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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We can run into each other

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

We can watch each other

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

We can be remembered

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

We can be recognized

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The algorithm for Substack is trying to do that job.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So more of that.

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

Collect the Pamphlet

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

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

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

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

The internet is not magical

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

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

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

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

Against the magic wand icon

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

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

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

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

Externalising collective imaginations

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

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

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

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

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

Seamful design as a democratic right

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

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

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

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

Legibility as ideology: Case studies in governance and labour revelation

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

Wikipedia & the emotional foundation of institutional transparency

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

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

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

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

Palantir, technopolitics & unconscious drives

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

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

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

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

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

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

Community cohesion through design

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s next?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's the link to participate!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's the link to learn more!

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

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

Collect the Pamphlet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elle: Is it a funding constraint primarily?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Join us at Mea.Media!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • April 15th, Office Hours! Register here.

  • April 22nd, Office Hours! Register here.

  • April 29th, Office Hours! Register here.

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

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Why Mea?

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

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

Mea.Media. My media.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • April 8th, Demo Day! Register here.

  • April 15th, Office Hours! Register here.

  • April 22nd, Office Hours! Register here.

  • April 29th, Office Hours! Register here.

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

We’re excited to share it with you!!!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elle & Jake

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

Collect the Pamphlet

In high school, I had Backstreet Boys posters all over my room and a stereo with a three-disc changer that played their albums on repeat—friends would browse my CD sleeve when they came over for a slumber party.

The iPod came out when I was in college, and we’d buy songs directly on iTunes. Listening to someone else’s iPod was to travel through their tastes and interests. We plugged headphones into the aux jack to listen with friends, and burned playlists onto CDs for each other.

Then Spotify came along, and we bought subscriptions instead.

We no longer pay directly for the music we love; we pay the platform for unlimited access to all of it. Our libraries are no longer the albums we bought and curated, but also the playlists Spotify curated for us.

There can be no doubt that platforms like Spotify expanded the reach of MTV’s TRL and the limited libraries in our CD sleeves. But they broke our relationship with the artist in the process. Now we have a relationship with a platform that controls what music we see and which artists it surfaces. By inserting themselves into the middle of that transaction, content aggregators now make much more money than the creators of it do.

And investors in the company earn more than everyone.

There are movements to realign platform incentives with the artists who create them and the fans who support them. Customers, once again, want to buy directly from the artists they love, and artists and fans want to be the beneficiaries of the companies that host them. The platform shouldn’t be the product; the art that lives on it should be. And the beneficiaries of the platform’s success shouldn’t just be a bunch of investors, but also the artists and fans who created it.

Companies are already building that future.

Spotify / Platform Economy

The advent of streaming fundamentally altered how musicians make money.

For a musician to earn $100,000 from their craft, they’d only need to sell 15,385 albums (at roughly $6.50 per album), but on Spotify, they’d need 25 million streams (at roughly $0.004 per stream). That’s if they are independent. If a major record label holds the rights, the label keeps 85%—now the musician needs to sell 102,564 albums or reach 167 million streams, with the hope that the label will provide some aid in reaching those numbers.

Looking at that math, we can see that it is by far more beneficial for artists to sell albums directly to fans than hope for streams. And that is, by far, more beneficial for artists to remain independent than go with a label.

If, that is, fans can find them.

Discoverability is the hope of the platform economy, but it comes at a cost. On Spotify, Discovery Mode lets artists opt into a lower streaming fee in exchange for getting their songs into playlists and on autoplay. As a result, Spotify’s algorithm prioritizes music for which it pays the least.

Spotify also pays 70% of its revenues to music rights holders, which makes it more profitable to prioritize content they own the rights to, like podcasts it has purchased outright. As a result, podcasts and playlists became the only things recommended in my feed, despite the fact that I never used Spotify to listen to podcasts and rarely listened to playlists. I’m an album listener.

Where we once purchased our favorite music directly, now we’re shuffled into playlists where we might not even know who we’re listening to. We’ve become passive listeners of playlists Spotify has quite a lot of leverage over. Any direct contact musician once had with fans disappeared when Spotify removed the notification bell from artists’ profiles. “Following” an artist on Spotify no longer means “tell me when an artist I love announces a new album or tour.” It means “add this data point to my profile so Spotify can better serve me content.”

