This is a guest essay by Eman Zabi for Post Nation, seven writers exploring a world after nation-states. Support the project by collecting the series as a digital or print pamphlet. 👇🏻

Collect the Pamphlet

“The nation-state is becoming too small for the big problems of life, and too big for the small problems of life.”

—Daniel Bell

It is easier to build a life across borders than to secure protection across them. Increasingly, people work for a company in one country, live in another, hold savings in a digital wallet, and spend much of their social and professional life online. But when something goes wrong, when a payment is frozen, an account is banned, a contract breaks, or care is needed far from home, it becomes clear how little of that life is actually governed as a whole.

That asymmetry between how we live and how we’re governed has helped give rise to the idea of the internet country: a political form that might close the gap between transnational life and territorial protection. I should preface this by saying I’m sceptical of most current talk about internet countries. Some writers treat online communities as nascent polities; others treat digital platforms as quasi-sovereign powers. Both capture something real. But neither is yet a country.

Platforms may govern, extract, and dominate, but that does not make them countries. And if the first internet country were simply a shared online world with a common identity, internal economy, and symbolic borders, then it would already have existed. Forgive the facetiousness, but in 1999, Neopets, an early online virtual world centred on digital pets and a user-driven economy, offered users a bounded digital world, a native currency, markets, rules, and a thick layer of collective meaning. Yet no one mistook Neopia for a sovereign order.

The question is not whether people can gather, trade, and belong online. We’ve seen that they can. The question is what would make such a formation not merely a community nor a platform, but a country?

For the purposes of this essay, I’ll borrow a set of definitions from international relations scholar, Christopher Reus-Smit: a nation refers to a people bound by a shared sense of identity. In contrast, a state refers to the sovereign political organisation that governs a population, usually within a territory. A country is the ordinary, less precise term for something that combines both.

Sovereignty, then, in this context, should be understood not simply as control over territory, but as the recognised authority to make, interpret, and enforce rules within a given domain. Empires and nation-states historically bundled this authority within geography. An internet country, if it emerges, would represent a partial and domain-specific form of sovereignty, not over land, but over aspects of digital and transnational life.

What, then, is an internet country and what will it actually look like? To answer that, let’s look at the evolution of the modern nation-state.

The evolving purpose of the state

In his work on the moral purpose of the state, Reus-Smit highlights that political orders do not arise from abstract principles alone. They emerge when changing forms of social and economic life make older models of authority inadequate.

In ancient Greece, fragmented city-states with no central authority and constant local conflict developed arbitration as a way to resolve disputes without collapsing the system itself, a discursive, speech-based conception of justice that reflected the participatory culture of the polis. Renaissance Italy, facing factionalism, instability, and reputation-driven power, evolved diplomacy into something ritualised and symbolic, where survival depended as much on perception as force. In absolutist Europe, the breakdown of feudal order and the violence of religious war made hierarchy and authority paramount, producing dynastic sovereignty and a conception of law grounded in recognised authority rather than mutual agreement.

Modern international society emerged under a different set of conditions again: capitalism, industrialisation, expanding markets, and the need for predictable cooperation at scale, giving rise to liberal sovereignty, multilateralism, and contractual international law. Each institutional order emerged as a response to a specific configuration of social, economic, and political pressures. However, those pressures only became institutions when the ideas underpinning the purpose of political authority changed.

To understand what the first internet country will look like, we need to identify the problems that define our moment and why they may require a new kind of political order. If Reus-Smit is right that institutional orders are shaped by beliefs about the moral purpose of the state, then the first internet country will be defined by a different purpose. Its role would not be to organise life within a territory, but to secure agency and protection for individuals whose lives are no longer contained within one. In other words, the shape of the first internet country will be determined by the reasons that necessitated its creation.

The digital state of nature

The defining problems of our moment are socio-technical. Social, economic, and political life have become increasingly networked and transnational, while the structures that govern them remain territorially bounded, fragmented, and often privately controlled. One of the clearest expressions of this is a growing jurisdictional mismatch. A person can work for an American company, live in Portugal, be paid through a global payments platform, and hold assets in crypto, yet their rights and protections remain tied to a single territory.

Those protections do not travel cleanly across borders, and when something goes wrong no single authority is fully responsible. For example, if a person is paid through a global platform and their account is suddenly frozen, they may find themselves caught between the platform’s internal processes, the regulations of the country in which the company operates, and the legal system of the country in which they reside, with no clear or timely path to recourse.

This mismatch is compounded by the fragmentation of identity in digital space. There is no stable, widely recognised identity layer that can anchor participation across systems. Instead, individuals exist as a loose bundle of partial identities: a Google account, a biometric passport, a LinkedIn profile, a wallet address. Each serves a function, but none fully maps onto the others, none travels seamlessly, and none provides a consistent basis for rights, obligations, or recognition.

Where identity is fragmented, recourse is weak. When something goes wrong online, there is often no credible, shared authority to appeal to. Platform bans are opaque, cross-border disputes are slow and uncertain, and fraud or broken contracts can be difficult to enforce. What is missing is not simply better systems, but a common judge: a legitimate structure of adjudication capable of resolving disputes according to consistent and recognisable procedures. For example, if an influencer who makes their income on Tiktok gets banned, there is often no recognised, independent forum in which that decision can be meaningfully reviewed and contested, leaving individuals dependent on the platform’s own opaque processes rather than a shared system of adjudication.

At the same time, governance has not disappeared from online life; it has been privatised. Platforms already govern speech, identity, and economic participation at enormous scale, determining who can speak, transact, and remain within their systems. Yet they do so as private actors rather than public institutions. Their rules can change unilaterally, accountability is limited, and users have little meaningful representation. Power is being exercised, but it is exercised without the obligations that typically define political authority.

These developments are part of a broader process: the unbundling of state functions.

Two of the clearest emerging rails are crypto and AI. Crypto provides mechanisms for transnational payments, shared ledgers, treasury management, and programmable coordination without relying on a single national banking system. AI, by contrast, expands and begins to externalise state functions: analysing census data, assisting welfare assessments, detecting fraud, and in some cases informing judicial processes. We’re already seeing this happen. Risk assessment tools like COMPAS, developed by a private corporation, estimate a defendant’s likelihood of reoffending and have been used by the US government to inform bail and sentencing decisions. While crypto reconfigures components of state financial infrastructure, AI begins to unbundle administrative capacity from the state, allowing functions once embedded in public bureaucracies to be performed across a dispersed set of platforms and institutions. But together they illustrate how core functions once bundled within the state are being rebuilt in modular, networked, often under private or hybrid control: interoperable in practice, yet not institutionally integrated into a new political order.

The result of this fragmentation is most visible in the domain of protection. Welfare systems, healthcare, insurance, pensions, legal safeguards, remain largely territorial, even as individuals move fluidly across borders and spend increasing portions of their lives online. The more mobile a person becomes, the more fragile these protections tend to be. Someone with a Canadian passport, living in Thailand, employed by a US company, and paid through a global platform may discover that the pension they are contributing to is tied to another system, their medical history is tied up with their GP at home, and when a contract or payment dispute arises, no single institution is clearly responsible for resolving it, let alone helping them get back on their feet. (For now anyway. The Nomad Citizen team at SafetyWing and Plumia is working to solve this.)

These pressures may intensify further if AI accelerates the erosion of stable, salaried work. In earlier social orders, protection was often accessed not through universal public institutions but through dependence on households, patrons, or employers. In Renaissance Italy, for example, someone in financial or legal trouble might turn to the powerful family that employs them for a loan, for backing in a dispute, or for protection against local rivals. Modern welfare states partially displaced that arrangement, but they never fully replaced the employer as a conduit of security. Much of the modern system still rests on relatively durable employer–employee relationships. If that foundation weakens, the logic by which benefits, protections, and long-term security are distributed comes under strain.

What is striking is that this concern is no longer confined to critics of technological change. Even firms building frontier AI are increasingly framing the challenge in terms of industrial policy, workforce transition, and portable benefits, suggesting that the disruption in question is institutional as much as economic. If AI weakens the stabilising role of employment while states remain territorially bounded and strained, then the institutional basis of protection, built around stable employment, predictable contributions, and employer-linked benefits, greater demands are likely to fall on state systems that are already poorly designed for lives lived across borders.

Taken together, these are not isolated issues but symptoms of a deeper misalignment: the structures of political authority no longer match the organisation of modern life. The social contract has not disappeared, but it has become uneven: strong within borders, weak across them. If previous institutional orders emerged in response to the pressures of their time, the question now is, what kind of political order can address these ones?

Hobbes provides the conceptual bridge between territorial political theory and the possibility of online governance. In his account, individuals leave the state of nature not out of idealism, but out of rational self-interest: where there is no common power to adjudicate disputes and secure peace, life becomes marked by fear, mistrust, and insecurity. The digital equivalent is not a literal war of all against all, but a condition of the institutional fragmentation we just laid out. Through this lens, the digital world resembles a Hobbesian state of nature: not because it lacks rules, but because it lacks a shared authority capable of making them binding and contestable. So if the first internet country were to emerge, it would be when individuals decide that submitting to a shared digital constitutional order offers more security and agency than remaining exposed to this fragmented environment. Its legitimacy would rest on protection. But unlike Hobbes’s absolute Leviathan, its authority would necessarily be partial and layered, supplementing rather than replacing the territorial state.

What an internet country is not

Before defining what an internet country is, it is necessary to say what it is not. We’ve established that a country needs two things: shared identity and belonging (nation) + system of binding institutions, rules, and authority (state). Many digital formations have one of these. Very few formations have both.

It is not a fandom, interest group, or online community. These may generate strong identity, shared language, and even norms of behaviour, but they lack binding authority. Membership is expressive rather than constitutive; participation signals affiliation, not obligation. There are no enforceable rules, no stable procedures, and no meaningful recourse when conflict arises. A subreddit, a Discord server, or even a tightly knit online collective may feel cohesive, but it does not organise political life. It connects people; it does not govern them. And no, mod bans don’t count as governance.

It is not a DAO. This may be controversial, but an internet country is not, at least in my opinion, a DAO. A decentralised autonomous organisation may coordinate capital, allocate resources, and vote on proposals, but that does not make it a polity. Most DAOs resemble investment clubs or experimental corporate governance structures more than constitutional orders. Token-weighted voting turns political membership into ownership, granting greater influence to those with greater financial stake rather than recognising members as political equals with standing, rights, and obligations. Governance, in this context, becomes an extension of capital allocation. My local sports club holds an annual general meeting, grants members voting rights, and owns the land we train on. But country it is not.

It is not a platform. While Big Tech increasingly exercises forms of governance by shaping speech, identity, and economic participation, it does so as private actors, not as public authorities. Their power, however extensive, is exercised through terms of service rather than constitutional obligation. They are the East India Trading Company to the British Empire a powerful entity in their own right, but an extension of the nation state, and of the nation state’s soft power. The difference between a platform and a polity is not that one enforces rules and the other does not, but that one enforces them at discretion, while the other enforces them through institutions. A moderator can remove you; a polity must justify, process, and be accountable for doing so.

It is not a SaaS platform Finally, an internet country is not a SaaS product, no matter how comprehensive its offering. A service that provides identity, payments, insurance, or coordination tools may solve real problems, but it remains a service. Users opt in and out as customers, not as members of a political order. The relationship is transactional, not constitutional. A polity does not merely provide functionality; it creates legitimate authority, binds individuals through shared rules, and establishes mechanisms of accountability and recourse. Until that threshold is crossed, the language of “internet country” remains metaphor rather than reality.

So, how then will the first internet country emerge?

What distinguishes an internet country, then, is not that it exists online, but that it institutionalises public life on the internet. It must do more than connect, entertain, or transact. It must establish durable rules, legitimate decision-making, accountable authority, and some meaningful bundle of common goods.

What, then, would it look like in practice?

My best guess is that the first internet country will not look especially romantic at first. It will look, instead, like a stack of public institutions. An internet country does not emerge when infrastructure exists, but when it becomes unavoidable. The threshold is crossed when its institutions become the default layer of coordination and recourse for a meaningful domain of life, as a system they cannot easily opt out of.

At its base would sit a constitutional charter. Unlike community guidelines or boilerplate terms of service, this would not simply regulate behaviour within a platform, but define the terms of membership itself: rights, obligations, amendment procedures, and due process.

On top of that would sit a digital identity system, secure enough to support signatures, payments and governance, much as Estonia’s e-Residency already enables authentication and remote company formation for non-residents.

A treasury layer could collect dues, manage reserves and fund common goods through transparent accounting and auditable payment rails, similar in user experience to how platforms like Wise or Revolut allow individuals to move and manage money across borders, but governed as a public system rather than a private financial service

Perhaps, a legal layer would provide online dispute resolution, drawing on the same principles of fairness, transparency and accountability that underpin UN Trade Law’s dispute resolution framework. A representative layer would give members standing not simply as token holders but as political participants.

A welfare layer could offer portable forms of collective protection, like insurance, emergency support, credentials, and trusted records, rather than trying to replicate the full social state from the outset. And because digital institutions alone are insufficient, the system would also need physical nodes in existing jurisdictions: offices, campuses, service hubs, or special legal arrangements through which online membership could acquire territorial depth.

So the first internet country will look less like a state uploaded to the cloud and more like a coalition of cross-border constitutional public infrastructure.

In practice, this will likely feel like acquiring a second layer of citizenship. Much like becoming part of a territorial state, there would be a process of enrolment, recognised membership, and a set of obligations and benefits. But unlike territorial citizenship, this layer would not govern where you live, but how you participate across borders.

A member might hold a recognised digital identity that allows them to sign contracts, receive payments, and access services across jurisdictions. Their income, whether earned from a company in one country or through online work, could flow through a shared financial layer that manages contributions to a common pool. In return, they gain access to portable forms of protection: insurance that applies regardless of where they live, a system of dispute resolution that can adjudicate conflicts with employers or platforms, and a set of records and credentials that remain valid across systems.

If a payment is frozen, a contract breaks, or an account is banned, they would not be limited to a platform’s internal processes or a single national legal system, but could appeal to a recognised, transnational forum for review, rather than relying solely on the discretion of private platforms or fragmented national systems.

This still leaves the question of the nation. If a country requires both institutions and a sense of shared identity, then the architecture described above only solves half the problem. It gives us a state-like structure, but not yet a people.

Can an internet country have a national identity?

Historically, nations were not engineered in advance; they were produced through shared experience, common institutions, and repeated participation in collective life. Language, media, education, law, and bureaucracy do not merely reflect national identity, they help create it. The same logic applies here. An internet country would not begin with a fully formed sense of nationhood. It would grow one over time.

The nation of an internet country is unlikely to be based on ethnicity, geography, or even culture in the traditional sense. It is more likely to be grounded in shared conditions and shared commitments. Membership would be defined less by where someone is from and more by how they participate: a common relationship to mobility, to digital life, to cross-border work, and to the institutions that structure that life. What binds members together is not origin, but orientation.

That identity would be reinforced through practice. Using the same identity system, relying on the same dispute-resolution mechanisms, contributing to and drawing from the same pool of common goods, these are not just functional interactions, but identity-forming ones. Over time, they produce familiarity, expectation, and mutual recognition. A member is not simply a user of services, but someone who shares in a system of rights, obligations, and protections that others also recognise and uphold.

There is also a cultural layer, but it emerges second. Narratives, symbols, and shared language would follow from participation rather than precede it. If early nation-states were built through print media and schooling, an internet country would likely be built through interfaces, rituals of participation, and shared digital environments.

Culture emerges not from shared interests, but from shared experiences. Over time, these repeated interactions would produce a shared experience of navigating the system. We have seen this dynamic before: the sound of an AOL dial-up connection, the interface of early Facebook, or even the notification of a Slack huddle became instantly recognisable markers of participation in a shared environment. If culture stems from our shared experiences of being citizens of this internet country, then what is the creative expression of that culture? What would the sounds of the internet country be? What would the memes?

The result is a different kind of nation: one that is opt-in, transnational, and institutional rather than inherited. It is not given at birth, but acquired through membership and maintained through participation. It is less about who you are, and more about the system you are part of.

This also suggests where such a nation might first emerge. Not from social platforms or online communities, but from environments that already approximate institutional coordination at scale. In that sense, crypto ecosystems demonstrate coordination without territory, but not yet governance with legitimacy. They’ve begun to assemble some of the underlying components: shared identity through wallets, collective treasury management, programmable coordination, and a degree of transparency in how resources are allocated and decisions are executed.

These systems remain incomplete. Many collapse into speculation, and governance is often dominated by capital rather than structured as a political order. But they do demonstrate something important: that it is possible to organise large, transnational groups of people around shared infrastructure rather than shared territory.

In that sense, the first internet country would not replace the nation-state, but exist alongside it. Its members would, at least initially, be dual citizens: embedded in territorial systems for coercive authority and physical protection, while participating in a parallel digital polity that governs aspects of their economic, social, and institutional life. Where the nation-state is rigid and territorially bounded, the internet country could be adaptive, transnational, and responsive to the needs of networked life.

This would not be a collection of separate services, but a more integrated system: the same identity used to sign a contract would link to payments, contributions, and access to protection, and to a recognised process for resolving disputes. Where the nation-state is tied to place, this system would travel with the individual, providing continuity across jurisdictions.

Transparency would likely be one of its defining features. It would involve intelligible rules, auditable processes, and clear lines of accountability that make governance legible to its members in ways that many existing institutions are not. The point is not radical openness, but credible trust.

The first internet country will not be declared. It will become recognisable sometime in the next two to three decades, when a set of digital institutions becomes the default layer of coordination and recourse for a sufficiently large and transnational population.

So if Reus-Smit is right, and institutional orders change when the moral purpose of political authority changes, the question, then, is whether we are beginning to see such a shift. If so, the first internet country will not look like a nation moved online, but like a new answer to an old problem: how to organise collective life under conditions that existing institutions can no longer fully contain.

The appeal of such a polity is not novelty. Most people are not waiting for a flag in the cloud. They are looking for something more ordinary and more important: institutions that can recognise them, protect them, and travel with them through a life that no longer fits neatly inside one place.

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This is a guest essay by Julien Starr for Post Nation, seven writers exploring a world after nation-states. Support the project by collecting the series as a digital or print pamphlet. 👇🏻

Collect the Pamphlet

Have you ever seriously thought about starting a new country? Not a thought experiment, not a flag and a website, but the real thing: a functioning state. What problem would it solve? What would its value proposition be? Who would want to live there, and why would any existing government help bring it into existence? Those are the questions that serious business founders ask, and there is every reason to apply the same discipline to statecraft.

Very few people alive today have had any hand in the creation of a new country. It is the ultimate startup and, by most reckonings, the ultimate challenge. The international order currently comprises 193 UN member states, the overwhelming majority of which came into existence through war, colonial withdrawal, imperial disintegration, or some combustible combination of the three. New countries have tended to be accidents of violence rather than products of intention. The Startup States model coined in 2025 challenges that assumption directly: a new country can be founded on dry land, by deliberate design, in full conformity with existing international law, without displacement of populations, without secession, and without any of the coercive machinery that has historically attended state formation.

