On an airplane recently I watched the Colorado River carve through the mountains in places without a road beside it. I want to live there, I thought—to hole up in a cabin in the woods. To let the world do all the crazy things it will do without me. To live peacefully and beautifully without having to worry about any of it.

This desire to abscond to the wilds is not a new phenomenon. This is the tradition Henry David Thoreau steps into, as well as John Muir, and now Martijn Doolaard. None of these individuals had to live this way, but all chose to forgo the comforts of modern life for something quieter.

I crave it.

The more I’m online, aware, watching the news. The more busy life gets, full of travel and calendar invites scheduled a month out. The more money I spend and things I have. It doesn’t feel enough anymore to not be on social media. I crave a deeper immersion. To not just get rid of parts of it but to get rid of it all. To enjoy something much simpler.

To enjoy something without.

Without screens and media and television.
Without microwaves and delivery and convenience.
Without cars and airplanes and speed.
Without calendars and schedules and planning.
Without expensive clothes and expensive vacations and always craving more.

Just a cabin in the woods with nothing.

It’s a sign of progress, they say, that our standard of living has increased. That more people can afford to buy more things and go to more places than ever before. It’s a sign of progress, they say, that we can reach anyone anywhere at all times—that we have phones and computers and internets. It’s a sign of progress, they say, that we can work on our computers and not out in the world with our hands.

And yet the more I have of all of it, I find myself wanting less of it. I want to live out in the wilds. The pandemic was the closest I’ve come to living that way, and among my happiest times. We didn’t travel beyond where we could drive. My husband and I got in our camper van and spent long stretches in the woods. We cooked simple meals outside and drank tea. We hiked up the closed ski slopes. I wasn’t online at all at the time, I was quietly working on a gothic novel no one ever heard of.

Now life has added everything back. The busy jobs and the busy calendars and the busy life. The tumultuous news and dramatic geopolitics. The phones and the notifications and the constant internet connection. The social media-ification of even the quietest online spaces.

Perhaps that’s why I find myself following the lives of those who live more simply.

First Martijn, whom I mentioned in a previous article, and then Father Johannes M. Schwarz, the priest living next door to him in the Italian Alps. Father Johannes once walked 8,000 miles to Jerusalem and back with just a backpack, then requested a hermitage where he’s lived for eight years. His videos show him working on his cabin, painting iconography and stained glass, then at the end, donning the vestments of his order, sitting before his altar, the bread and the wine, a few words of reflection.

The idea of a hermitage has always called to me, especially as a writer. Couldn’t I live so simply too? These individuals appear to live so completely offline even as they use cameras to capture it and the internet to publish it. They probably have Starlink in their windows and functioning cell phones, but I’ve been imagining that they don’t. I’ve been pretending that they live a fully analog existence and only venture down the mountain once a week to publish their videos and answer comments.

I’ve been dreaming of a world where it is still possible to write quietly away from the world even as I still publish to it.

Whenever I think of taking it to this extreme, about leaving it all for a hermitage, my mind stops me. I wouldn’t actually be able to live in the woods, I think. Because I want to travel, I want my season tickets to the theater, I want to live close to a city where I can have friends, I want to be able to go to a restaurant sometimes.

I want.
I want.
I want.

I want… too many things.

And I have often satisfied those wants.

My husband and I lived on an austere budget for two decades, saving all the rest. I took great pride in making a meal at home even when more money could have bought it. And choosing to go to a concert was a big deal because we’d decided it was worth being the one thing we spent money on that month. We knew our priorities because we had to budget for them—my husband’s favorite thing was skiing because he was always willing to spend $1,000 of our annual budget for ski passes. And I loved theater so much I was willing to do the same for season tickets. Those were our big ticket items.

Then my husband quit his job and we spent a portion of our savings traveling around the world for 18 months. We went everywhere and did everything and it was a true joy of a lifetime—a fantasy I could never have dreamed of. So much so that I found myself constantly whispering to myself that it was real. “I’m riding the tube in London,” I would tell myself, “I’m kayaking the waters of New Zealand,” “I’m camping on the beach in Japan.”

Seeing the world was intoxicating, because now I want more of it. I want to see so many places in China, I want to hike so many routes in the Alps, I want to explore so many castles and ruins and histories. My list has expanded tenfold.

And spending money was its own kind of floodgate. I saw Taylor Swift in Lisbon—it was the only concert in my life I have ever spent so extravagantly for and it was one of the most fun nights of my life. And now…. wouldn’t it be great to see Harry Styles too?

Wouldn’t it be great to have more beautiful clothing and see more plays and eat out at more restaurants? Wouldn’t it be great to have more, more, more?

This is the trap the Cynics warned against. The Greek philosopher Diogenes lived in a jar and had only one possession, a bowl—that is, until he saw a child drinking with cupped hands and uttered the apocryphal phrase: “Fool that I am, to have been carrying superfluous baggage this whole time!”

My husband and I utter this phrase constantly—so much of our lives are superfluous baggage now.

My closet has become a metaphor for it. It’s not that I have a lot of things—I have around 60 articles of clothing and have for a decade—but sometimes I buy new things and discard the old ones to maintain my minimalism. It happens in phases: When I am balanced in my life, I can go years without buying anything new. I hang every piece to dry, iron every item with care, oil my leather bags and boots, and re-dye the ribbon on my hat. I love caring for the few beautiful pieces I’ve curated, and genuinely appreciate everything I have. But sometimes, triggered by a beautiful thing I’ve found, I’ll go on a spree. I’ll buy new things in an endless quest for “the perfect thing”—the perfect white tee, the perfect knit tank, the perfect black sweater.

I hate this about myself. It’s wasteful, it’s expensive. It’s never being satisfied with what I already have. It’s feeling like what I have isn’t already good enough.

It was this facet of modern life Diogenes raged against. Because there are two ways to get what you want: To always go after the next thing you want, or to want less. To want what you already have. The rumored story is that Alexander the Great once offered Diogenes anything he wanted, and the philosopher asked the king to move aside because he was blocking the sun.

If only the sun were our only desire! Haven’t we all been happy with so little? If all we had in our day was a spot of sunshine to walk or picnic in, couldn’t we be happy without needing much else?

But it’s hard to rebuke the world. While writing this, I mused to my husband that, if a venture capitalist offered me millions to build exactly what I want, I would love to tell him to move aside because he was blocking the sun. “But think of the good you could build with it!” he countered.

That is the allure.

They say that happiness goes up as our income does, but I’ve always hated that statistic. Happiness isn’t a worthy enough goal. We should ensure an adequate baseline for everyone, but should we also make people absurdly happy with their yachts and their private jets and their extravagant vacations?

It’s not that the wealthy are to blame, we do the same stuff within our own means. My husband jokes that Taylor Swift flies a private jet so it’s ok if he eats a hamburger. It’s a silly line, but it comes with a truth: we all have our own excesses. And how happy they make us isn’t any indication of how many more of them we should have.

I’ve always been happy, for what it’s worth, but I like my life more when I don’t want as much. When I’m satisfied with everything I already have.

The filled life—with more money and more things and more vacations. With the internet and the notifications and the news. With the calendar notifications and the texts and the emails and the Slacks. It’s exhausting. It’s endless. It’s excessive. I want to get away from it.

I’m not alone.

I recently attended an event in which we had to draw the place we would live if we were going to live by ourselves forever and no one would ever see it. I drew a ryokan in the mountains filled with bookshelves—it had a tea table on the terrace where I would write overlooking a tranquil pool that spilled into a waterfall. It was surrounded by hiking trails, and had an outdoor shower for when I returned from long walks.

When we were done with our drawings we compared notes—not a single person had included a phone or a computer or any form of technology. None had imagined big houses filled with lots of things. Most designed a life with much less, rather than one with much more.

What does it say about modern life that what we actually want is a much simpler version of it? One that is largely accessible to all of us without needing very much to achieve it?

Perhaps it says that some of the conveniences we’ve built are not actually conveniences at all but the tiresome things we have to keep up just because of the slow creep of adding them all. Perhaps it says that adding more and more and more doesn’t mean better. Perhaps it says that some of the progresses we’ve made aren’t actually the progresses we want.

Perhaps not everyone feels this way. But for those of us who dream about leaving it all for the woods, perhaps it means there’s another future we should be working toward. Not the one with the screens and the shiny robots in every home. But the one without them.

The cabin in the woods, you understand, is not just a lifestyle dream, it is also a metaphor.

It is through this fantasy, through imagining what my life would be like if I really did abandon it all, that I can see more clearly what I want—quiet and simplicity and beauty—as well as what I don’t: notifications and internet connection and noise. I don’t need to physically move to the woods to achieve these ideals, but the craving for them is a tell. I can create a hermitage in my own house. I can choose not to travel for a while, to not attend everything. To return to our budget and prioritize only the things I love most. To want what I already have. To unsubscribe from the news and put my phone in a drawer and turn everything on airplane mode.

And being a writer or videographer is one way to force the ideal. In my normal life, I might not notice that a particular fern was “verdant, the precise fluorescent shade of absinthe,” but because I have to write about it, I do. And I might not get done with work and think “I’m going to bake bread now.” But if my job was to make a video about making bread, I would. I would dress a certain way and curate a certain aesthetic. The work itself is a forced constraint, and that creates a life spent baking with a certain aesthetic appeal. Martijn Doolaard’s cabin in the woods is curated by that task. So is Father Johannes’. So is Thoreau’s. So is my writing. Every article in my content calendar is a forced PhD in the things I want to research and think about, and this article my way of exploring why I long for a cabin in the woods.

In her novel A Prayer for the Crown Shy, Becky Chambers says, “the thing about fucking off to the woods is that unless you are a very particular, very rare sort of person, it does not take long to understand why people left said woods in the first place.”

We know why we left—for all of the progresses that have made our lives so much better. But then why do we keep wanting to return?

There’s something of the woods we forgot to bring with us.