The platform captures the value of the relationship while artists bear the production costs.

Certain musicians even get more airtime than others depending on their salability. Spotify uses localized pricing—a premium subscription might cost $10.99/month in the US but under $2/month in Nigeria, and since royalties are calculated as a percentage of customer revenue, a stream from a Nigerian customer pays the artist significantly less than a stream from a US customer, as low as $0.0003–0.001 per stream. Spotify thus has a geographic bias, pushing music that appeals to US and European listeners because those listeners will pay more.

Not only do artists with fanbases outside the Eurosphere earn less, but their music may also be less likely to get surfaced to new listeners because it’s less profitable to the platform. This can make it much more difficult to earn streams, the Nigerian musician Lindsey Abudei told me. “That’s why tours are good for the artists,” she said. “Because you can go to a territory where the subscription fees are higher, and if you have more people streaming in that area, then you earn more money.”

It’s not just Spotify. We saw a similar effect play out on Medium, where readers can subscribe to the platform and access an abundance of writers, but writers like me were subject to the whims of the algorithm, which rewarded only the most viral posts—usually clickbait about how to make money as a writer. Those are the posts that made Medium money, so those are the kind of posts writers write to make money. I had no control over who saw my work in their feed; even those who “followed” me weren’t guaranteed to see it. They merely saw “writers like me,” the algorithm deemed most profitable.

As on Spotify, the platform is the product being sold, not the art we were putting on it.

Actually, at Spotify, the product is the value of the company.

The more we listen to music on Spotify, the more the value of the company goes up, and that benefits founders, industry executives, and investors who hold stock in the company, not the musicians who are providing what we’re all paying for. When Spotify launched in the US, the three largest labels received a combined 18% ownership stake, netting them hundreds of millions of dollars and preferred placement on Spotify’s playlists. It no longer matters whether any particular artist gets more streams; the labels will profit from Spotify’s collective valuation regardless.

As someone who loves and spends money on music, this frustrates me. I want my dollars to go directly to the artists I’m listening to, not all the industry execs who have inserted themselves in the middle. I canceled my Spotify subscription two years ago and started purchasing the albums I love directly on iTunes. Now, my Apple Music app functions like an old iPod, and the amount I used to pay for a subscription—roughly $12 a month—goes directly to the artists I like, not to the platform they’re on.

I’m not the only one interested in a change. The platform economy is slowly evolving into an even better creator economy, a growing movement to pay artists directly.

Bandcamp / Creator Economy

Bandcamp debuted as an alternative to Spotify, allowing artists to upload their music and earn sales directly from fans who want to purchase their music and merchandise. Here, artists set their own prices and keep 80-90% of their earnings, while the platform takes only 10-20% of artist sales.

That’s why the musician Abudei prefers it to Spotify. “One of the reasons why people like Bandcamp is that you can sell your album, you can sell vinyl and t-shirts and zines and stickers,” she told me. “The physical is important. There is a subtle awareness about the internet and how fickle it is. People want to collect the physical.”

There is no algorithm deciding what music enthusiasts see; they are there to purchase albums and listen to them. And unlike Spotify’s nebulous “follows,” artists have direct access to their fans. “When you sell an album on Bandcamp, you can track your supporters and see them on your profile,” Abudei told me. “Bandcamp also has an app where artists can manage messaging—if you want to send messages to people who have supported your music or have bought albums, you can do that. If someone buys your album, you can send them a thank you.”

This is a much better transaction, and a wave of “creator economy” platforms has followed a similar model. Substack, for instance, allows writers like me to publish my writing directly to my subscribers without hoping the platform will algorithmically surface my work. Readers pay me directly, not the platform, and the platform keeps only 10% of my earnings, rather than the bulk. And if I ever leave the platform, I can take my readers with me by downloading my subscriber list. Metalabel and Patreon work similarly.

These platforms do an incredible job at solving the first half of the problem: Removing the middleman standing between the creator and the user. Our money goes directly to the people we support, not a subscription to the platform, and that’s much better!