The legal architecture to do this already exists. It has simply not been used in this way before.

The place to begin is with why the other routes do not get you all the way there, and why, given that you will have to negotiate with a government in any case, you should train for the gold medal rather than settle for something considerably less valuable.

There is a negotiating logic that runs through the entire Startup States approach. If you are going to invest the time, legal work, diplomatic effort, and relationship capital required to sit across a table from a sovereign government and make an ask, you may as well ask for the right thing. Think of it like the Olympics. Nobody trains for a bronze medal. Serious athletes train for gold, prepare for gold, and design every aspect of their preparation around winning it. An athlete who privately decides that silver is the more realistic target is not being pragmatic; they are negotiating against themselves before the competition has begun. The same principle applies here. Do not sell yourself short, go for the gold and go for starting your own country!

We can’t yet build countries at sea or on the moon

The high seas have a long romantic history as the venue of last resort for those seeking to escape the constraints of the existing territorial order, but the legal position is clear: Article 89 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) states that no state may validly subject any part of the high seas to its sovereignty. Article 60(8) adds that artificial islands and installations on the high seas have no territorial sea of their own and do not affect the delimitation of any maritime zone. The Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States (1933), which sets out the customary criteria for statehood in international law (defined territory, permanent population, government, and capacity to enter into relations with other states), further underscores this point. A floating platform in international waters cannot satisfy the Montevideo Convention’s requirement of a defined territory.

Proponents sometimes argue that a state not party to UNCLOS might recognise a maritime polity regardless. This misunderstands how the international order works. The Stimson Doctrine, first articulated in Henry Stimson’s note of January 1932 in response to Japan’s seizure of Manchuria, was a U.S. policy statement rejecting recognition of territorial or legal gains achieved through force or in violation of international obligations. Although initially a political declaration rather than binding law, it later informed a broader customary principle of non-recognition, which is reflected in Article 41 of the International Law Commission’s Articles on Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts (2001), which requires states not to recognise as lawful situations created by serious breaches of peremptory norms of international law and not to assist in maintaining them. With 169 parties, UNCLOS represents one of the most widely subscribed multilateral instruments in existence; its signatories would bring considerable diplomatic pressure to bear on any non-signatory that contemplated recognising a polity constituted in defiance of the regime.

The same Stimson Doctrine logic applies to Antarctica, where the Antarctic Treaty of 1959 freezes all existing claims and expressly prohibits new ones, and to outer space, where the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 establishes that no celestial body is subject to national appropriation. The 56 parties to the Antarctic Treaty and the 115 parties to the Outer Space Treaty would invoke identical non-recognition machinery against any polity founded in violation of those instruments. The absence of a formal claim to Marie Byrd Land does not mean Antarctica is open for business.

The concept of terra nullius is similarly unavailing in the cases of disputed territory that occasionally excite the imagination of the new-country community. Terra nullius is a doctrine in international law meaning “land belonging to no one,” historically used to describe territory that is genuinely unclaimed and not under the sovereignty of any state, think Cabo Verde in the mid-15th century before the arrival of the Portuguese. The ICJ’s Advisory Opinion on Western Sahara in 1975 confirmed that terra nullius requires genuinely sovereignless territory, a bar that disputed parcels like Gornja Siga on the Danube between Croatia and Serbia, or Bir Tawil between Egypt and Sudan, simply do not meet. The analogy is a crayon on a table: if one sibling insists it belongs to the other and the other insists the same, that does not mean a cousin can walk in and claim it as his own. He could say so; it would not make it true. Croatia has, in practice, exercised the capacity to expel individuals attempting to establish a presence in Gornja Siga which it states belongs to the Republic of Serbia and Serbia says it belongs to the Republic of Croatia. The parcel has owners; they merely disagree with each other about which of them it is.

Digital state formation is a genuinely interesting project, and the impulse to build governance structures from first principles using voluntary participation rather than coercion is one the Startup States approach shares entirely. But international law has not caught up. No UN member state has yet extended de jure diplomatic recognition to a network state or DAO, permitting it to establish an accredited embassy and exchange diplomatic credentials. Estonia’s e-residency programme and Palau’s digital residency initiative are significant innovations but operate within the sovereign structures of those states, not as substitutes for them. Albania has given an AI system a ministerial advisory role, and reports have circulated that Antigua and Barbuda extended some form of recognition to the Joseon Empire, a claimed successor to Korea’s historical Joseon dynasty, though the precise status and scope of any such recognition, and whether any diplomatic mission has been established in St John’s, remain unverified at the time of writing. These are interesting data points. None of them constitutes a new subject of international law. The Montevideo criteria remain the governing standard, and a digital presence satisfies none of its four requirements: a defined territory, a permanent population, an effective government, and the capacity to enter into relations with other states.

Anything less than independence can be taken away

Suppose a founding community negotiates part of the way: a special economic zone, a charter city, an autonomous region with substantial self-governing powers. The political ask is smaller and the runway to launch is shorter. But the structural problem with even the most sophisticated subnational arrangement is that it is ultimately subject to the political authority of the state in which it sits. The rug can always be pulled.

Hong Kong is the most instructive example. Under the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984 and the Basic Law promulgated in 1990, Hong Kong maintained its own immigration controls, customs regime, legal system, and currency. It was, by most economic measures, one of the most successful jurisdictions in the world. But its autonomy was extended by a central authority and remained conditional on that authority’s continued forbearance. Events from 2019 onwards demonstrated what happens when forbearance runs out. Even at its peak, Hong Kong did not have a full seat at the table in international affairs. It was a guest at someone else’s table.

Próspera, the Zone for Employment and Economic Development established on Roatán in Honduras, represents perhaps the most sophisticated subnational governance experiment of the current generation: genuine rule-of-law infrastructure, investor protections, meaningful self-governance. When the Honduran government changed in 2022, the incoming administration moved to dissolve the ZEDE framework. Subsequent arbitration and political evolution have produced some stabilisation, and the current administration is considerably less hostile. But the episode established something that cannot be unestablished: the optionality to pull the rug was exercised, and that permanently changes the risk calculus for investors and founders alike.

The Turks and Caicos Islands make the same point from a different angle. In 2009, the United Kingdom suspended the territory’s locally elected government entirely, placing it under direct rule from London. Whatever one’s view of the merits, the episode confirmed that even a long-established, economically sophisticated British Overseas Territory can lose its autonomous governance at Westminster’s discretion. Subnational autonomy is, at its most fundamental level, a licence that can be revoked.

The lesson is consistent: if you are going to negotiate with a sovereign government, train for the gold medal.

The "Startup States Approach: No hidden agenda, just agreement to create a new country

The Startup States model is structurally distinct from any subnational arrangement, and this distinction matters as much in political framing as in legal substance. There is no Trojan horse here, no incremental accumulation of de facto autonomy that a host government might later come to resent. Our ask is explicit from the very first conversation: a new, internationally recognised state, constituted by treaty, on uninhabited and non-strategic territory that the host state already owns but is not using productively. Everything is on the table, upfront. That directness is a feature.

A government considering a subnational arrangement has legitimate reasons to worry that it is making a concession that will expand in ways it cannot anticipate. The Startup States approach eliminates that concern: The new state is sovereign from day one and is not seeking to grow its autonomy incrementally. The constitutional and territorial relationship between the two states is defined in the founding treaty and does not change unless both parties agree.

There is also a sovereignty argument that works in the host state’s favour. The act of bringing a new sovereign state into existence is one of the most powerful demonstrations of sovereignty that an existing state can make. You know you have free speech; but the fullness of that right becomes most vivid when you actually exercise it, especially when you say something consequential. A UN member state that midwifes a new country is not diminishing its own sovereignty. It is flexing it in the most unambiguous way available. This is scaling sovereignty, not eroding it.

The appropriate template for the parent-state role is Montenegro rather than Kosovo. Montenegro’s independence in 2006, achieved through a referendum that Serbia and Montenegro accepted and followed by prompt and widespread international recognition, confirms that consensual, parent-state-approved statehood produces impeccable legal standing from the outset. Kosovo’s trajectory was messier: the ICJ’s Advisory Opinion of 2010 confirmed that Kosovo’s 2008 declaration of independence from the Republic of Serbia which still contests Kosovo’s independence to this day did not violate international law, but recognition remains contested by a significant number of UN member states. For a Startup State whose entire value depends on unimpeachable legal standing, recognition-market fit is the key metric, and the Montenegro model delivers it. Moving fast and breaking things works for a consumer application; it is considerably less suitable when the thing you might break is your own legal basis for existence.

A critical structural concept here is the distinction between dominium and imperium: between ownership of territory, which remains with the host state throughout the life of the founding treaty, and the exercise of governmental jurisdiction over it, which vests in the new state from the moment the treaty enters into force. The host state never loses its land because it never loses legal title to the land it leases and it never loses ownership. It leases plenary jurisdiction over that land to the new state in exchange for among other indemnities rent payments. The host state becomes a landlord and even depending on the terms of the deal could become a dividend receiving shareholder in companies which may be developing the infrastructure and administering the services for the new country. There is no cession and therefore no secession, because territorial title never changes hands. The construction is analytically distinct from secession for five reasons: there is no unilateral act; no existing demos asserting self-determination; no impairment of the host state’s territorial integrity, because the arrangement is an exercise of that sovereignty rather than a violation of it; no violence or coercion; and no breach of any peremptory norm of international law.

The legal architecture

The legal instrument at the heart of the model is a founding treaty concluded under the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties of 1969, binding the parties under the principle of pacta sunt servanda and interpreted according to the Convention’s good faith rules. The treaty should be registered with the United Nations Secretariat pursuant to Article 102 of the UN Charter, both as a legal obligation of the host state and as a matter of strategic transparency, placing the new state’s foundational instrument on the permanent public record of the international community.

A common misconception is that Article 102 registration is available only to UN member states. It is not. The Cook Islands, a full subject of international law and a party to UNCLOS and numerous other multilateral instruments, is not a UN member but participates in treaty arrangements deposited or registered with the UN. A founding treaty concluded with a UN member state as co-signatory would be registrable under Article 102, providing formal documentary evidence of the arrangement’s consensual and transparent character.

The historical precedents for treaty-created states are more numerous than is commonly appreciated. The Lateran Treaty of 1929 between the Holy See and Italy constituted Vatican City as an independent sovereign entity upon a precisely defined parcel of territory within Rome, on a legal blank slate, by agreement between two willing parties: the single most directly apposite precedent for the Startup States construction in the history of international law. Singapore’s separation from Malaysia in 1965, effected by a Separation Agreement signed and ratified by both parties on the same day, resulted in UN admission six weeks later, confirming that consensual treaty-based state formation produces immediate and comprehensive international recognition. The Austrian State Treaty of 1955, concluding Austria’s post-occupation statehood between Austria and the four occupying powers, is a further illustration of the treaty as the foundational instrument of a new state’s legal personality.

The founding community will need to satisfy both the declaratory and constitutive theories of statehood. The declaratory theory, reflected in the Montevideo Convention, holds that statehood attaches upon satisfying the four criteria: permanent population, defined territory, effective government, and capacity for international relations. The constitutive theory holds that recognition by other states is itself a necessary element. A founding treaty with a recognising UN member state as co-signatory addresses the constitutive requirement directly. The concept of the inchoate state, an entity that satisfies some but not all Montevideo criteria at formation and may be treated as a state in statu nascendi during an initial developmental period, can be managed through transitional provisions in the founding treaty. The territorial dimension will need to engage with the principle of uti possidetis juris, confirmed by the ICJ in the Frontier Dispute between Burkina Faso and Mali in 1986, which provides the legal basis for the new state’s insistence on the stability of its founding boundaries.

What the host state gets: found money and a sovereignty flex

From the host state’s perspective, the proposition is at its most basic a real estate reclassification play with extraordinary upside. An uninhabited, non-strategic parcel of territory is a non-performing asset: it generates no revenue, may impose maintenance costs, and holds no diplomatic value in its current form. The founding treaty converts that parcel into an income-generating relationship while the host state retains full ownership and title throughout.

The economic logic of the reclassification is best illustrated by the property market on the French Riviera. Cross from the commune of Beausoleil into Monaco and property prices rise sharply, by multiples that no improvement in physical infrastructure could explain. The sun is identical. The sea is identical. The architecture is largely identical. What changes is the legal status of the territory, and that difference generates economic value placing Monaco among the highest per-square-metre jurisdictions on earth. Reclassifying idle land as a sovereign state is the ultimate rezoning decision. The land does not move. The title does not change. The legal status transforms, and so does the return on the asset.

Because ownership never changes hands, the arrangement is the structural opposite of colonialism: the financial flows run to the rightful owners of the land throughout the lease period. The host state receives rent and associated financial arrangements, converts a dormant asset into a productive one, and acquires a bilateral relationship with a state whose existence it made possible. This is found money, and there is no political embarrassment attached to it, because the host state never gave away the land. It rezoned it.

Where the host state has concerns about its governance authority, a condominium structure, under which both states exercise defined concurrent functions over the same territory, is a calibrated and well-precedented solution. International law has long recognised concurrent sovereignty as a legitimate arrangement, as the historical examples of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan under the Agreement of 1899 and the New Hebrides under the Convention of 1906 demonstrate. Under such a condominium, the host state retains defined governance levers agreed in the founding treaty while the new state exercises independent legal personality in foreign affairs, immigration, and customs. Sovereignty is not lost; it is shared and, in sharing, amplified.

The Startup States approach requires no amendment to the UN Charter, no revision of the Vienna Convention, and no departure from the Montevideo criteria. It requires a willing host state, a serious founding community, and the conviction to deploy treaty law in a way that the law already fully permits. Vatican City proves the model is not theoretical. Singapore proves the recognition follows swiftly when the consent is genuine.

What the model delivers in return is the gold medal: a fully sovereign state, constituted by treaty, registered with the United Nations, entitled to all the privileges and protections of membership in the international community, with its own foreign policy, its own immigration and customs regime, and a standing in international affairs that cannot be revoked by a change of government in someone else’s capital. Not a subnational arrangement that a legislative session can unwind. Not a digital jurisdiction awaiting recognition that has not yet come. A state whose founding instrument is public, whose legal basis is unimpeachable, and whose sovereignty is not borrowed from a central authority.

The cap table is clean from day one. The legal framework is already in place. Train for the gold. Go build a country.

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This essay is my contribution to Post Nation, seven writers exploring a world after nation-states. Support the project by collecting the series as a digital or print pamphlet. 👇🏻

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In 2025, I purchased 25 shares in a Banksy painting that the art investment platform Masterworks purchased for $8.7 million. Very few could afford the full sticker price, but by opening ownership of the painting to hundreds of investors rather than just one, Masterworks makes it accessible to everyone.

My shares cost just $500—others paid millions—but when the painting sells in 9 years, all of our investments stand to increase in value as the painting does. Even museums who can earn a stake from the paintings on their walls.

It’s not just luxury goods. WeFunder has made it similarly possible to invest in and fractionally own businesses. I contributed to Substack that way, investing $3,000 alongside investors who put in millions. The platform is also how I financed my next book—I raised more than $100,000 from some 200 people, rather than one large publishing house owning it all.

Platforms like these allow anyone to fractionally own assets that go up in value. Why shouldn’t cities be owned the same way? By the people and businesses who live and work there? That’s a hypothesis I initially pursued while writing Let Cities Build Utopia. But while fractional investment works great as an investment in assets or businesses, I don’t think it works great for cities for one reason: Fractional investment is uneven ownership. Those with more equity benefit more than those with less equity. Does that really make sense for a city where everyone lives together?

Should a city benefit those who own lots of land more than those who rent an apartment? Should it benefit someone who lived in the city for 50 years more than it benefits the person who just moved there? Should we onboard and offboard people who move around, with cities benefiting transient populations least of all? And are dividends the best way to reward residents of a neighborhood? Because if your neighborhood is rich, you get cash?

A much better option is for the city to be owned by a trust that is regulatorily enforced to act in the interest of all residents—as more than 500 Scottish communities currently do. Here all land and assets are held by a trust which earns leases from commercial and residential real estate and reinvests those earnings back into the city. Residents don’t earn dividends proportional to their stake. The benefit is the city: the affordable housing it provides, the well-funded schools it supports, the energy they can now afford, the low commercial rents that keep Main Street alive and full of small businesses and niche restaurants.

That Banksy painting I own, after all, will benefit those who invested millions much more than it will benefit me, who invested $500. And Substack will be more motivated to benefit the VCs who invested millions in its company than the writers who contributed a few thousand. Fractional ownership is interesting and good—it cuts more people in on the deal than just investors and aligns incentives within communities who put their heart and soul and yes, money, into supporting the things they are passionate about.

But cities shouldn’t work like that.

AcreTrader gives us a glimpse of how fractional ownership works for land. Instead of one farmer owning thousands of acres, AcreTrader allows hundreds of people to share ownership, including the farmer. When I spoke to Rob Moore, the company’s general manager, he told me previous generations only needed to farm 2,500 acres to make a living, today they need to farm 5,000. Farmers can’t afford that much land.

“If you need 5,000 acres and it costs $10,000 an acre, that’s $50 million,” Moore says. “Nobody has $50 million.”

There’s an old adage that farmers live poor and die rich—they have millions of dollars worth of land they can’t sell because they need to farm it to make a living. And farming hardly makes a living. To solve this, AcreTrader gathers a group of 100 to 150 investors to buy the land, with the farmer often participating as part-owner too. The farmer leases the land from the investors—often at a discount depending on their ownership share—and reaps sole benefit from his or her farming business. When AcreTrader sells the land again in 5-10 years, all owners stand to benefit from the sale, including the farmer.

This is an interesting model for farmland, especially as it solves one of the major problems facing agricultural businesses today: No one wants to live on the farm.

“Imagine you’re a farmer. You own 1,000 acres of the 5,000 you farm. Then you die, your inheritance goes to your four children. Odds are at least three of them, and probably four of them, don’t live in northwestern Iowa and don’t farm. Those four individuals just inherited $10 to $50 million worth of value—they’re not looking to hold onto and manage a farm that is 1,000 miles away from where they live. The vast majority of them end up selling the farmland. That is creating a lot more turnover within agricultural real estate, and ultimately becoming commoditized.”

In the future, farmland could become fully institutionalized or it could become fractionalized. Moore is after the latter effect. Legally, AcreTrader investments are still limited to accredited investors, but this is only the first step of widening access to land ownership. “We’re not fully democratizing access—that’s the goal, that’s the ideal, and it’s frustrating that we’re not there,” Moore says. “But let’s say [farmland ownership] was available to 1% of households before—now it’s available to 20%. We’re still one in five, but we’re moving in the right direction.”

Jubilee Homes works similarly, but with residential land. Here, a resident and Jubilee buy a house together—the resident buys the house and Jubilee buys the land.

The company uses the think tank AEI to determine the value of the home vs. the value of the land. “At the county level, the average land share percentage, according to this third party, is 65% in San Francisco,” Jubilee founder and CEO Brian Elbogen told me. “So if you want to buy in San Francisco County we will buy the land share of the entire property for 65% of the total property value.”