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Thank you for reading,

Elle Griffin

Sometimes I watch Outlander and wish I lived in the 1700s. The book and series follow a time-traveling woman from the 20th century into the 18th, where she finds a rich life beekeeping and homesteading. When the sheep have been shorn, she gathers with friends to dye the yarn and knit it into blankets and clothing. Washing clothes is an afternoon spent by the river, raking cloth over washboards with friends.

How beautiful her existence is, I think. Perhaps I even crave it.

In the 18th century, we had to do these things to survive. Now we don’t. I purchase honey and vegetables from the store. My clothes are made by a machine, and cleaned by a machine. There is nothing I have to do with my day apart from sit in front of a computer for part of it, and assemble a few meals throughout it. At least in the developed world, leisure is abundant compared to any other time in history. What do we use it for? Social media and television, hours each day on screens.

Some have eschewed the modern world, trying to get some of the old one back.

Martijn Doolaard, for one, purchased an abandoned hamlet in the Italian Alps, and now my husband and I watch him build it back on YouTube. He wears suspenders and a wool hat as he mortars stone walls and slates his roof. His girlfriend bakes bread and tends to the chickens, wearing traditional wool skirts preserved by the old ladies who still wander through the Alps to chapel each Sunday. They walk to the neighbor’s house for dinner—he’s a Catholic priest living in a hermitage. At night, she tends to the fire, and he paints by the firelight.

As we watch, I feel jealous of their life. But it’s the same misplaced kind I feel watching Outlander—a romanticism for chores I don’t actually want to do. Because I could very well spend my day baking bread. I could tend to chickens or bees in my backyard if I wanted to. I could paint with my evenings, and even build my own house if I wanted to. I do some of these things—I knit sweaters and bake pies, and renovate my own house—but I don’t have to do them to survive so I often don’t. Some weeks I can barely motivate myself to weed my lawn, and I’ve abandoned every gardening attempt to the bugs. Unless I have friends to cook for on a Saturday night, cooking feels like ceaseless toil.

Instead I watch Martijn do it, and imagine that I would want to live that way if I had to.

Sometimes when I’m baking a quiche, I’ll go so far as to fantasize that I would enjoy it more if I were wearing a wool dress and baking in a rustic cabin. If only I had to pull eggs from the henhouse for the pie and bake it over a wood stove, I think. If only it were a 10-mile walk to the mercantile for flour instead of a quick drive to Trader Joe’s followed by an hour at pilates to make up for my lack of movement. If only I had to wash my floured skirts by hand, I would spend Thursdays by the river with friends and a washboard instead of putting it all in a machine and watching YouTube.

Modern convenience feels as if it’s robbed me of a pastoral existence, and yet I also can’t convince myself to take up a pastoral existence when I have the chance. I both wish I spent my day on more manual activities, and then don’t do it because there’s an easier option.

I’m being romantic about things—the past wasn’t better.

In 2001, PBS invited three families to live on the Montana frontier exactly as it was in 1883. They were given a one-week historical bootcamp to learn how to build log cabins, milk their own cows, and slaughter their own chickens; then they were on their own for five months, documented as part of a limited series called Frontier House.

My family watched the series when I was in high school. But rewatching it as an adult, I wanted to know whether they enjoyed that life when they were forced to live it. Did churning butter become a beautiful way to spend the day, or was it a stressful fact of survival? Was a day spent scrubbing clothes by the river preferable to an evening in front of the television? Would the things I’ve romanticized about the past be worth the considerable comforts the families would have to forgo to live it?

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I’m asking an AI, but not Claude or ChatGPT. This one is trained on the works of William Morris, a textile designer during industrialized London, and a socialist who raged against the machine.

And this AI does not live in the cloud, hosted on large data centers; it’s in my home—a small clear box disconnected from the internet or even power. It doesn’t use water or energy from the grid; I turn a hand crank 50 times to power it up and get his response.

Yes, that’s right. It’s an anti-AI AI.

“Ah dear friend, you’ve traded the sweat and toil of a human existence for the luxury of automation,” Morris answers me. “But what of the richness that comes from toil?”

A beautiful life, he says, comes from effort and dedication—from working with our hands: knitting or woodworking or building. If we automate all of that, what do we have left to do with our day? Watch TV? Spend hours on social media?

Is that the future we want to create?

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The artist and industrial designer Max Park doesn’t think so. His father grew up near Morris’ house in London, where his grandfather repaired watches and his grandmother worked as a seamstress. Like me, Park became enamored with Morris’s 1890 utopian novel News from Nowhere, which imagined a future of artisans, everyone free from the drudgery of factory work.

Handcrafting was the good part of life, he thought. Why would we want machines to do it for us?

With AI, machines do so much more for us than they did in Morris’ time. They automate, not just our labor, but our thinking too. Park saw his grandparents’ crafting dwindle, and Morris’ artisanal and intellectual future slipping even further away. “We seem to be creating an environment with completely different ideals to Morris’ world,” he said in a video. “And I was thinking, if he were still alive, how might Morris suggest we get out of this mess?”

Park thought AI was part of the problem, but also wondered if it could be the solution. Could better design create a world with more artisans, rather than automating them away? This was the question he ventured through a design project titled “Prompting Nowhere,” a nod to Morris’ novel. The result was the hand-cranked AI that now lives on my desk, but also the centerpiece of his project: An AI powered by the very symbol of industrialization, the treadle sewing machine.

In the mid 1800s, this foot-pedaled sewing machine was often the most expensive and treasured possession a family owned. At home, it symbolized freedom: a hand-sewn shirt might take 14 hours, but with the machine it might take one, and create a path to independent income for many women. But at the factory, the treadle sewing machine also powered the sweatshops, extracting more and more output for menial pay. When paired with capitalism, these “labor-saving devices” didn’t shorten the workday; they raised how much women had to produce in a day for their dollar.

This juxtaposition—technology both freeing us from drudgery as well as enslaving us to it—served as the crux of Park’s project. As part of his research, he interviewed Brian David Johnson, an applied futurist who reflected on the first Industrial Revolution, and specifically the English textile workers who once smashed the mechanical looms of adversarial factories. “Looms weren’t the problem,” he said. “It was actually the industrialists and the capitalists.”

He’s right. In the early 19th century, the “Luddites” weren’t against technology; they were against how that technology was being used: to drive down wages, to put work in the hands of cheap unskilled labor that hadn’t served apprenticeships, to evade trade customs and regulations, and to make a few rich churning out shoddy goods while degrading the tradesmen who once made superior ones.

To this day, we use the term “Luddite” to mean anti-tech, when our actual grievance, then as now, is with the social arrangement we created with that technology.

Johnson says the question we need to ask isn’t whether a given technology is good or bad, but what we are optimizing it for.

In the modern AI world, we might say autonomous weapons or the ability to beat China if it comes to war over Taiwan. Perhaps we’d say the economic superiority we gain because “the world is going to be built on someone’s AI stack” so it may as well make America’s companies rich, not China’s. America wants the biggest military and the richest economy, and that is what our AI is being optimized for.

What kind of world does that create? One ever escalating toward war. Where AI is rushed, developed at breakneck speed to win a geopolitical or economic race, with few guardrails to ensure societal wellbeing. It means AI that is owned by and benefiting companies and investors rather than the people who provided all that data and the workers who might be automated away because of it.

What did Morris want to optimize for? Beauty, and a life spent in pursuit of beauty.

What would AI be like if it were optimized for a beautiful life? Maybe it becomes like Socrates, asking questions instead of giving answers, encouraging us to be thinkers rather than passive consumers. Maybe it automates away our desk jobs, so we can spend less time on the computer and more time raising children. Maybe it funds increased leisure time, so we can spend more of our lives working with our hands, rather than sitting on screens. Maybe AI could create a more offline life rather than a more online one.

Park wanted to explore this better end as an art project. Not only did he train his AI model on Morris’ work, but he wanted to power it with the work of our hands. When Park invited the designer John Corcoran to experiment with his first hand-cranked version, a clear box similar to mine, Corcoran began singing an Italian opera because, as he cranked the machine, he said he felt as though he were making pasta.

Making pasta with our hands, singing an Italian opera that filters through our kitchen windows, these are the things that make life worthwhile, but having the leisure time to do so is still a privilege. Morris was only able to avoid factory work and spend his day engaged in textile design and furniture building because he was affluent enough to do so. Today, it’s computer work we must be privileged enough to escape.

When a friend and I recently reviewed our screentimes, she was shocked to discover how many hours she spent on TikTok, something she doesn’t actually want to be doing, while the things she wants to be doing—quilting, an unfinished sewing project—remained stowed away in her cupboard. But that’s because, when we spend the day bent over our laptops, the last thing we want to do is more work, so we reach for something passive instead. Something that requires no thought at all.

It is no wonder, then, that in the US, the “trad wife” has become a symbol of privilege. The idealized woman has time to bake, tend chickens, and run her farm, while her children live a sort of bucolic fantasy. Many might prefer to spend their days engaged in similar pursuits, as evidenced by the rush on homemaking activities during the pandemic, but doing so requires enough financial security that we can spend our days away from our computers.

Technology is not being optimized for that result.

AI may have given us super powers, just as the treadle sewing machine once did, but now as then, we work the same amount of hours despite doing so much more with them.

Park admits that comes with benefits. He’d intended to train the LLM model himself, but after an entire day spent “instruction tuning”—writing prompts and answers by hand—he’d only completed 250 pairs of a necessary 5,000. It became clear he was better off using ChatGPT, which completed the rest within seconds. He also needed additional power to get started—it would have taken 1,500 years of continuous cranking to train his small model by hand. Instead, he used Meta’s Llama 3.2 1B model as the foundation for his AI, which consumed 259,000 kWh of power in its training.

If we were living in Morris’ ideal world, this automation of tasks would grant us a 20-hour work week. But Google and Meta aren’t optimizing for a well-lived life, they are optimizing for profitability and value. If AI allows me to complete twice as much work in a day, companies won’t cut two workers down to part-time and let us keep our full-time wages. They will fire one full-time person and pay less in overall salaries. This is the future data foundries like Surge and Mercor make explicit—both companies pay knowledge workers to train AIs on all the things that still require a human, so that Google and Meta can one day go without them.