But they don’t solve the second half of the problem: That the platform itself is not owned by those who make it successful. Bandcamp, after all, started out the way most startups do: With investors expecting returns from a future exit event. The company was sold to Epic Games in 2022, which sold it to Songtradr in 2023, and those transactions caused huge windfalls for the company’s founders, investors, and Epic Games, but not for artists. Roughly half of the company’s employees were laid off, including those who attempted to unionize under Epic.

I know that Substack will eventually go this way, too. With all their funding, they will have to head toward an exit event, which will mean an eventual landslide for Andreessen Horowitz even as writers contribute all the work that made it successful. I appreciate the inroads they’ve made here—Substack raised a community round that I invested in which means, as a writer, I will benefit if there is eventually a sale, and that is a step in the right direction. Airbnb did something similar when it went public, inviting a small subset of Airbnb hosts to buy stock before trading began. We should align incentives so that platform users want the platform to succeed as much as investors do.

There can be no doubt, however, that SEC regulations make it difficult to do much more than that, and each platform’s top investors will earn the most.

There are movements to disrupt that too…

Subvert / Creator-Owned Economy

Subvert aims to be the next Bandcamp—artists set their own prices and sell albums directly to fans—but this time the platform is owned by the musicians and fans that create it.

When Subvert launched last year, I paid $100 to become a part-owner along with hundreds of other musicians and fans. As on Bandcamp, artists earn money directly from their fans, but this time the platform is actually owned by those same artists and fans.

Abudai was one of the first musicians invited to the platform. “I made $100 in the first month, but I still have not gotten $100 in the last three months on Spotify,” she told me.

As the company grows, it’s not just a small circle of investors who benefit; every musician and fan on the platform earns dividends based on their contributions. And they benefit not from the amount they invested in the company, but from the amount they contributed by uploading music, purchasing albums and merch, and attending concerts. The more they use the platform, the more “ownership points” they get.

In other words, the more musicians and fans use the platform, the more stock they own in the company. And the more profit they earn from distributions as the company grows, thanks to their efforts.

These member-owners even elect part of the company’s board. At Subvert, three directors will be elected by artists, two by labels, two by supporters, and two by workers. This ensures that, though the company has ultimate authority over its direction and growth, leaders are held accountable by a board acting in the interests of platform users, not just investors seeking to increase the company’s value at the expense of music and musicians we’re paying for.

Subvert is new, but Stocksy is a more seasoned case study in this realm. Equity in the stock photography company is owned by three stakeholder classes: 90% by photographers, 5% by workers, and 5% by the advisory board. Photographers even earn dividends based on the amount of sales they generate. If one photographer earns 5% of all stock photography sales that year, she will receive 5% of the dividend allocated to photographers. When the pandemic hit and demand for stock photography surged, the company earned a surplus of $1.14 million, 50% of which was reinvested in the business and 50% distributed to all stockholders—nearly 1,900 owners.

Stakeholders also elect board members: Photographers elect two, employees elect another two. The other seats—up to five—go to advisors who appoint each other to the role.

I think every platform should grant equity ownership, board representation, and dividends to the artists and fans who provide their services. That doesn’t mean giving up good business acumen or the ability to be profitable. Stocksy Director of Operations and board member, Michelle Sadler, pointed out that their board is still majority owned by business advisors who can ensure the company’s profitability, even as photographers have a seat at the table to represent their interests.

And the company is not a democracy; it functions just like any other company, with a hierarchical structure and business leaders empowered to make executive decisions, even as users are empowered to provide feedback through robust forums. “When we were founded, every decision was collaborative between our founders, our staff, and our contributors,” Sadler told me. “But as you scale, more voices come in, and it becomes very hard to manage a lot of voices—now we’re at almost 1,900 members. As we’ve grown, we’ve had to build up our staff class and give them more autonomy to make decisions, then decide which things go to vote and which don’t.

“Now, the only things that go to vote are the big structural decisions: A change to the royalty structure, a change to the payment platform, anything that would have a massive effect on our community or that would change a foundational principle or previous vote. Legally, as a platform cooperative, the only thing members are required to vote on is two resolutions—our minutes and appointing our auditor—as well as anything that changes our cooperative bylaws or our rules legislatively.”

