomadic communities transforming the social and economic character of other towns. Some of Edge City’s most enthusiastic supporters in the focus group still conditioned their continued support on whether this issue was adequately addressed in the future.

The study notes that this question deserves attention as a research focus in its own right. Research that tracks social and economic indicators in San Martín over successive editions would provide the evidentiary base needed to address those concerns honestly, and we think that work is worth doing.

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Key Takeaways and Recommendations

The picture participants painted is of an event that generated real intellectual, social, and personal value for the host-community residents who engaged with it. Despite its entry point being harder to cross than it perhaps needed to be, we don’t read participants’ critical observations as rejection of Edge City; quite the opposite. Regarding other critical comments, we highlight that participants who raised the sharpest concerns about access and displacement were also among the most enthusiastic supporters of Edge City’s return. Our assessment is that their feedback is the kind that genuinely interests local stakeholders when they think a project is worth getting right.

The recommendations drawn from participants’ comments map to the four phases of the arc that the study identified:

• Redesign first-contact materials for someone who has never heard of Edge City (or similar initiatives), and work through the informal local channels participants actually used.

• Create deliberate low-barrier entry points (e.g., open meals, free public talks, a local preview event) so first contact can occur as the data indicates it actually does.

• Involve local residents in programming as named facilitators, instructors, and ambassadors before the event, instead of as a passive audience during it.

• Rather than treating community engagement as a one-time deliverable, consider taking displacement concerns seriously as a planning input, establishing a baseline of local indicators, and building ongoing community dialogue into the model.

None of these recommendations should be interpreted as prescriptive. Instead, they identify decisions that organizers of any initiative, depending on local legitimacy, would optimally make early, explicit, and visible.

Where this fits and what’s next

These findings are drawn from a single 60-minute focus group with 10 English-speaking SAM residents who all had some prior contact with Edge City, conducted during a single iteration in one host community. We recommend viewing them as a snapshot rather than a comprehensive account of how the broader San Martín de los Andes community experienced Edge City Patagonia. We name several other limitations in the full study.

Our hope is that this study offers a textured view of how host-community residents experience an externally organized pop-up community, and a set of design implications for anyone building initiatives that depend on local legitimacy to succeed. The questions worth pursuing now concern not whether communities like Edge City can launch in places like San Martín de los Andes, but how the door can be opened wider for the residents who already live there.

The full study is available here under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Help support research and governance of parallel societies. Our organization is still developing. If you want to see the work continue, consider donating in crypto. The goal is less coercion, voluntary interaction, and more decentralization.

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What we learned

Participants in experimental community projects don't necessarily object to centralized decision-making. But they do mind when the gap between decentralization rhetoric and the centralized operational reality they encounter on the ground is wider than expected. Managing expectations regarding which decisions will sit with community organizers and which are to be shaped by participant feedback is a key activity that may shape community member willingness to remain or return. This is a finding the broader ecosystem of popup cities and network-state experiments will likely recognize.

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What participants told us about prototyping a decentralized community

In the final week of major programming at an experimental community we’re calling “Alphaville,” we sat down with a focus group of seven participants to learn about their experiences. They had spent weeks together as residents building personal and professional relationships, running experiments, attending workshops, and navigating shared living, while watching the Alphaville project unfold around them.

Throughout the 75-minute session, they opined on what worked at Alphaville and what didn’t. They also shared Alphaville-specific insights within the broader context of pop-up cities and parallel-society experiments, and these community initiatives’ overall attempts to prototype something genuinely new: alternative models of community, governance, and civic life.

Participants praised Alphaville as intellectually rich, indicating the community was full of people willing to engage seriously with deep questions. They also highlighted their appreciation for Alphaville’s rare willingness to actively build alternative civic and governance models rather than just analyze them. They commended the project’s ambitions to try something hard in uncharted territory without a tested playbook.

Frustrations also arose.

The most consistent criticisms centered around a perceived contradiction between Alphaville’s decentralization rhetoric and its more centralized operational execution. This distinction between the aspiration to decentralize and the tendency to revert to centralization proved to be one of the most important findings of our study. We note that what to decentralize (authority, tech infrastructure, ownership, etc.) and how are a broader set of questions the field is still wrestling with, which is why we think the findings presented in the Alphaville focus group study are vital for anyone trying to prototype new forms of community, governance, or civic life. More than anything else, the utility of these focus group findings to future community builders is why we think this study is worth sharing publicly.

About the study

Alphaville is the pseudonym for an experimental community we studied through a single in-person focus group with 7 participants. The study used Braun and Clarke’s thematic analysis and identified four interrelated themes: participant experience and well-being; social dynamics and inclusion; event organization and structure; and vision, purpose, and future engagement.

Because it shapes everything that follows, we want to highlight to the reader up front that four of the five authors of this study were themselves residents at Alphaville for the duration of the initiative. We were embedded participants, not external observers. Our fifth author, who had no on-site presence, conducted the thematic coding independently to introduce some analytic distance. We acknowledge in the study that this arrangement introduces selection, interpretive, and advocacy risks, and we’ve tried to be transparent about them. Readers should treat the findings as exploratory and situated rather than generalizable. The full study, including methodology, limitations, and our positionality statement, is linked again at the end of this post.

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What else did participants tell us? The positive

Participants particularly praised the curation of attendees and the quality of conversations that emerged in informal settings, e.g., late-night discussions, meal preparation and enjoyment, and collaborative tasks. The project's visionary ambition was widely commended, even by those with specific operational concerns. A majority of participants told us they would return to a future iteration of Alphaville. When participants in experimental communities describe genuine intellectual value and willingness to return despite acknowledged frustrations, we interpret that as an indication of what the project is getting right.

Many of the strongest reactions participants shared were positive. One participant told us, “I found amazing people, and I found a really high bar of conscious thought about important and deep issues.”

What else did participants tell us? The critical

Alongside positive reactions, participants also raised a set of tensions that the broader field will likely recognize. The most consistent of these concerned the gap between decentralization as a stated value and the more centralized operational reality participants observed on the ground. One participant put it this way:

“They want to do bottom-up stuff, but then they don’t. Well, in that case, they actually don’t want that. They just want to portray that. I think there was an intention. They just could not keep it together to make it happen. And I think it’s fine that things are a bit more centralized, but that needs to be clearly communicated that that’s the route we’re taking for these and these reasons.”

We highlight this quote because we see it as emblematic of a pattern documented in the broader field for years among governance researchers studying DAOs and other distributed-authority projects. The participant wasn’t asking for less centralization per se, but rather for more transparency about where decision-making resides. Is it only with a small core team of organizers, or is wider participation from community members welcome? The tendency toward a “centralized decentralization” effect appears in platform governance and DAO literature; its presence in a place-based, in-person community suggests it is not confined to digital infrastructure alone and can occur in any mission-driven initiative under time and resource pressure. Therefore, Alphaville is by no means alone in struggling with the problem of “centralized decentralization.”

Participants also described confusion about the project’s core intention. “What is the goal?” one participant asked. “Is it a network state node? Is it a special economic zone? Is it a glorified coworking space? ... If we can’t even define the thing that we’re going towards, how can we discuss whether we’re going towards it or not?” The question of direction is one Alphaville will need to answer for itself, and the difficulty is compounded by the fact that the available terminology (network state, network state node, popup city, permanent hub, etc.) remains genuinely contested across the ecosystem, i.e., our observations external to Alphaville indicate that projects working under these banners are themselves still negotiating what they mean. Our reading of the Alphaville focus group is that participants wanted the community organizer to take a clearer position about its own direction within a conversation that the whole field is still having.

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Key Takeaways

The overall picture participants painted is that Alphaville succeeded in generating real intellectual and social value while struggling to navigate the gap between stated values and operational practice (a gap many initiatives in this space encounter).

We don’t read participants’ critical feedback as rejection of the project. The seven participants were, by recruitment design, broadly aligned with the aims of network-state experimentation. Their willingness to engage critically is the kind of feedback genuinely committed participants offer when they think a project is worth getting right.

We also note that the recommendations below, drawn from participants' comments, aren’t specific to Alphaville. Namely:

• State the governance model honestly.

• Pre-establish rules and conflict resolution mechanisms before they’re needed.

• Invest in community-building infrastructure commensurate with the project's social ambition.

• Resolve the question of what the experiment is actually trying to demonstrate.

None of these recommendations should be interpreted as prescribing a specific model. Instead, they identify decisions that organizers in this space (Alphaville and otherwise) would optimally make early, explicit, and visible in the future.

Where this fits and what’s next

These findings are drawn from a single 75-minute focus group with seven people in one community, conducted at the end of an intense, weeks-long experience. We recommend viewing them as a snapshot rather than a comprehensive account of the entire Alphaville project. We also name several other limitations in the full study. Our hope is that this work offers a textured view of how participants in one prototyping initiative experienced dynamics that almost certainly persist across the larger pop-up and network-state ecosystem. The questions worth pursuing now concern not whether communities like Alphaville can launch, but whether they can successfully iterate.

The full study is available here under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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An Introduction to the Machine

We are all cogs unwittingly assembled into the Machine, a pseudo-religious techno-cult that is progressively dismantling our humanity.

This is the disquieting central thesis of Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, and as I read the book, I couldn’t help but nod along in agreement with most of its primary contentions regarding the current state of modernity.

However, I have no talent for book reviewing. So instead of critiquing Against the Machine, I’ve set out here to examine Kingsnorth’s main points in the context of my own uneasy relationship with technology, while sharing some thoughts on how to resist disappearing into the Machine.

But first, let’s outline the gist of Against the Machine.

Kingsnorth, who has a previous background in environmental activism, describes in several dozen essays how the West adopted a worldview that treats the earth as a machine, and why the Western socio-political approach to modernity appears fixed on replacing the cultures and religions of all people with a globalized cult of technical progress.

(NB: I think the most apt definition for “the West” in this context was recently explained by John Robb of Global Guerrillas as: “our globally networked commercial culture.”)

Kingsnorth lucidly describes how this happened. Centuries’ worth of pro-technology propaganda (going back at least to the Enlightenment) has “stripped away our sense of human-scale culture, our sense of humanity, our relationship with nature, our traditions, and our God.” Kingsnorth posits that the animating spirit behind this Western techno-religion, which he refers to as the Machine, is a desire to completely subjugate nature, including human nature.

The stakes are high in this war with the Machine. Will we allow this confluence of power, wealth, and technology to converge into a totalizing system of control? Or, will we defend nature and the commons from technologies that will eventually “unmake” humanity? Kingsnorth is clear that he thinks it unlikely humanity will ultimately win, though it is not a foregone conclusion that we must lose.

How the Machine Works: The Four P’s vs. the Four S’s

So, how does this Machine actually work? What is the mechanism being used to unmake us? Kingsnorth refers to a systematic process by which we are shepherded into a post-human future as “the Great Unsettling.” This Great Unsettling is achieved through a replacement of the Four P’s with the Four S’s:

Essentially, human culture arises from the Four P’s:

• Past. Where a culture comes from, its history and ancestry.

• People. Who a culture is. A sense of being “a people.”

• Place. Where a culture is. Nature in its local and particular manifestation.

• Prayer. Where a culture is going. Its religious tradition, which relates it to God or the gods.

In order to replace human culture, these Four P’s must be supplanted by their inverted counterparts. Kingsnorth calls these the Four S’s and identifies them as the primary factors driving us toward a post-human anticulture:

• Science. Where we come from. Science can offer us a non-mythic version of this story, and assert a claim as to the true (i.e. measurable) nature of reality.

• The Self. Who we are. The highest good is to serve the self and ensure its longevity.

• Sex. What we do. Both the highest means of sacral pleasure and, through public expressions of “sexuality,” an affirmation of individual identity.

• The Screen. Where we are going. The screen is both our main source of distraction from reality and the interface by which we are directed into the coming post-human reality of the Machine.

Kingsnorth argues that together, these latter four forces form the secular creed that defines modern “progress.” By displacing the Four P’s, the Four S’s erode limits, traditions, and shared human experiences rooted in nature, community, and mortality.

The Human Need for Roots

Kingsnorth describes how much of this process to replace the Four P’s with the Four S’s has unfolded gradually in the West through deliberate policies of deracination: the literal uprooting of People from their Place.

The importance of “rootedness” as a requirement for maintaining our humanity is a running theme throughout Against the Machine, with Kingsnorth drawing heavily on French philosopher Simone Weil’s World War II-era book The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind. Writing in exile from London while her native France was under Nazi occupation in 1943, Weil argued that rootedness is a fundamental need of the human soul and that its destruction is the defining spiritual catastrophe of modernity.

Kingsnorth agrees:

“I believe the heart of the crisis that is enveloping so much of the world today - cultural, ecological and spiritual- is this ongoing process of mass uprooting…This process, which has been going on for centuries, of uprooting us from nature, culture, and God, leads us into a mass society, controlled by and for technology, in which we have been on course to become, since at least the Industrial Revolution, mere cogs in a giant mechanism that we have no control over.”

Loss of Identity

Nowhere is this uprooting more visible than in how we have come to talk about ourselves.

Kingsnorth notes that: ”People don’t tend to talk much about their ‘identity’ unless it is under threat. The louder you have to talk about it, the more you have lost. Once an entire country is talking about nothing else, that’s a pretty good sign that the Machine has sprayed the roots of its people with Roundup and ploughed the remains into the field.”

Technology as Culture

As I mentioned above, Kingsnorth’s thesis left me with much to ponder in the context of my own relationship with technological progress. I am quite sympathetic to many of his arguments, especially that technology is flattening and even erasing human cultures.

But what if you’d grown up in a milieu where technology already was your culture? For those of us born American in the late 20th century, this is exactly what happened. We arrived naked and screaming into a culture saturated in techno-optimism. I positively marinated in it for most of my childhood and youth. We’d been to the moon, after all. AND we had the bomb, so take that commies! We were assured as children that armed with our shiny new computers, our modern education system was the best in the world. Nothing could stop America from progressing toward the brightest of futures.

What Remains When Technology Fails?

While reading Against the Machine, I often thought of the brand-new middle school I attended in the mid-90s. With the Millennium approaching, science, space exploration, and all things tech were major themes. Students were even administratively organized into teams named after each space shuttle.