The individual takes out a loan to buy the house and pays monthly rent to Jubilee for the land. Both the house price (plus interest) and the land lease are structured into the same mortgage, with the land lease increasing by 3% annually. At any time, the homeowner can purchase the land from Jubilee, whether they are still living or the property or preparing to sell it on the market.

Jubilee, as an organization, gets institutional investment. A retirement pension fund or life insurance company that needs to be able to reliably pay out stockholders in the future can’t afford to invest their dollars in a risky place. Instead, they invest in something more stable: Land ownership, for instance.

“You can think of us, from a business model perspective, a lot like a mortgage company,” Elbogen tells me. “Rocket is a good example. What do they do? They originate mortgages with customers, then they sell those mortgages to investors, and they maintain the relationship with the customer. Here we are effectively originating a ground lease, selling that ground lease to these large institutional investors, and then we retain the relationship with the customer. We’re the property manager on behalf of the investor.”

Investors in Jubilee will eventually own the land beneath thousands of homes, and see revenue gains as it is sold and purchased on the market.

Fractional ownership is a band-aid

The utopian version of both models is that people don’t have to spend as much on land or a house. But the dystopian version is that now a bunch of investors own most of both assets.

We’ve already seen this play out with commercial real estate. For my grandparents’ generation, commercial real estate was cheap. It wasn’t uncommon for a car mechanic to own his own garage or a bodega owner to own her own shop. But as commercial real estate went up in value and those business owners sold their real estate and retired, commercial properties were bought up by investors who could earn returns developing and renting them out. By my parents’ generation, ordinary individuals couldn’t afford commercial real estate—they had to rent from the wealthy investors who did. And small businesses no longer benefit from an asset that will help them retire.

The same thing is now happening with residential real estate. If my grandparents were the last generation who could afford the buildings their businesses were based in, mine might be the last generation who can afford to own the houses we live in. My husband and I purchased our home for just $390,000 in 2017 with a 3.2% interest rate—it’s worth $670,000 now with a 6.3% interest rate. Assuming a $100,000 down payment, that’s the difference between a $1,254/month mortgage and a $3,528/month mortgage, or about $2,350 extra each month. The exact difference between my mortgage and my sister’s mortgage, who is 11 years younger.

Median household income hasn’t kept pace—growing by $22,360 from 2017 (when median household income was $61,372) to 2024 (when median household income was $83,730). That’s nearly $6,000 less younger generations get to keep every year than my generation was able to, because housing is so expensive. And with rents just as sky high, younger generations have a much harder time building up that down payment in the first place. At the age of 27, 40.5% of Baby Boomers owned their own house, while only 32.6% of Gen Zers do at the same age. The median age for a first-time home buyer in 1981 was just 29—as of 2025 it is 40.

It’s easy then, to see fractional ownership as a step in the wrong direction. Sure, I can’t afford the land I farm anymore, but I can afford 5% of it. Sure, I can’t afford the house I live in anymore, but I can afford 20% of it. Fractional ownership may be better than not owning anything at all, but it’s also cutting people in on a deal that could just be theirs.

“The vision that I have for this is a little bit more nuanced,” Jubilee’s Elbogen told me. “Today, the worldview of home ownership is either you own nothing or you own everything—rent or buy. I bought into a tenant in common in San Francisco because I couldn’t afford to buy a single-family house. I own 33% of an entire building, but it got me into home ownership. Like, was that bad because I only own 33% of something instead of 100%? Well, guess what? I own 33% of something instead of 100% of nothing.”

He’s right. Maybe fractional ownership doesn’t replace ownership. It replaces renting—the middle phase of a person’s life between when they own nothing and when they own something. And there’s something to be said for AcreTrader or Jubilee in that use case. But neither fundamentally solve the problem of why land and housing is so expensive to begin with. Because when the “market rate” is whatever people are willing to spend on something, and wealthy individuals can easily bid each other up in price, then real estate becomes out of reach for most people.

Cutting us in on a fraction of that deal becomes the best we can really hope for.

AcreTrader and Jubilee both give individuals access to an appreciating asset—and that’s good!—but both rely on market rate real estate which will benefit investors most of all.

Land that never skyrockets in the first place, is much better.

Community land trusts are a cure

I’ve written extensively about Community Land Trusts in Eigg, Stornoway, Bournville, and Letchworth. They are particularly common in England and Scotland where land is purchased and removed from the market, then owned by the trust in perpetuity.

Residents and businesses can purchase and own their houses and buildings, but they lease the land beneath it from the trust. Lease rates are set using an equation like: costs + small margin = lease rate. That’s the direct opposite of “whatever someone is willing to pay for it.” The same benefit applies to agricultural land where the rent is whatever the town decides, not whatever the market will pay.

As a result, real estate is never so high that it is not affordable by its farmers, homeowners, or businesses. And because land trusts are a protected category, all lease earnings must be reinvested for the benefit of residents.

That’s how the Island of South Uist paid for and now owns the largest community wind farm in Scotland. In 2006, the Scottish island and two others—Eriskay and parts of Benbecula—formed Sealladh na Beinne Mòire (SnBM for short), a community trust that purchased 92,000 acres, 850 crofts, and three quarries for £4.5 million.1

At the time of the buyout, the islands were in disrepair. SnBM immediately raised commercial leases for the quarries, as well as fishing and shooting fees. They repaired the previous landlord’s hunting lodge so they could rent it out for sporting events, and resurrected a famed golf course, which hosts an annual open that brings dollars back to the local economy. In 2013, their financial stability allowed them to take out an £8.5 million loan and £2.5 million in capital grants to pay for the wind turbines,2 which now provide energy and income for the islands.

The turbines brought in £1.2 million in 2015. That income, plus more grants from HIE (£5 million) as well as the Western Isles Council (£625k) funded a new marina in 2015, which supported the growth of leisure and industrial marine economies. The success of both projects led to further investments: A harbour expansion project, an investment in the local seaweed industry, and a tourism center and golf course. Each project funding the next.

The results are staggering.

Before the land was bought by the community, all lease revenue flowed to private landlords. Today, nearly 20 years after the community bought their land, the trust generates between £250k and £800k a year in rental profits and between £763k and £1.5 million in wind farm profits.3

Nearly all of those surpluses are reinvested in the community. The trust invests between £200k and £450k in new buildings, plants, or turbines each year, with another £650k to paying down their loan principal for the wind farm. As of 2023, it’s holding £3.5 million in cash, and as of 2024 it’s holding £4.8 million in wind farm loans. When the loans are paid off, that’s even more money for community reinvestment—on an island of only 3,200 people.

The result is a new economy on an island people were leaving. And an affordable life that allows them to stay.

AcreTrader’s farmers still won’t be able to afford farmland 10 years from now because it will continue to be bought and sold at market rate. That means farmers will always have to rent, or at best, fractionally own the land they till. But SnBM crofters will always be able to afford their land because it will never be sold.4

Jubilee has to sell land at market rate, which will continue to remain out of reach for residents. SnBM doesn’t, because the commercial revenue it generates from its wind, marina, harbour, and seaweed economies funds residential affordability in perpetuity. Jubilee’s land returns flow upward to pension funds and insurers. SnBMs land returns flow sideways, into the next turbine, the next harbour, the next generation of residents.

On the islands, outside investors don’t own the land, a corporation doesn’t own the commercial district, and nothing is being bought and sold at ever-increasing market rates that, in the US and around the world, force local populations out and investors in. Instead, farmers stay on their land forever. Children don’t have to move to the mainland to find work. Residents can afford their homes, their farmland, and their businesses, permanently. The trust constantly earns money and recycles it back into resident needs.

We don’t need to be cut into an increasingly expensive real estate game. We need to avoid it getting expensive altogether. With community land trusts, the fundamental equation is seismically altered.

There’s a lot to love about fractional ownership of paintings, books, businesses—even farmland and housing—but collective ownership is better.

At least when it comes to the cities and towns we all live in together.

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This is a guest essay by Michael Skinner for Post Nation, seven writers exploring a world after nation-states. Support the project by collecting the series as a digital or print pamphlet. 👇🏻

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“Start a new country” was the pitch I’d bought into. I traveled halfway across the world to lend a hand. To pioneer a new kind of society.

When I first arrived in Forest City, Malaysia, I understood the appeal immediately. Tall residential towers right on the beach. Hanging gardens, walkable pathways, shops and dining built into every block. The master plan was compelling: a “model city of the future.”

But I could walk for twenty minutes without passing another person. The “special economic zone” was supposed to attract international business, but wasn’t all that special. Billions of dollars of infrastructure, and the best thing it had going was the manicured landscaping.

The developers had built this “model city” for out-of-town investors, not residents who wanted to steer the future of living.

For most of human history, people didn’t choose where they lived. Geography chose for them. The American Pilgrims broke that pattern when they crossed the Atlantic in pursuit of self-governance and religious freedom. The promise of land ownership pulled 80,000 people to California during the Gold Rush. And the idea of a “startup society” drew me and hundreds of others to a ghost town in Malaysia.

Ideals draw people to a new place. But what draws them in isn’t necessarily what keeps them there.

In the early days, people stayed because the US government gave them reasons to: security, property rights, a shared identity. Those were enough to keep colonists rooted to a continent an ocean away from everything they knew.

People also stayed because leaving was expensive and dangerous. Trains, planes, and passports made it cheaper and safer. The internet made it faster and easier. Today, you can own property in Portugal, run a business registered in Estonia, and hold a Czech passport while living in Paraguay. A Pakistani developer can earn dollars from a client in Berlin and spend pesos in Mexico City. People often spend more time with their favorite online communities than with their neighbors.

As ownership, relationships, and work peeled away from geography, the switching costs dropped. And lots of people are taking advantage. In 2025, 142,000 millionaires moved to other countries. The UK lost 16,500 in a single year. The reasons for moving change with the times. Taxes, regulations, opportunity, lifestyle. But the underlying theme is no different from a good technology product: people will choose the option best suited for them.

Nations are taking notice. Some are scrambling to keep the citizens they have. Others are scheming to attract new ones, like Bhutan building a Mindfulness City, or the UAE adding new visa categories every quarter. They’re all competing for loyal citizens the way companies compete for customers.

Which means countries are becoming products.

The best products have a good retention strategy. And a new class of builders is starting to develop one. Balaji Srinivasan, entrepreneur, investor, and author of The Network State, has articulated something that’s been taking shape for two decades: the internet is a place. More and more people are choosing to settle there. These settlements in the cloud can be short-lived with just a few people (an online meeting, for example) or as big and enduring as WhatsApp and Facebook each with billions of users worldwide. He calls them startup societies: online communities organized around shared values that eventually acquire physical territory.

That label seeded a wave of real-world experiments. In 2023, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin hosted Zuzalu for the first time, a two-month experiment in Montenegro. That event spawned over 20 pop-up villages over the next 18 months. One of those spin-offs, Edge City, is now a self-sustaining business testing what it takes to build permanent towns. Balaji is testing the theory himself with Network School, a startup society he’s building in Forest City. The goal? To bootstrap other startup societies.

These pop-up cities are what garage tech startups were in the 90s, disrupting a market that incumbents thought was a monopoly.

But they’re only prototypes. They prove demand, test assumptions, and attract early adopters. There’s an experiential difference between a two-month live-in event and a multi-year commitment to a place that people build their lives around. In month one, everything is novel: the people, the rhythm, the shared sense of purpose. How do they feel six months later when the honeymoon phase ends?

Getting someone to show up is good marketing. Getting them to stay is good design.

So what does good design look like when the product is the place you’re building your life? The builders thinking about these questions are landing on three pillars: ownership, governance, and community.

Traditional ownership ties your wealth to a single property in one jurisdiction. You buy a house, and your financial life is anchored to that patch of ground.

Amagi, a regenerative village in Koh Phangan, Thailand, thinks that model is broken. Housing, they argue, fuses two things that should be kept separate: a place to live and a financial asset. According to their whitepaper, “You don’t need to buy a home to belong to a place. You can bring value, reduce your rent, and build shared equity while keeping your freedom to move.”

In their model, residents buy into the entire neighborhood instead of buying a single property. What would’ve been a down payment on a house is now an equity stake that appreciates as the community gets more residents and better infrastructure.

Rather than a mortgage, your rent is pegged to your stake. The larger your stake, the lower your rent. A $50k stake might bring your rent to $2k/mo; $100k brings it to $0. And capital isn’t the only way in. Time, labor, and participation all build your equity. A resident who teaches surf lessons, helps build a common space, or shows up to community meetings earns equity alongside residents who invested cash. The more you contribute, the more you own.

If you decide to leave in a few years, there’s no house to sell. You can transfer your equity to another neighborhood in Amagi’s network, or sell it to others. Value stays within the system, but residents can still benefit individually.

This kind of unbundling can also be extended to how things are run.

The traditional model of governance is a static rulebook. A constitution written once, rarely amended. You accept the entire social contract or you leave.

Sound familiar? It’s the same deal you accept every time you buy a new smartphone or create an account online. The Terms of Service. Privacy Policy. 67 pages of legalese you scroll through without ever reading, then click “I agree,” and hope for the best.

What if governance worked more like app permissions?

Like the popup that says “This app would like to access your location.” You choose Allow Once, Always Allow, or Never Allow. It’s specific and transparent. You can grant permission, deny it, or update it anytime you wish.

Imagine moving to a new country and, instead of inheriting decades-old regulations as an all-or-nothing package, you grant specific, limited permissions. Is this community allowed to collect 8% of your income for shared infrastructure improvements? Are you okay with the land use department rezoning downtown without a majority vote? Can this HOA charge you $20 if you miss the quarterly planning meeting? Each permission is visible, trackable, and reversible.

Citizenship becomes something you actively manage, not something imposed on you.

Ownership gives you financial skin in the game. Governance gives you a voice. Neither explains the emotional driver that makes someone want to commit to a place for the long term.

I saw the difference when I worked in the vacation rental industry. Homeowners who lived in the neighborhood maintained their property, knew their neighbors by name, showed up to HOA meetings on a Tuesday night. Out-of-town investors treated the same houses as line items on a spreadsheet. Both had money on the line. Equal voting rights. But one group chose the neighborhood. The other chose the investment.

Traditional countries inherit their citizens. You lived, worked, and died where you were born. The people around you were an accident of circumstance. But in an opt-in community, you’re effectively choosing your neighbors. Everyone at the dinner table selected each other. All organized around a shared perspective about how life should work. Alignment is higher, trust is faster, and there’s a willingness to do hard things together.

That kind of self-selection is a great filter, but it’s not the only one. The way a community designs its onboarding shapes who walks through the door. A community that requires capital attracts a different person than one that requires volunteer labor. Before you can even visit Amagi, you have to pay $1,000 and join a 3-hour online meeting with other applicants. These meetings are a way to filter out those out-of-town investors that are just in it for a buck.

Screen for values, you get one crowd. Screen for net worth, you get another. All deliberate design choices for architecting a sense of belonging. The community genuinely wants you there, and you feel like you belong.

The opt-in mechanism is what kept the Pilgrims together hundreds of years ago when more than a hundred brave souls decided to settle Plymouth with no playbook. They had bad tools and worse odds. But they shared an ideal, and the willingness to figure out how to live together—or die trying.

That small settlement grew into a country of 340 million people.

Today, Forest City has a population of 170 internet pilgrims. And the tools are a lot better now.

Post-Nation states need what the best subscriptions figured out: a product so good it’s painful to leave. That won’t come from cheaper rent or faster visa processing. Those leading the way are focused on three core features: Make your people feel like owners. Give them a real say in how things are run. And surround them with others who chose to be there for the same reasons.

Whether designed from the start or adopted on the fly, this is the difference between living among tourists and planting a flag with fellow patriots.

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This is a guest essay by Jeff Fong for Post Nation, seven writers exploring a world after nation-states. Support the project by collecting the series as a digital or print pamphlet 👇🏻

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Shared Roof is a standard-looking mixed-use development in Seattle’s Phinney Ridge neighborhood: 35 residential units with some ground-floor retail and the amenities we usually see in new developments like this—a gym, bike room, and common spaces. Perfectly lovely, but seemingly standard fare.

But there is something different about Shared Roof, and that is its ownership structure.

The building was funded by ten friends who contributed the capital needed to bring the project to life. Those funders became shareholders in the legal entity that directly owns the building, entitled to dividends as the building generates revenue and to any appreciation in the value of their equity over time.

The really interesting part, though, is that several of the project’s investors are also tenants.

You might expect that to mean they just get a free unit. What actually happens is that they pay market rent, like anyone else, because their role as a shareholder is separate from their role as a tenant. As the building generates value, the corporate structure distributes it back to the people who collectively own it.

Shared Roof is one building on one street in one neighborhood, but the arrangement points toward something bigger: a different way of thinking about how we create, collect, and distribute the value that cities create.

Give me land, lots of land (value)

As a city’s economy grows, it becomes increasingly advantageous to live and do business there. More people and more money flow into the city, driving up the demand for space. As an economy grows, however, land becomes increasingly expensive.

More people making more money cluster in places of opportunity, in part because of everyone else who went there before them and made it a great place to be. This is what economists call agglomeration effects. Perhaps a more accessible way to think about it is as a house party—a party is only as good as the people who show up.

While municipal governments don’t unilaterally control this dynamic, they’re also not just along for the ride. They provide generalized services like sanitation and law enforcement, creating the broad conditions upon which urban growth depends. Local governments drive land values in more direct, localized ways as well. Transit stops increase adjacent property values everywhere from New York to Hong Kong to Paris. Other location-specific amenities like public parks or high-performing public schools have the same effect. The decisions a city government makes about where to invest, what to build, and how to govern itself shape the conditions under which agglomeration either flourishes or stagnates. And those conditions show up, reliably, in land values.

If we understand municipal wealth as really being land value, then the two most straightforward ways for a city government to monetize that value are either land value taxation or municipal land leasing—taxing land people own or leasing out land that belongs to the city. Both work on the same basic insight: when a city grows and the municipal government makes good investments, land becomes more valuable. A municipal government should fund itself from all that value it’s helping to create.

Think about what happens when a new subway station opens. The land around that stop becomes more valuable because it becomes functionally closer to everything else. A land-based revenue model looks at this and says that the value creation enabled by public infrastructure and created by the community as a whole ought to be collected and deployed in the public interest, not privatized by landholders who were simply lucky enough to buy into the dirt somewhere first.

Fully implemented, this creates a virtuous cycle. The municipality collects land value, makes public investments to increase land value, and leaves other types of economic activity relatively untouched (meaning more economic growth and…you guessed it, higher land values). The shift to land-based revenue itself also tends to increase land values — by removing the tax penalty on development and concentrating holding costs on unproductive land, LVT encourages denser use of urban space, which drives up the very base the city is drawing from. The act of switching increases the value of the very asset the municipality uses to fund itself.

And yes, it’s plausible to imagine a city could make most of its money by monetizing land values. The City of St. Paul, Minnesota sits on over $6 billion in taxable land value.1 Its annual budget is around $883 million. If the city collected 15% of that total land value every year, it would more than cover current expenditures.2 So the business model makes sense and, if this all still seems too fanciful, it’s also just how a mall works.