Equity ownership, board representation, and profit sharing are enough. Musicians don’t need to run the company—I wouldn’t recommend that—but they should benefit from its success, and have a say in how best to achieve that success. After all, they provide the product.

As Subvert says in their manifesto, we should create “an economy where value flows to those who create it—not just those who invest in it.”

And, “We aim to further erode the foundations of exploitative platform capitalism, where businesses like Bandcamp succeed by virtue of their artists and workers—then turn around and sell them out.”

There are a number of platform cooperatives in this vein: Tertulia is an online bookstore akin to Amazon Kindle, but owned by readers. Several driver cooperatives work like Uber, but owned by drivers in Colorado and New York. Radish is Uber Eats, but owned by drivers in Canada. CoopCycle is DoorDash, but owned by bike couriers in Europe. Up&Go is a home cleaning service owned by cleaners in New York.

There should be many more: A writer-owned Substack, a podcaster-owned podcast platform, a filmmaker-owned YouTube, a user-owned social media platform.

The Best of All Worlds

The solutions are there, but VC-funded companies outmaneuver the better ones. Investors are willing to pour buckets of money into startups because of the promise of an eventual payout. But the company lives to serve the interests of those investors and must head toward an exit event for their benefit—even if that’s not the best option for the platform and its users.

Cooperatives live to serve their owners, which might include some investors but mostly the creators and users of their platform. Those users can make the platform more successful by using it and marketing it, but they aren’t pouring buckets of money into the company, and thus can’t run at a loss for years while investing in gaining market share.

This means that traditional companies have the funding they need to reach economies of scale while cooperatives do not. As a result, Spotify has the most artists and fans, then Bandcamp, then Subvert. Even if that’s the inverse of what artists prefer: Abudai’s first choice is to sell albums on Subvert, her second is Bandcamp, and her third is streaming services.

Like many artists, she feels she can’t leave streaming services because that’s where most listeners are. “I feel like streaming might come to a breaking point—there’s a general exhaustion with artists,” she says. “But if an artist is big enough to pull out from streaming, can they still survive? If I said ‘I don’t want to put my music on Spotify or Apple,’ can I still have a sustainable career?”

Subvert hopes to solve this conundrum by forming two companies: A public benefit corporation that owns the platform, and a cooperative that owns the corporation. This forms a circular system in which investors can invest in the corporation that owns the platform, even as they have little to no control over how the platform is run because the corporation is owned and governed by the cooperative, which is controlled by users.

Investors can invest in the Subvert corporation. But the Subvert cooperative controls it and how the platform is run.

It’s helpful to look at this chart of how money flows.👇🏻

As Subvert puts it: “Even though investors have rights to future shares in the corporation, the cooperative maintains control because: The co-op owns 100% of the corporation’s voting shares, the corporation’s board consists of the same elected representatives from the co-op board, the corporation contracts the co-op to build and operate the platform, and all major decisions go through the co-op’s democratically elected board.

The primary benefit to investors here is dividends as the company grows. An exit event, in most cases, wouldn’t be favorable to the platform’s owners, except in very creative circumstances. Subvert’s manifesto includes possibilities such as selling to a nonprofit that holds the rights on behalf of artists, allowing the corporation to sell or go public even as the cooperative that controls it remains member-owned, or even nationalizing the platform as a public utility, “recognized as critical infrastructure for independent artists.”

“In Silicon Valley, imagination runs wild. Start-ups promise to disrupt everything from how we hail a cab to how we brush our teeth—yet creativity stops when it comes to reimagining the fundamental structure of those businesses themselves,” Subvert’s manifesto says. And, “If we prove that collective ownership can be a winning competitive advantage, we think we will permanently change start-up culture. We will have engineered an evolution of business, opening up the possibilities for how future efforts are founded, funded, and governed.”

With funding and network effects, as traditional companies have, platform cooperatives could emerge from their niche and become real players, ushering in a creator-owned economy—not just an investor-owned one. And if big-name artists can bring their audiences to these platforms, all the better. After all, I can purchase albums on Subvert and Bandcamp, but the catalog on both platforms is limited. If I want to listen to Taylor Swift, I have to use another platform.