That’s why governments need to step in to mandate a shorter workweek. Make 30 hours a week the new normal, just as we once made 40 the standard during the factory era. If people can get the same amount of stuff done while using AI, why shouldn’t they? And when AIs require humans less and less, we can reach the George Jetson ideal, working just 9 hours each week to push the buttons and pull the levers AIs still can’t or shouldn’t.

What would happen if leisure wasn’t a privilege, but the norm? We have hundreds of years of proof: We spend more time raising our children, tending to aging parents, and checking on neighbors—the kind of care nations struggle to provide are things we could provide ourselves if it weren’t for our workloads. We strengthen civic life and democracy because now we have the opportunity to get involved in local associations and volunteer organizations—the erosion of which has precipitated our failing democracies. We contribute more cultural goods to our societies, like music and writing and entrepreneurial pursuits that might not be profitable, but bring value to communities nonetheless. We host block parties, bake cakes for a friend’s birthday, raise chickens and share the eggs with neighbors—things that foster social cohesion and can’t be produced by paid employees but only by passionate individuals with time. We spend less time online, because we no longer need to passively unwind after a long day. Even our health improves, because we have more time to move our bodies, which puts less strain on our healthcare systems.

All of us benefit from increased leisure time—the AIs most of all. Because we spent billions of hours creating the entire internet and everything the AIs were trained on, unpaid. We did it with our free time and our social media posts and our blog posts and our academic research papers and our books.

As part of his project, Park asked Róisín Inglesby, curator of the William Morris Gallery, whether she would contribute her work to an AI even if it weren’t traceable back to her—so long as she were free from financial concerns. Inglesby said yes. I would too. If someone learns something because of the hundreds of hours I put into researching it—great! That’s why I do the research! But in practice, the platform benefits much more for surfacing those results than we do researching it. The key part of Park’s question is “so long as we are free from financial concerns.”

Some think we should compensate that unpaid labor through data unions or AI-funded sovereign wealth funds—both provide a partial solution. I’d go even further: I think every company should be owned by stakeholders—not just the investors of a company, but also the workers who built it, the customers who buy from it, the data unions that represent our data, the governments that fund R&D, and the municipalities that host the company headquarters or data centers. If people and places hold equity in the companies we participate in, then it wouldn’t matter if labor was automated away. We’d hold equity in the economy we create and earn dividends from that collectively held value.

In this world, governments could tax companies instead of incomes and fund important services that ensure our wellbeing—like healthcare, reskilling sabbaticals to retrain the workforce as needed, and guaranteed jobs at a guaranteed living wage. In a world where work is automated away, this combination of supports would mean people always have access to healthcare and the guarantee of work and a good paycheck. This last one means governments put people to work doing the things we still need humans to do, just as Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal once employed 8.5 million people to build roads, bridges, schools, and parks during the Great Depression.

William Morris thought we should eliminate “useless toil” even as we remain financially secure enough, and with enough leisure time, to engage in “useful work”—working with our hands and bodies and minds. Morris never explained how we’d arrive at his world of artists and artisans, but maybe AI finally does. With provisions to ensure we remain well cared for and policy to protect our time, why couldn’t we automate away the rote parts of our lives even as we spend most of it off the internet?

But it’s not just our time and labor and incomes Park wants to protect, but also our data. In England, the National Health Service entered into a contract with the surveillance platform Palantir to much public outcry. “It’s terrifying that if I use the NHS, my medical data is going to be accessible by this company,” Park told me. “And we’re not limited to that. It’s a given that if you go out in the world and you go to the supermarket or cross the border, you are in the system.”

We are well aware of this bargain. Every Facebook, Tesla, Strava, and Roomba user trades away their privacy for access. So does every Claude and ChatGPT user. We grant permission to every smart car and smart toilet and period tracking app to harvest our data. We are traced through every Uber trip and Amazon purchase. We are listened to by every smart speaker in our home and every app on our phone. Target famously knew a customer was pregnant before she told anyone else.

No one thinks this is a good idea. We are being surveilled every hour of every day, even in our own homes, and our data is known by a vast network of companies and governments we don’t trust, but there’s little we can do about it. We click “agree to terms” without reading the small print. We have to in order to use anything.

Park solves this problem with locality and private ownership. If the data is never shared with the cloud to begin with, then no one else can access it by default. The AI he built for me lives solely on the microchip embedded in the clear box on my desk. I could smash it with a hammer and it’s gone—every question I asked and every answer I received permanently unavailable to the companies that made it. “It doesn’t go off to a data center. It’s not backed up on the cloud,” Park says. “It’s all happening exactly there.”

What I wouldn’t give to be able to use my Claude the same way—to download it to my computer and have it live there, never reporting back to corporate. Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, went to elaborate lengths to make his AI work that way. It was nearly impossible for him to create, even as a highly specialized and technically apt individual, but his argument is that it shouldn’t be. Privacy and data sovereignty are technically possible, the only reason companies don’t build their products that way is because they profit too much by doing it.

Governments could stop this. They could mandate that companies only collect what’s necessary to provide their service. They could ban surveillance advertising outright. Even states make a difference: Illinois’ biometric privacy law, passed in 2008, mandates that before collecting someone’s biometric identifiers, like fingerprints or face scans, a company must get written consent from the user, publish a retention and destruction policy that means the data is destroyed after use, and agree to never sell the data. Any individual can sue for damages per violation.

And they have.

In 2010, Facebook was able to start making “tagging suggestions” because the company built a vast database of faceprints from uploaded photos without asking. Illinois residents sued, Facebook fought for five years but lost. The company paid out a $650 million settlement, and 1.6 million Illinois residents received checks of $340 to $400 each. The triumph: Facebook shut down facial-recognition entirely, worldwide, and deleted more than a billion faceprints.

One state law enforced by ordinary citizens helped force a trillion-dollar company to abandon facial surveillance.

Illinois gets much better tech as a result: Google’s Nest cameras and Amazon’s photo recognition tools give Illinois the tracking-free version. Even Sony’s Aibo robot dog ships to Illinois without facial-recognition software. Apple’s Face ID and photo recognition survives solely because it passes the test: Facial recognition happens only on your own device under your own control, and Apple never receives the faceprint.

All of this serves as its own kind of proof: surveillance is optional. More states and governments should mandate that companies remove it.

It will be an uphill battle: governments benefit too much from the data to do anything about it. Governments buy the data they need from brokers, or subpoena it from companies that originally collected it for advertising. It’s how ICE gets around needing warrants to get information—they can get the information directly from tech companies like Palantir instead. The proposed “Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act” is designed to target this loophole. We should pass that too.

But if the AIs won’t create for anything but economic gain, the artists will. It is through his locally hosted, handcranked AI, trained on the work of an 19th-century social reformer, that Max Park makes a poignant statement during this moment: What we want isn’t more technology, more screens, more automation, more surveillance by companies and governments, all so that we lose our jobs or fight in more wars—even if those are the ends nearly every AI is after by default.

What we want is more leisure, the opportunity to work with our hands and raise our children. To live free from surveillance and privacy concerns. It is possible to build for these better incentives, to design for beauty, and it is this future, more so than any other, that we are fighting for when we rebel against data centers that pop up in our backyards, that use our water and power and resources and siphon wealth to investors and companies and governments that will use them for their own gain at the expense of ours.

As with the Luddites who came before us, the problem was never that we created a superpower, it’s that we’re using it for supervillain gains when it could be used for our own.

It is this polarity that I explore, not just in this essay, but in the coming essay series. Because AI and technology have created a world of advancements, but for who? And to what end? How are we tangibly making life better for all of us? Because most often, I would argue we’re not.

It is for this reason that I became entranced by Max Park’s project to reimagine technology from the view of one of my favorite utopian thinkers. And, when I reached out in emphatic support of his work, he offered to build me a final version of his AI on commission. The sculpture that now sits on my desk—private, local, personal, owned—will forever remain an affirmation of beauty and a reminder of what technology can be when it is optimized for a life well lived. Not just profits.

I hope Morris’ dream will finally be realized, and that we will choose to optimize for that future.

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Thanks for reading,

Elle Griffin

It was when I was sitting with a friend, sharing memes through bouts of silence and chortling, that I noticed the reality of what we were really doing. We were sat a cushion apart, sending every image out of the room, through a server miles away, and back again to cross the couch. To share meaning through nothing more than technological mediation, while sitting physically next to one another, is just absurd. And yet it contains so many layers of historical human development that we sometimes forget that the technology we take for granted in our everyday lives is a product of the deepest waters of collective imagination, and a choice about what form that ought to take, writ large.

Today it’s AI this, AI that…but we have, in fact, been arguing about our technologies in the moral language of good and bad for a very long time. For more than 2000 years the optimists have been suggesting automated tools might finally deliver us from toil, while the pessimists have warned that they will deliver us from relevance. Human history nevertheless agrees, without ever quite saying so, that technology is a thing to be adopted or resisted, celebrated or mourned, diffused or banned.

How do we judge the tech we build in a way that resists good and bad, but instead focuses on what is more or less beautiful, and where the beautiful is not separable from the good? Instead of scale and capability, we chart a course through design and discernment, where all things should rightfully begin.

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, capturing the zeitgeist of romanticism, speaks on this point from the vantage of an entire industry. Nolan shot the film from first frame to last on IMAX film stock, the first feature ever to be made this way, which means that in the few theaters equipped to run it as intended, one of the oldest stories we have still travels as a ribbon under precise tension, drawn through a frame, with human hands at either end of the machine. Nolan has intimated that once we strip away technical vocabulary, what we have are aesthetic reasons. The image, he believes, is simply more beautiful. Here is one of the most commercially powerful auteurs alive, working in the most thoroughly industrialized art form we have, and his advantage consists in refusing a kind of automation that the rest of his industry accepted twenty years ago.

The Greeks would have understood him, because their language performed the fusion automatically. To kalon, the construction Aristotle reaches for when he wants to praise an action, means beautiful and noble and fine all at once, and one of the highest compliments the Athenians paid a person was a compound: kalos kagathos, the beautiful-and-good, as though the two qualities could not be certified separately. Virtuous action, Aristotle writes in the Nicomachean Ethics, is undertaken for the sake of the beautiful (tou kalou heneka). Judgment of this kind proceeds by degree along a single scale, and not by verdict between two bins.