I try not to read too many retconned omens into this, but a few years later, in 2003, my team’s shuttle, the Columbia, broke up on atmospheric re-entry, killing all seven astronauts onboard. The shuttle program was retired shortly thereafter. In hindsight, that event seemed a symbolic end to the promise sold to my generation of American youth.

Instead of the bright techno-future we had been promised, we got forever wars, the 2008 financial crash, an opioid addiction epidemic, and COVID. It often seems to me that we’ve lost the stars in exchange for limbic system-hijacking devices that steal our creative energies and ruin our attention spans. In Against the Machine, Kingsnorth repeatedly suggests that this promised future will never arrive, making it absolutely essential to resist the Machine’s efforts to destroy the foundations that have given our human cultures their shape and meaning, lest we find ourselves completely uprooted.

Confessions of a Recovering Effective Accelerationist

Despite technology failing my generation at every turn, I persisted. Here I confess to being a recovering effective accelerationist. Blame it on the American techno-propaganda I was raised with, but I was initially seduced by Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto and its effective accelerationist ethos (aka, ”e/acc”). Coming off the post-COVID blahs, it seemed just the antidote we needed in the West to heal our cultural and spiritual malaise when I first read it in 2023.

While I still think many of Andreessen’s arguments have merit, I’m concerned e/acc takes far too much of a materialist view of the world, and does not adequately address several current human pathologies including (but not limited to!) state violence, class warfare, environmental degradation, and corporate rapaciousness, which are not fixable through increased wealth and prosperity alone. I worry that going full e/acc risks leading us away from something like a Star Trek vision of the future toward a world closer to The Expanse. Technology itself is not a panacea for solving human coordination failures, nor can it fill the spiritual void that seems to accompany modernity. I conclude that on our current trajectory, the majority of future humans are more likely bound for a Belter-type existence than for Starfleet Academy.

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The d/acc Construct

I’m no longer an effective accelerationist, and two things in particular crystallized this shift. First, there must be a middle ground between full-throttle techno-accelerationism and de-growth doomerism, and I think I found the sweet spot with d/acc.

Formulated by Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin, the defensive, decentralized, democratic, differential acceleration (d/acc) construct was introduced in his 2023 essay My Techno-Optimism. The d/acc concept rebuts Andreessen’s cheerful assurances that the world’s problems will be fixed by rocketing up the Kardashev scale. Instead, Buterin argues that we should accelerate technologies that strengthen human defense, distribute power, and preserve individual agency, while holding back those that concentrate power or degrade human dignity. I will always believe technology has an inevitable (and positive!) part to play in future human flourishing, but it needs wisdom and restraint applied, which I think the d/acc concept recognizes.

The second thing causing my pivot from e/acc was a deep dive into several 19th and 20th-century thinkers (many of whom I later discovered Kingsnorth also cites in Against the Machine) who wrote eloquently about the modern tendency to idolize science and technology.

The most important of these for me was probably C.S. Lewis, whose The Abolition of Man imagines a future in which a class of technocrats he calls “the Conditioners” might use a combination of technology, psychology, and propaganda to reshape the desires and values of all humans. Lewis later fictionalized the concept in his 1945 sci-fi novel That Hideous Strength, where a group of academics and scientists attempt to establish a global authoritarian technocracy.

Both works reflect Lewis’s rejection of scientism, the belief that science is the only valid source of knowledge, and his concern that humanity could be reshaped by a technocratic elite who no longer recognize any moral law above their own will.

Between Buterin’s framework and the warnings of Lewis (and many others - see bibliography below), I landed on d/acc as a way for us to cautiously embrace technology without entirely losing our humanity.

Finding A Middle Way

In some ways, Against the Machine is the blackest of black pills. Kingsnorth doesn’t have much hope that the Machine can be defeated, and he’s pessimistic overall about our ability to thwart our total subjugation by “Techno-Sauron.” It’s perhaps unsurprising that his solutions for fighting or escaping the Machine are relatively thin compared to the book's critical portions. And that’s fine; I actually find it refreshingly humble when an author gives a detailed diagnosis of a problem without ending with an explicit answer about what he/she thinks is the perfect solution.

However, I do think Kingsnorth’s pessimism might be alleviated somewhat if he had explored some compromises, call them middle ways, between what he sees as the Machine’s inexorable march to eradicate humanity, and some current efforts to harness technology in a more wise and human-scale fashion.

One area that is clearly near and dear to my heart is the contemporary parallel society movement. As we’ve written about extensively on this blog, the parallel society or parallel polis movement goes by many names (network states, parallel societies, startup societies, etc.) and represents a broad array of ideas, but their unifying factor is aptly summed up by Kingsnorth himself in Against the Machine (paraphrasing Jacques Ellul): “the only successful way to attack these features of modern civilization is to give them the slip. To learn how to live on the edge of this totalitarian society…”

Obviously, these experimental communities have their challenges. Buterin himself has been candid about this regarding the Zu pop-up city archipelago he founded and continues to inspire, e.g., conceding that governance remains to be solved (who decides the rules?), membership defined (who gets in, and why?), etc. These are questions every durable community in history has had to answer. Additionally, Simone Weil’s warning that “whoever is uprooted himself uproots others” is of particular concern for emergent parallel societies. Many of those most drawn to building parallel communities are themselves thoroughly deracinated. A parallel society built by uprooters seriously risks uprooting host communities (my piece Expat, Immigrant, Missionary, Guest details some of the most significant of these issues).

Ultimately, though, I think Kingsnorth might find the sphere of parallel societies interesting to study, especially the often thoughtful, constructive, and intentional ways in which its advocates and practitioners are using tech. They represent the kind of constructive engagement with modernity that would benefit from Kingsnorth’s analysis. I’d be very curious to hear his thoughts on these efforts (even if highly critical) because he arrives at something close to the same instinct in the final pages of Against the Machine:

“To me, the dissolution of the modern nation-state into smaller, more anarchic, less centralized units would be welcome. Perhaps then we could rediscover the roots of our old nations, and begin to rebuild them again. Perhaps too, new nations will form, built around a spiritual core, and a love of place, which will give to their people the kind of meaning which the nation-states of the Machine era have so successfully imitated whilst at the same time destroying. Perhaps we will live in real nations again. Perhaps we will build them. Nobody else can.”

Nobody else can. That is the driving force behind every parallel society, pop-up village, and emergent social order that attempts to live as purely human rather than as an automaton. Based on the quote above, I would invite Kingsnorth to explore the parallel societies movement for a much-needed respite from the Machine. Because, as much as I agree with many of Kingsnorth’s diagnoses of modernity’s ills in Against the Machine, I don’t think individually retreating to the fens or the mountains is an attractive, let alone scalable, option for most people. Instead, I see an opportunity to use technology with intention, deliberation, wisdom, and restraint to found new, enduring communities and hopefully rejuvenate old ones.

Maybe we can’t fully escape the Machine, but we can certainly try to rewild it on our own terms.

I close by inviting you, dear readers, to discuss. What do you think? How do you negotiate life in the Machine? What traditions or places still root you? Are there technologies you use with deliberate restraint? Please let me know in the comments. I would love to hear from you!

Selected resources for further reading:

Against the Machine: The Unmaking of Humanity, Paul Kingsnorth

The Technological Society, Jacques Ellul

The Need for Roots, Simone Weil

The Abolition of Man & That Hideous Strength, C.S. Lewis

Frankenstein; Or, the Modern Prometheus, Mary Shelley

The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture, Wendell Berry

Accelerating technology development to attract investor attention, or LARPing as a “disruptive innovator,” may not drive actual progress. In fact, it can be harmful. Many tech leaders embrace disruption for prestige, investment, and a sense of belonging to an elite circle.

But this ethos does more than confer status and money; it is potentially destructive. When combined with pressure to satisfy investors and stakeholders, it becomes a structural deficiency in all markets. In this sense, we do not need more disruptors; we need responsible builders who weigh consequences as seriously as profits.

Disruption may feel bold or rebellious, but it often produces unintended consequences. Companies focused on disruption and its financial upside frequently neglect downstream harms and externalized costs, leaving the fallout for others to manage.

These problems are not incidental. They are endemic to tech and other capital-intensive industries. Current innovation frameworks are largely incapable of accounting for externalities. Moving from extractive development practices toward responsible progress requires new methodologies, such as Yellow Teaming.

Venture-capital-driven approaches illustrate the problem. The aim is often to move fast, gather user feedback, iterate rapidly, and push aggressively toward product-market fit. Lean startup and agile frameworks exemplify this approach. While effective at accelerating deployment, these models have caused and will continue to cause significant harm to ecosystems, communities, and the planet.

Case Studies in “Don’t Be Evil”

Two companies illustrate these dynamics with particular clarity.

Google

The company famously adopted “don’t be evil” around 2000, a slogan that was suspect from the start. The motto shifted to “do the right thing” under Alphabet in 2015 and was largely removed from the code of conduct by 2018. By then, any pretense had faded.

Google evolved from a search engine into a multipurpose platform in pursuit of profitability, creating one of the most expansive commercial data-surveillance infrastructures ever assembled.

The consequences have been far-reaching. Google’s geofence warrant system allows law enforcement to request location data from all devices within a specified area, effectively turning every smartphone user into a potential suspect. Between 2017 and 2019, these requests increased by over 1,500 percent, with Google receiving as many as 180 requests in a single week. Innocent people have been jailed based on faulty data. The company also faced a $1.4 billion settlement with Texas over deceptive data collection and a $425 million verdict for continuing to collect user data after users believed they had opted out.

Under the banner of innovation, Google relied on rapid iteration and market cycles. There was no methodology for understanding, mitigating, or seriously considering downstream consequences. What mattered was the bottom line and appeasing stakeholders. The harms have been severe and continue to propagate socially, culturally, and technologically.

OpenAI

OpenAI presents a different but related problem. The long-term consequences of its work remain uncertain. Like much of the tech sector, it operates within agile frameworks emphasizing rapid deployment and competitive positioning. Its public branding even embeds the language of multipolar traps and arms races, with a stated goal to “win the AI race.”

Ostensibly, the company considers AI safety. But key questions remain: Is it meaningfully opting out of runaway race dynamics? Does winning the AI race include restraint, risk mitigation, and long-term responsibility?

Google once claimed opposition to evil while drifting toward it. OpenAI claims to benefit all of humanity. Yet in a market paradigm dominated by stakeholder appeasement and financial optimization, products must succeed in markets, and investors must see returns. This creates relentless pressure to build ever more powerful models.

The consequences of failure at the frontier of AI could exceed those of surveillance corporatism. Even if a “paperclip maximizer” scenario never occurs, the structural risk landscape demands sober consideration.

The Multipolar Trap

Both cases point to a deeper structural problem.

This is not a critique of markets themselves. Markets are powerful coordination fields capable of channeling immense creative energy into innovation and human flourishing. But misused, markets produce harm.

The problem is structural. Current innovation frameworks generate value in one domain while exporting harm to another. They solve problems for users while creating problems for communities, ecosystems, and future generations. This pattern is what game theorists call a multipolar trap. As Daniel Schmachtenberger describes it, a multipolar trap is a situation in which multiple rational actors, each pursuing competitive advantage, collectively generate destructive outcomes. Even when cooperation would yield better results, incentives compel participants to continue harmful behavior out of fear of relative loss.

In short, everyone acting rationally produces an irrational outcome on a civilizational scale. The tech industry operates within this textbook multipolar trap. Firms are incentivized to move faster, scale harder, and capture market share before competitors. Slowing down to consider consequences becomes strategically dangerous. This is how Google drifted into developing surveillance architecture and why OpenAI risks deploying dangerous AI models.

Structural Failures All Around

The problem extends beyond firms and institutions. It is cultural.

We have constructed an ecosystem that celebrates speed over wisdom, growth over sustainability, and disruption over stewardship. The mantras are familiar: ask forgiveness, not permission, fail fast, fail often. Move fast and break things.

But what is actually breaking?

Social cohesion. Governance institutions. Environmental stability. Human psychological health.

When algorithms optimize without regard for mental well-being, or blockchain systems deploy without understanding MEV dynamics, harm follows. Technologies become extractive rather than generative. These are not isolated failures; they are coupled system failures emerging from the same incentive substrate.

Mental health issues are left to therapists, and environmental pollution to governments. Organizations generate crises that others must remediate. Responsibility is displaced, allowing competitive dynamics to continue while maximizing stakeholder returns.

Agile frameworks excel at building things right, but fail to ask whether the right things are being built. We need a different orientation: not anti-technology or anti-market, but pro-responsibility and pro-wisdom. Development frameworks must measure success not only by growth metrics and revenue, but also by collective betterment, social resilience, and ecological stability.

Yellow Teaming: A Framework for Mature Progress

One framework offers a practical, concrete starting point.

Daniel Schmachtenberger’s concept of Yellow Teaming provides a promising approach. Where Red Teaming stress-tests vulnerabilities and Blue Teaming focuses on execution, Yellow Teaming asks: what happens if this project succeeds? What are the harms of success at scale?

Teams map potential negative externalities across ecological impact, social cohesion, mental health, inequality, information integrity, and institutional trust. They move beyond feasibility and profitability to analyze consequences and mitigate harm.

For example, a Yellow Team might examine how a social platform optimized for engagement could amplify polarization, or how an AI coding tool could accelerate malware alongside productivity gains. The goal is to surface harms before they metastasize.

Yellow Teaming also addresses multipolar trap dynamics and runaway harm cascades. Companies compete in environments that reward speed and punish restraint. Rather than ignoring this tension, Yellow Teaming embeds responsibility into development without sacrificing viability.

This raises difficult questions: What if competitors refuse these practices? How can firms remain competitive while internalizing costs others externalize? Yellow Teaming does not offer easy answers; it offers only a structured approach to confronting systemic risks.

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Technological Teaming

The infrastructure to support this shift is emerging. Blockchain can enable transparent governance and accountability aligned with long-term well-being. DAOs can coordinate around values beyond profit. Smart contracts can enforce externality accounting that legacy markets ignore.

But infrastructure alone is insufficient. Cultural evolution must accompany technical capability. We must stop celebrating disruption as an intrinsic good and instead adopt a different approach. We should ask: disruption toward what end, for whose benefit, and at what cost?