Ok, back to Seattle. Shared Roof created value by building something that added value to the neighborhood and the city. This is what governments do on a municipal scale. But Shared Roof also remits that value back to tenant shareholders. Let’s talk about how a city could do the same.

Collective ownership of urban life

Imagine a city where residents own shares in a municipal corporation. The corporation generates revenue by monetizing land value (again, by either taxing privately-held land or leasing publicly owned holdings). Excess revenues, after the city’s operational needs are met, flow back to residents as dividends.3 The more shares a resident owns, the larger their stake in the proceeds of the city’s economic growth. And just like a corporate board, the management put in place by the shareholders — a mayoral administration and council members elected by the city’s residents — would be responsible for navigating the tradeoffs between bigger investments and more generous dividends every year.

The key departure from conventional shareholding is how people come to own their shares. In our Shared Roof example, ten friends put in capital and got equity accordingly. Their ownership stake was commensurate with their financial investment. That logic makes sense for a building, but applied to a city, it would simply recreate the wealth inequality we already struggle with today. After all, allocating the lion’s share of municipal wealth to whoever had the most money in the first place hardly seems like much of a change. Instead, my idea is a system in which shares accrue based on tenure. The longer a resident lives in a city, the greater their stake and the more upside they gain from ongoing growth.

Let’s suppose we structure this using a vesting schedule (i.e., a system that grants an increasing number of shares over time). A resident would receive an initial tranche of shares at the age of majority, setting them up to begin adult life.4 Shares would then incrementally accrue each year of residency with a final significant tranche at retirement. This would ensure retirees could actually retire.

For residents who move away, vesting pauses (analogous to a leave of absence at a company with equity compensation). For those who arrive later in life, their schedule is pro-rated.

Shares would carry one right only: a proportional claim on excess municipal revenue. Not voting rights, not governance power. The motivating idea is to create a system of economic ownership operating in parallel with political enfranchisement. Shares would also be non-alienable and non-bequeathable. If they could be sold or inherited, it would take only a few generations for the city’s financial upside to concentrate in a small set of hands.5

A rising tide that lifts all ships

So, what is all this actually for? A way to share in the wealth that cities create that’s not just more equitable, but also pro-growth.

A land-based revenue model reorients municipal governments toward growth. Transit infrastructure, a quality public education system, and even just a competent administrative apparatus that makes things like getting a business license easy all support economic activity and, ultimately, drive up the land values the city monetizes to fund itself.

And this isn’t just an incentive story. It’s an epistemological one. Land values function as a price signal for public investment. A road doesn’t have to be a toll road to generate revenue; if it increases the value of surrounding land, a municipal government would have a legible way to tell whether its spending was actually working.

The more consequential shift, though, is what this does to residents.

Middle-class Americans rely on home values as their primary vehicle for wealth accumulation. And home values, as we’ve established, are really land values. The problem with the way we do things today is that we distribute upside based on who happened to buy the right piece of dirt at the right time. The system is haphazard, exclusionary, and creates all the wrong incentives. A homeowner whose wealth is tied up in their property value has rational reasons to oppose the very things that drive broader urban growth: New housing might be a threat to free street parking. Infrastructure might require increased property taxes. When the change that growth requires comes with no upside for property-owning incumbents, the incumbents have every reason to fight it.

We built a system based on individualized land speculation, and it’s created a relationship to urban growth that’s short-term and myopic. What this shareholder idea is meant to tease out is how we might align people’s preferences with the entire city. When a new apartment building down the street is part of what keeps the city growing (and residents’ dividends along with it), people have a reason to welcome their new neighbors. When people aren’t anchored to a specific parcel they’re hoping will appreciate enough for them to retire off of, their attachment to place becomes an attachment to the city as a whole — instead of a parochial fixation on only a couple blocks.

Similarly, this would lead to residents understanding and supporting longer-term investments. Policymakers would have a much easier time selling residents on longer-term investments if they could credibly promise that every new public investment will benefit them. A new public school benefits residents without children. A commuter rail extension matters even to people who don’t use it. Both increase land values, and therefore dividends. The system gives everyone a way to share in the upside.6

Beyond the welfare state

It would be easy for some folks to read all of this as an elaborate way of doing a universal basic income. But the ideas here aren’t intended to motivate mere redistribution. They’re proposing a different way to think about collective wealth.

Consider the Alaska Permanent Fund. It’s a sovereign wealth fund, seeded by oil revenues and managed by the state, that pays an annual dividend to every qualifying Alaskan resident — roughly $1,000 per person in 2025. Alaskans do not understand this arrangement as welfare. They understand it as a form of collective ownership. This is the relationship I imagine residents would develop with the institution of shareholder ownership. And really, I’d imagine that relationship developing even more strongly.

Alaska’s oil sits in the ground whether any human has done something or not. A city’s land value, that reflection of demand to be in a place, exists because of everything everyone in a city has contributed. The businesses that create the job market, the employees that make the business possible—the art, music, and broader cultural life that economic activity makes possible—exist because of everyone’s collective participation. A party is only as good as the people who show up, and I’d say the same is true for cities. Shareholder ownership recognizes all of that, and ensures the people who make a city great get to share in everything they’ve collectively built.

This is a thought experiment, but it’s a hypothetical whole made out of actually existing parts. Land value capture (whether of the LVT or municipal leasing variety) exists and is only becoming more popular. Sovereign wealth funds are quite real. And, of course, shareholder forms of ownership are commonplace. So perhaps building blocks are more readily available than they might seem.

In the immediacy though, I hope this conversation helps us better appreciate the contours of the problems we face and begin thinking more radically about the types of solutions we could build to carry us into the early days of, if not a better nation, then perhaps just a better world.

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This is a guest essay by Mark Lutter for Post Nation, seven writers exploring a world after nation-states. Support the project and collect the series as a digital or print pamphlet 👇🏻

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For my lifetime, the map of the world has appeared oddly permanent. Borders have been stable, new countries relatively rare. History was over, to borrow Fukuyama’s phrase. The nation-state is a natural and durable political unit with intrinsic sovereignty. Countries, in general, do not meddle in the internal affairs of other countries.

Today, we can see the beginnings of change. Between Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the recent Israeli recognition of Somaliland, the spat between Rwanda and DRC, and the potential buying of Greenland, borders and countries are once again in flux. Understanding the origin of the current order is crucial to understanding where we go next.

Nation-states, at least in the modern sense, first emerged in Europe, in particular during the 30 Years War that birthed the Westphalian order. After the ravages of war, where an estimated 30% of the population died, peace was created. This peace was sustained by nation-states. What happened within a nation-state was up to them. However, a nation-state using force against other nation-states was generally forbidden.

This order has continued to the present day. Of course, it contains many exceptions for powerful countries, but the fiction was real and useful. Heads of state are treated with respect. Secessionist movements are strongly looked down upon by the international community. Changing borders is forbidden.

In some ways, the current order reflects the original Westphalian peace. Countries are supposed to control violence within their borders, and if they do they are respected as a country. However, that facsimile reflection obscures the underlying changes of the force containment and projection. In reality, the Westphalian order can be broken into two phases, the European order and the American order.

The European order is where nation-states first emerged. The process was hardly smooth, and the Westphalian peace hardly stopped state violence; however there were the conditions for an emerging framework for states to engage each other as equals or close to it. After World War II, this framework was applied, particularly through decolonization. However, while the European order was premised on force projection by nation-states or groups thereof, the American order was nearly entirely enforced by America. There was no balance of power.

As America withdraws from its role of global policeman, the global order we supported will decay. The polite fiction of nation-states will go away. Power politics will return. Regional hegemons will exert their influence, sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly. Institutional variety will increase, though institutional complexity, especially at the periphery, will decrease.

Understanding the future requires understanding the past. How did the current order emerge? How was it created, accepted, or imposed on different parts of the world?

Emergence

The Westphalian order emerged following the Peace of Westphalia. The common, simple story is that following the 30 Years War, which devastated Europe, leading to deaths of 30% of the population in some regions, the relevant powers, including the Holy Roman Empire, French, Swedish, Spanish, Dutch, and the Papacy, got together and agreed on mutually recognized sovereignty. Namely, that each country had exclusive jurisdiction over what happened within its territory.

Of course, history is rarely so simple. The peace of Westphalia guaranteed a quite limited freedom of religion in the Holy Roman Empire, and re-arranged some borders, hardly consistent with what we think of as the Westphalian system today.

Nevertheless, given the subsequent scholarship and the fact that myths, sometimes incomplete or incorrect, do influence the world today, it is useful to start the Westphalian order during the Peace of Westphalia. Further, the idea of sovereignty and mutual non-interference emerged organically and chaotically over time. It was not handed down from Mount Olympus.

The European order that followed Westphalia was not peaceful, but it was constrained. Sovereignty was backed by retaliatory capacity. States that violated the autonomy of others faced predictable coalitions, not moral condemnation alone. War was common, but it was generally limited in scope and objective.

In addition to the threat of retaliatory violence, Europe had another key condition for evolving the Westphalian system: Britain. As an island, Britain had more flexible alliances than other countries. They did not have enough power to conquer Europe. Their role, therefore, was to prevent a hegemon from emerging. They would fund allies, enter conflicts late, and ensure a balance of power.

Of course, this relative equilibrium did not apply outside Europe. European countries conquered and colonized where they could. It was only in Europe, where there was a threat of reciprocal violence, that drove restraint.

Inside Europe, however, a set of norms and practices emerged to protect the Westphalian system. This included permanent embassies that would continue even during war, legal theories about what constituted a ‘just war’, and increased trade and commercial power. These norms and practices further embedded the Westphalian system.

The greatest challenge to the Westphalian system until the 20th century was Napoleon. France, which at the time had a relative population of Europe far higher than today, and was in the early stages of industrialization, almost conquered Europe. Napoleon marched to and burned Moscow, but was ultimately defeated, not once, but twice, by coalitions that wanted to preserve the status quo. The Westphalian system did not prevent Napoleon’s success, but instead is how we describe interstate relations resulting from the balance of power.

In the late 19th century, Japan, during the Meiji restoration, demonstrated the first example of a non-European or neo-European country entering the Westphalian system. Japan was effectively sovereign prior to Commodore Perry’s gunboat, as its island nature allowed independence and self-directed action. However, once encountering American and European technology and military prowess, Japan realized they would have to ‘catch up,’ or risk being on the menu.

This catching up not only required technological, social, and military advancement, but also a change in their relations with other East Asian powers. East Asia did not have the Westphalian concept of Sovereignty. Borders were ill-defined. Trade was politically subordinate to politics in a way distinct from Europe. Countries were expected to pay tribute to China, the regional hegemon.

East Asian sovereignty norms developed distinctly from European norms because of differing initial conditions. While Europe was difficult for a single country to conquer, leading to a relative balance of power, China was the hegemonic power in East Asia. Their hegemony, combined with the inability of most states to threaten reciprocal violence, led to a different understanding of the relationships between states.

To emerge as an equal to European states, Japan at the time required an unprecedented modernization effort. It had to restructure society, import top European talent to learn from, and become militarily competent to challenge European powers. Japan’s defeat of Russia in 1905 solidified its place as the only non-European/neo-European power. Most countries and people were unable to modernize effectively, leading them to be taken advantage of by European states.

Post-war order

The European Westphalian order failed. However, it did not fail because its norms collapsed, but because the balance of power broke down in the face of industrialized and ideological war. In fact, the norms outlived the system that created them.

Germany, at one point, conquered nearly all of continental Europe. America, playing the historic role of Britain, financed and empowered a coalition to defeat not just Germany, but also Japan. However, unlike Britain, America had sufficient wealth and industrial capacity to impose a new kind of peace. Rather than a negotiated settlement meant to maintain a balance of power. America asked for, and received, unconditional surrender.

While the Westphalian norms remained, they were no longer underwritten by the mechanism by which they originated. Gone was the carefully constructed balance of power. The new order was maintained by 1) Europe horrified by the consequences of industrial war and more importantly 2) American military power. The European Westphalian order was defined by reciprocity; the post-war Westphalian order was defined by hierarchy.

The Suez Canal crisis illustrated the new Westphalian order. After Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal, France and Britain, two historic powers, allied with Israel to take control of the canal. They attacked, and would have won, except the United States and Soviet Union put immense pressure on them, causing them to withdraw. Their military superiority was insufficient to achieve their political objectives.

During the European Westphalian order, the Suez invasion likely would have succeeded. It was justified legally, by both France and Britain being shareholders in the Suez and having treaty rights. It was justified strategically given the importance of the Suez to shipping lanes. Egypt lacked the ability to defend their claim, much less threaten France or Britain.

America, however, was worried that allowing the invasion would strengthen the Soviet Union’s position in the Middle East. They put France and Britain under immense pressure, both financial and diplomatic, forcing them to abandon their goals. The European Westphalian order constrained states through reciprocity; now states were constrained through hierarchy.

This is further illustrated via decolonization. Dozens of new states were created as countries in Africa and Asia declared independence from their colonial masters. These states had many, if not all, the rituals and recognition associated with modern states. They had a recognized territorial monopoly of violence, their borders were defined, they hosted and had permanent embassies, they joined international organizations, they decided who was able to enter their countries and under what conditions.

Decolonization fundamentally altered the international system by universalizing sovereignty. What was once won by industrial and military might became an automatic entitlement. Newly independent states inherited borders drawn for administrative convenience rather than political coherence, yet these borders were rendered inviolable by postwar norms, or more explicitly, American power. States were formally equal despite radically unequal capacity. Non-intervention became moralized, border revision delegitimized, and internal disorder treated as a domestic affair.

The global Westphalian order was premised on American power. Usually diplomatic and financial pressure were sufficient to encourage countries to fall in line. When they weren’t, America would use force. Of course, the force was sometimes inconsistently applied. However, it was sufficient to freeze borders, and often polities, around the world.

The future

Today we are seeing cracks in the order. America is no longer interested in being the global policeman. The withdrawal of American power is thawing conflicts, creating uncertainty. The changes can be seen across the world. From Russia waging war against Ukraine, to Israel recognizing Somaliland, to America attempting to buy Greenland, history is back.

Given the world today, I probably don’t have to convince the reader that the old order is changing. Mark Carney’s recent Davos Speech illustrates that even Heads of Government of G7 countries are acknowledging the changes. The global Westphalian order was a historical oddity dependent on a relatively benevolent hegemon imposing a European governance form on the world.

The easiest frame for understanding the future is to examine the past. Historic organizational forms will re-assert themselves. The uncertainty is on the edges, how old forms re-assert themselves within and around the old order. Institutional variation will increase, as old forms wither and increased competition forces the emergence of new.

Europe, where the original Westphalian order emerged, will continue to follow it. Europe does, however, have pressures that could lead to further changes. First, the EU is not Westphalian. It is a continent-wide trade, migration, and, to some extent, currency zone. A generation of Europeans have been raised within it, often thinking of themselves as European first, and their nationality second. Russian pressure could accelerate the transformation of the EU into a state, though given the internal EU stresses, such an outcome is hardly guaranteed. Further, demographic change via migration will likely change European states further, as the populations have less identification with their host countries.

The Americas are likely to continue within the Westphalian tradition as well, albeit, a more hegemonic one. Via the Donroe Doctrine, the current administration, and almost certainly future administrations, will ensure peace and stability in North and South America. Trade deals might become more one-sided than previously, but borders and governments will generally remain unchanged.

East Asia is likely to return to the historic norm as well, dominated by China. Unlike the American order, China’s role in East Asia would not rest on universal rules or formal equality, but on asymmetric relationships calibrated by proximity, dependence, and usefulness. China is likely to tolerate ambiguity—using economic leverage, selective coercion, and political pressure to shape outcomes. This mirrors historic East Asian practice, where hierarchy reduced transaction costs and stabilized expectations, even as sovereignty remained conditional rather than absolute.

The future of the Middle East is more uncertain. Most countries have relatively limited experience with modern statehood, with their borders being a recent invention. The importance of oil to the global economy has attracted American interest which has preserved the status quo. However, as America is energy independent and appears to be withdrawing interest, the future is open. Kuwait, for example, was invaded by Iraq, and only exists today because of American intervention.

The survival of small states with large oil reserves—like Kuwait, the UAE, Bahrain, and Qatar—could be threatened. It’s possible China steps in as the hegemon to ensure order. China is a huge energy importer, and keeping oil flowing is important to its economy. However, as of today, China does not have force projection capability to act as the hegemon.

Africa faces a challenging future. While it will remain integrated into the global economy on certain margins, its inability to industrialize makes African states weak. Demand for natural resources, and to a lesser extent, people, will continue. However, most African states will have poor negotiating power. Worst-case scenarios include states losing their territorial monopoly of violence, with bandits and more organized militant groups taking control of territories. The form of national governments might continue, as it gives Western countries and companies a counterparty they can interact with. However, the function of some national governments might become a shadow of what they once were.

Perhaps the most important lesson is to widen the possibilities of how power is exercised in the future. For the past 50 years, it has been taken for granted that states held a monopoly of violence. Most countries would ape liberal democracies, with autocrats holding elections understanding the legitimacy it granted them, even if the elections were rigged.

Moving forward, expect to see more forms of power that are less legible. It might be a regional hegemon making loans to another country and using those loans to influence policy. It might be an organized insurgency that requires payment for transit through their territory. It might be a special economic zone controlled by an opaque corporate actor. The standardization that accompanied the nation-state will recede.

Order is ultimately defined by the use of force. The Westphalian order emerged in Europe because multiple countries were capable of reciprocal violence, and Britain, by virtue of being an island, ensured that no single country could dominate. This order was then imposed globally by the United States.

As America withdraws from our role as global policeman, the order which we enforced will change.

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This is the foreword to Post Nation, written by Sondre Rasch, CEO of SafetyWing and patron of this essay collection. Support the project by collecting the digital or print pamphlet. 👇🏻

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In 1911, two expeditions set out for the South Pole. One British, and one Norwegian.

The British team, led by Robert Falcon Scott, moved deliberately. They planned for scientific discovery alongside the journey, took a methodical approach, and aimed to manage risk at each stage. Progress was steady, but slow.

The Norwegian team, led by Roald Amundsen, chose a different strategy. They optimized for speed. Their goal was singular: reach the Pole and return as quickly as possible. They accepted higher short-term risk because they understood that every extra day in the field increased the chance of failure.

Only one made it back.

The difference wasn’t in skill or preparation, but in philosophy. In an environment where time compounds risk, moving slower is not safer. It is more dangerous.

That raised a question: what would it mean to go straight for our own South Pole, the global social safety net?

In 2018, we founded SafetyWing to build a global social safety net for internet citizens. The challenge was where to start. Most components of a safety net, healthcare, income protection, retirement, are deeply entangled with nation-states and difficult to reconstruct from scratch.

We needed a simpler entry point. Travel insurance already operated globally, with an existing regulatory framework. It was narrow, but it worked. From there, we expanded into global health insurance, and then toward something more integrated.

At that point, we faced a choice: build the system piece by piece, or move directly toward the end state and iterate from there.