And yet when Aristotle enters our contemporary conversations about automation, he tends to enter as a sentence he never wrote. “When looms weave by themselves, man’s slavery will end” circulates on conference slides and in many a book about technology and employment. But it is a fabrication. What Aristotle actually wrote, in the first book of the Politics, is conditional about what is unreal: “for if each of the tools were able to complete its own work when commanded, or by perceiving in advance…if thusly shuttles wove themselves and plectra played lyres, master-craftsmen would now need no craft subordinates nor masters of slaves.” This is not a promise of emancipation, far from it. It is an account of why, in the absence of such instruments, some human beings must be owned, according to Aristotle, which means that automation enters Western political thought alongside an extreme form of despotism. I spent the better part of my time in academia with this single passage, and its long afterlife suggests that the association has never entirely left us.

Later thinkers inherited the burden of this ledger and have noted its dark undertones. Marx pauses over the same passage in Das Kapital and scoffs that Aristotle “dreamed,” and on the very same page he reaches back to Antipater, the Greek poet who had hailed the water-mill as a liberator because the enslaved women who ground the grain could at last sleep past the cockcrow, a wishful golden age restored. Norbert Wiener, writing at the birth of cybernetics, warned in turn that the automatic machine is “the precise economic equivalent of slave labor,” such that any human work forced into competition with it must accept the same terms. From the Politics to Das Kapital to the quarterly earnings call, the debate over automation has therefore been conducted in a single currency, namely who is freed, who is owned, and what it pays. Strikingly, beauty plays second fiddle, or no fiddle at all, to economics. What we have misplaced is to kalon.

The series of essays in this edition therefore begins with the neglected art of seeking beauty in one technological expanse at a time. The first concerns a sewing machine, and the choice is not accidental, since looms keep appearing at the hinges of this history: Jacquard’s punch cards were instructing looms a century before they instructed computers. From there the questions delight and provoke. Was churning butter a beautiful way to spend the day, or a chore to be automated away? Do we have to run off to the woods to remember what parts of the modern world we want to enjoy? What do Chinese fantasy dramas understand about imagining the future through a glorified past? What are solarpunk video games trying to teach us about how technology, society, and the natural world should be designed together? Should the future have more buttons and fewer screens? And what can it mean to age naturally, once nobody has to?

We are technological animals as much as we are political animals, and the Athenians fused their two highest qualities into a single compliment because they suspected that neither keeps for long without the other. As we choose the next century of how we make technology together, we owe ourselves a habit of judgment, before our vocabulary shrinks to make this too difficult. When the next tool arrives asking to be adopted or banned, we might decline the binary altogether and ask instead what the thing is beautiful for, and what it makes of the hands that use it. Everything we build already sits somewhere on this register, whether we grade it or not.

All of which returns me to the couch, and to my friend. Graded on this scale, our afternoon was only partly beautiful: the laughter, and the company. But the mediation, and the detour every joke took through a server to travel the length of a cushion, were decidedly less so. But we noticed. That noticing is where the habit begins, and the essays in this edition are an invitation to keep doing so.

Yours,

Ziyaad Bhorat

Vice President, Imagination and Strategic Growth, Mozilla Foundation

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I am very for technological progress societally—yes, let’s cure the diseases and automate the cars and advance scientific understanding. But I am extremely dissatisfied with it personally—I think it’s eroded social life with the social media and the scrolling and the phones on every table, eyes flicking across the screens like cigarettes we can’t quit.

Our technological innovation should get us a more beautiful offline life, not a screen-addicted online one.

It is this juxtaposition that I explore in my new essay series and print pamphlet, titled “This Sewing Machine Powers AI.”

Over the coming weeks, I’ll explore technology through the lens of my personal life:

• AI that is optimized for a good life, not just a good economy

• 18th-century chores and whether they were a beautiful way to spend the day or a chore to be automated away

• Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and the desire to “fuck off to the woods” as a response to modern life

• Utopian philosophy in Chinese fantasy television, and what we can learn from idealist fiction in a world of censorship

• Solarpunk philosophy in video games and how game designers use the medium to design a better future

• Less screens and more buttons—technologies should build for an offline world rather than an online one

• Aging in the time of Botox

The forward, as well as the first and sixth pieces in the series will be free for all subscribers. After that:

• Paid subscribers read the full series online and get the e-book version when it’s done.

• Collectors get all of the above and receive the print edition in the mail.

I’m grateful to the founding patron of this project, Mozilla Foundation, and their VP of Growth, Ziyaad Bhorat, who wrote the foreword to the series. The first piece, as well as one other, will be syndicated on their blog Nothing Personal. I am also grateful to Foresight Institute, who served as a patron with Beatrice Erkers penning a reflection for our digital and print pamphlet. A special thank you to Emiliano Raspante who designed our cover illustration and to Patricia Faggi who designed the print pamphlet. And my deep gratitude to Max Park, who served as my muse for this issue and designed the sewing machine that inspired my cover as well as the subject of my first essay.

And thank you, most of all, for reading and contributing to this media ecosystem imagining a better future.

Posts start next week,

Elle Griffin

Every now and then, I’ll awake in the middle of the night in a panic. I’ve heard a sound—the crunch of a footstep beneath my bedroom window perhaps, or what sounds like my back door opening.

It’s not actually these things, and I can usually get back to sleep once I realize it. But this is not normal, my friends tell me. None of them panic that someone might break into their house in the middle of the night with the intent to harm them.

But I do, because 20 years ago someone did break into my bedroom in the middle of the night—with a knife. I woke to the sound of the screen ripping off my window, I saw him struggling to open my window, I still remember the crash of him breaking through the glass when he couldn’t. He was there to kill me, he’d left a note for his parents explaining his plan.

But I was 20 years old back then, and that was the end of a five-year period during which this person stalked, threatened, and attempted to harm me and my sister on numerous occasions. You can read the full story here if you’re interested—but for the sake of this essay, all you need to know is that he’s been in prison ever since. My family and I healed, we moved on and all live happy and beautiful lives. Most of the time I forget this even happened to me—I mean it’s been 20 years!

Except that sometimes in the middle of the night I still wake in fear, and that means my body still remembers something my mind has long forgotten.

And that is deeply aggravating to me.

It’s not just this one trauma, all anxiety works like this—at least for me. Claude calls it “somatic anxiety” and I’ve had it as long as I remember. It’s when nothing in your life feels wrong at all, and yet your body develops symptoms of disorder anyway because it detects that something actually is. Over the years, it has taken many forms in my body: aching muscles is the most common, but I also experience numbness, muscles involuntarily twitching or pinging as if with electricity, bouts of vertigo, heart palpitations and racing. You know, the kinds of things your mind latches onto and goes, “I’m developing MS” or “I’m experiencing a stroke,” or “I’m having a heart attack.”

I know the signs of my anxiety so well by now that I can reason with it. First, because I have gotten full-body scans the past two years in a row and that has given me an armful of evidence to counter with. Then, because I can recognize the tells: When symptoms only appear before I go to bed then it’s obviously my anxiety—real bodily disorders don’t typically wait until I’m at rest to creep in. Finally, and most importantly, I can look back and say (cue Hansel voice from Zoolander) “wait, haven’t you had [insert three diseases of your choice], in the past year alone, so couldn’t this all be in your head?”

It is, and because I am aware of this, I am careful to stop it immediately. The moment my body has developed some new “disease,” I start doing yoga every night before bed. My symptoms go away every time.

But as with my midnight panics, I am annoyed by this. Because I usually feel fine—not stressed or overwhelmed. I might even feel content, happy, or joyous. But the body is tuned into a finer signal that the mind can’t detect. There’s an earthquake below, and the body disturbs first. The mind can’t feel it until the seismic waves get too large, enough that it can start to worry and think, “something’s wrong,” or at its most severe, “I’m going to die.”

When I was in my early 20s and suffering panic attacks, things were really bad. Giant seismic forces throwing my body into chaos, my heart ceasing to beat for several moments at a time, my lungs gasping for air, and my mind convinced I was dying. All of it with the obvious cause: the trauma I was then enduring. Now, in my early 40s, they are extremely mild, just the smallest of bodily sensations. Armed with reason and my yoga mat, I note those tremors in my field notes for what they are: my body responding to a disturbance my mind can’t detect yet. Usually something minor like I have too much on my plate, I had an upsetting interaction with a family member that’s still bothering me, or I have a parole hearing to attend.

Funny how the body can keep track of these things even when the mind thinks it’s moved on.

The parole hearings are a newer thing. They’ve occurred once or twice a year for the past four or five. We hear his voice on the phone, explaining why he tried to kill us that night and many times before, we hear him reason why he won’t do it again when he’s out, and then we speak. My statement is a Google Doc I’ve filled with facts. I’ve never trusted my emotions with this doc and wrote it with all the rigor of a journalist. I pulled out all the transcripts from past sentencing hearings and trials and police reports so I could quote what was said verbatim rather than rely on my memory, and I’ve recorded every hearing since so I can refer back to those transcripts too.

Every year, I mark the event on my calendar as if it were any other meeting invite, and every year I think it’s not going to disrupt my day at all. Like I’ll go to work, attend this meeting, and then go back to work again. After all, it’s only about 30 minutes—all I have to do is show up and read something I wrote. But when I read my statement I hear a wobble in my voice. And afterwards, when I expect to get back to my workday with ease, I can’t. I’m gutted. Most recently, I was so exhausted I ate cereal for lunch, fell into my couch, and watched every episode of How to Get to Heaven from Belfast, my eyes watering tears for no apparent reason at all. Except for the obvious reason that I attended a parole hearing that day and was probably upset about it. The next morning I woke up in pain, every muscle firing aches against my will.