The swagger of the disruptor must give way to the responsibility of the builder. Builders consider not only what can be built, but what should be built, and what must be prevented. Yellow Teaming offers a practical pathway from what Schmachtenberger calls “inauthentic progress,” which externalizes costs and ignores harm, to “mature progress,” which internalizes externalities as fully as possible.

Toward a Wisdom Ethos

Ultimately, the challenge is not technological capability. The tools to build transformative systems already exist. The challenge is wisdom. Do we have the foresight and judgment to use them well?

Innovation without wisdom is like a ship without a rudder: it may move fast, but it risks running aground. Wisdom means anticipating downstream consequences, internalizing costs, and aligning action with long-term human and ecological flourishing.

Open-source security practices provide a clear example. Software ecosystems became more secure not because companies voluntarily restrained themselves, but through disclosure norms, bug bounty programs, peer review, and reputational consequences. Making vulnerabilities visible changed behavior and created a culture of collective responsibility, demonstrating that systems, norms, and accountability can make ethical choices the rational choice, not just the right one.

As Norbert Wiener observed, “We cannot see the future; we can only try to understand the consequences of our actions.” This means asking not just what can be built, but who it serves, what it costs, and how it shapes the shared world. Yellow Teaming, coordination frameworks, and a culture of stewardship provide practical ways to act on this insight.

The tools exist. The frameworks are emerging. What remains is the collective will and wisdom to use them. Innovation must be guided by judgment, not just capability. Only then can progress truly be worthy of the name.

References

“Alphabet Drops ‘Don’t Be Evil’ Motto.” Time, October 4, 2015. https://time.com/4060575/alphabet-google-dont-be-evil/

Bostrom, Nick. “Ethical Issues in Advanced Artificial Intelligence.” 2003. https://nickbostrom.com/ethics/ai

“Development in Progress.” The Consilience Project. https://consilienceproject.org/development-in-progress/

“Don’t be evil.” Wikipedia. Accessed 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don’t_be_evil

Gans, Joshua. “AI and the paperclip problem.” CEPR VoxEU. https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/ai-and-paperclip-problem

“Geofence Warrants and the Fourth Amendment.” Harvard Law Review 134, no. 7 (April 2023). https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-134/geofence-warrants-and-the-fourth-amendment/

“Geofence warrants help police find suspects using Google. A ruling could curb their use.” NBC News, March 8, 2022. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/geofence-warrants-help-police-find-suspects-using-google-ruling-could-n1291098

“Google’s Motto Was ‘Don’t Be Evil’?” Snopes, October 27, 2024. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/google-motto-dont-be-evil/

“Instrumental convergence.” Wikipedia. Accessed 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence

Kubler, Michael. “Transitioning to a Moneyless Society: Key Insights from Daniel Schmachtenberger.” December 23, 2023. https://www.kublermdk.com/2023/12/23/transitioning-to-a-moneyless-society-key-insights-from-daniel-schmactenberger/

“Multipolar trap.” Daniel Schmachtenberger’s Knowledgegraph, compiled by Stephen Reid. https://stephenreid.net/k/daniel/terms/multipolar%20trap

“Someone is Always Watching: Implications of Google’s WAA Privacy Case.” Syracuse Law Review, 2025. https://lawreview.syr.edu/someone-is-always-watching-implications-of-googles-waa-privacy-case/

“The Yellow Team.” Be Like Water, August 29, 2024. https://belikewater.blog/2024/08/29/the-yellow-team/

“What the $1.4 Billion Google Settlement Teaches Us About Data Privacy.” BigID, May 14, 2025. https://bigid.com/blog/what-google-settlement-teaches-us-about-data-privacy/

Wiener, Norbert. The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. Houghton Mifflin, 1950.

"The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place"
– George Bernard Shaw

This piece feels more personal than usual.

Over the past year, through conversations with people inside and outside the network society space, I have concluded that if we in the movement want to attract more people, we need to alter how we communicate our vision for the future.

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Drop the “Normies” Talk

First, a personal pet peeve. Because so many people in this movement have roots in tech and/or Silicon Valley, too much jargon has become integrated into how we describe the movement. This needs to change. For example, I loathe the casual use of the term “normies” to describe people outside of our world. It is condescending and reinforces an unnecessary “us vs. them” divide. If the goal is to persuade or invite people into a new way of thinking, beginning with an air of superiority does not strike me as constructive.

The Orchid Interview That Went Viral

We must also understand that our descriptions of new technologies and social ideas can seem disconcerting or frightening to those not tinkering with emergent technologies. I do not want to pile on to the criticism she has already received, but Noor Siddiqui exemplifies how not to communicate tech products.

Here is some background. Siddiqui founded Orchid, a biotech startup that offers advanced embryo screening, allowing prospective parents to select embryos with fewer genetic risks. She was recently interviewed by Ross Douthat of The New York Times in a conversation titled: “The Next Parenting Trend Starts Before Conception For as little as $2,500, you can choose your future baby. Should you?”

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The exchange I want to highlight is a perfect example of two worldviews talking past each other. Toward the end of the interview, Douthat, illustrating concerns about the cultural and emotional consequences of decoupling sex from procreation, reads aloud a Galway Kinnell poem that beautifully captures the intimacy of family life created through love and chance. With tears in his eyes, he asks Ms. Siddiqui:

“Do you worry about removing or diminishing from human experience that aspect of being a husband and a wife, in a relationship, with a child?”

Siddiqui looked slightly confused for a split second before replying with a flat “What do you mean?” followed by a lighthearted remark that “sex is for fun, Orchid and embryo screening is for babies.” The moment went viral (on X in particular) because it was so jarring for many non-tech people. Fellow tech founder Amal Dorai probably summed it up best:

“A guy who can be moved to tears by a poem tries to interview a Silicon Valley founder, results are predictable.”
— @amaldorai

I do not think Ms. Siddiqui intended to appear flippant or glib in the interview; it is just that they were speaking two different languages. Douthat was speaking in deeply emotional registers of love, intimacy, poetry, and tradition. By contrast, Siddiqui came off as speaking in the impersonal, utilitarian logic of Silicon Valley, which prizes efficiency, optionality, and optimization above all else.

A DAO Conversation Gone Wrong

I recently saw this same pattern play out in myself when I tried to explain the idea of a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) to a philosopher friend. The context was a broader conversation about Web3, Bitcoin, and the emerging interest in alternative governance structures, particularly the network state and parallel society concepts. I wanted to use DAOs as an illustration of how digital-native communities can experiment with governance and human coordination, but she interpreted them as prescriptive blueprints for how all of human governance should and inevitably would evolve.

I tried to explain that DAOs are primarily governance systems designed for blockchain communities rather than entire societies, but the more I emphasized their limited scope, the more her position hardened. Already a tech skeptic, in her mind, the very fact that technologists were building such systems implied that they believed this was the destiny of all governance.

After that conversation, it occurred to me that if I cannot clearly explain how experiments in digital governance could help eventually solve coordination failures in real life to someone trained to interrogate ideas critically, then I am clearly failing to frame the issue correctly.

Why Systems Sound Like Prescriptions

My personal experience is that many, if not most, tech people think in systems and sometimes struggle to consider human elements like values, stories, traditions, and identities. However, to non-tech people, technology signals how we see ourselves in the future, and sometimes this imagery paints a portrait of an Orwellian hellscape.

As with the Douthat-Siddiqui discussion, my DAO conversation illustrates that in any exchange about the future where some people speak in tech-framed terms of systems, protocols, and optimization, others may misinterpret this as value-laden prescriptions about how human life should be organized. To a non-tech person, a DAO looks like criticism or even rejection of liberty. Embryo screening looks like a slippery slope towards eugenics and the dystopian future portrayed in the film Gattaca:

A Crisis of Governance, A Chance for Dialogue

Before I close, I’d like to emphasize Sterlin’s last post on the governance crisis.

We are increasingly beset by coordination failures, value traps, and institutional breakdowns. To address this crisis, we need more than new systems; we need a new way of speaking them. Suppose we learn to translate system-centric thinking into stories that connect with ethics, traditions, histories, and lived experiences.

In that case, we can create space for understanding and collective agency. Only then can our experiment with alternative futures, whether in digital parallel societies, DAOs, or biotech, succeed. We need to invite openness, not dread, angst, or anger. To achieve our quest to solve the governance crisis, we must not adopt Silicon Valley’s heartless pursuit of progress at any cost.

The future of humanity and our flourishing depend on it.

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“We are agents who alter the unfolding of the universe.”
― Stuart A. Kauffman

Many institutions are focused on solving global catastrophic risks. Their primary concerns are AI, biotech, and planetary ecology. Surprisingly, narrowly focusing on these problems is a distraction and error. To make meaningful progress, we must shift priorities.

Governance is not just one issue among many. It is the foundation. Until we address how decisions are made, who makes them, and how they are coordinated across complex systems, every "solution" remains fragile. The central issue should be governance. Only a handful of people are discussing the governance crisis and its role as the precursor to all apocalypse scenarios. It is the upstream failure that enables every downstream catastrophe.

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Since the agricultural revolution, the human race has been in escalating conflict modes. In recent history, we have unlocked the technology to delete ourselves. Threats include catastrophe weapons, synthetic organisms, superintelligent LLMs, supercolliders, and autonomous drones. Indeed, persistent conflicts, driven by competition for resources, wealth, power, and ideology, have shaped societal structures and political sensemaking.

As we face increasingly complex challenges, from climate hazards and pandemics to superintelligent AI, the existing governance frameworks to manage these advancements prove inadequate at best and evil at worst.

The mechanisms designed to maintain social order and progress are now struggling to adapt, leading to a widening gap between our problems and our capacity to address them. This inability to enact collaborative governance constitutes the essence of the governance crisis.

Zero-Sum Geopolitical Configurations

The “governance crisis” now spirals into chaos and species-wide apoptosis. Israel and Iran are at war. Ukraine and Russia are at war. The US maintains proxy wars through both Israel and Ukraine, but it may enter the fray on the slightest provocation. The balance is fragile. The only reason that a World War III scenario has not unfolded is due to mutually assured destruction.

Humanity could not thoroughly destroy the planet in the past. With the advancement of technology, we have gained unimaginable destructive competency. Individual self-preservation on the upper echelons of power is the only thing preventing total war.

The problem is that governments are overly centralized, corruption-prone, and engaged in zero-sum dynamics. On a grand scale, geopolitics is akin to game theory playing out on the global stage. All national superpowers are stuck in these suicidal interaction loops.

For those unfamiliar with the term, a zero-sum game is a scenario with one winner and one loser. One's gain equals another's loss, resulting in a winner-take-all system. In such a scenario, cooperation becomes impossible; instead, individual players are incentivized to maximize their own gains at the expense of others. This dynamic often leads to competitive and adversarial exchanges, as seen in many geopolitical conflicts where nations vie for limited resources or influence.

Addressing Metacrisis:
Moloch or Sapien

The result of these zero-sum games is perpetual arms races, races to the bottom, and perverse feedback loops. These problems cause and exacerbate the “metacrisis,” or the confluence of global concerns that represent threat vectors and black swan eventualities.

As this metacrisis grows and accelerates, most people feel lost. They do not consider governance a problem because they see it as a consequence of human nature; thus, they see destructive human tendencies as “natural” and inevitable.

Others ignore the problem by focusing on symptoms and outcomes. For example, visionaries like Bryan Johnson think we must live forever to address AI risk, but this is not a solution. It is wishful thinking, a prayer to the technocratic gods for salvation. Living forever does not thwart zero-sum game dynamics and poor governance.

There is a solution, but it requires foresight and courage to switch focus. We must tame base instincts by correcting the broken systems that feed corruption and warp incentives. If we are going to solve AI risk, ecocide, and the “metacrisis,” we must address problems of human governance.

This problem falls on what we can call the Molochian-Sapien Continuum.

Psychologically, we will always reward ourselves as individuals first at the expense of others. This description is not a portrait of “human nature,” though. It is game theory. We are a social species, but only to the extent that society elevates us individually, plays to our egos, and infuses us with dopamine spikes. Our social nature makes us prone to building hierarchies and letting “strong men” become our saviors. That is our Molochian tendency.

Fortunately, our social nature also endows us with the potential for generosity, empathy, and wisdom. The Molochian–Sapien continuum is not hardwired in our biology or DNA but reflects how we choose to organize, build institutions, and incentivize behavior. We can opt for either Moloch or Sapien. The Moloch-leaning path amplifies the selfish, greedy, and corrupt aspects of our nature, while the Sapien trajectory fosters harmony, fairness, social cohesion, and balance.

And as long as we lean more toward Moloch, we are less likely to solve any type of crisis, much less address the “metacrisis.” The metacrisis is exacerbated because we are stuck in the Moloch.

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So, what is the good news?

We need not alter human nature to move toward the Sapien position. The problems of corruption, global conflict, and dysfunctional governance are not based on some inherent flaw in humanity. Yet many continue to believe that traits like selfishness or aggression are hardwired into our DNA, as if concepts like the “selfish gene” or “warrior gene” define who we are.

In truth, our brains are adaptable, and our DNA responds dynamically to environmental influences through epigenetic mechanisms. Fixed patterns do not bind us; we can make different choices, shift our behaviors, and forge new paths. By retooling how we act and relate, we can tune our systems. This requires a conscious turn toward wisdom, beginning with a deep understanding of the incentive structures embedded in our governance systems and a commitment to upgrading them.

Solving Governance:
The Wisdom Turn

First, the gravity of the situation bears repeating: while we are stuck in Moloch, we cannot solve the metacrisis. The governance crisis is not just another problem within the metacrisis—it is the chief problem from which the others arise. AI misalignment, environmental collapse, economic inequality, cultural fragmentation, and disinformation campaigns radiate from the same core malfunction: misattuned coordination and governance structures.

This situation demands more than improved policies, electoral reforms, or minor political adjustments. Governance must undergo a profound transformation in how we structure coordination. Achieving this requires a shift away from power-driven approaches and toward a wisdom-based foundation.

As Aristotle framed it in phronesis, wisdom is practical judgment rooted in virtue. It is context-sensitive, not rule-based; it operates through discernment, not domination. A wisdom-oriented governance system is one that:

• Aligns individual well-being with collective flourishing

• Encourages sensemaking over propaganda and hierarchy-based dominance

• Incentivizes long-term thinking instead of short-term extraction

• Distributes power with embedded feedback and self-correction mechanisms

• Supports emergence rather than ossification

In this sense, the problem is not simply that people in power are corrupt. The systems we have inherited structurally reward corruption and pathological competition. We need governance architectures that turn Moloch incentives on their head, replacing adversarial logics with regenerative ones.