We tried the first approach, but progress stalled. And I realised something I’ve seen repeatedly in my startup career: up to a point, hard things are easier than easy things.

Hard things grip you.

They capture attention and force action. Easy things, by contrast, are easy to neglect, you take them for granted, and fail to do even the small things required to make them work.

It’s counterintuitive, but that was the lesson. So we changed strategy.

Nomad Citizen is an early version of that shift. It brings together key elements of a social safety net into a single structure designed to follow individuals across borders. It is still early. But it makes something important visible: these systems do not have to remain theoretical.

Growing up in Norway, I saw what a strong social safety net makes possible. It provides a baseline of security across life’s risks. But it is bounded. It works within borders.

What happens when your life no longer fits inside them?

While building my first company, Superside, the gap became obvious. People were already working across borders, earning income globally, and organising their lives online. Healthcare, insurance, and financial protection remained tied to a single country. The more global your life became, the less those systems worked.

The need was clear: a social safety net that follows people across borders. But no one was building it.

So we did.

When new infrastructure appears, people reorganise their lives around it. Gradually at first—how they work, how they earn, how they access services. But once a better system exists, adoption compounds. The shift rarely reverses.

We are living in a world where people, capital, and work move faster than the systems designed to support them. You can build within existing structures, wait for alignment, and reduce uncertainty step by step. Or you can accept short-term imperfection and build for the world we’re moving toward.

This is not just about products. It points to something larger: a new layer of organisation emerging alongside the nation-state. In the not-so-distant future, what we describe today as internet countries will become a field of their own, with hundreds of thousands of startups and major companies building the infrastructure to support them.

That same tension between incremental adaptation and building ahead of the curve runs through this collection.

Post-Nation brings together a set of perspectives grappling with a shared question: what comes after the nation-state as the default unit of organisation? No single essay offers a complete answer. Instead, this collection puts forward several, often in tension with each other.

Eman Zabi asks what the first true internet-native country might look like—not as metaphor, but as a functioning system. Michael Skinner explores how individuals might begin to invest in cities, while Jeff Long pushes further, asking what it would mean to own part of one. Elle Griffin argues for trust ownership of cities or micronations. Julian Shapiro considers whether countries themselves might become modular, able to spin out new jurisdictions much as companies spin out products. Mark Lutter examines how the failure of existing nation-states could give rise to charter cities. Madison Karas takes on one of the most foundational questions of all: how taxation might work in a network state.

Taken together, these essays do not describe a single future, but they do map a landscape of possible ones.

What underpins them is the collective acknowledgement that the current system is under strain, and waiting for it to adapt may pose greater challenges.

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Our next pamphlet drop is here! Post Nation is seven writers exploring a world after nation-states. Collect the digital or print pamphlet to support the project.👇🏻

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You can also follow the series right here, where I’ll be publishing the series in eight installments over the next four weeks. All essays will be free to all subscribers, with paid supporters at the Collector tier receiving this and every print edition we publish. Post Nation has already been sent your way!

Seven writers explore a world after nation-states

This essay collection is because I don’t think giant superpowers will create the future we want. I think lots of micro-sovereignties will.

Small pockets of utopia can upend the world order—they have in the past, and I think they will in the future too. I’m not alone—I’m joined by six thinkers who, through this collaborative essay collection and print pamphlet, explore a world after nation states. We’re talking about what might cause their downfall, how micro-sovereignties might emerge in power and influence, what they might look like, and how they could join federal governments à la carte.

Coming up in the series:

• “What comes after the nation state?” A foreword by our patron, Sondre Rasch, CEO of SafetyWing

• “America created the world order—what happens when it leaves?” By Mark Lutter, founder and Executive Director of Charter Cities Institute

• “You should own stock in your city,” by Jeff Fong, author of Urban Proxima

• “How will new countries attract (& keep) citizens?” by Michael Skinner, author of Savvy Cities

• “Fractional ownership works for Banksy paintings—not cities” by Elle Griffin, author of The Elysian

• “Why new countries should rent land—not buy it” by Julien Starr, founding director of Startup States Society

• “What will the first internet country look like?” by Eman Zabi, author of Thinking in Public

• “How should we tax internet countries?” by Madison Karas, Plumia fellow

• “Let states choose their federal governments” by Elle Griffin, author of The Elysian

SafetyWing serves as the patron of this issue. The organization provides a social safety net for a global citizenry, and I am grateful for their support of our design and illustration costs. The cover illustration is by Emiliano Raspante with the digital and print pamphlet designed by Patricia Faggi. Pamphlet sales go directly to contributors—the Elysian treasury keeps 20% of profits with the rest split between contributors.

If you’re new to The Elysian, this is all part of our mission to bring pamphleteering back. Just like the Enlightenment era thinkers who came before us, we’re exploring a utopian future through essay collections and print pamphlets. With this pamphlet I’m also excited to debut the Elysian Shop! This is a new custom-built platform where you can purchase all of our pamphlets, our printer will immediately print and ship orders as they come in, and contributors will immediately receive profit shares according to each product’s split. All profit sharing splits are transparent on each product page.

This new shop is much more efficient than our previous publishing on Metalabel. For one, we no longer have to pay Metalabel’s 10% fee, which makes each project more profitable. For another, shipping is calculated based on the weight of each pamphlet, the number purchased, and the location you are shipped to, rather than Metalabel’s flat rate, which means rates are accurate and I no longer have to subsidize shipping fees when prices don’t line up. Most excitingly, profit sharing happens immediately upon purchase and is transparent the whole way through!

The new shop is our first step toward a publishing platform that shares profits with contributors and, hopefully soon, readers too!!! I’m working toward a reader-owned media ecosystem and this is a foot in the right direction.

I hope you will join us for this collection—read the essays, respond in the comments, support the pamphlet at the price point that works for you, and drop by one of our office hours calls along the way!

This is our last collaborative pamphlet for the year. The next several pamphlets are personal projects I am working on independently, and will debut as long-form essay collections and pamphlet series over the summer and fall in the vein of Let Cities Build Utopia. I’m currently studying entrepreneurship in Italy, attending Quaker services, volunteering for a global communitarian aid network, and reading about companies that give ownership to communities in research for a wide variety of series. I’m excited to share those with you next.

Thanks for reading and thinking with me,

Elle Griffin

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We’ll next meet on May 21st, May 28th, and June 4th at 1pm Mountain Time (Noon Pacific Time/6pm Eastern).

Charlie Rogers of Undefinable Life Design is even dropping by on June 4th to share his extraordinary self-publishing successes with us. As I prepare my forthcoming book launch, I’ll be excited to learn from him!

Here are the links to register 👇🏻

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This month I want to talk about a recent deep dive I did into the strategy of my business. Now that I have Claude Code installed on my computer, I dumped every possible data point into it—including my entire Substack zip file, the backend of my Metalabel account and WeFunder crowdfund, the members of my Slack channel, and my past four years in Quickbooks.

I asked Claude to analyze what was working, what was not working, and make an action plan for how to address the problems and grow beyond them. I had to go back and forth with it a bit to provide context, but I was ultimately impressed by its ability to make connections I would never have seen–like that subscribers from Italy were churning at a higher rate than other subscribers, which we were able to link to a cause.

Most of the actions on this list I’ll be working on behind the scenes and you won’t ever see the results. For instance, I already asked several writers I admire to recommend mine, and asked several others to unrecommend mine. That has already fixed some of the churn problems I was having. A lot of this I’m also ignoring or changing to suit my personality. For instance: I did create a drip email program, but I did not follow Claude’s recommended emails for it. I did start posting to Substack notes, but I have not posted anything resembling what Claude suggested I say there. Some of this is also just brainstorming: Possible ideas for the future of my business that I had it explore, but that I may or may not take.

If you’re interested in reading the rest, here’s Claude’s complete analysis:

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Thank you so much for following our collaborative essay collection Internet Sovereignty, nine writers exploring the future of the internet.

The collection was serialized in 10 installments over the past five weeks. You can still support the series by collecting the print or digital pamphlet here. 👇🏻

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The print edition has already been shipped to paid subscribers at the collector tier who get everything we publish in print. Subscribers can access the series in its entirety here:

• “It’s obvious why we hate social media,” by of

• “The case for taxing AI slop,” by

• “I quit Spotify—now I buy albums like it’s the 90s” by

• “Airbnb, Uber, & Meetup wanted better exit options” by Schneider

• “The hidden labour of the internet” by

• “The algorithm doesn’t have to destroy us,” with

• “The Internet has no benches,” by

• “The internet needs ecologists” by

• “How I disconnected from tech in 2025” by

• “The redemption of the digital age,” by Hara

A special thank you to who supported this issue as a patron. And thank you you so much for reading and supporting this project!

We’ve got one more collaborative pamphlet coming in the next few weeks, before I spend the summer and fall working on personal projects—a number of long-form essay series that will become print pamphlets as well as chapters of my forthcoming book.

More to come soon,

Elle Griffin

This is a guest essay by for Internet Sovereignty, nine writers exploring the future of the internet. Collect the essay collection as a digital or print edition.👇🏻

Collect the Pamphlet

It was the third grade, a run-of-the-mill afternoon. Our science class was interrupted by a guest speaker—an employee from the national park on the other side of town. He took time off work to talk about ecosystems to a couple dozen chatty kids shifting in their seats, waiting for the bell. I must admit, I was surely no more engrossed than the others in his lecture about energy flows and nutrient cycles. That is, until he pulled a bottle from his briefcase.

A 2L plastic bottle, probably once filled with Pepsi or some other form of liquid gold. It was now packed with soil, rocks, moss, a few small plants, and who knows what else. Mr. National Park explained he built a closed terrarium: a self-contained ecosystem that mimics Earth’s water cycle to sustain the life inside the bottle without any outside interference. He said it hadn’t been opened in 3 years. 3 years! That’s, like, an eternity in kid terms. To third-grade me, he was a god holding the world in his hands. It was pure magic.

I went home, begging my brother to get off the family computer so that I could google everything I needed to know about making my own terrarium. I gathered my supplies: a printed WikiHow article, one of my mother’s mason jars, and an assortment of Outside Things I gathered from the garden. I stuffed the jar, sealed the lid, set my terrarium on my bedside table, and waited. Unfortunately for third grade me, all the plants became shrivelled and gray after a week or so. The gardening forums told me it was root rot, or mold, or the wrong plants, or a combination of everything. Watching that tiny world fail was my first lesson in how fragile ecosystems really are. They’re precise. Every part depends on every other part, and any small disruption ripples outward.

Fast forward to the winter of 2024. I was asked to give my first lecture as part of a new social education program in the city. To me, art and science were two sides of the same coin. Julian Klein, the head of Institute of Artistic Research Berlin, describes research as a process of not-yet-knowing, and the desire for knowledge—an experience that surely applies to the arts as well. He explains that art and science both exist in the same cultural space, on the balance between tradition and innovation.

The lecture was titled The Internet’s Root System, an exploration of how our digital space functions as an ecosystem, and what hidden life sustains it. I was pleasantly surprised to hear it had reached capacity. To meet interest, I hosted the lecture as a free webinar, which had more than 250 registrants. It was clear: people wanted to know how to rethink their relationship with the internet and learn how we may tend to it as a system of care.

Eventually, I aim to develop a comprehensive guide for how to care for our internet ecosystems. Here, I will share an amuse-bouche of sorts as to why learning from nature is more important for our digital selves than ever.

The internet’s root system

I wouldn’t be the first to describe the internet as an ecosystem. In fact, tech bros love nature metaphors to domesticate technology. Data flows, attention streams, growth driven by venture capitalists is organic. Nature is emotionally soothing, and using its metaphors removes moral responsibility. It lets tech companies present human-made systems as inevitable environments, rather than the contested political spaces they are. In the article The Environment is Not a System, Tega Brain explains how the oversaturation of these metaphors in technology changes how we think about the ecological world. It makes environments seem knowable and optimizable, inviting technological interventions that claim to “solve” environmental issues. Brain draws on Anna Tsing’s conception of environments as open-ended assemblages, where “the question of how the varied species influence each other—if at all—is never settled.”

Perhaps the value of the term ecosystem is as a pedagogical tool, rather than an ontological one. Although subject to oversimplification, ecosystems invite us to think about interdependence, diversity, and fragility of the spaces we occupy. In my work, I think this is especially important for our digital spaces. The internet has completely overhauled what it means to connect with humans and non-humans. It is a space where interactions between different players are constantly shifting and culminate non-linearly. In fact, the field of platform studies reveals the abundance of ways that the “thingness” of hardware and software shape our media landscape, from concepts like platform time to connective memory. Further, in Technobiophilia: Nature and Cyberspace, Sue Thomas explains that humans have a tendency to make sense of complexity through nature metaphors, which may actually reinforce our connection to nature and contribute to a greater tech-nature balance. Despite its limitations, seeing the internet as an ecosystem is a starting point to engage with its complexity and realize the role of care in sustaining it.

What do we know about ecosystems?

Coined by British botanist Arthur Tansley in 1935, an ecosystem refers to a space where organisms interact with their environment. Tansley rejected ecological terms that were prevalent at the time, such as “complex organism” and “biotic community,” because these did not fully represent the interactivity between living and non-living components. In The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts, he described the fundamental conception as “the whole system, including not only the organism-complex, but also the whole complex of physical factors forming what we call the environment (p. 299).”

Ecosystems are dynamic. They are subject to constant change and lack predefined edges. Tansley described ecosystems as mental isolates; arbitrary objects we categorize for the sake of understanding. One ecosystem may overlap and interact with one another. As much as a forest can be an ecosystem, so can a single oak tree. The question is: does the internet qualify as an ecosystem? Well, if ecosystems have no predefined edges, then we can interpret it as one for the sake of understanding.

In The Closing Circle: Nature, Man & Technology, ecologist Barry Commoner describes four laws of ecology: (1) Everything is connected to everything else, (2) Everything must go somewhere, (3) Nature knows best, and (4) There is no such thing as a free lunch. These laws provide us with a lens to ask questions about how the internet collectively behaves, and we want to behave within it. Let us walk through each law, and explore how the internet exhibits it.

Everything is connected to everything else. Online, nothing exists in isolation. Each platform, algorithm, community, and user influences one another. Take the rise of TikTok and short-form video: the creator economy reorganized itself around it, and so did the way we consume media. Celebrities and brands began to overhaul their marketing schemes to be digital-first, and suddenly the Duolingo owl is commenting on every popular video. Shortly after, other social media platforms like Instagram and YouTube adopted the same format for their Reels and Shorts. In the span of 6-8 years, short-form video content completely changed our digital public spaces, not by itself but by rippling throughout the ecosystem.

Everything must go somewhere. One of the greatest tricks of modern information technology is the illusion of ghostliness. In Programmed Visions: Software and Memory, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun explores the paradox of software: how it is both visible and invisible. Interfaces make things look simple, but underneath them are complex systems designed to store, track, and make everything retrievable. Software also structures social life and transforms how we behave and make choices. Even in the sense of all software being reliant on hardware—like cloud memory stored in data centres—digital traces persist.

Nature knows best. Although an increasing proportion of our digital spaces are owned by “Big Tech” corporations (more on this later), certain behaviours emerge in uncontrollable or unpredictable ways. Fandoms, for example—communities of fans who bond on social media over a particular celebrity or topic—often evolve organically. Memes often go viral randomly, without influence. Like in the physical world, subcultures, norms, and communities emerge in response to sociocultural undercurrents. The rising distrust in Big Tech, and the subsequent developments in new platforms and online discourse, is a prime example of how emergent behaviours resist top-down control and reshape the digital ecosystem.

There is no such thing as a free lunch. Every action has trade-offs. Although most social media websites are monetarily free to scroll on, you’re paying with your attention and data. You watch ads, or engage with sponsored content, and platforms collect usage data to improve their platforms and, sometimes, sell. Just like natural ecosystems, the internet is a culmination of its resources.

Cultivating technobiodiversity

As mentioned, it is no surprise that there is a growing weariness in Big Tech corporations, like Google, Netflix, and Meta. Numbers vary by report, but estimates suggest they account for 40-60% of global internet traffic. Of course, this is concerning. Concentration of control at that scale means that a handful of companies—without our best interests necessarily in mind—have tremendous influence over what we say and share. Outages and other infrastructural vulnerabilities have large-scale effects, cutting off access to services we have become dependent on. Algorithmic systems influence our personal wellbeing by shaping our attentions and reinforcing social biases. It often feels scary, and for good reason.

Though, we may also critique the narratives that reinforce fear and helplessness, that tell us the internet is doomed, which stand to benefit from the same neoliberal systems they criticize. Like in nature, ecosystems are fragile and subject to external pressures, and dynamic and resilient. It’s possible, and perhaps necessary, to critique the structures that govern our digital ecosystems while also zooming out to see the creativity and community that thrive despite this.

When I think of the internet, I think of all the incredible, creative, and talented people I have met—yes, even through social media. I think about the poetic web and the imaginative and experimental projects that artists and designers have made. I think about the vast array of open-source knowledge available beyond borders. I think about the messy, scary, corporatized spaces, and how communities have emerged to navigate and resist them. As the title of my lecture alluded to, this is what I conceptualize as the internet’s root system—the unseen networks that sustain life online. And it’s what keeps me logging back on.

Ultimately, ecosystem thinking is a reclamation of our digital public spaces. It’s a refusal of inevitability, of helplessness. These spaces play a crucial role in the ways that we organize, socialize, advocate, and experience culture. Without them, without an ecosystem, we limit the diversity of voices, practices, and experiences that emerge in the commons. Allowing these spaces to erode would lose us the dissent and solidarity that reveal our values as an online community. And listen: we have a lot of work to do. Our public spaces are far from perfect, but they are worth saving. To think like an ecologist is to stay engaged, to pay attention, and to steward the internet toward a more human and resilient future.

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This is a guest post by for Internet Sovereignty, nine writers exploring the future of the internet through an online essay collection and print pamphlet. Support the series by collecting the digital or print pamphlet. 👇🏻

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There’s a Japanese proverb that goes 一期一会 (Ichigo ichi-e), which literally translates to “one time, one meeting.” But in practice, it’s used to capture how every particular moment and gathering only exists once in a lifetime. Striking up a conversation with a stranger on a park bench, making eye contact with someone on the bus, even hanging out with friends in the park on a random afternoon, are all once-in-a-lifetime events.

In 2026, people are going offline as much as possible—I think, in large part, to reclaim this feeling of preciousness around life. They’re chaining their phones to their walls, starting movements to touch grass, and creating entire product lines around reducing phone usage. In the face of a hostile internet, abstinence has become the mainstream accepted response. We crave the spontaneity we know to be in the physical world.

I don’t blame them. The Internet looks quite grim these days. Dead internet theory, stating that the internet is being overtaken and, eventually, will only be inhabited by bots, is entering mainstream discourse as AI social accounts multiply and compete for what flavor of slop comes after Italian brainrot. People are arguing with fake people, and creators have to clarify that they didn’t use AI to make the work they share. Culture commentators are writing about the death of the open internet as people retreat into dark forests, private spaces like group chats that are hidden from the web.