My husband and family find this obvious. Of course I was upset by having to speak at the parole hearing, they think. But I’m annoyed by it. Why should this still affect me years later? Why should I be left with the remnants still? I am a 41-year-old well-adjusted person who knows an awful lot about healing, who spent years on my mental health back then and who still prides myself on how well I’m able to care for myself with vigilant maintenance. I mean, look how good I am at NOT having anxiety most of the time!?? Look how happy and content and at peace I am in my life!!!!!

And yet, I can feel the rumbles still. I must remain vigilant with my field notes, noting the signs so that I don’t accidentally let things get worse.

Because if I let things get too far, then we reach the darker edge. Because how does one know when it’s not just the tremors of anxiety but the real thing: An actual medical emergency requiring the ER, or an actual person breaking into my house and trying to kill me? My body acts up because it’s trying to get my attention, it wants to alert me to a problem. And 99.9% of the time that problem is normal general stressors of being alive. But 0.1% of the time it’s really a man trying to get into my bedroom in the middle of the night and my body needs to react fast enough to run away.

That means my body sometimes runs in panic mode on the back end. Alert, aware, ready to notify me of danger even if there is no longer any danger to be found.

My solution is always the same: Calm the backend alert system. Yoga, yoga, yoga. Stretch my body, listen to relaxing music while I do it, have a journal ready so I can jot down the thoughts in my mind and know what it’s doing, then focus my mind on a more beautiful narrative instead. More stretching, deep breaths. Savasana. This, paired with the reasonable fail-safes—annual medical screenings, secured doors and windows—arms me with calm and reason. If it’s the usual stressors, yoga will make it all go away. If it’s ever something more serious, then I will be calm in the face of it.

We are alive, and so our bodies will always worry about survival. But unlike every other species, we also have minds capable of worrying about so much more than that—navigating social and familial life, having bosses and jobs and stress. And no matter the disturbance to our mind, our bodies will read the signals as a threat to survival. Even if it’s as small as a stressful workday or a lingering trauma from 20 years ago.

So, despite my annoyance, I keep vigilant with my field notes. Most of the time, I feel good and happy and well. And when my body doesn’t—when my head decides to split into massive headaches or my arms go weak or I wake in a panic from a noise outside—I know it’s a sign from my body to come back to the mat. To read happy books and watch happy sitcoms. To eat comfort foods. To point my mind toward beautiful things. To throw everything I have at my peace and happiness and repeat the process forever and ever.

Because I have a mind and a body—and I have to care for both if I don’t want to spend that life in fear or anxiety. But I’m annoyed about that too. And I’m frustrated that our bodies require so much maintenance to feel good. And I’m exhausted that the body keeps remembering things I want it to forget. I know this is part of just having a nervous system that must be constantly regulated in the face of thousands of stimuli, and I’m aware that being mad about it is akin to being annoyed by having to eat three times a day or maintain my muscle strength—but frankly sometimes I’m annoyed about those things too.

And I’m writing this post in the middle of that annoyance, I suppose, to let out the frustration I’m feeling and to remind myself that it’s ok, after this most recent hearing, to have to come back to my mat once again, all so that I can be back to the beauty of it all by tomorrow.

Press repeat.

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I don’t usually publish posts like this—please be respectful in the comments.

As always, thank you for reading!

Elle Griffin

This is The Ledger, an (almost) monthly newsletter in which I share the strategy behind building a media ecosystem and writing a book in public.

Today I want to share the new title for my book, a few changes I’m making to my business model, and introduce the next step toward becoming a reader-owned media, with a request for your feedback on how we should built this next.

First, I changed the title of my book

During the last board meeting for my forthcoming book, we agreed to change the title from We Should Own The Economy to We Should Own the Future. Here is the new mockup for the cover:

We made this decision for one reason: When I set about this research, I thought: the economy needs more equity owners, the government should incentivize that. I no longer think that, alone, will solve the problem.

Our economies primarily benefit investors, but so do our neighborhoods, our cities, our states, our national governments. As I’ve learned from my research, we need to fundamentally alter who owns everything, if we want the world to work in our favor. My book aims to provide a new vision for that world.

The book has expanded to meet that scope, as evidenced by the manuscript so far, and the new title is a better fit. Covers have been redesigned, I have three monster sections to research this year and next, and I’m planning research trips readers will be invited to attend next year, as well as our first conference.

Paid subscribers will continue to get new chapters as they come out, and I am still on target for a tentative January 2028 publishing date.

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Second, I’m changing my collector tier

Paid subscribers at my Collector tier get every print pamphlet I publish in a year—that’s about 4-6 per year now. Based on the analysis of my business I did last month, I’m making a few changes to that tier. Going forward:

• Print pamphlets will only go out to paid subscribers at my collector tier. They will not be up for individual sale until I’ve moved on to future projects. This is so that I can focus on my subscription business, with individual sales available only for purchasing past editions.

• The exception will be collaborative pamphlets. When multiple people contribute to one pamphlet, articles will continue to be free to read online, and digital and print pamphlets will be sold as the series publishes, with collaborators sharing the profits.

• There will no longer be an annual Elysian book. Now that all of my work is being printed as pamphlets and packaged into my forthcoming book, I will no longer be publishing the annual Elysian book, which previously contained one year of my written work. The book was great when it was the only print piece I published each year, but now it’s redundant. Volume III was the last one!

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Also, our community now meets in Substack Chat instead of Slack. It was too difficult to onboard and offboard paid subscribers to the Slack space, whereas on Substack, that part is automated. If you want to join us, get the Substack app and click the chat icon to head to the chat space. You’ll find “The Elysian” there.

I will continue to use this space to share the behind-the-scenes of my life and work, host regular salon discussions and questions, and share ideas the rest of the community might enjoy. Paid subscribers at all tiers can start new discussions there as well. More to come for this space as I debut future collections!

Finally, we’re moving toward reader-owned media

I’ve long been experimenting with reader-owned media. I publish cooperative print pamphlets, sharing profits from pamphlet sales with contributors. I crowdfunded my next book from readers, and will share the profits with investors when it sells. Now, I want to make my entire media business reader-owned.

The idea is that the more you contribute to this community over time, the higher membership tier you reach, and the more shares you earn in a future Elysian Trust. Readers get points for every dollar spent on a Substack subscription or in the pamphlet shop, and those points are worth more the longer you’ve been a subscriber—points get multiplied by 1.25 if you’ve been a subscriber for more than 3 years, and by 1.5 if you’ve been a subscriber for more than 5. Readers get bonus points for commenting on posts (2 points per comment) and sharing posts with friends online (5 points per share or restack), as well as contributing guest essays (100 points).

Subscribers who have contributed most to the community, who have been with us the longest, and who participate in discussions and share posts earn higher membership tiers, receive higher benefits for their contributions. Our highest tier, “Trustees,” will even eventually earn annual dividends as my business grows, but that step involves a $1,500 business expense to change my business from an LLC to a membership LLC and I don’t yet have profits to distribute as dividends. I’ll wait until we arrive at that point to make the legal switch.

All of these metrics are tracked by my Substack and Stripe accounts, as well as my shop, so I had Claude design a custom plugin that lives on the backend of my website, connects to all of the above, and assigns every reader a membership score. You can find yours by going to this page and entering the email address you used to subscribe to this newsletter or to purchase a pamphlet from the shop. There, you should be able to see how many points you have and the various membership tiers available to you based on those points. (Please note that investments in my book are a separate project that come with their own tiers!)

So far, I’ve built the membership system that does all of the hard work, tracking everyone’s contributions and upgrading them into new tiers as we go. But I haven’t yet built out what each membership tier should include. That’s where I’d love your feedback!!! Please leave a comment and share ideas that could be fun to include in each membership tier. I’ll incorporate at a later date, and send out rewards when we’re ready to go.👇🏻

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Thank you so much for contributing to my business over the years—for reading, commenting, sharing, and inspiring all of us to write and think about a better future. Some of you have been here for a long time—it’s been five years since I started this newsletter!—and I’m excited to invest in you in return, and reward readers who continue to be part of what we’re building here.

I’d love your feedback as we go!

Next up, I’ve got a new essay series publishing soon and I’m excited to debut that one shortly.

More to come,

Elle Griffin

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 Our Land

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 provide welfare

• US states should have autonomy—like EU countries

• We should create more US states

Federal governments should be à la carte

• Let states choose their federal governments à la carte

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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Paid subscribers can join us for open discussion. Come prepared with a question you’d like to ask or a topic you’d like to discuss. July dates are the 9th, 16th, and 23rd at 2pm MT (afternoon in the US, evening in Europe, early morning in Japan, Australia, and New Zealand).

RSVP below 👇🏻

Read more

Thank you so much for following Post Nation, seven writers exploring a world after nation-states. You can still collect the digital or print pamphlet to support the project and all of the writers who participated.👇🏻

Collect the Pamphlet!

Here’s the entire 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 served 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. I hope you will read the essays, respond in the comments, support the pamphlet at the price point that works for you, and drop by one of our next office hours calls to discuss the series ne.xt week (dates coming on Thursday!)

This is our last collaborative pamphlet for the year. The next several pamphlets are projects I am working on independently, and will debut as long-form essay collections and pamphlet series over the summer and fall. I’m currently researching three deep dive series and I’m excited to share those with you next.

Thanks for reading and thinking with me,

Elle Griffin

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This 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. 👇🏻

Collect the Pamphlet

“Canada should join the EU.”

That was the suggestion made by former German foreign minister Sigmar Gabriel when Donald Trump took office in 2025. The idea was quickly backed by former Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt. A poll later found nearly 60% of Canadians open to it.

Canada sends 75% of its exports to the US and with the US slapping tariffs on every shipment, the country was staring down a barrel of economic ruin. Joining the EU would give them a favorable alternative—free movement of goods, services, and capital between countries, and the ability to trade and negotiate as a much larger bloc.

The EU’s mutual defense clause is similarly appealing. With the US wavering on NATO, Europe’s version ensures that an attack on any is an attack on all, with countries agreeing to respond “by all means in their power.” That is a much stronger trigger than NATO, where each member country can voluntarily choose what help to send.

As a bilingual country, with a parliamentary system and a social-democratic welfare model, Canada seems like it would be a good fit for the EU.