How do we embrace pragmatic wisdom moving forward?

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Polis Labs Research and Advisory Focus

We now have a unique opportunity to engage in careful, deliberate governance experimentation and to foster a shift toward wisdom. We live in an ideal moment to deepen our understanding of how we organize, incentivize behavior, and cooperate. Rapid social growth and change are underway. Numerous polities are emerging worldwide. These include network states, pop-up cities, charter cities, internet-native nations, and other new territories.

What we need now is a cultural and intellectual commitment to running safe experiments within these communities—treating them as living governance labs. These spaces serve as testing grounds for alternative models of sovereignty, identity, coordination, and conflict resolution. Within them, we can explore how sensemaking, resource-sharing, and accountability might operate beyond the zero-sum constraints of legacy institutions.

Polis Labs is dedicated to advancing governance and coordination research within these network states. We have taken a leading role in addressing the governance crisis. Recently, we conducted our first focus group at the Zuitzerland popup in Switzerland, where we posed challenging questions: Are these new systems bettering how we organize? Do they promote win-win dynamics? Are organizers staying true to their vision for the future? Can we move beyond centralization, authoritarian rule, and technocracy?

Most importantly, can we build governance structures that foster human flourishing rather than collective despair?

Our findings suggest we are on the right path, though opportunities for growth and improvement remain. We plan to share much of our research through reports, blogs, advisory statements, and open-source frameworks for use by network states and parallel societies. We aim to fundamentally reorient governance based on collective knowledge, wisdom, and understanding.

We have accumulated vast knowledge and experience as a species, yet much of it remains unpracticed. Now is the time to act. We hope our work and this article inspire others to focus on addressing the governance crisis rather than examining its symptoms or attempting to tweak political systems.

The Adjacent Possible

This moment calls for more than superficial reforms. It demands a transformation in the architecture of governance itself.

We must move beyond mere power optimization and instead cultivate systems grounded in wisdom, empathy, and long-term thinking. As Stuart Kauffman describes, evolution unfolds through the adjacent possible—a constantly expanding space of new potentials made accessible by each step forward.

Likewise, reimagining governance is not about slouching to utopia but unlocking the next layer of viable structures that catalyze cooperation, resilience, and flourishing. By reorienting toward wisdom-based governance, we begin opening doors to futures we could not previously see, yet are now within grasp.

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In technology, a "sandbox" refers to an isolated environment where experiments can be conducted safely, innovations can be tested, and failures can occur without threatening the integrity of the larger system. While crucial to software development, this concept can just as easily be applied to the experimentation of societies themselves.

Throughout history, Switzerland has served as a kind of governance sandbox: a controlled, semi-insulated space where new political forms were tested, refined, and sometimes exported far beyond its mountainous borders. The secret sauce behind Switzerland’s renowned reputation as a model of civic engagement and political stability is the concept of subsidiarity. But we’ll get to that below.

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This spring, the Polis Labs team joined Zuitzerland (part of the broader Zuzalu archipelago) for a month-long exploration of its "future society sandbox." Based at a stunningly beautiful location in the Swiss Alps, the Zuitzerland pop-up village served as a playground for experiments in decentralized governance, regenerative economics, and new societal models.

One of our hypotheses at Polis Labs is that human flourishing comes not from perfecting top-down control, but from building bottom-up trust. By taking both an observational and direct, participatory approach at Zuitzerland, we gained valuable insights into how the Swiss concept of subsidiarity works when real people, with real needs, consider what it would take to build a governance system from scratch.

Switzerland: A 700-Year Governance Laboratory

As we dive deeper into the study of network states, parallel societies, and emerging social models, it is important to understand the historical context of Switzerland's long-standing legacy of political innovation, particularly at the subnational level.

Many people may not be aware of how deeply Switzerland embodies the principle of subsidiarity, which is the idea that decisions should be made at the lowest capable level of governance:

Under the notion of autonomy, within the framework of laws and constitution, lower units organize themselves and decide how to accomplish their tasks. Higher levels should thus only take over powers of the lower levels when the lower levels are not able to assume their responsibilities or when an overarching solution is absolutely needed.

— Andreas Ladner, Switzerland: Subsidiarity, Power-Sharing, and Direct Democracy

In practice, this means that the 2,000+ municipalities in Switzerland, spread across 26 cantons, all handle a wide range of local issues, escalating only what is necessary to cantonal or federal levels. This system has allowed Switzerland to function not as a monolith but as a federation of semi-sovereign communities, much like the ideal many network societies today aim to achieve.

This did not occur easily, though. The modern Swiss state emerged from centuries of conflict, negotiation, comprise, and experimentation. Beginning with the 1291 Federal Charter, small cantons formed alliances based on the need for mutual defense and self-governance. This decentralized federation concept was revolutionary, given the total dominance of absolute monarchies in Europe at the time. But it wasn’t always stable. Religious wars, economic rivalries, and political fragmentation led to frequent upheaval until the post-Sonderbund War reforms in 1848 finally codified a federal constitution. That constitution formalized the subsidiarity principle, shaping what has arguably become one of the world’s most successful multi-level governance systems.

Swiss Experimental Governance in Action: From Geneva to Appenzell

Some early iterations of Swiss governance sandboxes include Geneva’s fusion of civic and religious authority under Calvin, built on a values-driven civic system, and Appenzell’s Landsgemeinde, an open-air vote that embodied direct democracy and hyper-local sovereignty.

Even more striking is how Graubünden’s pluralistic League of the Three Leagues united multiple linguistic communities under a decentralized, yet functional system: a direct historical precursor to the idea that cultural heterogeneity can thrive within federated political frameworks. This last one is a foundational principle of the network state concept, which aims to bring together like-minded individuals from all over the globe.

Zuzalu: A Subsidiarity Prototype for the 21st Century

Fast-forward to the present: in 2023, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin helped launch Zuzalu, a pop-up city of around 200 people in Montenegro. Designed to last two months, Zuzalu aimed to embody the logic of subsidiarity in real-time. Local pods made decisions, rituals formed organically, and governance emerged from the bottom up. The idea was that participants weren’t just cohabiting, they were co-creating society. While we cannot say whether Vitalik had Switzerland in mind originally with Zuzalu, the Montenegro approach to conflict resolution, infrastructure sharing, and social governance reflected a subsidiarity-first approach.

Zuitzerland: Scaling the Sandbox

In 2025, Vitalik and his collaborators took the next step with Zuitzerland, hosted in Switzerland itself. This was both an intentional homage to the nation that pioneered the principles being tested and an experiment with the possibility of building a permanent hub in the country. Drawing on Switzerland’s federalist DNA, Zuitzerland became a larger, more intricate experiment in community building.

Combining the lessons of Switzerland’s historical sandbox with the real-time experiments of Zuzalu and Zuitzerland, our team had the following takeaways:

1. Delegate Downward First: Just as in Switzerland, decisions in a network society should ideally start at the community level. Give real authority to clusters of 100–300 people to manage shared resources, set local norms, and resolve disputes. Only escalate when coordination requires it.

2. Consider Governance Diversity: Different subcommunities may wish to explore different social contracts, e.g., consensus in one, quadratic voting in another, and reputation-based systems elsewhere. Like the Swiss cantons, allowing for pluralism under a shared constitutional shell could be the way forward.

3. Facilitate Norm Formation: Forming shared community norms serves two purposes. First, shared norms build shared meaning, the glue of subsidiarity. Second, a community charter co-created from the bottom up and based on community norms can be used as the foundation for a conflict resolution system based on community consent and not through enforcing rules imposed from top-down authority.

4. Modular Infrastructure, Shared Protocols: Invest in core tools that enable autonomy: interoperable ID systems, dispute resolution pathways, digital voting protocols, and transparent budgeting tools. Think of these as your equivalent to Switzerland’s excellent public transit system, serving to connect, but not override.

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Human Flourishing Through Layered Autonomy

At Polis Labs, we believe the future belongs to interoperable civilizations, i.e., to federations of communities that are sovereign in character but unified in principle. Subsidiarity offers not just a method of governance but a philosophy of freedom, responsibility, and dignity.

The common thread between Swiss subsidiarity and Zuitzerland’s governance experiments is trust: trust that local communities can govern themselves, and trust that resilience emerges from decentralization, not from uniformity.

It is also important to note that the Zuzalu and Zuitzerland experiments are not utopias. They are scaffolds. But they point to what’s possible: a world where governance is closer to life, where politics is reclaimed by the people most affected by its outcomes, and where network states don’t repeat the mistakes of centralized modernity.

As we continue researching and advising new societies, from eco-villages to blockchain cities, we encourage all founders and builders to ask: Are you designing for control, or for trust?

If it’s the latter, subsidiarity might just be your most powerful tool.

To further support our work at Polis Labs, consider donating to fund our next deep governance research project at Edge City, Patagonia. Donate via our Manifund crowdfunding campaign below.

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“What happens when an industry transitions from using one or more 'smart' and centralized networks to using a common, decentralized, open, and dumb network? A tsunami of innovation that was pent up for decades is suddenly released.”

-Andreas Antonopoulos

Nation-states are inefficient; their governance mechanisms are outdated, corruptible, and failure-prone. They face disruption from decentralized technologies and parallel societies, especially network states. As a result, legacy governance institutions may cede power and territory. However, for network states to succeed, they will require fault-tolerant economic structures.

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One such structure is cosmolocalism, which combines global knowledge-sharing with local production. By leveraging open-source knowledge and distributed manufacturing, cosmolocalism is a scalable and antifragile economic scheme.

Typically, governments could resist cosmolocal startups because they would emerge inside national borders, leaving them vulnerable to regulatory scrutiny. Platforms like Google or Amazon could also muscle them out of the market by revoking their hosting or undermining their business.

With the emergence of network states, cosmo-local startups may be able to operate more freely while unlocking new business opportunities. Anyone involved in network states should comprehend this model. Let us explore it more granularly.

DGML

Cosmolocalism can be summarized with the acronym “DGML,” or design globally and manufacture locally.

Jose Ramos generally describes it as a new economic model in which what is light (knowledge, design, software) is global and what is heavy (production, manufacturing) is local.

Michel Bauwens, founder of the P2P Foundation, envisioned cosmo-localism as an economy where communities utilize open-source designs, digital fabrication, and commons-based governance to achieve self-sufficiency. According to Bauwens, “Cosmolocalism proposes a relocalization of material production, so a move away from a lot of world trade, coupled with a global cooperation through ‘organized networks with commons’, i.e. ‘everything that is heavy is local, everything that is light is global and shared’."

Cosmolocalism can also be considered a “post-capitalist” solution to undo endless amounts of corporate waste and excess. It has the potential to surpass previous governance and economic structures, behaving like a prototype for a more efficient economy that accounts for the best capitalist and socialist outputs. In other words, it transitions us beyond the confines of socialism and capitalism.

Two key principles guide this transition:

• Global Knowledge Commons, Local Production — Knowledge, design, and intellectual resources should be shared globally as digital commons. In contrast, physical production should be localized to reduce the environmental footprint and enhance regional self-sufficiency.

• Distributed, Open-Source Innovation — Open collaboration and decentralized networks allow communities to co-create solutions tailored to their local needs while benefiting from global expertise and shared knowledge.

This approach negates traditional models by ensuring that communities maintain sovereignty over production and governance rather than depending on monolithic organizations. Let us explore how network states interact with cosmolocalism.

Network States

Network states are digital-first communities that embrace pluralistic governance frameworks to establish political independence. Unlike traditional nation-states, network states often operate in a more decentralized fashion, relying on p2p tech for decision-making and organization. However, network states face challenges that could threaten their long-term viability.

Self-sustainability remains a primary concern, as these emerging communities must establish economic resilience without relying on the traditional sector. Governance poses another hurdle — maintaining social cohesion without a centralized authority demands innovative models that balance autonomy with sensemaking.

Additionally, resource allocation is a pressing issue, as network states must develop resilient architectures rather than depend on fragile supply chains, which can be vulnerable to disruption.

Cosmolocalism provides a framework to address such challenges.

Sovereignty via Cosmolocalism

By fostering decentralized governance, network states can achieve autonomy while ensuring cooperation among their members. Economic independence becomes attainable through localized, high-tech manufacturing that leverages digital fabrication, minimizing reliance on supply chains.

Furthermore, cosmolocalism allows network states to stay agile, integrating global knowledge while tailoring solutions to a specific context. Combining international expertise and localized implementation enables network states to evolve rapidly. This combination emboldens the creation of self-sufficient polities.

The following are active cosmo-local initiatives that could empower the network state movement. Network state entrepreneurs should explore these and other integration options.

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Case Studies and Prototypes

Several real-world enterprises illustrate the potential of cosmolocalism in a network state ecosystem:

1. WikiHouse and Open-Source Cities:

   • WikiHouse provides open-source blueprints for modular housing, enabling communities to build sustainable dwellings without reliance on centralized construction firms.

2. Smart Villages and Fab Cities:

   • Initiatives like Barcelona’s Fab City movement promote self-sufficient urban communities using distributed fabrication and open-source design.

3. Gitcoin and Quadratic Funding:

   • Gitcoin funds public goods through decentralized crowdfunding, demonstrating how network states can finance local initiatives while maintaining global collaboration.

4. Maker Markets:

   • Maker Markets are decentralized, peer-driven economic systems where individuals or small entities create, customize, and trade goods or services directly, often leveraging digital platforms, blockchain technology, and open-source tools.

These examples indicate that cosmo-local strategies work at varying scales, offering blueprints for network states. So, what are the implications?

Cosmo-Local Designs, Extractivism, and Challenges

Network states that adopt cosmolocalism transcend top-down nation-state governance. Rather than hierarchical bureaucracies, governance can become modular, open-source, and community-driven. This change enables network states to:

• Reduce economic dependencies on external factors.

• Foster sustainable economic models based on commons-based peer production.

By combining global collaboration with local self-determination, network states preserve cultural heterogeneity while benefiting from global knowledge.