The Internet has lost its innocence, and logging on feels like fighting for survival.

But every once in a while, we still encounter something meaningful that makes it all worth it. Something heartwarming, genuine, inspiring, or joyful that justifies all the hours scrolling and a lifetime chained to our devices. Earnestness shines through even in “content” manufactured for spread.

If dead internet theory posits that the internet will eventually become only bots, alive internet theory proclaims we will never let the open internet die. We will always find a way to look for each other, to answer a call for help, to share a laugh and an argument right after one another. If there’s one trait of the human race that every apocalypse movie agrees on, it’s our will to survive.

We still have hope for the Internet because deep down, we still believe in each other.

The Internet uniquely brings people together who would have never met in the real world on a global scale. We can connect with others over niche interests while being exposed to a thousand other worldviews. At its best, the Internet cultivates our unique differences and allows them to coexist. Rather than a monoculture, we form a multi-faceted, collective network, interconnected but not forced to assimilate. This pluriverse of cultures breeds other differences, hybrids, and niches to connect over.

I actually rediscovered Ichigo ichi-e on my TikTok feed, in a spontaneous meeting via the algorithm several years ago. From what I can remember, the video featured a creator talking about a random encounter with an old man in Tokyo, how, in under 8 minutes, they shared the different problems their countries faced and uncovered this tangible sense of shared humanity.

There are two reasons this has stayed with me for so long.

First, it’s a reminder that spontaneity in digital space is still very much possible and can lead to the kinds of encounters that I wouldn’t have the chance to experience through my physical body.

Second, it’s a testament to how deeply we can impact each other through such simple means, and perhaps, the primitive nature of the methods frees us to break past our abstract notions of society to reach a deeper emotional level.

We still live on the Internet, and as long as we do, we can still bump into each other and have these life-changing encounters. But it’s been overdeveloped and undergoverned. Like cities that have prioritized cars over people, visiting the Internet now entails controlled apps and search engines, designed for extraction. There’s nowhere to rest because the benches are covered in spikes. All we can do is sink into the feed and run along the scrollbar until our eyes bleed.

We are all so online, yet being online feels so solitary. Social media is designed for content consumption, brand distribution, and prestige broadcasting, not the warm, funny, and weird moments that happen when humans simply exist together.

We’ve been conditioned to think the Internet can’t be changed, but all our current interfaces—infinite feeds, follower counts, black-box algorithms—are features created by social media platforms to optimize their metrics. Just as they were made, they can also be transformed.

Like guerrilla public improvement projects put benches in public spaces, repopulate foliage in neglected intersections, or transform dumping sites into neighborhood gathering spots, we can also retrofit and reshape our digital space.

So what would an Internet that actually encourages these encounters feel like?

Where can we sit together on the internet? How do we discover a new neighborhood, shelter under a bodega awning during a summer shower, sit quietly at a cafe and work among the chatter of strangers?

Maybe it starts with breaking down the capital-I Internet into several, much-less intimidating tiny internets where we can experiment with new forms of coexisting and relating to one another online.

Rather than a single feed or the same interface copy-and-pasted under new management and brand colors, we might find how people have imagined new ways of living online. Maybe there are no profiles and the feed is a random constellation of images for every minute of the day. Perhaps you have to say hi to five new people before you can write your status. Or you have to go hunting for every new piece of content, pixel by pixel across the screen.

Maybe strangers spontaneously travel through URL rabbit holes together, collectively deciding which way to go next. Meanwhile, others can sit together on the sidelines and watch them bustle.

In my neighborhood internet, I’m a regular at several local spots. I stop by to see the new community chatter, bring a gift or two, and forage for some inspiration from the archives that people have brought back. Some days I travel to other neighborhoods, even new countries, and experience how the culture changes. How do they share their updates? What’s their way of greeting each other? How do they gather inspiration?

We can run into each other

As I run around the web, I spontaneously encounter others in the same places, online together at the same time. I can wave at them, share a warm conversation, play cursor tag, and shake the web page to call others to join us. We share a brief moment of intimacy to honor fate bringing us together.

We can watch each other

Like going to a busy city park and watching the immensity of life unfold, I can take things slow and watch people in their digital pursuits. I can take the scenic path as we travel between links, notice people on their respective commutes and adventures, and get lost in a new place.

We can be remembered

When I visit a website, dig around the links, and leave a note for the owner, the traces of my presence don’t disappear after I leave. Our actions leave a felt mark. This digital patina adds an extra texture to websites, hinting at who has passed through, how frequently they come, and the adventures that have unfolded here.

We can be recognized

In real life, we’re recognized for our faces, names, and styles. In the digital world, we should be recognizable if we meet again, whether it’s the way we move our cursors, the colors we choose, or the marks we make.

I’ve been experimenting with creating internet neighborhoods of my own, to make poems with strangers, turn the lights off to say good night, collect every color in existence, and grab a drink at the cursor bar after a long day scrolling.

I want everyone to be able to create their own Internet gathering spaces, so I made playhtml, an open-source library for designing communal internet experiences by enhancing web elements with real-time, persistent interactivity. Take it for a spin, and if you need help, remember that I’m just across the web.

Somewhere right now, two strangers’ cursors are touching. Someone is breaking ground on a new piece of the internet for their personal website. Hundreds more are visiting tiny spaces and games to share their feelings with their online family.

The Internet was never promised to be open, free, or modifiable. Born in the U.S. military and courted by several private companies, it could have easily been seized by a single entity. Instead, many brave people fought to keep it open to everyone, collectively stewarded by many, and owned by no one.

We can shape these internets together, piece by piece. We can make our own public parks, cafes, bodegas, waterfalls, and mountains. We can take care of them, not as users, but as stewards maintaining a home for generations to come.

These internets won’t be an escape from the real world. We’ll go offline to touch grass, hang out with friends, and then come back online to find friends and strangers a world away, meeting for a brief moment. One time, one meeting. 一期一会.

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I believe the world should work for our benefit, and I explore that the way visionary thinkers always have: Through essay collections, print pamphlets, and books. In the vein of my literary heroes, I call this work utopian.

Paid subscribers get every essay collection I publish online. Collectors get every series as collectable print pamphlets—about 4-6 each year. Join us to get the next one. 👇🏼

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In 2026, I crowdfunded $85,000+ to turn my body of work into a book called We Should Own The Future. I’m currently writing it in public—paid subscribers unlock every chapter, and receive future chapters as they publish.

Here is the manuscript so far:

We Should Own The Future

A new vision for a world that works for our benefit

Part I. We Should Own The Government

Cities should benefit residents

• The Scottish island that bought itself

• Cadbury built a city for workers—then gave it to them

• Ebenezer Howard built a better city than the government

• San Francisco should be profitable—instead property owners are

• Disney World has more autonomy than any US city

• Cities should own their land—like Vienna and Amsterdam

• Singapore—where your home loses value and everyone’s better off

• Stop idolizing Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Próspera

• An indigenous nation just built a better city than California Forever

• Decentralize America: The case for cities that don’t need Washington

States should support citizens

• US states should have autonomy—like EU countries

• We should create more US states

Federal governments should be decouple from nation-states

• Decouple federal government from nation-states

Part II. We Should Own The Economy

Economies should benefit stakeholders

• Mondragon as the new City State

• The Cooperatist Manifesto that inspired Mondragon

• How Silicon Valley got rich

• Every company should be owned by employees

• Founders will get much richer by selling to employees

• Who should control AI?

• [Large section coming soon]

Part III. We Should Own The Future

We should build this future without waiting around for governments to do it.

• [Large section coming soon]

Thank you so much for reading and supporting journalism that researches the most important ideas of our time and how we can create a utopian future for us all. Your subscriptions, comments, and shares make all of it possible!

See you in the community,

Elle Griffin
Author, The Elysian

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This is an interview with for Internet Sovereignty, nine writers exploring the future of the internet through an essay collection and print pamphlet. Support the series by collecting the digital or print pamphlet. 👇🏻

Collect the Pamphlet

is the co-founder of Substack. Here is our interview about how we can build better internet platforms.

Elle Griffin: Everyone is on Substack now. Politicians are here—like . Celebrities are here, like . People are moving from social media platforms like Instagram and Twitter and writing long-form posts and videos directly for the people who follow them. How does it change the world when we change our platform?

Hamish McKenzie: There’s a Charlie Munger quote, “show me the incentives, and I’ll show you the outcome.” And for at least 20 years, we’ve been stuck with media platforms that have bad incentives and warp our culture.

Substack, of course, is the only pure and perfect media platform, and that will lead to a cultural renaissance. That’s a tongue-in-cheek statement, but what I do believe is that Substack is an attempt to set up a media system that has better incentives, where the people participating in the in ecosystem—the publishers—are incentivized to win and hold on to the trust of their audiences, and then the audiences actively participate in helping the culture and the makers of that culture flourish.

The platform undergirding it all, in this case Substack, is forced by its business model to act in service of the publishers and the audiences. We only make money when publishers make money. And publishers own their audience relationships, and those audience relationships exist on a mailing list that they can take with them anytime they want, anywhere. They own all their content, which they can export with a click of a button.

As a result, the culture of the platform becomes something that’s much more about trust, relationships, and quality and depth. Which is not to say it’s going to be perfect, but it’s going to be completely different from the media platforms that have dominated for the last 20 years.

Elle: Being sold on the economic model already, what do you think changes when a politician doesn’t make their next announcement on Twitter, but on Substack instead?

Hamish: When a politician or an artist shows up to speak in the space, they have a much better chance of being understood with nuance and context. With other platforms, nuance and context are ripped from the conversation, and it’s forced into a soundbite that is thrown against the wall.

And it’s not because Substack is a team of geniuses, although there are many brilliant people who work at the company. And it’s not because the technology of Substack is somehow superior to all other technologies. It’s because the incentive system is different.

I don’t think Tiktok, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and LinkedIn are going to go away, at least not overnight. But increasingly, I think the places that aggregate audiences and control the relationships and force people into a feed that is optimized for advertising are going to produce different types of culture than what you see on Substack. It’s going to be much more superficial, fun, and entertaining, but also lightweight.

That’s not where we think deeply about something and spend time with an idea. But now there is a place where you can spend time with an idea and think deeply about something and engage in genuine, thoughtful discourse with other people. I think you’ll see more thoughtful people and more thoughtful culture being rewarded.

Elle: I agree. Recently, a Utah citizen decided to run for Congress and posted an introduction video on Twitter. This person was of Somalian descent, and Twitter just went insane—2 million hateful comments were calling on ICE to deport him. I have to imagine that if he had published his video to Substack instead of Twitter, the response would have been very different. How can our platforms solve for hate?

Hamish: The first thing to note is that Substack is not perfect—it’s not Disneyland. It’s not like there are never bad things being said, or that there are never fights. But it is, I think, at least an order of magnitude different in terms of civility and the way people engage with each other.

For years, we have labored under the illusion that the problems related to speech online could be addressed or solved by a more sophisticated content moderation apparatus. And I think what we’ve seen is that as companies and platforms have invested more in trying to refine their content moderation apparatus, as they’ve hired more people to act as content moderators, as they’ve made their policy documents more complicated and precise, and as they’ve spent billions and billions of dollars in trying to get the system to solve or address the problems, we’ve only seen those problems get worse. Or at the very least, they haven’t gone away and they haven’t gotten better.

So we suspect that the problem has to do with the incentives of the systems that they have set up. A system like Twitter incentivizes the types of actions and behaviors that have everything to do with getting attention at any cost and nothing to do with helping us understand each other or build trust in each other, or seek truth. If you create a different system where you’re incentivized to help each other understand each other, which I think direct subscriptions and direct relationships create the best proxy for, then you’re going to get a totally different outcome than the other systems.

What Substack has shown over many years now, for many millions of users, and for an extreme diversity of ideologies and perspectives, is that you can have a hands-off approach to censorship while also having a healthy culture and productive discourse. That doesn’t mean we don’t do any content moderation. We do do some, and there are rules that protect the platform at the extremes, but it has been shown, I think, that the incentives matter even more.

Elle: Does that change artist and celebrity culture? Do we still need social media and paparazzi when artists and celebrities can speak directly to us with full nuance and context?

Hamish: That’s what we are seeing—Lizzo or or being able to express themselves in ways they simply can’t on other platforms. The other platforms flatten artists and celebrity voices, as well as academic voices, but Substack can give context and color and contours and result in something just fundamentally better for anyone who cares about quality and understanding. I don’t know if that’s going to become the dominant way that people interact with culture, but it’s going to get larger than it is today, and it’s going to be more present than it has been in the past.

Elle: Substack announced an app for smart TVs, which I think is an incredible replacement for YouTube. If YouTube were subscriber-based, and I could pay for my favorite people right there and watch the things that they’re producing for me, rather than whatever the YouTube algorithm wants to surface to me next? I think that could change the culture a lot. Do you agree?

Hamish: It can change the culture a lot, yeah. Even inside Substack, we underestimate the potential for reshaping culture as a result of the direct relationships model. I don’t even think we need to replace YouTube to change the culture in a positive way.

There are three big powerhouse media models at the moment. There’s Netflix, which is an aggregator—you pay for the platform directly, and then the platform decides what you see and where the money goes. It’s a successful thing, serving hundreds of millions of people and making lots of money. Then there’s YouTube, and anyone can publish there, but it’s still an aggregator. Its revenue model is split between platform advertising and platform subscriptions via YouTube Premium. But YouTube still controls the relationships and still owns all the communities that happen there. People show up in the comments underneath your videos. But that’s not your community, that’s YouTube’s community.

What has been missing all along is this direct relationships platform or ecosystem. Substack has made it work for blogging, and writing is arguably the hardest thing to commercialize. Being a writer was the hardest way to make a living when we started Substack in 2017, now we see writers becoming millionaires based on this direct relationships model. So I’m really excited to see what can happen with the direct relationships model when it’s applied and scaled to things like video, including TV shows, films, news, studios and curators, independent filmmakers, and so on. Where it’s not just a format type that unites people, but it’s a model type that unites people. It’s direct relationships, and an artist ownership model.

Elle: I could see a world where a lot of platforms start to head in that direction, and that excites me. Whether it’s video or reading or social media, changing the economic model and the relationship model changes what you see. But Substack has introduced an algorithm that surfaces people we aren’t following, which I’m sure will be part of the TV as well. Even in the Substack app, the video feed shows me people I don’t know, and that I don’t subscribe to. What have been the risks and benefits of adding the algorithm, and what have you learned about how to make that work for the good?

Hamish: The algorithm is a bit of a boogeyman. It’s a scary word, right? But the important thing isn’t whether there is an algorithm, it’s what that algorithm has been asked to do.

The algorithms everyone has become skeptical of are based on the last 20 years of social media, where the algorithms were asked to addict you to the feeds so that you can see more ads. But the only way Substack makes money is when publishers make money. The only way publishers make money is by getting subscriptions from their audiences. And so the algorithm is trying to drive people into those deeper relationships so that they might result in subscriptions, so that they might result in money to the publishers, so that might result in money to the platform, which can then improve the whole experience for everyone.

So the algorithms of Substack are very different from the algorithms of other social media platforms. They’re doing a different job.

Elle: Since Substack Notes debuted, what have you learned about making the algorithm work in a way that drives relationships?

Hamish: We started out with the mindset that people wouldn’t want short posts or videos or images. Here, they’re serious readers. I’m a serious reader and I just want the good stuff. I’m sick of those other spaces that are vying for my attention. I just want to see the posts that are going to force me to be on my best behavior.

It turns out that is not the best way to help people enter into deep relationships with writers and creators, and that a browsing experience helps. Introducing someone to an idea or a person that can deepen over time through repeated exposure will actually lead to more subscriptions for writers down the line. So that was a key insight.

And the types of activity that convert into subscriptions are not just relentless promotion of a specific piece. It’s, “Oh, I’m interested in this person’s mind. They’re showing up in an interesting way in this feed. Can I find out more about that person? Maybe I’ll follow them. After following them for a while, maybe I’ll invite them into my inbox with the subscription. Later on, they’ve convinced me so much that I’m going to pay them.”

The algorithm for Substack is trying to do that job.

Elle: I will frequently see somebody hating the Substack feed for this reason or other. And then Substack design head Mills Baker will pipe in and say, “We keep trying to make that kind of content not show up, but you guys keep making it show up because you want it.” There’s a feedback loop where the things people say they don’t want are also what they’re clicking on and liking, which makes the algorithm hard to work for everyone. How do you solve for this?

Hamish: Historically, one of the limitations of a system like this was a response to the user’s activity. So if you have been enjoying a lot of horse photos recently, you’re probably going to be shown more horse-related things in the next little bit. And sometimes, people just browse shitty shit and then they get lured into something that might be a guilty pleasure at first, but isn’t content they’d choose as their best self.

But with machine learning and improvements in machine learning and LLMs, we can actually get more sophisticated than that. We’re at such an early stage with this, but we’re trying to make sure that we give people more and more tools so they can set their own conditions within the app. For example, you can choose the feed that is purely machine-driven, or you can choose the “following” feed which is only going to show you the people you follow or subscribe to. And it stays persistent so the next time you pick up the app again, it will remember the feed that you said you preferred.

We’re still testing features like this, but we’re rolling it out more and more. If you don’t like a note for whatever reason, you can click an X in the top corner and choose a reason why you didn’t like it. For instance, “I want to see less political stuff or slop or rage.” Then there are extra signals that give Substack an advantage over other platforms, like the subscription signal. If you subscribe and pay money to a particular writer who’s an expert in a particular thing, it’s quite likely you’ll want to hear from that person more than other people that you’re following. And there’s a good chance that you’ll be interested in who they recommend.

So there are concentric circles of subscription interests, and though there are some limitations to machine learning based algorithmic feeds, Substack’s infrastructure provides the opportunity for refining a feed that really works for the end user with greater depth and possibility than what other systems can offer.

Elle: Let’s talk about Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification. Everybody is entirely stressed out that it’s going to happen to Substack, because Substack is everybody’s favorite app and all our past favorite apps are no longer our favorite apps. How do you avoid it?

Hamish: If you look at the top revenue earners on the leaderboard across all categories, you’re not getting people who have turned up to win internet points; you’re getting something of depth and where there’s real community. I think this is a system that’s much more resistant to the enshittification that is rampant on every other platform.

And maybe one day Substack will become vulnerable to the forces of enshittification, but it’s not going to happen at its current scale, which is millions of users in the app every day. Facebook went for decades before the word “enshittification” was ever uttered, and with a model that was focused on advertising and had billions of users. So there’s still plenty of runway and time before Substack reaches that point.

People get scared when things change and new things arrive because it’s messing with the original conception of what the thing was. But over time, I think largely people have discovered that they can live in the way they want to live on Substack. They don’t have to watch short-form video if they don’t want to. They don’t have to read Charli XCX’s essay if they don’t want to hear from celebrity voices.

Elle: I love Substack’s expansion into video and podcasts because I think the world needs Substackification. But I’m also nostalgic for and miss when Substack was just writing and reading and commenting and that was it. So I both know that Substack needs to grow and reach more people and have more features for different kinds of creators, and I’m nostalgic for a time when it was just focused on writing and my own niche. How can Substack be the app for everyone, as much as it is the app for each individual niche?