The only reason it can’t join is because Canada does not qualify as a “European state” under Article 49 of the Treaty on European Union. Morocco was turned away on the same grounds in 1987. But the idea has been floated enough that it’s worth considering whether federal layers like the EU should be open beyond geographic bounds. Or as I prefer: whether countries should be able to join part of a federal layer without joining all of it. Canada, after all, might want to join a tariff-free trade agreement or a national defense clause, but be less enticed to adopt the EURO or place the EU court system above theirs.

Why shouldn’t Canada be able to join some, but not all of the EU?

That is already happening. In 2017, Canada joined CETA, a free trade agreement which nearly eliminates tariffs with the EU. When the EU launched Readiness 2030, a plan for Europe to become militarily autonomous from the US, Canada became the only non-European country to join parts of it, like SAFE, which provides low-interest loans to member states for weapons procurement and allows Canadian companies join EU countries in weapons deals. Japan applied too, and is currently under review. South Korea is expected to follow.

This is new. More than at any time in history, countries are joining federal governments that are not their own.

Europe has been particularly innovative here, where federalism has long been à la carte. Norway, Iceland, and Liechtenstein participate in European trade through EFTA and EEA agreements without participating in the EU. Twenty-nine European countries participate in the Schengen agreement, allowing free movement of people across borders, without necessarily being part of the EU: Switzerland shares open borders with other European countries without being a member of the EU. Ireland and Cyprus are EU countries that do not share open borders with other Schengen countries.

Europe’s new military plan, Readiness 2030, has been particularly à la carte. No single European country participates in every component—each one chooses the parts that best fit their priorities. All 27 EU members participate in the mutual defense clause, for example, but Ireland, Austria, Cyprus, and Malta—which claim neutrality—get caveats. The Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) is a particularly à la carte framework—it’s basically a menu for defense projects, with countries deciding which ones they want to sign on to, fund, and participate in.

This, I think, is the future of federal governance. We shouldn’t be making the EU bigger; we should be separating it into parts that countries can join à la carte.

We should even create new layers that can expand beyond geographic territories: Like CANZUK, a proposal to share open borders, tariff-free trade, and defense cooperation between Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK. It’s basically an intercontinental EU, and it’s incredibly popular: 72% of Canada supports it, as does 70% of the UK, 75% of New Zealand, and 68% of Australia. Under the proposed agreement, a Canadian could move to New Zealand with ease, as could an Australian to the UK.

This structure is highly unique—it’s Europe’s open borders agreement combined with its free trade agreements, and new shared defense strategy—but between several continents, not just one of them.

For the first time in history, we are creating new federal governments that countries around the world can join regardless of location.

And that could allow smaller countries to secede from their heavy national federal governments and join lighter-weight international ones instead.

Norway gives us a good example of what that could look like. The country seceded from Sweden in 1905 and has since assembled, piece by piece, membership in more than 5 different international layers without joining the EU itself. A Norwegian citizen today has open borders with 28 other European countries through Schengen, the right to live and work across 30 countries through EEA, and free trade with more than 30 countries through EFTA and the EEA. All while they retain their sovereignty, keep their own currency, and manage their own foreign policy.

Why shouldn’t more countries do the same? Why shouldn’t a world of small nations join federal governments à la carte, rather than be stuck with the whole menu?

Now, more than ever before in history, we have a way to do that.

We should decouple federal governance from nation-states

In the last 100 years, we’ve established not just the EU, NATO, and the Schengen Zone, but also the Council of Europe, which has produced more than 200 treaties countries can individually opt into. The European Convention on Human Rights, most famously, binds 46 countries to a shared human rights floor even as they have no obligation to share currency, trade policy, military command, or political institutions—even Brexit didn’t pull Britain out of it.

In force since 1953, the treaty protects the right to life, liberty, and a fair trial. It guarantees freedom of expression, freedom of religion, and freedom of assembly. It protects democracy and free elections. Most importantly: it’s enforceable. Citizens in any member state can sue their government at the Court in Strasbourg if they believe their rights have been violated—it receives some 30,000 applications each year and has issued more than 20,000 judgements. Including the forced decriminalization of homosexuality across Europe, accountability for the British when their soldiers in Iraq resulted in civilian deaths, and the reversal of Turkey’s block on Google’s hosting services, which the court ruled a breach of freedom of expression.

The Basel Convention—joined by every country in the world except the United States, East Timor, Fiji, Haiti, San Marino, and South Sudan—ensures hazardous and plastic waste isn’t dumped in the ocean or left on another country’s shores. It achieves this by regulating shipments—the exporting country must notify the importing country in writing, and the importing country must give written consent of the shipment. Even the US, which doesn’t participate, is subject to agreement terms by default. Because no country will accept them, US waste shipments become “criminal traffic as soon as the ships get on the high seas.” And because insurers won’t cover shipments that violate international rules, the regime forces the US to get on board.

I could go on and on: ICAO regulates air travel between all countries—if a country’s safety oversight is below standards, foreign carriers won’t fly there. IMO works similarly for marine shipping regulations, with 176 member states signed on. ITU decides which radio frequencies are used for mobile phones, which for the military, and so on, all agreed upon by the world. ICANN governs the internet—domain names and IP addresses—it began as a California nonprofit before it spun out of the US and became an independent federal layer in 2016.

Each of these governing layers is lightweight, meaning they govern one specific thing: border control, for example, or aviation safety. They are also advantageous to join—a small country could get a lot out of joining NATO where it suddenly has access to a much larger military defense than it would on its own, or by joining the Schengen Zone, which allows small countries to share open borders. By comparison, nation-states as governing bodies are quite heavy—they dictate quite a lot of the lives we live from human rights to the economy, from military to education, from healthcare to immigration. For a big country like the United States to have one federal government managing all of those things is incredibly cumbersome. And so long as you are a US state, you are stuck with the entire menu.

That doesn’t mean Europe gets everything right. It has struggled in a middle ground for years, operating either as every country for itself or all of Europe together—both messy. Before the Euro, there were too many currencies for stability. And independent militaries meant each were doing its own thing—often incompatible with one another. Meanwhile, the EU requires unanimous agreement to move on just about anything, which meant Ireland could veto corporate taxes for their own gain and Hungary could block Russian sanctions or Ukraine aid.

It took geopolitical pressures for Europe to create something better. Motivated by Brexit, Russia’s war on Ukraine, and Donald Trump’s wavering support of NATO, countries throughout the continent decided to form a military bloc that would no longer rely on large supranational bodies like the US. That was the motivation to form PESCO. Countries can opt into the projects that fit their politics and skip the rest. One of the projects might be considered “Schengen for Tanks”—the “military mobility” project creates open borders for militaries. A “cyber rapid response team” is basically NATO for cyber attacks—if one country is attacked, all participating member countries respond to resolve it. The European Patrol Corvette is a cooperative of countries building warships together, the Eurodrone is the same for drones. Twister is a long-range space-based early detection system designed for hypersonic missiles. In each case, member countries sign on, pool funding, build together, and share the IP.

The result is not one big military owned by one state. It’s many militaries, participated in by many states.

This is truly revolutionary. We’re talking about a decentralized military no longer tied to nation-states, mutually funded by and benefiting all participating states.

Think about what that does to power: projects become important and well-funded because nations collectively agree they are important and worth funding. That is the exact opposite of one government deciding on and funding a whole slate of military activities that benefit themselves alone.

That doesn’t mean international bodies always succeed—many fail. Particularly those where enforcement is voluntary, like the Paris Climate Accord. Or where key players are missing from participation, like the International Criminal Court, which is supposed to prosecute genocide and war crimes but, despite 125 participating member countries, doesn’t include the US, China, Russia, India, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, and North Korea—all the countries doing the war crimes. Artemis similarly tried to set rules for the moon, but terms are favorable to the US and thus missing China and Russia. And then there’s corruption: the same Interpol data good guys use to put away bad guys has been used by authoritarian governments like Turkey, Russia, and China to pursue political dissidents or go after journalists and activists.

But the working case studies are many and worth expanding upon. Instead of having giant superstates that control nearly every aspect of government for the states in their geographic territory, why shouldn’t we offload that power to several more specialized branches? That’s what the political scientist Philippe Schmitter was arguing for when the European Union began consolidating power in the early 2000s. At the time, many wanted the EU to become more like the US—a consolidated European superstate that presided over all European countries—but Schmitter advocated for democratizing those government functions across several jurisdictions.

“Instead of a single Europe with recognized and contiguous boundaries,” he said at the time, “there would be many Europes: a trading Europe, an energy Europe, an environmental Europe, a social welfare Europe, even a defense Europe, and so forth.”

Europe has been steadily creating them, even breaking up the EU to accommodate a more piecemeal approach. As we learned from Brexit: Britain should have been able to opt into the EU’s economic trade and security and defense layers, while opting out of the EU’s Common Fisheries Policy which was disproportionately disadvantageous to Britain. The choice shouldn’t have been all of the EU or none of it. Now, like Norway, the UK is building back those same layers ad hoc—choosing which trade agreements, border controls, and military programs to join. Each layer negotiated separately.

Nations around the world should do the same.

A decade ago, a lot of this would have been impossible. But today we have options.

And those options might allow us to secede from national governments altogether.

We should secede from nation-states and join federal governments à la carte

Large nation-states like the US don’t do a good job at running the country in the best interest of citizens. The US federal government, after all, takes the whole country into debt to pay for things most states don’t even want. The result is high dissatisfaction. Just 22% trust the US federal government to do what’s right. Meanwhile, 61% trust their local governments! This same pattern unfolds internationally—just 33% of EU residents trust their national governments, even as 60% trust their local governments!

If we trust our local governments but not our federal governments, how come federal governments earn the majority of our tax dollars? In the US, 68% of our tax dollars go to the federal government, while only 19% goes to the state, and 13% to local governments. We need to flip that script: our tax dollars should go to the localities we trust to spend it right back on us, not a large federal government that will pilfer it on a wide range of activities we have no wish to fund.