However, challenges such as open-source extractivism (where powerful entities exploit open knowledge without reciprocation) must be addressed through healthy governance frameworks.

An example of this kind of extractivism occurs within the Ethereum blockchain. It is called MEV (maximal extractable value) and is an ongoing problem. MEV occurs when a validator in the ecosystem changes the production order of a block within the blockchain so they can maximize the fee value they derive from validation activity. This situation constitutes the exploitation of “open source” transactional knowledge on a blockchain, whereby powerful validators are able to manipulate it for their own gain.

Similar forms of exploitation could arise within the decentralized knowledge-sharing networks. This represents a new form of “capture.” The p2p Foundation suggested that cosmolocalism must be safeguarded from corporate capture, ensuring that its principles of open access and local empowerment remain intact. In this sense, network states should anticipate various challenges to implementing cosmo-local designs.

Challenges with Cosmolocalism

Despite its promise, cosmo-local designs face several hurdles that must be addressed to become viable.

• One major challenge is coordination: Decentralized communities must find ways to avoid Moloch Traps, where misaligned incentives lead to self-destructive competition and decision paralysis. Without robust mechanisms for governance, resource allocation, and conflict resolution, cosmo-local networks risk fragmentation and inefficiency.

• Another key issue is scalability. While localized, decentralized production can be highly adaptive and resilient. Questions remain about whether cosmolocalism can scale to meet the demands of large, complex economies. Traditional economies benefit from economies of scale, centralized logistics, and industrial efficiency — advantages that distributed models may struggle to replicate. To compete, cosmolocal systems must develop distributed manufacturing networks, automation strategies, and interoperable standards that allow them to scale without sacrificing core principles.

• Institutional resistance also presents a formidable challenge: Existing political and economic structures are designed around centralized models of production, regulation, and taxation. Integrating cosmolocal frameworks into legacy governance systems requires not only technological adaptation but also legal and regulatory innovation. Policymakers, businesses, and network states must be willing to experiment with new models of public-private collaboration, governance, and alternative economic incentives.

Addressing these challenges demands continued research, technological innovation, and institutional experimentation. By refining governance structures, developing scalable production methods, and fostering policy adaptations (especially within special economic zones), cosmolocalism moves from an aspirational ideal to a transformative economic force.

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A Cosmolocal Future

As network states emerge as a new paradigm for governance and sovereignty, cosmolocalism can provide a robust foundation for novel economic and social configurations. Network states can achieve resilience, sustainability, and autonomy by harnessing global intelligence while fostering local self-sufficiency.

Polis Labs is at the vanguard of this transformation and is beginning to explore how network states can integrate cosmolocal principles into governance, economy, and social organization.

There are plenty of challenges ahead, but it seems clear that the nation-state and other legacy structures are almost certainly relinquishing power. This is a clarion call for entrepreneurs and social architects to embrace the incoming tsunami of innovation and change. Contact Polis Labs if you want to find ways to work together or learn more.

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The Polis Labs team was fortunate enough to attend the Infinita Crypto Cities Summit at Próspera earlier this month. Throughout the week, we had an opportunity to discuss "startup societies" encompassing a diverse range of initiatives, from network states and pop-up cities to online communities and charter cities. These endeavors seek to experiment with new policy ideas, fostering a climate where innovative governance, economics, and biotech research can flourish.

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A consistent theme in the presentations at the summit and in our conversations was the need to ensure these new communities can integrate into existing ones without causing harm. There was general recognition that new startup societies are not established on terra incognito. Instead, they will enter an area inhabited by deeply rooted communities with their own histories, cultures, economies, and social structures.

To that end, and in keeping with the Polis Labs mission of defeating Moloch, we strongly believe that any startup society must recognize this reality and actively seek to align incentives with the local population. By fostering mutual benefit rather than zero-sum competition, new startup societies can prevent unnecessary conflict and create sustainable, cooperative structures.

Moreover, in building a framework for local interaction, it is crucial to understand how startup society members will fit within the new country or jurisdiction. An essential first step is to identify what type of foreign presence a startup society will embody and the broader implications this will have towards building a thoughtful and long-term integration strategy that minimizes negative externalities and builds positive-sum relationships with the local community.

Understanding Foreign Presence: Who Are You to the Local Community

Foreigners in a host country take on different roles, each with its own pros, cons, and responsibilities. Understanding these roles can help a startup society anticipate how its presence will be perceived and how to engage ethically and productively with the local population. Below is a brief outline of four types of foreigners likely to be attracted to a startup society.

1. The Expatriate (Expat)

An expatriate is a person who temporarily or permanently resides in a foreign country, usually for work, business, or diplomatic assignments. Expats often bring high skills and investments, which can benefit the local economy. They can contribute to job creation by establishing businesses or working for multinational corporations that employ locals. Expats may also introduce new business practices, education systems, and global perspectives, leading to beneficial cultural exchange with the host country.

However, expats can also contribute to economic and social inequality by receiving higher salaries than locals, distorting local economies, and making local living expenses unaffordable. Many expats live in wealthy enclaves and interact mainly with their communities, limiting integration and creating cultural barriers. This, combined with the economic effects on the local population, can lead to resentment.

Some best practices for better integration include learning the local language and customs, engaging with local communities rather than forming exclusive expat circles, respecting cultural norms, and supporting local businesses instead of relying on imports.

2. The Immigrant

An immigrant is a person who moves to a foreign country intending to reside there permanently or for an extended period. Immigrants typically relocate for economic opportunities, education, family reunification, or escaping conflict and persecution. Unlike expats, who often maintain a strong connection to their home country and may intend to return, immigrants integrate into the new society and seek citizenship or long-term residency.

Immigrants may struggle with cultural and legal differences, as many countries have strict social norms, bureaucratic complexities, and different work permit systems. Unlike expats, who often live in temporary bubbles with a clear return plan, an immigrant must navigate deep integration into the host society, which may involve challenges such as language barriers, different legal rights for foreigners, and social acceptance. In some regions, immigrants may be viewed with suspicion due to historical influences, economic disparities, or political tensions.

Another major hurdle is employment and economic stability. While some immigrants arrive with jobs lined up, those who seek independent employment or entrepreneurship may encounter restrictive business regulations, lack of access to financial institutions, and biases in hiring processes.

Social integration can also be difficult. Many find building close friendships with locals challenging, as relationships may be prefaced on long-term trust rather than perfunctory networking.

Ideally, for successful integration, immigrants would learn the local language and gain a deep understanding of cultural norms. Respect for local traditions and active participation in the broader community—not just expat circles—are key to long-term success.

3. The Missionary

A missionary moves to another country for religious, political, or economic work, often intending to spread a faith, ideology, or specific economic model. Missionaries can provide valuable investment and development to the host community, especially in healthcare, education, and infrastructure.

However, missionaries can potentially cause harm when they impose their beliefs aggressively and can easily be perceived as neo-colonial. Some missionary-led aid programs, for example, create long-term dependence on external support instead of promoting self-sufficiency within the beneficiary community. Additionally, missionaries may be perceived as intrusive, especially in regions with strong existing cultural or religious traditions. Political and economic missionaries, such as those promoting specific governance models or market-driven economic systems, may face similar resistance if they undermine local structures or disregard indigenous ways of managing society and commerce.

To ensure ethical engagement, missionaries should focus on collaborative development rather than imposing change, learn the local language and cultural practices, work alongside local leaders instead of replacing them, and prioritize long-term development efforts over short-term humanitarian or charitable aid. Economic and political missionaries should engage with local governance structures to ensure their initiatives are welcomed rather than seen as foreign intervention.

4. The Guest (Tourist, Student, Digital Nomad, etc.)

A guest is a foreigner who visits a country temporarily for tourism, study, business, or short-term work. Tourists and short-term visitors boost local economies by supporting hotels, restaurants, cultural sites, and businesses. They also encourage global connections and cultural exchange, while international students contribute to the education sector and bring innovation.

However, guests can also cause disruptions. Overtourism can lead to environmental damage, cultural exploitation, and rising living costs for locals. Tourists who ignore local customs can cause cultural tension, and since guests are temporary residents, they often do not invest in long-term community development.

Digital nomads, in particular, have found themselves at the center of local ire in several places where large numbers of them gathered during the COVID-19 pandemic. As one Lisbon native explained in a recent Time Out article about the digital nomad phenomenon:

“These are people that come to make the best of a place while it still makes sense for them, then move on to another place.

‘And when they leave there's a huge trail of destruction that gets left behind. And the locals are the ones that have to deal with that. Because we are not going anywhere. We were here before, we were here during the time that everything became more expensive, and we will be here after this phenomenon dies down.'

For respectful engagement, guests should respect local laws (e.g., not engage in poorly regulated or illegal subletting of housing), local traditions, and social norms while supporting local businesses over global chains. Learning the history of the area and some basic phrases in the local language also shows respect for the local population and helps minimize harm.

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Case Study: Unintentional Harm Through Wage Distortion

Since we’ve examined a few integration challenges specific to each type of foreigner, let’s look at a more generalized example of unintentional harm to a local community that a startup society could cause.

One of the most common yet unintended consequences of a foreign presence is wage distortion — where foreigners overpay local workers, unintentionally disrupting the local economy.

How Foreigners Drive Wage Inflation in Service & Domestic Work

Wealthy expats, diplomats, and foreign professionals often pay significantly higher wages to attract workers, creating a dual-wage economy where locals working for foreign employers earn much more than those working for fellow locals. This leads to labor shortages in traditional sectors, as workers prioritize foreign jobs over domestic employment. Even relatively wealthy locals struggle to hire domestic workers because they cannot match expat-level wages. This could create an artificial "foreigners' market" for labor, where local businesses lose workers to the higher-paying expatriate economy. Even foreigners’ practice of overtipping can exacerbate this issue.

Consequences for the Local Community

Wage inflation can distort local service pricing, making everyday necessities like domestic help, taxis, and restaurant meals unaffordable for middle-class locals. Price expectations rise, disproportionately impacting lower-income residents. Locals who do not work for foreigners may feel left behind, potentially leading to resentment and community divisions.

Tips to Avoid Wage Distortion

The primary solution is to research local wage standards and respect existing wage norms, following local government regulations and guidelines such as minimum wage, etc. Excessive over-tipping or overpaying should be avoided or at least done thoughtfully, ensuring that it does not create an unsustainable cycle of inflated wages.

Final Thoughts: A Startup Society Must Integrate, Not Isolate

It is understandable that, caught up in the monumental task of negotiating agreements at a national level for the establishment of a special economic zone (SEZ), charter city, or other specialized jurisdiction, a startup society’s founders may overlook or insufficiently address the short- and long-term effects on the local population.

However, without proper alignment of incentives with the local community, startup societies risk falling into the same type of Moloch Traps they seek to escape. This is why we strongly believe that prioritizing integration by respecting and working alongside the local population is the best path for a startup society to thrive and grow in a sustainable and responsible manner.

We intend to study this topic in greater detail to provide guidance to startup societies on best practices for local integration. We will also explore the possibility of entirely new societies emerging post-integration, potentially incorporating elements of the startup society and indigenous culture. Our aim is to identify optimal integration solutions that balance immersion with each startup community’s unique mission and goals.

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Preliminary note: Polis Labs is starting with a hypothesis. Our hypothesis is that governance can be improved through experimentation, and this hypothesis should be tested. Until now, there has been no real or true experimentation in governance.

Democracy was invented in ancient Athens and resurged during the Enlightenment in the United States. At the time, democracy was considered a beautiful experiment, overthrowing the tyrannical monarchies of the day. However, other models of governance were not tried or tested. Instead, a representative version of democracy was copied and pasted worldwide.

With the modern parallel society and network state movement, we are rethinking the status quo and transforming our world. We can now challenge and test our social premises. We can craft neverbefore-seen governance structures. This social transformation heralds the invention of collective sensemaking.

Ending Hubris in Governance

A key insight from the parallel society movement (which we will discuss in future pieces) is that governance should not be an arbitrary or random design to inform human organization and collective sensemaking. Arguably, until modern times, governance — typically called “government” — has been established by a ruling class or elite. They have decided what is best for their citizens based on caprice and happenstance. Governance models have not been selected based on empirical evidence or what unequivocally results in human flourishing and betterment.

Governance models have typically emerged like this: an elite hands down rules they think are the fairest, or more realistically, what is in their interest rather than in the interest of individuals and their communities. This mentality is the height of folly and hubris. These biased, ad hoc governance implementations result from people believing they can build Utopia, which Thomas More wrote satirically about in 1516. Overall, formulating rules for governance has been an exercise in central planning mixed with the chutzpah of a bureaucratic class.

This article aims to reimagine how people and societies think about governance. People the world over must begin to view it as an ongoing, adaptable experiment. We are undergoing an evolution of governance, with the opportunity to pave a path to a better tomorrow. With this notion in mind, we propose a new field of inquiry: Applied Human Governance (AHG).

We will explore the field's initial ideas and assumptions. In later pieces, we will examine the parallel society movement within which AHG will thrive and the preferable futures the discipline anticipates.

Applied Human Governance (AHG)

AHG is our proposed scientific inquiry. It focuses on understanding human organization and governance within emergent societies, such as network states or parallel societies. As an interdisciplinary field, AHG draws from game theory, political science, architectural design, social psychology, information theory, blockchain governance, economics, panarchist literature, Hinduism, Buddhism, and other diverse wisdom traditions.

We define AHG as a methodology to understand what governance frameworks function optimally for the betterment of humankind in the physical world and cyberspace. The discipline's related focus is determining what governance structures hinder or prevent zero-sum games and Moloch dynamics. We will operationalize and expand the components of this definition to grapple with the full scope of our inquiry. The following are AHG's core assumptions. We necessarily start with assumptions that can and will change during experimentation.

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Core Assumptions

• Optimal Governance: Governance should not (nor can be) be a one-size-fits-all solution. Each governance experiment should “optimize” for different features or outputs for eclectic, culturally unique communities. What is “optimal” for a governance model or framework will be what benefits the individuals and the groups who have opted into that model. So, metrics will be “human” focused.
  