Hamish: For people like me who are reading-oriented and writing-oriented, I can still have that experience on Substack. In fact, I have several escape hatch options. I can still be in the app if I don’t mind Notes—and I don’t, because I like discovering new things that are cool to read. But I can also keep my inbox as the place where I have my experience with writers and reading a text. I can even make my inbox the primary tab in the app, so that I’m being nudged to focus on reading the writers I really deeply care about, and then Notes becomes an afterthought.

Or I don’t have to be in the app at all. I can go to individual websites and follow writers only through email. There’s no other platform that allows that flexibility or diversity of engagement styles. So while I’m somewhat sympathetic to the people who would rather Substack remain the purest text platform, my message to them is you can still have that, and unlike other platforms, you have the choice.

Elle: Last question. This is for an issue called Internet Sovereignty, it’s a bunch of writers exploring the future of the internet. Even if the whole internet worked like Substack and we’d achieved your nirvana, what would you still want to change about the internet? How would you want it to be better?

Hamish: I still want real-life, person-to-person interactions to be the primary mode of social engagement, and the internet and online discourse to be a distant second to that.

Online communities should activate real-world interactions. There are certain things you could build into platforms that would actively encourage that, like selling tickets to events. Or helping them run good meetups, happy hours, or gatherings.

When I used to work in magazines in Hong Kong, I was a music editor and part of the job of making a good music section was to throw good music events and show people that indie music was something to love and appreciate. Hong Kong was not an indie music town back then, so we held a competition for indie bands. People would send in demos and the winning band got world-class producers, engineers, and studio time to make this beautiful album. We threw a big party for them at the end of it, and that launched musicians onto the scene. One went on to become a bestselling pop act in Hong Kong.

That’s the sort of thing that conveners of culture can and should have outsized influence over.

So more of that.

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This is a guest essay by for Internet Sovereignty, nine writers exploring the future of the internet. Collect the complete pamphlet as a digital or print edition. 👇🏻

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The kind of design that goes unnoticed—a short-term rental agreement, a cleverly put-together government announcement—is the kind that often creates the authority that rules our lives.

In the past, this power was wielded by colonial empires to obscure their violent extraction, thereby creating legitimacy and a veneer of ‘civility.’ Today, these same mechanisms are wielded by Big Tech to erase the people who really built the internet, in an attempt to justify the concentration of power and wealth in the hands of the few. Our job is to reveal these mechanisms.

Colonial regimes used cadastral surveys, pass books, and civilising‑mission rhetoric to turn land theft and extraction into orderly, documented governance; today, Big Tech disguises extractive data practices in metric dashboards and “innovation” language that looks similarly procedural and neutral.

The imbalance between the real creators of the internet and those who control it is built into the internet’s design. Making this power visible—the power of creators, content moderators, media organisations, journalists—opens space for us to govern the internet on our own terms.

The internet is not magical

Most people’s everyday experience of the internet is that of a mystic force attributed mainly to the work of a select few tech oligarchs.

The experience of the internet as a mystic force is a design choice, subtly ingrained in the collective subconscious through the concept of “Seamless Design.” This philosophy is the guiding force behind most modern interface design, and it teaches that the “seams” of our digital experiences ought to be invisible, nominally to create a more “intuitive” user experience.

But by making the seams of the digital expertise invisible, you also make the people behind it invisible. Seamless Design may make it easier to post a quick snap of your family dinner—but it does not make it easier to exist in and create a more equal society.

TikTok’s estimated 2022 revenue was $9.4B, yet the average creator earns less than minimum wage per hour invested. The “creator fund” is notoriously opaque, and it’s very unclear how creators are actually compensated. The messy editing process, the hours that go into each video, not to mention the content moderators, the infrastructure workers, and the software engineers, are all invisible. The like, comment, and share buttons are designed to give us a rush of social validation without giving us time to pause and notice — or question — anything else, or anyone else but ourselves and the person we see on our screens.

Against the magic wand icon

Many AI tools are marked with a magic wand icon, magic sparkles, or other visual cues that indicate they are mysterious, magical, and not to be questioned.

Rationally, we all know these AI outputs aren’t the result of a magical wizard hiding in our laptops, and the insistence from tech companies that this is the case makes people feel lied to. We are all being expected to unilaterally accept that these tools make things appear out of thin air, whilst knowing that common sense dictates otherwise. Thus begins the social outcry, frustration with AI across all platforms, and a growing refusal to use AI in any capacity.

The human sense of navigation is core to how we interact with the world. We find ways from A to B by gathering information and plotting a course of action. Whether we are finding our way to a friend’s house or to the information we need on the internet, we are using the same skill set, and this skill set is essential to our sense of agency and autonomy over our experiences.

In its current form, AI, through the ideology of seamless design, erodes this agency. People have a clear emotional need to find their own way on the internet, and the failure of the magic wand icon underscores this. People need to navigate their own way, build mental models, and understand the path. Simply presenting people with answers isn’t how we’re wired.

Externalising collective imaginations

Social media platforms externalise the imaginative work that goes into creating our shared futures through a form of cognitive offloading, which Bernard Stiegler, ex-bank robber turned philosopher, coined tertiary memory. Tertiary memory is a form of memory that encodes others’ experiences into our understanding of the world, and it is key to social processes, playing a central role in the learning abilities that set humanity apart.

Stiegler argues that technics (technology in the broad sense of the word, extending to tools such as writing, art and machines) create these tertiary memories through our interaction with them. These technics have the power to create social reality through these processes, by dictating what is and is not part of our tertiary memories.

With social media as the primary medium in the social sphere, we find a significant portion of the population with an individualistic tertiary memory and, as Steigler argues, a diminishing sense of a collective, shared future. This causes a sense of constant now.

It’s in the best interest of Big Tech to continue this emotional sense of constant anxiety, constant now—this sense of anxiety that keeps you hooked on their platforms. Through technics and the creation of tertiary memories, we do not develop a collective understanding of one another, of our future, or of the real work behind the internet.

A future in which this invisible labour is considered, and wealth and power are more evenly distributed, must adopt a different view of labour representation for the end user. If done correctly, this will enable the development of a collective consensus for a co-operative, sovereign internet by creating a new set of tertiary memories that build on and understand the labour of the digital age.

Seamful design as a democratic right

A design philosophy grounded in sovereignty, co-operative economics, and democracy should reform relationships among users, workers, and organisations by making the underlying work and the institutions that shape it legible. Seamful design is an approach that advocates showing the ‘seams’ of the internet to users, as a key to promoting democracy in the digital world. Its advocates question the premise of “seamless” design, arguing that the harm done to autonomy and power relations far outweighs the perceived positivity of a “seamless” experience.

What might this look like in practice? Design interventions that follow these principles should allow people to easily understand the connections between the pixels on their screen and the people behind them. It should be non-intrusive, working towards an internet that promotes community cohesion through gentle awareness.

Solution 1: A dedicated, easily accessible interface element (e.g., a small, persistent icon) that, when clicked, reveals the specific policy version, the governing body (e.g., a DAO, a corporate board, a community council), and the last three policy changes that directly affect the user’s current view or interaction.

Solution 2: A persistent, non-intrusive interface element that displays the real-time, cumulative labour cost (in time, money, or compute) associated with the content being consumed. For a short-form video, it might show: “Content Creation: 4.5 hrs (Creator X); Moderation: 0.02 hrs (Mod Y); Compute/Bandwidth: £0.003.”

Legibility as ideology: Case studies in governance and labour revelation

We can see this in practice through two seemingly opposed examples: the widely used Wikipedia and the controversial Palantir. Both entities are experts in creating tertiary memories through a fascinating combination of obfuscation and a deep awareness of the labour processes behind each click, and how these processes should be organised and communicated to end users.

Wikipedia & the emotional foundation of institutional transparency

The co-founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, has been appearing in the media to discuss the controversial Online Safety Bill and its implications for Wikipedia’s mission, particularly the role of moderators and the risks of being required to disclose their identities.

Wikipedia has long advocated community-built technology rooted in values of transparency and transparent governance. This approach has allowed it to build arguably the most successful knowledge-sharing infrastructure on the internet. What sets Wikipedia apart is the transparency of its labour and governance procedures.

The visibility of edit histories allows users to track changes, understand the collaborative effort that goes into each page, and recognise the contributions of diverse editors. This not only creates transparency but also lays an emotional foundation of trust, shared ownership, and togetherness. The friction throughout the creation process of each and every article is clear for all to see through these edit histories, restoring a sense of trust in the truth of the information in each page - in an age where this accuracy is often underconsidered.

The system is designed to be self-sustaining and demonstrates how clear, transparent systems and people-design can align a large, messy base with a public‑good mission by building emotional investment and collective consensus.

Palantir, technopolitics & unconscious drives

On the other end of the political spectrum, we can also see the infamous “definitely not a data company,” Palantir, as another example of the crucial importance of careful, deep consideration of labour and decision-making processes.

Often portrayed in the media as a Disney-villain-like entity, Palantir takes on data interpretation work for public bodies, which are themselves often portrayed as militaristic or otherwise nefarious. They have developed their terrible reputation through questions about surveillance and algorithmic bias that inevitably arise in any work involving large amounts of sensitive data.

For example, Palantir’s predictive policing software, deployed in US departments like the LAPD, has been shown to perpetuate racial biases by disproportionately targeting minority neighbourhoods based on historical arrest data, amplifying existing inequalities through opaque algorithms. But this happens across almost all examples of AI & data being used in the public sector. Virginia Eubanks’ “Automating Inequality” discusses this in relation to welfare systems, where automated decision-making often leads to vital support being unfairly denied to vulnerable populations. “I, Daniel Blake” is a dramatisation of a real story in which similar algorithmic decision-making led to dire consequences for many UK benefit claimants.

The theatrical reputation they have developed serves to obscure the largely mundane data and integration work the company actually does, allowing them to get ahead of any criticism by painting themselves as the villains from the get-go and using that reputation to oversell the work they provide.

Their CEO, Alex Karp, has a background in philosophy and psychoanalysis, with a particular interest in Marxism and humanity’s tendency to relieve unconscious drives through irrationality. Karp calls himself a socialist and is known to lecture his employees on the importance of Marxist theory (while maintaining his wealth and position, of course).

Palantir’s edge does not lie in uniquely advanced software, but in understanding and shaping institutions and unconscious drives. Karp’s most recent book, “The Technological Republic,” while of questionable scholarly integrity, also sheds light on this. The book examines and explains the different organisational structures that inspire Palantir, including honeybee swarms and flocks of starlings. Taken together with Wikipedia, this shows how labour and decision‑making are considered, framed and revealed to the public are central to pursuing any ideological project for the internet.

Community cohesion through design

Ethics are important, but we won’t win people over on ethics alone. The contrast between Wikipedia’s transparency and Palantir’s theatrical approach highlights the potential for design interventions that move toward a genuinely co-operative and sovereign internet, in which conscious technopolitics distributes power fairly among users, communities, creators, journalists, artists, and infrastructure workers.

A new design paradigm is about building a more democratic, open internet rooted in principles of sovereignty through legibility and clever design. But it is also about a psychological transformation from isolated interaction toward a more integrated community experience.

It is about improving people’s day-to-day lives and experiences by giving them the information they need to see themselves as part of a whole society, make informed choices, connect with others, and feel good about their decisions.

A redesigned reward loop would de-emphasise individual vanity metrics (likes, shares) and instead highlight metrics related to collective effort and shared achievements. This loop could involve 4 key steps:

1. Engage with the interface element (such as the cumulative labour hours widget)

2. Recognise others involved in the process, fostering a sense of community by seeing yourself in the Other (which is essential in identity formation).

3. Connection & Impact: With a new understanding, connect with others and make an impact beyond the screen. For example, donating to Wikipedia.

This creates a small emotional reward, starting a gradual shift towards an online culture that values the hidden labour behind the internet. Ensuring this reward creates the change it intends to involves carefully considering the appeal and design of the element (is it clear and visually appealing), and asking the following questions:

1. Considering recognition processes and how this element builds solidarity, will the user recognise themselves as part of a social whole through this design?

2. Is it accessible for the user to create real change after the experience (for example, in their consumption patterns, or by connecting with others)?

What’s next?

This is why I’m part of the team building BTN Media—a news aggregator with a distinct focus on UK independent media. Currently under development, Bulletin is a news aggregator redesigning the relationships among independent media, online revenue streams, and readers.

Building BTN means mapping out every decision point and process—aggregation, publisher outreach, algorithmic curation, moderation, community feedback, and engagement. Each of these elements is being designed to be transparent and democratically shaped, ensuring that labour and automation are both visible and continuously improvable.

To achieve this, we’re prototyping a microtipping incentive structure. This system empowers readers to direct money and data to specific outlets and projects, making it clear where their support goes. By providing clear breakdowns of “where your money goes,” we hope to align autonomy, emotional investment, and trust for everyone involved. This is the blueprint for a new digital contract that places readers, publishers, and technologists on equal footing as collaborators in the future of news.

What do we need to do to see this implemented at scale? That is not a question I can answer here, but I hope to have made a start. The next steps should involve developing a voluntary design framework, tracking its effectiveness, and using this research to lobby governments and engage larger organisations. The key to a sovereign internet is deliberately designed connectivity, and proof that this design method works, creating emotional connection beyond individualistic engagement metrics. Let’s get started.

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One year ago, I launched a crowdfund for my next book, We Should Own The Economy, a new vision for the future of capitalism and our world. I raised $75,000 to write, market, and sell a book without the need of a publishing house.

Now, my community round is officially closing—this is your last chance to be part of the round or increase your investment, before it closes at the end of April. Investors will earn 40% of book profits, including everything we earn from book sales, a research trip, a launch party and the conference we will be hosting when it debuts. Another 10% will be donated to GiveDirectly.

Here's the link to participate!

I’ve been writing the chapters in public ever since I debuted the project on WeFunder. The scope has significantly expanded since then to include not just economic reform, but government reform as well. My manuscript is now at 43,000 words and I am about halfway through writing the book. I’ve hired an editor to help me put together the final version—my old Esquire editor, Adrienne Westfeld—and I’ve completed an outline for the rest of the book with a clear and detailed research path for completing it.

I’m actively researching these parts now, with plans to publish them online this year and next.

Here is my updated outline (you can see where there are plenty of blank spaces to fill in) 👇🏻

This has been a fun and collaborative writing process. Investors are newsletter subscribers and board members who have been meeting with me quarterly to help me brainstorm ideas and introduce me to the people and organizations I should know and learn more about. This community of experts has directly led me to so much of what I’m researching and writing about! Not to mention, publishing the ideas live has allowed me to update the manuscript based on feedback and comments from knowledgeable readers as everyone follows along.

Once this book is done, it will be clear: This wasn’t written in isolation and edited by a publishing house with no expertise in the subject matter. This was written out loud, published for and benefiting from a knowledgeable readerbase with a vested interest in contributing to the book they want to read, while financially benefiting from its success. The goal isn’t to pursue corporate interests here, but reader interests.

And that’s exactly the kind of alignment I’m arguing for in my book!

If you want to be part of the only book with 200+ investors, this is the last chance!

Here's the link to learn more!

Thanks for supporting it along the way. I’m honored to have your trust and support as I continue the work from here…

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This is an interview with Nathan Schneider for Internet Sovereignty, nine writers exploring the future of the internet through an essay collection and print pamphlet. Support the project by collecting the digital or print edition. 👇🏻

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Nathan Schneider is the author of Everything for Everyone and Governable Spaces. Here is our conversation about how we can create better internet platforms, available as a video (above) or edited transcript (below).

Elle Griffin: What is technofeudalism, and what can we create instead?

Nathan Schneider: There are two approaches to this metaphor. The first is that of Yanis Varoufakis, the economist and former finance minister of Greece, who wrote in his book Technofeudalism that capitalism is being undermined by platform economies that are intrinsic monopolies built around achieving dominance over a whole sector of the economy and eliminating competition.

Another approach to the feudalist metaphor is the one I take in my book Governable Spaces, which begins by asking: Do we experience democracy in a group chat, a Facebook group, an Instagram thread, or an open-source software project? And how did that compare to experiencing democracy before the internet existed? My mother’s garden club, for example, has far more democratic structuring, elections, bylaws, and procedures than virtually any online space I’ve ever been part of. I call this habit of everyday oligarchy in online spaces “implicit feudalism.”

I was interested in tracing the history of implicit feudalism and how it gave rise to a political ideology that craves a return to monarchism, which we now see very much alive in American politics and politics in many parts of the world today. I argue that turn is not just a rehashed authoritarianism, but is actually coming out of our experience with online life.

Elle: Are you saying online life should be more democratic if we want a more democratic society?

Nathan: It’s less that they’re antidemocratic, and it’s more that they didn’t even try. That’s why I call the feudalism “implicit”—because people were calling the early internet “democratic” when a lot of these norms were forming. But in actual practice, they did not set up tools for collective decision making, or the basic features of democratic life that people like Alexis de Tocqueville or Robert Putnam knew as everyday democracy.

The practices that we might experience in a garden club, a labor union, a neighborhood club, or a mutual insurance organization—none of these are present in the corporate platforms that now run the internet, or even the very community-driven platforms that came before the internet was commercialized. In some respects, it’s not just a critique of corporate power that I’m talking about. It’s actually an ideology that came before. Corporations figured out how to make gobs and gobs of money on the internet, but now we’re seeing the deeper consequences.

Elle: What’s an example of an online platform that you think shows how this could work better?

Nathan: Great question. Some of the early cases that come to mind are Wikipedia, where you have participants co-governing the platform. You have open source projects like the Debian project, which runs the software that a lot of web servers are running on. A driver’s cooperative in New York (and now here in Colorado) has a rideshare platform governed and owned by its drivers, and Stocksy is a stock photography service that is co-owned by its workers and photographers. A new one that’s really exciting is called Subvert, it’s an attempt at a Bandcamp replacement that is owned by musicians.

These kinds of models have tried to kind of dream up a vision for a different kind of internet, but so often they’re running up against incredible pressures and incredible power. They’re struggling to raise half a million dollars with a crowdfunding campaign. Meanwhile, their competitor can raise $30 million on a pitch deck. So we’re really in a situation where we know it’s possible to do things differently, and the experiments are out there, but we don’t have a system that’s well set up to support the real success of those experiments.

It’s really important to recognize that the ability to get $30 million on a pitch deck is fueled by the law and by the idea of venture capital. This model is the dominant way of financing tech companies, but that too had to be invented. It wasn’t until the late 1970s, when laws were changed and regulations were adjusted, that venture capital started to take off. We have to recognize that the situation we’re in was constructed through policy and decision-making, and other systems are possible too.

Elle: Do we need a platform cooperative version of every internet platform? Not just a musician-owned Spotify, but also an artist-owned Patreon and a writer-owned Substack?

Nathan: Those alternatives exist. Ghost is a nonprofit-driven platform that operates on a different model. For Patreon, you have Open Collective which has some really interesting differences but is also working asymmetrically. But their ability to win the entire market is not the same as venture-backed competitors. The alternatives are out there, and they’re possible, but it’s a real David and Goliath story.