One solution is to allow states and regions to secede from national governments, even as they join new governance layers à la carte. In fact, that should be an enforced part of secession planning—that so long as smaller governments opt into larger layers of governance that enforce human rights, allow them to negotiate as a trade bloc, and participate in military support, they can effectively govern themselves much more.

We already have a textbook example that seceding entities can follow. In 1993, Czechoslovakia peacefully split into two countries. Both were immediately recognized by the UN and quickly joined the Council of Europe. Czechia joined NATO in 1999, Slovakia in 2004. Both joined the EU in 2004, though Slovakia adopted the Euro while Czechia didn’t. Separation, in this case, wasn’t a risk. It was a well-thought-out plan, with economic and military treaties negotiated in advance over a span of many months. They created two new countries, but both immediately belonged to a wealth of international federal layers that would hold them accountable and grant them access to larger trade blocs that would help them be successful.

Similarly, after Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania declared independence from the USSR in 1991, they joined Western layers instead. By 2004, all three had joined the EU, NATO, and the Council of Europe. Later they joined Schengen and the Eurozone. When Montenegro split from Serbia in 2006, it joined the UN and the Council of Europe within a year, followed by NATO and an application to the EU. Before that, Finland peacefully left Russia in 1917, and Norway peacefully seceded from Sweden in 1905. Perhaps most radically, after it seceded from Denmark in 1944, the tiny island of Iceland, with less than 400,000 people, became one of the world’s most heavily layered nations, part of Schengen, EEA, and NATO, even though they never joined the EU.

Iceland is proof even the tiniest countries can become part of a larger à la carte stack, and participate on the world’s stage even as they remain independent!

It’s easy to see what polities could be next. Scotland has long contemplated secession from the UK for the very reason that it wants to pick and choose which governing bodies it participates in. A 2014 whitepaper outlined the country’s desire to no longer fund nuclear projects, even as it wished to remain part of defense campaigns. In 2014 residents voted to stay in the UK by 55%, but after Brexit, secession attempts have been renewed. A 2022 update detailed Scotland’s desire to leave the UK even as they hope to rejoin the EU.

This kind of modular governance should allow countries to leave and join the governments of their choice—some countries, however, don’t allow it. Catalonia, for one, has long desired to secede from Spain, but the country has blocked them at every turn. Catalonia even declared independence in 2017, but Spain called it a rebellion, imprisoned leaders, and vowed to block the region’s entrance into the EU if they tried. As a result, it would be economically ruinous for Catalonia to leave, not to mention violent. For Spain too.

But it could be the opposite.

Why couldn’t both governments negotiate terms of secession that are beneficial to both? Catalonia could leave Spain and become an autonomous country, under the condition that it pays a quota to a new Spanish governing body that provides social services and manages foreign affairs. Spain’s Basque and Navarre regions already work like that—why not bring those terms to a secession movement? A future Spain in which regions formally secede from the country could also see them rejoining a new Spanish layer that provides for the greater whole. At the same time, regions could outsource some of the things the Spanish government currently provides to international bodies like EFTA.

Spain, in this case, would become like a mini EU, but without needing to provide nearly as much.

Interestingly, 49% of Europeans trust the EU. That means they trust the large supranational body more than their own national government. Why? Because it handles only the functions outsourced to it, not the everyday functions of their lives.

In North America, it’s trickier. Quebec has often proposed secession from Canada—in 1995, residents decided against it by less than a 1% margin. Alberta separatist movements have also picked up steam in recent years. But Canada is one sovereign entity and doesn’t yet have all of the separate governance layers Europe has. The same is true of the US, where all federal operations come from one giant supergovernment and secession is illegal. For states to secede from Canada or the US, they would need to be able to join new federal layers that don’t already exist—a US inter-state trade deal, perhaps, or a Schengen-like agreement that keeps borders open between states or provinces, as well as an assortment of military agreements states could participate in.

Excitingly, US states are starting to form those layers. As the US federal government covers less and less, new entities are stepping up to cover more and more. The US Climate Alliance, for instance, is a new coalition of 24 states that have adopted the Paris Climate Accords independently of the federal government’s actions. They even participate in UN climate summits as an independent bloc, representing 55% of the US population and 60% of the US economy. Similarly, the Western Climate Initiative has created a carbon market between California, Washington, New York, and Quebec, without national government involvement.

As we continue to create new governance layers states can join ad hoc; they will become better equipped to operate without the federal government at all.

There are two ways we could get there, and I think both are viable, perhaps even inevitable. The first is that the federal layers created in Europe and around the world extend beyond geographic boundaries. That’s already happening, as evidenced by Readiness 2030. The second is that we create new federal layers that do the same, like CANZUK. The combined trend is unstoppable: as federal governments shrink, the new layers replacing them grow—completely independent from nation-states.

In the future, a seceding US state might join the Human Rights Convention or the EU’s mutual defense clause. It might join a US version of EFTA for trade or Schengen for borders. It might join CANZUK to have open borders with Canada and New Zealand and Australia, or participate in the US Climate Alliance or an independent FEMA that funds aid for natural disasters. The seceding state would enjoy all the same things they currently rely on big federal governments like the US for, but now they don’t need the US federal government at all.

States around the world could secede under similar conditions, choosing what borders to share, what military blocks to join, and what climate agreements to participate in.

They could become like Iceland—small, autonomous, but still global.

As we continue to create new federal layers, secession can become, not a risky rebellion, but a peaceful evolution. States could negotiate with federal governments, with the terms of secession contingent on participation in larger layers. Referendums in each state could put it to a vote: should we leave our country and join these federations instead?

As Nathan Schneider says in his essay “Lighten the load of the nation-state,” “If people have opportunities to be part of more kinds of jurisdictions, they can put less stock in any one jurisdiction. They can keep identifying most with their nation-states, which can then focus on being great at governing their particular territory, or they can exchange that layer for other ones. The ethnonationalist fantasy has less to offer if the nation is no longer the only hope for change. A constellation of new jurisdictions is globalist, but it is also localist and more.”

We should decentralize global superpowers

A world that does this will empower nation-states to focus on what they are actually good at—creating a good quality of life for the people who live there—even as it disempowers our highly centralized and morally problematic “world superpowers.”

One big country with one big military, that’s also a complex bucket of ideologies and economic policies and national interests, shouldn’t get to rule the whole world. Instead, decentralized layers of governance should.

A bloc of many countries, after all, is much more powerful than any one country alone, and that’s a good thing! In October of 2021, an unprecedented 140 countries agreed to a minimum corporate tax rate of 15% globally. Suddenly, Apple, Google, and Amazon couldn’t route their profits through Ireland or the Cayman Islands. There was nowhere they could hide their money—tax avoidance collapsed! No single country could have done that alone, but together they coalesced for the greater good.

The best federal layers, after all, are the ones most countries join, and those become the hardest to compete with. This is why NATO and the EU’s mutual defense clause are so powerful—it’s not one country defending itself, but many. Going against Poland became a lot riskier. It’s also why ICANN can’t be dismantled—Russia has been trying to make state control of the internet happen for 20 years, but too many countries rely on ICANN to defect from it and join a more state-specific version.

Even if nations don’t participate, they find themselves subject to blocs with the most momentum. The EU is a market of 450 million wealthy consumers—no company would willingly give up that market. As a result, when the EU passes regulations like data protection laws, bans on single-use plastics, the adoption of the USB-C charging device as a standard, and environmental regulations, a multinational company has two options: build a separate EU-only product or apply EU rules to global operations. More often than not, the latter is the more economical option.

Known as the “Brussels Effect,” this means companies adopt EU rules globally, and EU rules become the de facto world standard. Apple was forced to adopt USB-C, McDonald’s and Starbucks were forced to reduce plastic use, and global EV makers had to redesign batteries for recyclability. If they wanted to sell their products in Europe, it was the only thing to do.

Continuing this decoupling will be how we solve some of the greatest challenges yet to come. Giant superpowers are currently rushing toward AI doom all so we can beat other countries to it and best them in the next world war. But that thinking completely misses the point that we could avoid war altogether if we create federal layers that can effectively govern these institutions together.

Naturally, Europe is already building it. The EU’s AI Act is one of the most ambitious pieces of AI legislation, banning AI use in circumstances with “unacceptable risk,” like building facial recognition databases for surveillance. It also regulates AI use in “high-risk” circumstances, such as when used for critical systems like power grids and water. Even in “limited” or “minimal” risk scenarios, deepfakes must be marked as synthetic and AI-generated content must be labeled. A system of fines enforces all of the above.

The Brussels effect is already in action—as of early 2026, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have all signed the GPAI Code of Practice, committing to meet the act’s guidelines. Meta refused to sign, even as it adapted its products to AI Act standards. They have to, or they’d miss out on the European market.

Now, the superpowers still throw their weight around a lot. China chooses not to participate in human rights organizations and completely ignores attempts to enforce them. The US pulls out of the WHO, the Paris Agreement and the Iran Nuclear Deal, or refuses to participate in climate initiatives or women’s rights initiatives. Both countries are large enough that they could choose not to participate in any number of international treaties and veto the larger effect. And they do! What good is a bunch of countries agreeing to uphold AI safety regulations if the largest choose not to?

This is exactly the dynamic we are trying to disrupt. Only decentralized blocs can hold the world’s superpowers to account, and they have over and over again. As evidenced when the WTO thwarted China’s rare earth monopoly, and 140 countries outmaneuvered the US’s attempts to gain an exemption from the global corporate tax. As evidenced by constraints on China’s chip market, which were coordinated by Netherlands and Japan. As evidenced by every World Trade ruling that forced the US to end behaviors that harmed other world economies. The rest of the world can do a lot of good against even the largest forces, and that’s exactly what they should continue to do.

The creation of more and better layers of governance should eventually break those large governments into parts, even as we reassemble them without nations. As countries come together to agree on this regulation or that war, we shift risk away from centralized national interests in favor of decentralized international interests. Economic policies, military policies, environmental policies, and AI regulation—these shouldn’t be in the purview of one giant government that controls them all, but should be handled by independent governance layers that tackle each of them individually. And acting together!

We’re creating that already.