  For instance, a “GDP,” or gross domestic product, is a metric used by modern governments. It is a data point we consider “inhuman” because it benefits a ruling elite and their systems more than the people. “GDP” as a metric demonstrates a government's economic health and power. It is too abstracted from everyday living; indeed, economic growth does not necessarily equate to happiness. In a previous article, we mention that the focus on human happiness is what we refer to as “humanware.” We hope to calibrate our models to empower and uplift people to maximize their incentives to cooperate and live peacefully.
  
  Optimal governance will typically be informed by metrics like what the Kingdom of Bhutan calls “GDH,” or Gross Domestic Happiness. Other metrics could include emotional well-being, governance fairness calculations, civic liberty, etc. Optimal governance metrics are all about aligning incentives based on the needs of the communities that have opted into a given social experiment. As a note, optimal governance will also vary based on culture, mores, and trends.
  

• Collective Betterment: We use the term “betterment” often. The idea of collective betterment or flourishing means that whatever metrics governance models optimize for, they result in a net positive gain for individuals who opt into a given model. The term is not subjective or concocted creatio ex nihlio. Instead, we have operationalized “collective betterment.” It suggests that the metrics we optimized for are being implemented and result in a member’s desire to stay in a specific community. In this sense, AHG is a catalyst for creating healthier, happier, liberated societies.
  
  We shamelessly borrow the term “betterment” from the work of the Civilizational Research Institute, started by Daniel Schmactenberger. He and his colleagues sometimes use the term to differentiate authentic progress from naive or immature progress. “Naive progress” refers to the illusion that we progress as we develop sophisticated technologies and expand our national economies. In “Development in Progress,” Schmactenberger and his team summarise their perspective:

  ”The way we understand what progress is and how we achieve it has profound implications for our future. Ultimately, it shapes our most significant actions in the world — it affects how we make changes and solve problems, how we think about economics, and how we design technologies. Whatever is not included in our definition and measurement of progress is often harmed in its pursuit. Its side effects (or externalities) occur in a complex cascade, often distributing harms throughout both time and space.”

  

  
  We are still working within a framework for immature progress as a society. Many governments and institutions are causing untold downstream harm via technological advancement, unending bureaucratic logjams, and runaway corporate excess. Under the sway of the naive paradigm, we erroneously believe we are building a better future. The reality is we are self-destructing. We perpetuate this self-destruction by advancing forward with myopic techno-optimist efficiency.
  
  Here is a fictitious example of naive progress: a company produces a novel quantum communicator device. The device allows people to connect with each other holographically, suffers from zero signal distortion, and takes our communication capabilities to the next level. However, in producing the gadget, its components are made of biohazardous material, which leeches toxins into a nearby stream or reservoir. The fallout from this mass production may not be seen until later, causing the destruction of local fauna and inciting the development of disease in children. This spillover effect example exposes a “downstream” consequence of developing the new device. It is an “externality.” This example is fictitious, but real-life examples are ubiquitous. Read the “Development in Progress” piece for a complete analysis.
  
  On the other hand, “authentic progress” carries us into the future without self-annihilation. It is a type of progress imbued with wisdom. It means we have addressed and rectified the delusion and pains of naive progress. It denotes building technologies and moving into a future without creating spillover effects. It anticipates and addresses black swan scenarios. It suggests not being reactionary but understanding what produces the most peaceful, happiest, and liberated societies while preserving ourselves and the health of the planet. AHG is specifically geared toward solving the problems of immature progress by focusing on governance, cooperation, and organizational sensemaking. This focus is what leads to collective betterment and brings us into a mode of authentic progress.
  

• Moloch Prevention: AHG also aims to understand and prevent Moloch dynamics. We touched on this in a previous article because we view comprehending game theory as critical for improving our world and preventing the destruction of ourselves, resources, and the planet.
  
  Moloch Dynamics are game-theoretic scenarios in which everyone in a community or society optimizes for short-term benefits over collective well-being and betterment. These situations lead to races to the bottom, arms races, tragedies of the commons, and various zero-sum games that cause massive harm, potentially leading to the fall of civilization and planetary despoliation. We aim to achieve governance models that minimize or entirely negate Molochian impacts.

  

  
  Our “communication device” example is a great illustration of a race to the bottom. The company's ambition to maximize profit disincentivizes it to consider downstream or long-term harms caused by the production of such a device. The irony of Moloch dynamics is that those involved in this zero-sum game know what they are doing is harmful but feel as if they cannot escape its clutches. They feel “trapped,” which is why these scenarios are also referred to as “multipolar traps.” However, potential climatological harm or environmental degradation is only one aspect of multipolar traps run amok.
  
  A more salient fear is that Moloch becomes pronounced within ecologies of power. Many of those who are embedded in bureaucratic offices do not care about the citizens they serve. They become incentivized to increase their power at the expense of everyone else, which provides the rationale for why all legacy government architectures naturally and endemically go morally bankrupt and corrupt, causing the widespread planetary harms previously referenced. In her pivotal work “Governing the Commons,” Elinor Ostrom said:

  “What we have ignored is what citizens can do and the importance of real involvement of the people versus just having somebody in Washington make a rule.”

  At Polis, we won’t ignore what people in communities can achieve. We focus on discarding the dynamics of all inept governmental structures. Instead, we envision AHG as the methodology that would set the stage for studying governance to prevent zero-sum games from overtaking our most valued institutions. As Suzanne discussed in her previous article, we want to prevent our systems from becoming stupid. We aim to minimize zero-sum competition within human organizations on a fundamental, structural level.

Conclusion: Sensemaking over Politics

The stated goal or outcome of AHG is to create a world where competing governance models adapt to human needs based on empirical evidence, data, and attunement to cultural wisdom and knowledge. We are witnessing the start of a new era and the diminishment of politics as usual.

The idea of collective sensemaking is a new way to solve problems without relying on political action. Leveraging governments and hedging bets on power has only resulted in continual zero-sum games and self-destructive activities.

Instead, the key to escaping our governance quagmire is to focus on experimenting with models that incrementally erode Moloch dynamics and produce happier, more liberated communities.

AHG is a field of inquiry that foreshadows the cultural turn. It prepares us to learn more astutely how our governance models affect our societies, individual lives, and planetary ecosystems. This transition toward collective sensemaking overtakes “politics” as the dominant form of social problem-solving and rulemaking. It is the key to shedding all of our ineffective, destructive routines, subroutines, and habits as a species.

In the next piece, we will delve further into the emergence of the parallel society movement and how AHG enhances the governance outputs of those cyberstates and parallel ecosystems.

Cipolla’s Matrix of Human Behavior

Carlo M. Cipolla's theory of human stupidity is a thought-provoking and somewhat humorous framework first outlined in his essay The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity. In the essay, Cipolla, an economic historian, classified human actions into four categories based on whether they benefit or harm the actor and others:

1. Intelligent: Actions that benefit both the actor and others.

2. Helpless: Actions that harm the actor but benefit others.

3. Bandit: Actions that benefit the actor but harm others.

4. Stupid: Actions that harm both the actor and others.

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Based on his definition of the “stupid” category of human action, Cipolla formulated "laws" to describe how stupidity manifests and affects society:

1. Everyone underestimates the number of stupid people in the world.

2. The probability that a person is stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.

3. A stupid person is someone who causes harm to another person or group while deriving no benefit themselves and possibly even incurring harm.

   • Cipolla repeatedly emphasizes this as the core of his theory: stupid actions result in a net loss for everyone involved.

4. Non-stupid people always underestimate the destructive power of stupid people.

5. A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.

Cipolla argues that for a society to flourish, it must minimize the influence of stupid people and maximize the impact of intelligent actions. But what if we applied Cipolla’s argument to entire systems, organizations, or even nations?

Can An Entire Organization Become Stupid?

An entire organization can absolutely exhibit characteristics that align with Cipolla's definition of stupidity, particularly if its overall behavior consistently results in zero-sum or even negative-sum outcomes. In such cases, the organization operates in a way that harms itself, its members, and its stakeholders without producing any net benefit, effectively functioning as a "stupid" entity.

Given the focus of this series is on education, below are presented some key areas of stupidity in the American K-12 system:

Overemphasis on Standardized Testing

• Stupidity Classification: Actions that harm students (stress, lack of critical thinking skills) and teachers (burnout, demotivation) while benefiting neither.

• Example: No Child Left Behind (NCLB) tied school funding and teacher evaluations to standardized test scores. This led to:

  • Teaching to the test, narrowing curricula to math and reading while neglecting arts, sciences, and social studies.

  • Schools focusing more on test preparation than fostering creativity, critical thinking, or problem-solving skills.

  • Cheating scandals (e.g., Atlanta Public Schools in 2009), which highlighted how harmful incentives can lead to unethical practices.

  • Net Outcome: A generation of students less prepared for real-world challenges and a teaching profession that feels undervalued and constrained.

Administrative Bloat

• Stupidity Classification: Excessive growth in school district administrative staff drains resources from classrooms while creating inefficiencies.

• Example: Between 1950 and 2015, the number of administrators in U.S. schools increased by over 700%, compared to a 96% increase in student enrollment.

  • Consequences include:

    • Fewer resources allocated to teachers and students.

    • Complex bureaucracies that slow decision-making and innovation.

  • Net Outcome: A system that prioritizes compliance and paperwork over student outcomes, creating inefficiencies that harm everyone.

Neglect of Diverse Learning Needs

• Stupidity Classification: Implementing "one-size-fits-all" policies harms students with different learning styles, needs, and abilities without yielding better outcomes.

• Example: Many schools struggle to support students with special needs, gifted students, or those from non-English-speaking households due to insufficient funding and rigid curricula.

  • Net Outcome: Students who are marginalized or left behind, reducing their ability to thrive and flourish.

These are a few generic areas of stupidity found in the current American K-12 system, but let’s examine a particular case study: the widespread adoption in the English-speaking world of the now largely discredited whole-word or whole-language approach to reading instruction.

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Applying Cipolla’s Theory of Stupidity: The Failed Whole-Language Reading Approach

“I don’t know why education and in particular reading, within the field of education, has been so wimpy with respect to building on evidence rather than on heart … The way we went down the road to whole language is really a story of stupidity.”

-Dr. G. Reid Lyon, former Chief of the Child Development and Behavior Branch within the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development at the National Institute of Health – Converging Evidence – Reading Research What It Takes To Read

The whole-word or whole-language approach to reading instruction encouraged students to use cues like pictures, sentence structure, and prior knowledge to predict words rather than relying on phonics to decode them. Despite evidence that systematic phonics instruction is far more effective, the whole-word approach was widely adopted throughout the English-speaking world in the 1990s and continues to be highly influential in education training and practice.

1. The Stupid Decision

According to Cipolla’s Third Law:

A stupid person is someone who causes harm to others while deriving no benefit themselves, and possibly even suffering harm.

Adopting and persisting with the whole-word method fits this definition:

• Harm to Students:
  Students taught using whole-word methods often struggle with reading fluency, comprehension, and long-term literacy skills.

• Harm to Teachers:
  Teachers face frustration as they watch students fail to grasp reading fundamentals, often requiring later interventions that could have been avoided with phonics.

• Harm to Society:
  Poor literacy skills result in reduced employability, higher dropout rates, and economic inequality, leading to broader societal costs.

• No Clear Benefits:
  Proponents of whole-word methods failed to demonstrate lasting advantages, yet the method persisted for decades due to ideological adherence and institutional inertia.

2. How Did Stupidity Persist?

The Second Law:

The probability that a person is stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.

This principle explains how even highly educated policymakers, administrators, and educational theorists supported and promoted the whole-word method despite mounting evidence against it. Their decisions were often driven by:

1. Appeal to Modernity:
   Whole-word methods were marketed as progressive, making critics seem outdated or resistant to innovation.

2. Confirmation Bias:
   Advocates ignored evidence supporting phonics, instead favoring anecdotal successes or poorly designed studies.

3. Institutional Momentum:
   Textbook publishers, teacher training programs, and bureaucracies doubled down on whole-word approaches to justify earlier investments.

3. Who Benefited? (Bandit Behavior)

Cipolla’s Bandits harm others while benefiting themselves. Certain groups exploited the whole-word method to their advantage:

• Publishers profited by selling new curricula, textbooks, and supplementary materials promoting whole-word techniques.

• Consultants and Trainers built careers offering professional development sessions to teach ineffective methods.

• Administrators advanced their careers by aligning with what was perceived as cutting-edge pedagogy despite the evidence.

While they gained in the short term, the broader costs to education and literacy reveal the stupid behavior underlying this trend.

4. Lessons from Cipolla’s Fourth Law:

Non-stupid people always underestimate the destructive power of stupid people.

The damage caused by whole-word methods may have persisted for decades because critics underestimated the institutional inertia and emotional commitment to the methodology. The persistence of the whole-word reading methodology mirrors Cipolla’s theory of stupidity, as it likely caused widespread harm without clear benefits. It demonstrates how educational systems can fall victim to irrational trends, institutional inertia, and misplaced priorities.

Conclusion

If a stupid person is the most dangerous of all, as per Cipolla’s 5th rule, then it follows that a stupid system is even more destructive. Unlike individuals, these systems have the resources and authority to perpetuate dysfunction on a larger scale. Recognizing stupidity at all levels—personal, organizational, and systemic—is the first step towards minimizing the influence of these stupid entities on our lives.

Increasingly, parents are recognizing that traditional K-12 educational systems have become “stupid.” In response, many are taking steps to reduce the influence of modern compulsory education on their children’s lives while seeking smarter, more effective alternatives that align with intelligent systems and promote better educational outcomes. In the next part of this series, we will take a closer look at some of these educational alternatives in greater depth.

Sources for further reading:

The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity, Carlo M. Cipolla

Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong

Systematic Phonics Instruction Helps Students Learn to Read: Evidence from the National Reading Panel's Meta-Analysis

Ending the Reading Wars: Reading Acquisition From Novice to Expert

Whole Language! What was that all about?

“Coordination is the foundational mechanism human societies evolve, adapt, and innovate.”

-Neter
Escape the Coordi(N)ation Hunger Games: The Matrix of Coordination & Optimistic Exit (Part 1)

“In the very near future, we are going to lift something to Heaven. It might be Moloch. But it might be something on our side. If it’s on our side, it can kill Moloch dead.”