Elle: That’s frustrating as a writer and creator on the internet, because you see all of these great examples, but a lot of them are very niche and very small. I read Everything for Everyone recently, which was published eight years ago, and when I looked up every company that was featured in that book, so many of them were closed or gone. So you had all these great examples that really empowered me and inspired me, but then we can’t even create it. Everything stays too small, we can never get the $30 million from a pitch deck to make them bigger, or the system isn’t allowing us to do it. Why are these experiments not working out in the end?

Nathan: The first reason is just that startups are always high risk. Whether they’re venture-backed or not, doing something new is very hard. The second reason is that, historically, cooperatives have tended to play cookie-cutter roles. You have your credit unions, your food co-op, your hardware co-op—they take a model that existed in one community, and they replicate it in lots of communities, and that’s still a really viable approach. But when you’re trying to build an online platform, network effects are really important. It really matters how many people you have participating to create value for the platform. It’s hard to achieve that scale with any amount of funding. And your likelihood of success without a ton of funding is even lower.

Elle: Is it a funding constraint primarily?

Nathan: And, by extension, a policy constraint. I was working with the founder of Meetup.com some years ago. His company was up for sale by WeWork, and its revenue is all from its users. He thought it would be perfect as a co-op, and that’s what he dreamed of, but the US didn’t have the structures in place to be able to do that. We have to recognize the way in which public policy is saying which structures are okay and which structures are not. When you create that structure, capital is able to flow into them at large scales. The problem is that, at least in the United States, we’ve always siloed it. We’ve always said, “You can have a cooperative structure, but it has to be for this very specific problem.” What I believe we need are structures that allow us to do anything we want with shared ownership. And that includes tech platforms.

Elle: I spoke with a lawyer about turning my business into a co-op and he actually advised against that, because he said it would limit what we can do financially just because of the way the co-op structure is set up in the US. It doesn’t need to be that way!

But I also want to go back to talking about the network effects problem. Because in a world in which the venture-backed world rules, and the cooperative structures are disadvantaged, how can we compete? As a musician, do you put your music on Spotify and hope for that big reach despite the economic disadvantage? Or do you put it on Bandcamp or Subvert where the economics are much better but the audience is much smaller? Are we placing ourselves in the hands of technofeudalism by living on the larger platforms? Can we still create sovereign collectives inside the technofeudal structures that currently exist? Or do we need to create new parallel ones outside of them?

Nathan: It’s the oldest question in the world, right? When you’re in the empire, how do you create the space of liberation? I used to be a freelance reporter, and back then, I did not have a choice to not be on all the social media platforms. One of the advantages of being an academic now is that my paycheck is not dependent on my social media reach, so I get to spend a lot more time on, for instance, a cooperative I co-founded on Mastodon called Social.coop. It’s a social media platform that is governed as a cooperative and I just prefer to spend my time there. My reach is much, much smaller than if I were spending more time on X or Instagram, and I still broadcast to those places, but I don’t really hang out there out of preference. But I totally recognize the way in which others need to make other choices in that regard.

Elle: I don’t know if you’re familiar with the platform Metalabel, but we’ve been publishing collaborative print pamphlets there, which has been a fun way to dip our toes into profit sharing and creating cooperative media projects, without needing to actually become a cooperative. Do you see advances in technology aiding these models? Is it the legal business structure we need, or do we just need platforms that can facilitate these transactions?

Nathan: I think what Metalabel is doing is really interesting. My lab did a release on Metalabel early on, and we’ve been having conversations with founder Yancey Strickler all along. I really appreciate how they’re trying to figure out where we can meet people.

A question that I think is worth asking is: What kind of sharing is important in any given project? Sometimes it’s the governance that really matters. We need to make sure that people have a voice. With Social.coop, nobody’s making significant money off of it. What matters is the governance. Sometimes profit-sharing is the component that matters.

I think it’s really important to recognize that the way technology is designed makes huge differences in what’s available to us democratically. For example, a Facebook group does not have the functionality to vote off an admin. It wouldn’t be that hard to build that functionality in, but it’s just not there. One thing that’s interesting about Metalabel is that it started out with Blockchain technology which broke the logic of implicit feudalism because it wasn’t built on a central server. As a result, people started, in 2017 to 2020, developing really interesting governance experiments.

In that regard, the nature of the technology has huge effects on the democratic possibilities available to people using it.

Elle: How much governing access should I have online? How much should Substack take into consideration what I think as a writer on the platform? And how much should Yancey Strickler take into consideration how I want to use Metalabel? The Elysian Collective is a community of writers gathering together on a project—how much governance should the other writers in my world have over what we’re doing?

I’ve seen discussions on Substack about the contradiction between what writers want Substack to be like and what the platform knows will make writers money. The writer thinks, “I want this to be a quiet place where I can read and write and nothing else,” but the platform can see that when it adds other features that helps writers with discoverability, it also increases their sales potential. Who should be in charge of those decisions, and how do we balance those competing ideas?

Nathan: Those are really important questions, and they’re deeply related. This is something my colleagues and I just published a paper on. It’s called “Online Governance Surfaces and Attention Economies.” Say that we win and we democratize everything: What should we expect of ourselves and each other for participating in governance?

Many of the people reading this are probably co-owners of major companies that affect their lives. That ownership might be constrained to financial interests—they own stock—but there is a system designed to maximize shareholder return. The goal for other kinds of shared ownership models is to broaden the reasons that we become stakeholders. Maybe you’re a member of Substack for reasons other than just making Substack richer and richer and richer. Maybe there are priorities you have for your Substack that are different from what an investor’s priorities would be.

That doesn’t mean we should do away with leadership. Leadership still matters. Leaders still have to make hard decisions. People who lead investor-owned companies still have to have hard conversations with stakeholders. The question is: Who are the stakeholders they should be up at night worrying about? And I think a lot of leaders wish they could be accountable to people other than the people that they happen to be accountable to.

Shared ownership is less about making every decision by committee and having everybody in the room have an input on everything, and more about who you are accountable to at the end of the day. Who do you have to answer to? That’s what this is about. It’s not about introducing an unsustainable sort of micromanagement into the operation of an organization.

Elle: As a journalist, I’ve worked in rooms where the editor-in-chief has the final say and chooses everything the writers write about, and at DAOs where nobody was in charge, and everybody was writing about whatever they wanted and there was no cohesive direction at all. What could an ideal scenario look like for creative stakeholder ownership?

Nathan: I think the starting point is having stakeholders elect the board. That means they are not involved in management, they are not the president. They’re not interfering with how the HR department functions. They have that one piece of input, which is the same piece of input shareholders often have in investor-owned companies. This might sound boring, but it’s the most important.

Basically, everyone who has experience in the cooperative scene agrees that having no leaders and voting on everything is completely unsustainable and ridiculous. Many had to learn that the hard way, and sometimes through interesting experiments, but they often end up replicating a lot of the structures that already exist in corporate America but with different names. “Quarters” become “seasons,” “proxy votes” are “liquid democracy,” and so on. Boards were invented for the same reason that we invented two- and four-year elections. You need to have this kind of structure.

That’s not to say we can’t improve these structures. There’s a lot of excitement these days among people interested in sortition, using randomly selected juries for more functions. That could become a lot cheaper using online tools, and AI companies and social media companies have been experimenting with these kinds of practices under the hood. X’s Community Notes feature is built on a really amazing democratic tool called Polis that’s all about finding points of agreement. So there’s a lot of really interesting stuff going on right now that I think could open the door to moving beyond representatives on boards.

Elle: I love the idea of tech platforms facilitating a kind of new democracy. For instance, with the Elysian Collective, I curate the group of writers who participate in our collaborative print pamphlets. But with Metalabel’s new Dark Forest Operating System, members will soon be able to publish something secretly inside a small community, and members could upvote various essays into pamphlets. Are there other experiments you find exciting when it comes to the democratization of the internet?

Nathan: I’ve run a few publications, too, and I think we have to be really thoughtful about what we want to democratize. Sometimes we don’t want to democratize taste. You are the person that people have come to trust and maybe they’re here because you’re going to make calls the group as a whole isn’t going to make. Communities of taste are built around a vision, and often that vision is very personal.

But maybe you can democratize things other than taste. Maybe it’s the infrastructure you democratize, perhaps by sharing the revenues like you’re doing with your book, We Should Own The Economy. That’s a really powerful way to share ownership, while not changing whose voice is going to be guiding the process.

The more I learn about democratization, the more I think we can’t throw away everything we know from other kinds of organizations. Let’s just get the accountability right and have the right stakeholders in mind.

Elle: While you were talking, I couldn’t help but think that there is a lot of voter choice, so to speak, online already just by the fact that you can subscribe to somebody, and unsubscribe from somebody. You can choose to pay them. You can choose not to pay them. You can choose to get off the platform and use a different one. By virtue of competition, both platform competition and creator competition, there already is a lot of choice on behalf of the reader or the patron of that art, so that alone is at least some form of democratic practice.

Nathan: The role of exit is a really important aspect of online experience. One thing I really appreciate about Substack is that they build the platform on an open protocol email—the exit option is always there. You can always move your subscriber list to a different email provider. Of course, they are trying to build more “lock-in” features, but the initial impulse is very powerful.

But I also don’t think exit is enough. The economist Albert O. Hirschman had this distinction of exit and voice, arguing that you need to balance both. And that is especially important when we start to become dependent on these platforms, and the exit option isn’t actually real. If we’re creators trying to make a living with our communities and the exit option is not real, voice should be an imperative. And that’s something that we often haven’t had.

Elle: If you could architect a better future for all of these platforms, what are the things you think platforms should implement that would give more voice to the people that are who are actually creating the internet?

Nathan: Companies can be wildly successful by being appropriately accountable. Cory Doctorow just put out this book about Enshittification—that platforms start by being wonderful to their users, and then turn on them once they have to make money. He’s right about that, and we should fight for a system in which companies actually can succeed and be accountable to their users at the same time.

In 2019, Uber and Airbnb were getting ready for their IPOs and they submitted letters to the SEC asking to share ownership with their users. The Airbnb letter, in particular, was like: “Look, our users are what make this platform possible. We want to align our incentives with our users. We want to hear from our users. We want them to have a voice in governance.” That became really important when the pandemic hit, and they needed buy-in from those hosts, but the SEC didn’t have a framework for that.

These companies are often demonized as the worst of the worst platforms that dominate everything, but they were begging for a framework that would align their incentives with their users. And the SEC couldn’t do it.

That’s all I’m asking, in some respects: Let’s start with a really good version of what Airbnb and Uber wanted to achieve at the moment. Where companies are going up for an IPO, and can align incentives with their users because users are the ones who actually make the business healthy. I hate to be such a corporate chill here, but over the years, I’ve encountered so many founders who just wish they had better options. They wish they didn’t have to make a bad business decision and compromise the long-term health of the community and platform they built just because of the need to meet short-term financial interest, and because the only game in town is investor ownership.

Elle: When you say, “align incentives with users,” what do you mean? How could Airbnb have aligned incentives with users? Or, how could Uber have done that at the point of IPO?

Nathan: In their case, they were asking for something really modest, which was just to be able to grant equity to their users the way they do with their employees. We already incentivize our employees with equity; why can’t we do that with our non-employees?

But let’s think about the even bigger picture: What if a company could also be accountable to the users they depend on. Uber drivers, Airbnb hosts, they all want to make money too. Writers want Substack to be successful because they want to be successful. I think we could deepen that alignment even further. For instance, the goal of the Drivers Cooperative in Denver is to make drivers money. That’s really cool! They have very serious disagreements about how to make drivers money. They’ve argued, for instance, about algorithmic pricing and surge pricing—should we do that? Should we not? But that company, at the end of the day, knows that the goal is not to screw over drivers, it’s to make this as lucrative as possible for the people who are driving cars in this city. I think that is a totally reasonable goal we should be able to run a business on.

Over and over, I’ve seen people try to build these reasonable businesses, and then they get undercut by unreasonable forces in the economy. We have to find a way to make that stop.

Elle: I agree, thank you so much for speaking with me. Any final words?

Nathan: Thank you for your questions and your interest, but most of all for your experiments. The greatest successes for shared ownership were built on experiments. The Rural Electrification Act in 1936 happened because Roosevelt, when he was governor of New York, saw the experiments among the farmers who were sharing electrical power, and he knew it could work.

These experiments matter so much when it comes to changing the system.

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Now, we’re ready to open the app up for your use.

Join us at Mea.Media!

I hope you’ll participate in our experiment of building this app together this month. First step: Join the website and save it to your phone as an app. To do that, visit the website from your phone browser, then click the share button followed by “save to home screen”—that will add it as an app to your phone!

Here’s my profile on the platform if you want to try collecting a few things. I’m also following everyone else on the platform so it’s a good place to start finding people and collecting things. Here’s my cofounder Jake’s profile, he’ll be a great person to follow as well!

Now, I’d love to get you involved! Write something in the app! Send your drafts to others and allow them to provide feedback before you publish! Publish a standalone post or series in it! Collect writing you like and save it to your library. Highlight articles you’ve collected and take notes on them. Start discussion threads at the bottom of posts and chapters! See all of your notes organized into your notebook! Follow people and comment on chapters alongside other collectors!

There is no real money in the app right now—it’s Monopoly Money—spend with reckless abandon and collect everything you’d like. You won’t be charged.

This app is in Alpha—there will be bugs! If you find them, please report them in our online feedback channel. If you have any feedback or ideas, share those in the community too. We’ll be fixing bugs, taking in your feedback regularly, and incorporating your thoughts through constant and daily product updates. Register for our weekly office hours to join us for further brainstorming:

• Join our private online community—we’re meeting in the #mea-media chat channel for brainstorming, feedback, and bug reporting

• Attend office hours to join us for feedback and brainstorming:

  • April 15th, Office Hours! Register here.

  • April 22nd, Office Hours! Register here.

  • April 29th, Office Hours! Register here.

We are already taking in all of the feedback from our call last night. Jake and I are currently sifting through the list and deciding which of your ideas to add to the app this week. We’ll notify you of every product update we make in the online community, and we’ll be taking in your notes and suggestions in real time, adding those to the app too. Thanks for being part of a one month expeirment to build it with us!

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Why Mea?

Our name is latin for “my” or “mine” and comes from the phrase “Omnia mea mecum porto.” All that is mine I carry with me.

As people were fleeing town with all of their belongings, they asked the sage Bias of Priene why he carried nothing—Cicero quoted this phrase as his response. The knowledge he had studied and learned was his forever. That’s our inspiration.

Mea.Media. My media.

Collect a post or series and it lives in your library forever. Highlight it, take notes in the margins, these are your private notes to keep. You should be able to export the articles, books, and notes you’ve taken at any time and take them with you. The media you buy should be yours to keep.

This is a prototype and living art project designed to think about the future of publishing in the era of the internet. We appreciate you being here for the live experience.

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and I built a new publishing app together. We’re going to give you a live demo of the product tomorrow, then we’re going to give you open access so you can start playing with it! We’ll host weekly office hours for the next four weeks where you can bring your feedback and suggestions and we’ll release weekly feature updates based on your feedback.

As a live demonstration of the ideas we’re talking about through our Interent Sovereignty pamphlet, we thought it would be fun to actually build them together: A prototype for the future of publishing on the internet. Here’s how you can join us on this experiential journey:

• Register for our demo tomorrow! (We’ll share the recording on Thursday)

• Join our private online community—we’ve created a chat channel just for this project!

• Register for our office hours and join us for feedback and brainstorming:

  • April 8th, Demo Day! Register here.

  • April 15th, Office Hours! Register here.

  • April 22nd, Office Hours! Register here.

  • April 29th, Office Hours! Register here.

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We built this because Jake Simonds is a software engineer and “open social” advocate who wants us to own our online identities rather than rent them from platforms that hold us hostage to them. I am writer who has long advocated for a disruption of the publishing industry and a way to publish books and series online that makes them easy to navigate, share, and monetize (I’ve given a TEDx talk on the topic, as well as written about it here, here, and here). We met at Network School in Malaysia and, with Claude Code now at our disposal, spent the month combining our powers to build this prototype.

We’re excited to share it with you!!!

Our app is our vision for the future of owned media. You collect an article, series, or book—it gets added to your library forever. No long-term subscription required.

Our goal is to be the perfect place to read books online. That means an app that holds your place and easily navigates to the next chapter of your book. The ability to highlight and take notes on the things you’re reading, and save those notes to an organized notebook. Only discussions are public, and they’re only available to paid collectors.

I also wanted to create the perfect place to write—that means an editor that can replace Google Docs entirely. Write directly in an aesthetically beautiful composer with a highly organized sidebar so you easily navigate long and unwieldy manuscripts. You can even invite people to comment and make suggestions on the draft, just like you can do with Google Docs, but directly in the composer and without needing to copy and paste everything from one place to another.

And no notifications ever. This is a quiet place to read and write with no social media-ification. Everything you save to your library is yours to keep, highlight, and take notes on. You can set daily, weekly, or monthly email notifications that alert you only of the things you want to be notified about.

I want to be clear: We are not planning to take on Kindle or Substack. Do not approach this project with a “How can you possibly compete for market share with Substack or Kindle?” mindset. That is not our goal. This is an art project designed to ask the question: What would we build if we were building it only for the most niche audience of people no venture capital company would focus their time and money on: writers and readers.

Our app is the vision Jake Simons and I have for that future. We were calling it “iTunes for writing” until we realized no one remembered what iTunes was. Back in the day, you could buy a single song for $1 or you could buy an album for $12 and that music would be added to your private, offline library where you could own and listen to it forever. What if you could similarly buy your favorite article for $1 or a bundle of them for $12 (a book) and could have offline access to them in your library forever?

We’re both big fans of owned media. If you subscribe to my Substack today you can access everything I write, but if you unsubscribe tomorrow you will be locked out of everything you’ve read. You don’t own it and thus you have to pay to rent it forever! Subscriptions are a great way for writers to earn ongoing support of their work, but as a reader I would also love to collect and save the writing I love. I can, after all, purchase my favorite book and grab it from my shelf whenever I want to refer back to it. I should be able to collect online articles and books the same way.

In my mind, the ideal publishing app should kill Substack, Kindle, Reader, and Google Docs—and we built that! But again, that is not our goal. It is simply to build it: the ideal place to read and write.

During the Internet Sovereignty project, we thought it would be fun to open it up to other writers and readers too so that we could continue the work of building it together. Help us create the art project! After our demo tomorrow, you’ll be able to get the app, write something in it, and publish a standalone post or series in it. Collect writing you like and save it to your library. Highlight posts and take notes on the and see all of your notes organized into your notebook. Comment on chapters alongside other collectors. Send your drafts to others and allow them to provide feedback before you publish!

For one month, this project is an experiment in developing for niche audiences rather than mass market ones. We’re building something just for us. Not something that needs to turn a big profit. I hope you’ll join the experiment with us!

See you on the call tomorrow—we’ll send it to you on Thursday if you can’t make it. See you then!

Elle & Jake

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