By creating independent layers of government smaller governments can adhere to, states and regions can peacefully secede from their larger cumbersome governments, even as they add lightweight layers that ensure they treat everyone well, can trade internationally and grow their economies, and can protect one another on the world stage.

In the future, Canada won’t need to join the EU, Alberta could join EFTA. The US won’t need to manage everything from borders to disaster relief; Utah could join a US Schengen and Texas could join FEMA. All of these secessions and re-affiliations could be negotiated case-by-case to work for the best benefit of the leaving and joining party.

Europe, after all, has a long history of peaceful secession. The institutions that made that possible didn’t exist a century ago. But they were built, layer by layer, to coordinate a more autonomous world.

We should keep going, building federal layers no longer limited to nation states, and that states and regions can join à la carte.

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This is a guest essay by Madison Karas 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

Take any online community you are part of and imagine it growing into a nation. Your Facebook group, your Discord channel, or a Substack community you’re a part of.

Imagine it built a government and economy and defined its own citizenship criteria. Your existing population could have default citizenship, dual citizenship with nations that they are already a part of, or immigrate to your nation from the existing one they are from. You all share a citizen identity that you chose and define together, and as you determine how the nation should operate and what you can offer citizens through your government services, you eventually reach the question: What do citizens offer the nation in return?

The short answer, for many territorial nations, is quite literal: taxes.

Comparatively, then, for a digital nation, the question becomes a practical one: How do you design a contribution model that sustains mutually shared digital public goods, offers legitimate incentives for participation, and keeps people genuinely engaged rather than just compliant?

For the past several months, I’ve been an inaugural fellow with Plumia, an innovation lab on global mobility, investigating this. The fellowship supports visionary writers, artists, researchers, and musicians seeking to explore the future of digital civilization, network societies, and human flourishing. My background didn’t come from existing “network state” worlds of theory, but from experience in community management, journalism, and product management, where I’ve learned that the question of “how to sustainably fund a public good that exists online” is one shared across many domains.

Over the course of this three-month research period, I conducted a descriptive case study review of contribution models for digital goods, spoke with a few experts on them and also those within digital public goods and interoperability, and completed a literature review to generate a proposal for what a tax model in a digital nation, for, in Plumia’s case, digital nomads could look like.

What does a tax model look like when there’s no existing territory to enforce it, no default citizenship to draw from, and no legacy infrastructure to inherit? My hypothesis rested on the assumption that, while a digital nation doesn’t yet exist, lessons can be learned from the architecture of what does.

The biggest starting point was differentiating between existing “voluntary” contribution models that people choose to participate in, “mandatory” models that are imposed on people, and models that combine elements of both. If a digital nation has voluntary citizenship, doesn’t that imply voluntary contribution? If it wants to fund real public goods, doesn’t it need enforcement?

The cases assessed quickly showed that the enforcement mechanism matters more than the types of goods funded—voluntary models use reciprocity and exclusion: if you don’t participate, you lose access to the community’s benefits. Mandatory models use legal obligation and default allocation. Both can sustain “public” goods. This raised a leading question: which aspects of a digital nation’s governance, access, and services could be mandatory, and which could be voluntarily allocated on top of that? More on that later, but first, looking at the cases, some lessons about design surfaced.

Gitcoin and Optimism Collective are the most structurally innovative models I looked at. Gitcoin uses quadratic funding, a mechanism where individual contributions are matched by a pool based on the number of contributors, not the size of donations, which amplifies small community support and theoretically reflects genuine collective preference. Optimism Collective takes a retroactive approach: rather than predicting what’s valuable, it distributes funding after the fact, based on demonstrated community impact.

Both are genuinely interesting experiments in funding public goods without central authority, but both have struggled with the same failure modes. The definition of “public good” turns out to be load-bearing, and neither community resolved it cleanly, leading to areas of vulnerability and gamebility. In Gitcoin’s governance forum, I asked participants directly about this. One delegate, Gonna.eth, who has been involved with Optimism since its inception, put it plainly: “You need to define ‘public good’ and we wasted years without guidance to come up with a definition.” Another participant, castall, a DAO steward at Gitcoin, described the desire to move away from commercial framing altogether: “I would like to move away from being rigid about what is a ‘public good’ and instead judge what is important to humanity as a metric that is orthogonal to ‘does it have a business model.’”

Existing tax models, like Germany’s Rundfunkbeitrag, use a flat household fee that funds public broadcasting regardless of whether anyone watches it. Denmark’s dual-portfolio model combines direct government subsidies to news publishers with a basic data program that funds shared digital infrastructure, and both operate inside tax systems with functioning enforcement mechanisms. These models have what voluntary ones don’t: more predictable, stable revenue that doesn’t depend on continued engagement or market conditions. But they’ve earned a different set of problems.

In Germany, citizens have mixed reactions to enforcement, particularly for a service they may feel doesn’t serve them. The legitimacy of mandatory contributions to shared public goods isn’t automatic—it has to be earned and maintained through demonstrable impact. Denmark’s model works partly because it operates inside a high-trust state, but you can’t assume that condition when you’re designing a new institution from scratch.

The “hybrid” cases, which often involve aspects of both voluntary and models, are where the most useful design lessons lived, including the most instructive failure.

In one example, Furusato Nōzei, Japan’s hometown tax donation system, sits inside Japan’s mandatory tax infrastructure but adds a voluntary allocation layer: citizens can direct a portion of their taxes to municipalities of their choice and receive a tax deduction in return. In theory, this gives citizens agency over where their contribution goes while keeping the mandatory base intact. In practice, it became a shopping program. The gifts municipalities offer to attract donations (Kobe beef, premium seafood, luxury goods), became the primary draw, crowding out the civic motivation the system was designed to nurture.

Anthony Rausch, a professor at Hirosaki University who has written extensively on the program described the dynamic directly: “Everyone wants to get Kobe beef from some municipality that is known for quality beef... but that is simply allowing the individual to determine the winners while rewarding the advantaged places and ignoring those places that are less endowed.”

He also offered the sharpest characterization of what Furusato Nōzei reveals about the design challenge: “What sets Furusato Nozei apart is its hybrid nature: part tax policy, part crowdfunding platform, part loyalty program. As such, it blurs the boundaries between citizen, consumer, and taxpayer, offering a glimpse into the future of public finance in an era of personalization and choice.”

Drawing on these cases, I think digital nations should distinguish between infrastructure goods, foundational services that enable national operations, and service goods that could be avenues for citizens to have a meaningful say in funding. This would split a tax model into a two-tier structure, requiring citizens to participate in both tiers.

Tier 1: Mandatory Infrastructure

Tier 1 covers services essential for basic participation in the digital nation: services that exhibit strong network effects and whose exclusion would undermine core national functions. The qualification tests for something to belong here are:

• Universality test: Is this service required for basic citizenship participation?

• Network effects test: Does value increase substantially with universal adoption?

• Exclusion harm test: Would excluding non-contributors undermine the good’s core function?

• Infrastructure test: Is this foundational to other services?

What that looks like in practice: identity and authentication systems, security protocols, governance infrastructure, interoperability standards, compliance and enforcement mechanisms, and data collection.

In your digital community nation, this tier could look like charging citizens a flat annual fee or income-based contribution, which would give your community a stable, predictable operational cost. This would help you cover things such as the platform you operate on and host, the upkeep and processing of identity statuses, and funding the core governance and offices capability.

Tier 2: Citizen-Directed Allocations

Tier 2 covers services that enhance citizenship but aren’t essential for basic participation. All citizens make a mandatory contribution, but direct it based on their own priorities. This is the design move that distinguishes the framework from Furusato Nōzei: keeping contribution mandatory while making direction a citizen choice prevents the consumerism trap without removing agency.

Qualification criteria for Tier 2 services:

• Excludability test: Can access be limited to those who fund it without undermining core functions?

• Preference diversity test: Do citizens have genuinely varying preferences for this service?

• Competitive provision test: Could multiple providers deliver similar services?

• Mission alignment test: Does this connect to the digital nation’s stated values?

• Innovation potential test: Does this allow experimentation?

In your digital community nation, these tier programs could serve as a collective identity, with a set amount or percentage of taxes dedicated to them. In Plumia’s case, asking digital nomads about their needs yielded ideas for services such as visa support and travel coordination, VPN services and secure communication tools, language training and skill development, healthcare navigation, family support resources, experimental community-driven initiatives, and cultural goods.

The governance model for Tier 2 could include review boards to establish approved categories, transparent qualification processes with citizen input, and impact assessments. Services that receive insufficient directed funding can be suspended or restructured, which creates accountability without removing the baseline civic contribution. Like existing public services, there could always be a better market alternative for purchase, but the government could serve a role in offering these types of services subsidized, customized, or more accessible to the population.

The two-tier model is designed to do three things: first, separate what must be universal from what can be individualized, ensuring the universal component is never compromised; second, embed revenue generation into the system’s identity and infrastructure services, rather than depending on ongoing enthusiasm or market conditions; and third, give citizens a meaningful role in allocation decisions, transforming tax contribution from a passive obligation into an active expression of citizenship.

The deepest pattern across all the models studied is this: the ones that endure are the ones that connect individual participation to collective meaning. Gitcoin and Optimism struggle when the definition of collective meaning is vague, Rundfunkbeitrag struggles when citizens don’t feel the collective benefit, and Furusato Nōzei struggles when the individual benefit swamps the collective purpose. Finding a path for a working model that makes this connection between contribution and benefit legible and real will be a continued obstacle in the design of a digital nation governance and taxpayer program. None of it works below some minimum viable scale, either; the threshold needs to be named, not assumed.

A digital nation is an unusual opportunity. It gets to build the connection between contribution and collective benefit from scratch, without inheriting the legacy infrastructure, historical debt, or institutional inertia of a territorial state. You still have to do the slow, careful work of defining what you’re funding, who decides, and how the system sustains itself when enthusiasm wanes and circumstances change. And that’s not a limitation of the digital nation concept, it’s the work. And it’s the same work that anyone building a sustainable “public good”—a newsroom, a cooperative, a commons—eventually has to do.

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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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