-Scott Alexander,
Meditations on Moloch

The chief aim of Polis Labs is to prevent Moloch dynamics in governance, especially for parallel and independent societies. Our vision is to lift governance to heaven, à la Scott Alexander, and inspire a future free from broken systems that give lip service to humans but feast at the altar of a vile deity. Ultimately, we intend to destroy Moloch, but we must understand what we are up against to achieve success.

Moloch dynamics include skewed incentives and coordination failures that plague outdated governance structures. A Moloch dynamic is a game-theoretic scenario in which individuals optimize for personal benefit at the expense of collective well-being. This broken dynamic causes externalities and spillover effects that harm swaths of people and devastate ecologies of organisms.

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Currently, coercive-backed politics and infighting dominate most of our governance frameworks. This is because humanity has largely adopted government over governance, which leads to a downward spiral of corrupt gameplay. Politicians harbor a winner-take-all mentality, which results in the propping up of a managerial class, leading to a cascade of downstream consequences. 

The solution to these Moloch tendencies is consistently applying wisdom and restraint in governance. In this context, wisdom means we have learned from past mistakes and understand the outcomes of governance models based on historical analysis and accumulated data. Overall, we see the pinnacle of wisdom and restraint in governance in the deployment of “humanware,” which we will discuss at length. Exploiting humanware in governance will uphold dignity, peace, and prosperity as we move into the future. 

This article explores modern governance practices and promotes the application of humanware to disrupt Moloch games. 

Governance Fitness

As we mentioned, instead of deploying governance models, we use government in most places worldwide for human organization and political sensemaking. How is this problematic?

“Government” is a predatory human organizational model. Regardless of its form or style, government is an association of people who monopolize the use of force and rule over a population. It does not matter if the operating system is a democracy, monarchy, oligarchy, or communism. Government is not meant to be a framework for human flourishing. It is a framework for control. It is the instantiation of Moloch in society. H.L. Mencken famously said, “Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.”

Conversely, governance is a voluntary cooperation model that deeply implies being data-driven and defined by human organizational expertise and wisdom. When we say wisdom in governance, we refer to governance that is not geared around control, coercion, or manipulation. Instead, it is based on the thriving, adapting, evolving, peace, and prosperity of a social structure. We call the application of wisdom in human organization governance fitness.

To achieve governance fitness, quantitative and qualitative measures must be established in a framework that a specific network state or parallel society adopts and consistently deploys. Governance fitness should be weighed on a sliding scale and backed by economic and psychological measures and outputs.

In this sense, governance fitness calculates how well a governance framework functions — and Polis Labs intends to define “functionality” along a spectrum of measures, including what the Kingdom of Bhutan calls Gross Domestic Happiness (GDH). Other measures and scales can include (but are not limited to) individual prosperity, economic freedom, civic freedom, spiritual well-being, etc. 

The overarching goal of governance fitness is to subdue or eradicate Moloch dynamics and coordination failures. When runaway Moloch dynamics contaminate a system, governance collapses into power politicking, and humans can experience a failure to thrive.

Let’s explore Moloch dynamics in detail. 

Moloch Dynamics

The glaring tragedy of Moloch dynamics is that the people involved know they are making the world worse.

For example, modern governments and corporate entities are racing to develop the most sophisticated and devastating drone warfare capabilities. They do this because they are stuck in an arms race — an arms race is just one version of a Moloch dynamic.

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This is how it works: individuals at the top of a government or corporate hierarchy notice other governments or corporations relentlessly pursuing advanced drone weaponry. They feel these actors may preemptively attack, so they ramp up development efforts. They push more resources into their agendas. They know they are driving a zero-sum game but cannot escape its grasp. 

The results are an overwhelming net negative for humanity and our collective well-being. One could argue that this scenario results in mutually assured destruction, but certainly, having mutually assured destruction is not a preferable outcome. Not to mention, all the time, energy and capital being expended on developing catastrophe weapons could be better spent making the world more peaceful and cooperative.

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Humanware

We believe the best way to prevent or eradicate these dynamics and bolster governance fitness is to include “humanware” within our frameworks. 

Our friend Neter coined the term “humanware.” Neter would say we have a world of hardware and software but little humanware. We have advanced technology but little consideration of human relational and cultural insight in governance.

The reason for promoting humanware is that technologists and technocrats often consider the human element as merely another variable or metric rather than a central concern. It is with this attitude that democratic states devolve into Moloch-riven technocracies.

So, what exactly is humanware, and how do we achieve it? 

Put succinctly, humanware is people relations, rules, interactions, and coordination. All the relational interactions and dynamics emerge in a complex system, which can be seen as an emergent property of large groups congregating to form a tribe. Included in the humanware are these pieces: 

1. Coordination mechanisms (market networks, social platforms, organizational apparatus, tech) 

2. Rulesets, constitutions, mores, and taboos

3. Dispute resolution and arbitration agents 

4. Emotional/relational/spiritual dynamics 

For the purposes of this article, I will not delve into each granular component of humanware. Just note that humanware is an indispensable part of developing a new society. “Government” has typically been an artificial, proxied stand-in for humanware. Governments have taken the mantle of providing and regulating the means of coordination, defining the rules, resolving disputes, and setting the groundwork for cultural and relational dynamics.

The reality is that when humanware is packaged by governments as a one-size-fits-all solution, it degrades and results in what Jeremy Bentham called the “panopticon,” a surveillance prison, the same as Aldous Huxley’s vision of dystopia in Brave New World. In this context, it is not humanware; it is Molochware.

We view achieving humanware implementation as being rolled out as unbundled governance services backed by a collective understanding of wisdom and restraint to prevent Moloch dynamics and coordination failures. This type of collective understanding is provided by coalitions and alliances of network states, parallel societies, and research institutes that work in concert to ensure Moloch remains suppressed.

These coalitions deliberately leverage knowledge and data from various fields, including game theory, behavioral economics, social psychology, blockchain, AI, and anthropology, to prevent coordination failures and Moloch traps that repeatedly undermine the development of our societies and our ability to resolve conflict meaningfully, without violence.

Conclusion

As a species, we are evolving our understanding of human relations and what governance of our complex societies implies. Insights from history, anthropology, and game theory are essential to comprehend how we can deploy independent societies and their social structures.

We don’t have to assume some governance or government structure is the best because a ruler or dark triad personality says so. Instead, we can leverage data from many fields to achieve the best results. And the best results must mean “gross domestic happiness,” the capacity for individual self-actualization, minimal violence, and a flourishing economy.

It is an underlying meme that governance always seems like an ad hoc decision of some “leaderly” type. Those days are coming to their rightful conclusion. Governance is not about power dynamics and politics. It is about maximizing governance fitness, human cooperation, and the continuation of our existence on this planet and in the universe at large. 

The high school was designed as an assimilation machine from the very beginning. Because of the need to integrate many different races and nationalities, America developed a highly conservative, conformist social structure. The classroom had become an all-important homogenizing instrument.

  - Jon Savage, Teenage: The Prehistory of Youth Culture: 1875-1945

Consider a daily routine where you are forced to sit in a classroom. You cycle from one room to another at the sound of a bell, shove your lunch down in a specified timeframe, must undress in front of dozens of strangers, and are obliged to follow an endless set of arbitrary rules (usually in place for “safety” purposes). Above all, you are forbidden from simply walking out the door. Under these circumstances, you would probably feel mistreated. Rightfully so, as this routine is generally reserved in modern society for military recruits in basic training and convicts doing hard time in prison.

So why would a country choose to systematically treat its children this way?

Mass Compulsory Education:
An Outdated System

The answer lies in the history of how compulsory education systems in the United States and Europe first evolved between the 18th and 19th centuries, and then expanded globally in the 20th.

Influenced by the Industrial Revolution and various economic and social agendas aimed at creating a disciplined workforce and homogenous society, the introduction of compulsory education laws were ostensibly aimed to prepare students for citizenship and work. They focused heavily on standardized curricula and assessments to measure student performance.

The American concept of compulsory education was originally based on the so-called “Prussian system,” and was imported to the US by Horace Mann in the 1840s. Originally created by Frederick the Great in the 18th century, the Prussian system of state-sponsored mandatory schooling was designed to ensure obedient subjects would follow orders without question if conscripted into the army. It has endured into modern times, and is the default model for modern schools worldwide.

Public Schools As Conformity Factories

Critics of the Prussian-based system, including the late John Taylor Gatto (an American public school teacher and educational reform advocate), agreed that the main goal of compulsory education had always been “effective early indoctrination of all children.” However, in the 20th century American and European contexts, the object was not to create obedient soldiers, but to build the necessary workforce required for the Industrial Age.

The idea in the early 20th century was that state-enforced educational systems would “bring the whole continental population into conformity,” according to Gatto. Entire populations could then be treated as a human resource to be managed by the emerging professional–managerial class. Hence why public school systems still train children as adult workers, confining them to a specific “place of duty” for 6-8 hours per day, with coercive truancy laws that empower the state to punish parents and children who disobey.

In his book, Teenage: The Prehistory of Youth Culture: 1875-1945, author Jon Savage agrees with Gatto’s assessment regarding mass indoctrination. He noted that in developing the US high school system in the early 1900’s, its designers prioritized conformity.

This requirement for conformity, Savage writes, was largely due to the changing dynamics of the United States as it transitioned from a frontier society that prized “individualism, wanderlust, and self-sufficiency” into an industrial empire that:

… demanded dependability, physical strength, unquestioning obedience, and the ability to work in a group–to develop, in the educational jargon of the day, “a socialized disposition.” As in public school in Britain, this ethos was best inculcated in the young through sport, and team activities became of prime importance in schools and universities.

Delayed Maturity, Damaged Families

Gatto contended that the social engineering purposely built into the American public school system also actively discouraged young people from maturing. In an essay title “Let’s Abolish High School,” Dr. Robert Epstein, writing for EdWeek in 2007, made a similar point about the public school system delaying maturity:

Over the past century or so, we have, through a growing set of restrictions, artificially extended childhood by perhaps a decade or more, and we have also completely isolated young people from adults, severing the “child-adult continuum” that has existed throughout history …

A primary way in which public schools reinforce this breaking of the “child-adult continuum” is through the deliberate sorting of children into classes by age. This results in children that are almost entirely “peer oriented,” a problem illustrated by the Canadian team of child development expert Gordon Neufeld, Ph.D., and family physician Gabor Maté, M.D., who wrote in their 2005 book, “Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers,” that:

… children today increasingly look to their peers for direction—their values, identity, and codes of behavior. This “peer orientation” undermines family cohesion, interferes with healthy development, and fosters a hostile and sexualized youth culture. Children end up becoming overly conformist, desensitized, and alienated; being “cool” matters more to them than anything else.

Much of the central thesis of “Hold On to Your Kids” echoes one of Gatto’s key assertions, made in a blistering 1991 essay for the Wall Street Journal, “I Quit, I Think”:

Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history. It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents.

Debate continues regarding what factors underpin the dramatic recent drops in family formations and fertility rates, with most OECD countries now below replacement-level. Given their detrimental effects on both family formation and overall mental wellbeing of individuals, it is worth exploring how compulsory public education systems may be linked to crashing fertility. One case study that will be explored further in this series concerns the possible correlation between East Asian education systems and the alarming phenomena of collapsing fertility rates, particularly among Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore.

For example, in a recent brief an unnamed official at Statistics Korea, apparently conceded that the government did not have a clear theory “about why married couples choose not to have babies,” adding that “my understanding is that addressing that part is going to be the focus of our policies (to boost the birth rate)," as per reporting from Reuters.

It is entirely possible that South Korea’s brutally competitive education system is contributing to the immiseration of its population, and could be a factor in the country having the highest suicide rate and the lowest fertility rate among the 38 OECD member nations.

This is a subject that will be explored in further detail in subsequent parts of this series.

A New Way Forward

In the same essay quoted above, Gatto analyzes why, in 1991, he was considering quitting the public school system after 26 years as a teacher (he would go on to teach another 4 years), saying in reference to the conformist nature of the institution, “I teach how to fit into a world I don’t want to live in.”

John Taylor Gatto died in 2018, so he did not live to see the ongoing mass re-appraisal of compulsory public education systems that occurred as a direct result of the Covid-19 pandemic. Gatto’s important contributions to educational reform may finally be realized in our lifetime, though, with perhaps millions of families worldwide now searching for a way out of fossilized compulsory education systems that no longer seem fit for purpose in the modern world.

In future installments of this series, we will explore this issue further.

For additional reading on the history of modern compulsory education systems, we recommend the following resources:

The Underground History of American History by John Taylor Gatto

When High Schools Shaped America’s Destiny by Paul Beston for City Journal

The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager by Thomas Hine

Teenage: The Prehistory of Youth Culture: 1875-1945 by Jon Savage

Montessori: The World’s Most Influential School? by David Robson and Alessia Franco

About Alexander Inglis's 1918 book 6 Principles of Secondary Education

Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers by Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Maté

As a result of school closures and remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, parents and families worldwide received a front-row seat to their children’s daily educational experiences. Clearly, many were unimpressed with what they saw, causing a widespread re-evaluation of modern education systems.

At Polis Labs, we welcome this re-assessment of the conventional wisdom regarding modern schooling because it is well overdue.

Before the pandemic, it was assumed that the vast majority of children would continue to follow an archaic system based on the 18^th century Prussian model. They would be confined to a place of duty (school) for 6-8 hours, where they are divided by age into separate “classes” (regardless of their varying ability levels) and expected to sit still while an authority figure at the front of the room transmits information that they must memorize and successfully regurgitate to be considered “educated.”

This antiquated concept, originally created by Frederick the Great to ensure obedient subjects would follow orders without question if conscripted into the army, has somehow continued to be the default model for modern schools worldwide, despite consistent criticism from 20^th century educators like Maria Montessori and John Taylor Gatto, who argued for better, more effective pedagogical methods.

To the detriment of future generations, the modern system of compulsory education, regardless of country or society, is one of the most entrenched, pernicious examples of a multipolar trap — where a perverse set of interests has resulted in a race to the bottom that does not allow for meaningful reform. Remaining stuck in this system is limiting humankind’s development and constraining its ability to flourish.

In this multi-part series, we will explore why state-enforced compulsory schooling persists and how to break our children out of this increasingly zero-sum system.

Polis Labs strongly believes that as network states and other parallel poleis proliferate and thrive, these new communities will set an example for educational system reforms that could lead to a true pedagogical renaissance worldwide —one that would inspire every human to achieve their true potential, live in abundance, and ultimately propel humankind towards becoming a multi-planetary species.

“In a world in which our lives are increasingly digital and borderless, the bureaucratic institutions of the state have been left behind, incapable of providing a peaceful order. The Westphalian system that birthed the nation state is struggling to keep up with a multi-polar, interconnected world. In this paradigm shift, the supra-national global elite is cannibalising its citizens and the fiat monetary system is collapsing in real time.”

-Logos: A Declaration of Independence in Cyberspace, by Jarrad Hope

“If you wish to converse with me, define your terms.”

-Voltaire  

We are experiencing a renaissance of the parallel polis, a reshuffling of our governance structures to provide new living conditions for everyone. These parallel poleis (plural and pronounced pole-ice) manifest digitally and physically, often in both forms. Some exist permanently; others are achieved and gone instantly, like a Zuzalu pop-up village. They are also fluid and dynamic. The problem is that they are inadequately defined and misunderstood. Even “parallel polis” may be unclear for innovators and governance architects working within the industry.

Further complicating matters, entrepreneurs invent names for these social orders every time they deploy a new one. They now have many names and represent a broad array of ideas. Their names often correlate with a specific idea, goal, or philosophy. They include network states, parallel societies, startup societies, internet-native nations, cloud communities, virtual territories, virtual states, temporary autonomous zones, public-good communities, and popup cities, on and on ad infinitum. However, most social orders represent the same or similar thing but with different terminology.

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This article aims to demystify the “parallel polis” and establish it as the container for encapsulating the vast range of emergent social orders. This discussion is not merely a masturbatory fixation on semantics. Our aim is to explore the history of how we arrived at the movement for parallel poleis, clarify terminology, define them, and identify what ideologies and values they represent to their communities.

Without a compass and map to describe the current phenomenon, we would be lost in an endless labyrinth of innovation and creative complexity. The map is not the territory—and as we shall see, that phrase becomes more palpable when dealing with social mutations linked to the internet and the budding age of the “global village,” as Marshall McLuhan so lovingly put it.  

Let us begin by exploring the current social order and recent upheaval in how people view work, life, and nations. 

Declination and Resignation

Most people can tell you that they live in nation-states; they know they live in a specific state, zone, or city associated with that nation. They often share some of the values, culture, and customs. However, under the current paradigm, people are coerced into abiding by their nation’s values and rules.

This “monoculture” upholds and enforces an allegedly inviolable social contract that determines the rules its citizens must respect on the threat of punishment. As a result, more people have become skeptical of the nation-state. They question their allegiance to it. They ask whether it will endure. With evidence from analyzing hyperinflation, mass warfare, and arms races worldwide, one can surmise that modern states are in decline. 

Along with this overwhelming skepticism of nation-states, people have become more nomadic and less localized. They travel and live in temporary housing more. Hostels, Airbnb rentals, and hotels frequently comprise their living space. In this sense, locals have become global. This trend further intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic, which created “The Great Resignation” phenomenon.

The Great Resignation was a worker-led exodus from traditional 9-5 office employment, likely resulting from quarantine rules established by most countries during the pandemic. After the COVID-19 lockdowns ended, people did not exactly long to return to their regular jobs or routines. They realized they could live and work remotely from anywhere. Recent statistics suggest that “Between April 2021 through April 2022, 71.6 million people separated from their jobs, which averaged 3.98 million people quitting each month.”

Undoubtedly, people started to become skeptical of all conventional living arrangements. Some may have migrated quasi-permanently to other provinces, and other entrepreneurs even relocated their businesses entirely—an idea called “human capital flight.” When people question their living conditions or deem them unsatisfactory, they may leave those jurisdictions, “draining” their prior homeland of precious human ingenuity. Thus, we live in a world frequently reordered and reframed politically, geographically, and cognitively.

What is the Parallel Polis? 

We are experiencing a reboot of what Czech dissident Václav Benda called the “Parallel Polis.” Benda was an activist during the “Velvet Revolution” in Czechoslovakia, a peaceful transition of power in 1989 when the communist party relinquished control and authority.

In his 1978 short essay “Samizdat,” also called “Parallel Polis,” Benda argues that an “independent society” is needed to resist totalitarian regimes and their censorship apparatus. “Samizdat” is the Czech term for “the clandestine copying and distribution of literature originally banned by the state.” The parallel polis, therefore, developed a culture of resistance and defiance within the Czech state.

Specifically, it operated parallel to the communist party, and the citizens involved would align with diametrically opposite or orthogonal values. Benda defined the goals of the parallel polis succinctly:

“The objective of the parallel polis is not confrontation with the power structure, but the creation of an independent society, which is nevertheless public, where free life may be lived regardless of the state’s control.”

Thus, the people enmeshed in the parallel polis and the Velvet Revolution were inherently nonviolent and peaceful. They believed in nonviolent culture and resistance. They essentially practiced a form of what Gandhi called Satyagraha, or “truth force.” The goal of “truth force” is to engage in an actionable form of civil disobedience. Of course, the dissidents in Czechoslovakia used the independent society or parallel polis as their springboard for social change.

Features of Parallel Poleis 

The modern parallel polis movement shares many features and characteristics with the original idea. Most people refer to erecting new communities and bringing value-aligned people together on the land as “network states.” Balaji Srinivasan coined that phrase, and it is currently the most popular. However, the network state is only one version or vision of the parallel polis. We will discuss Srinivasan’s specific vision shortly. 

The “parallel polis” idea, as described and implemented by Benda, is powerful because it worked. His activism and use of the parallel polis or “independent society” sapped power from legacy governance structures in Czechoslovakia, and he and his followers did this peacefully. In this sense, the idea represents a potent umbrella term for describing the social paradigm shift because it has undeniable historical precedence for unleashing change. 

With that said, the modern movement to develop parallel poleis has many nuances. They typically share 3 features: 

• Independent Society: Even if they fail to admit it in their marketing literature, most parallel poleis seek to interdict traditional or legacy systems. They are communities that coalesced to build an “independent society” where they can craft their own governance, culture, and values. They did not emerge as a just-so story. Building these communities requires tremendous capital, time, and energy. They are purposeful and typically involve a form of activism against orthodox power centers. Furthermore, Benda argued that people who suffer oppression require the “space” to become fully human, build, live, and love without interference. This activism-driven component of modern parallel poleis is frequently understated and hidden strategically by founders if they do not want to incite the ire of authoritarian regimes. In this vein, some may even seek support from a host country and attempt to gain diplomatic recognition to survive and thrive.
  

• Digital-First, Values-First: Emergent parallel poleis initially form as online communities or as contributors to a blockchain ecosystem. These groups usually align on underlying values or guiding principles. Their values can be singular in nature, such as Vitalia’s focus on biotech development and human longevity — an idea Srinivasan called the “one commandment.” It should be noted that some parallel poleis could choose not to acquire land and strictly maintain a governance model in cyberspace. See the intentions of the Logos organization for more information on that strategic trajectory. A similar idea was also articulated by the panarchists in the late 1800s. They advocated for choice in governance regardless of where they are living physically. This belief is expressed as the philosophy of “nonterritorial exit.” Note also that digital-first, as Srinivasan states, does not mean land never. These digital-first societies can choose to manifest physically in meatspace, or they can opt to maintain a digital-only existence.
  

• Experimental Governance: These poleis experiment with their own implementations of idiosyncratic governance. This experimentation can happen legally or extralegally, depending upon their circumstances, values, and geographical location. However, since each parallel polis adopts certain values, their culture will typically inform their governance. Types of governance can include democracy, benevolent dictatorship, anarcho-capitalism, anarcho-communism, panarchism, opt-in tyranny, and mashups of all of the above. It should be noted that host countries and investors may inform some aspects of their functioning, especially regarding “criminal codes or law,” but this could change once parallel poleis gain more sovereignty and autonomy. One key characteristic of all these governance modalities is that they keep exit and switching costs low. Therefore, people can easily move between poleis without restrictions other than their contractual obligations.

These features of the parallel polis necessitate a renaissance of the idea. With so many people leaving their homes and experimenting with new governance structures, we can only expect a Cambrian explosion of differing, unique, and novel societies. The parallel poleis can also vary in size. They can be as large as a country or state or as small as a city. They can also be massive or tiny, existing solely in the cloud.

Let us now explore a few that have recently emerged.

Classification of Parallel Poleis

Underneath the parallel polis are many discrete social orders that establish values, identities, cultures, politics, and goals. However, it must be restated that these social forms fall directly under the container and rubric of the parallel polis. They all exist parallel to legacy nations but do not seek to challenge the old regime. They only vie to build “independent societies” to allow human thought and spirit to flourish. We will briefly classify and define a few of them.

1. Network State: One of the most popular parallel poleis is the network state; entrepreneur and investor Balaji Srinivasan laid out the vision. His idea indicates that a value-aligned community coheres online and can manifest later in a physical space or territory. Srinivasan referred to members or citizens of network states as “netizens.”
   
   In his book, he defined the idea:
   
   “A network state is a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states.”
   
   Srinivasan launched his V1 implementation of the network state idea as the “Network School” near Singapore. The network school aims to spin up and bootstrap network states. These new network states and their founding members will determine the governance model they will deploy. In this sense, the governance of network states is de facto experimental and evolutionary, often determined by its founder and community.

   
   Another name for a network state is an “internet-first nation” — like Praxis — but they may or may not adopt the minutia or specifics of Srinivasan’s vision. Other names for network states include “cloud community” or “public-good community.”
   

2. Startup Society/country/city/community: A startup society is an internet-first community experimenting with new territorial governance and organization structures. These societies congregate online in forums, chat groups, and value-aligned ecosystems. They frequently start with a “founder” and a core team, who build online and transition to the ground. However, a key to these poleis is that they plan their growth and development after Eric Ries’ pioneering work in the startup world. In his book, “The Lean Startup,” he argues that tech companies should model themselves after Toyota, which originated a “lean manufacturing model.” This framework emphasizes iterative feedback processes and eliminating waste to streamline workflows. In the context of startup societies, they construct their growth trajectory like a tech company, using an iterative process of citizen feedback to mature their communities and innovate rapidly.
   
   One example of a startup city is Prospera. Their webpage describes it as a “startup city with a regulatory system designed for entrepreneurs to build better, cheaper, and faster than anywhere else in the world.” The goal of Prospera as a parallel polis is to create an independent society for entrepreneurs to build quickly without dealing with an onerous regulatory regime.
   
   Notably, startup cities are scaled-down versions of “startup societies.” The idea is inherently the same, except a startup society starts small and can grow as large as cities, states, or countries. The point is that they are internet-first, startup-oriented, and seek to create an independent society. They often focus on regulatory hurdles, which stifle innovation. They are arguably less “politically” and more “innovation” motivated.
   

3. Virtual State/Virtual Territory/Crypto Libertaria: If the Network State is political, then the virtual state, virtual self-sovereign territory, or temporary autonomous zone is the pinnacle of that perspective. The virtual state idea and its correlates are the cypherpunk and the crypto-anarchist aesthetic of the parallel polis. Without a doubt, these are the visionaries of parallel governance models that seek to directly undermine the State apparatus. However, these actors still do not pose a physical challenge to the state; they only minimize the global harm governments do by creating independent social orders. They also promote massive decentralization to prevent the creation of centralized honeypots for legacy structures to attack.
   
   The literature on virtual states is legion, and it is arguably true that the cypherpunks spearheaded the original idea. In 1992, Cypherpunk Timothy May wrote an article called “Libertaria in Cyberspace,” outlining the framework for a virtual society with parallel governance. Another Cypherpunk, Jerry Everard, in the late 1990s, wrote a book called “Virtual States,” which explored a similar train of thought: using an internet culture to surpass governmental control and surveillance. Timothy May described his vision succinctly:

   This is the most compelling advantage of "Crypto Libertaria": an arbitrarily large number of separate "nations" can simultaneously exist. This allows for rapid experimentation, self-selection, and evolution. If folks get tired of some virtual community, they can leave. The cryptographic aspects mean their membership in some community is unknown to others (vis-a-vis the physical or outside world, i.e., their "true names") and physical coercion is reduced.

   Indeed, the crypto-anarchists are maximally focused on protecting civil liberties and leveraging anonymity-enhancing techniques like zero-knowledge cryptography to foil state-based control of their newly crafted poleis.

Conclusion: Other Language and Open Discussion

Finally, many people are using the term “parallel society.” We considered that term the umbrella phrase to describe and subsume all independent societies. However, that idea has a specific history and definition that lies outside the scope of the parallel polis. It was originally intended to describe ethnic or religious cultures, which could have formed in parallel to legacy states but did not have the idiosyncratic characteristic of a “digital first” entity.

Furthermore, there are “pseudo-polis” societies such as intentional communities, eco-villages, etc. They do not necessarily fall under the rubric of a parallel polis because they do not necessarily focus on experimental governance or are predisposed to being “digital first.” However, many of them may inevitably metamorphose into a form of parallel polis.

The parallel polis and independent society movement is broad, contentious, and rife with innovation. New structures will appear, vanish, reappear, and eventually gain a semblance of autonomy. In this sense, how we have classified the language here is not the final word on the subject. We only intended to open up the discussion so that we may all agree on the classification terminology so that founders and governance architects can understand what they are dealing with immediately. The only final word concerning the subject is that we are on the path to changing our world in an indefinable, weird, and arguably beautiful way.

Container Reference:

Note: the reasons for container placements are not intended to be arbitrary. They are based on historical precedent and analysis of the way those who first used or coined the terms intended. However, the volume of language and distinctions makes it impossible to land on absolute clarity in defining and classifying all of the iterations. This is especially true with terms like state, nation, community, society, polity, etc.

1. Parallel Polis - Independent Society (meta-container)

   1. Network State (container)

      1. cloud community

      2. internet-first nation (internet-first states, cities, communities, etc.)

      3. public-goods community

   2. Startup Society (container)

      1. startup nation

      2. startup state

      3. startup city

   3. Cyber Libertaria (container)

      1. virtual state

      2. virtual territory

      3. virtual self-sovereign territory

      4. temporary autonomous zone

   4. Intentional Community (container) (pseudo-polis)

      1. ecovillage

      2. freedom cell

      3. octalogue

      4. cooperatives