In the meantime, I switched to Qobuz, a French platform that not only lets me purchase albums like iTunes does, but also focuses specifically on high-resolution audio—it’s the audiophile’s music app. In many ways, it works a lot like my current iPod setup, but discoverability comes, not by shuffling artists into mindless playlists, but through a curated “magazine” feed that intersperses editorial content with artist interviews and deep dives into the music industry.

That’s how I discovered Fantasyland, an album by the Chinese composer Yu-Peng Chen. He scored the video game Genshin Impact and then decided to score his own fantasy world through a standalone album. “When I started composing Fantasyland, I wanted to build a complete world… with different ‘areas’ representing different cultures,” he said in the interview. “For example, I used Japanese instruments like the koto and shakuhachi for the ‘aquarium’ section… Chinese instruments, like the erhu, guzheng, dizi, pipa, and morin khuur, appear in the part that represents an ancient Chinese city.”

I was instantly hooked, went over to sample his album, and then purchased it. It’s exactly what he was going for: An epic fantasy score, not for any existing film, but for a world of his own making.

Qobuz made a deeper fan out of me—and even elicited a purchase from me—than putting one of his songs in a playlist or putting his album cover in my feed ever could. It brought me right back to the days of collecting the music I love and playing it on repeat with friends. And if I still want the benefits of an unlimited library, Qubuz still offers a monthly subscription for added discoverability—it even comes with discounted album prices and pays artists $0.01873 per stream, much more than Spotify’s $0.004 or Apple’s $0.01. To reach $100,000, an artist on this platform would need only 5.3 million streams, compared to 25 million on Spotify, which is a much more achievable number.

The platform might not be owned by the musicians and audiophiles that use it, but maybe one day it could be, at least in part. When the owner eventually retires, why not sell a portion of it to artists and their fans, and give them a stake in an app that’s in their best interest to succeed?

Why not align the interests of our platforms with those who are actually building them?

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

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Francisco is working on a highly anticipated book when he learns he will need to be the full-time caretaker for his terminally ill mother. His income from copy-editing has all but disappeared since the release of LLMs. His book contract is in peril. It is saved when his publishers secure bridge funding that enables Francisco to hire a caregiver.

A high school in New Mexico where 65% of the students are categorized as food insecure can fund a year’s worth of visual art and music supplies. Last year, funding for “Arts & Creativity” was cut in order to accommodate tax concessions dealt to a datacenter project in the county.

One of the last remaining independently-owned newspapers in Ohio is on the verge of folding when they get a lifeline grant, enabling them to make payroll. A private equity firm attempted to assume control with the intent to automate web articles using generative AI summaries of newswires.

In Kansas, a public radio station launches a weekly segment focused on big agriculture and its impact on farming ecosystems. Travel, editing, and original music are funded. They stream it online, where it becomes a surprise hit.

As the clock strikes midnight on New Year’s Eve, 25,000 researchers and educators are sent need-based grants to cover rent, materials, and other expenses for the calendar year. There was no short list, long list, or onerous grant application process from a foundation started by a wealthy arms dealer. Anyone qualified as a cultural worker—a term spanning disciplines and research methods—is able to apply for funds. None of them are working on generative artificial intelligence, and most of them view using genAI as an alien interloper into their practice. Yet their work is urgent and enriching. Over half of them report being on the verge of quitting their practice if not for this financial support.

These stories are fictitious, but the struggles they represent are real. In each case, the cultural production in question has come under threat by the rapidly metastasizing presence of Artificial Intelligence tools, known specifically to human creators as “AI slop.”

Where did this sudden influx of funds come from? How were millions of individuals and cultural organizations given grants and emergency lifelines at a time of intense precarity and technological disruption? The answer is surprisingly simple and broadly popular—a minuscule tax levied on the values of multi-billion dollar AI companies—the same companies whose extractive AI models flood our media, news feeds, and public institutions with cheap derivatives.

Why tax slop?

It would seem that “AI Slop” needs no introduction. You hear it on Spotify, where the platform has begun to stream tracks from fake bands whose music is composed by AI. You see it on YouTube, where a recent study determined that a new user will encounter around 21% fully AI-generated videos on their feed. You read it on Amazon, where books written via AI prompt are pumped out at an inhuman scale, flooding recommendation lists and fooling readers. In fact, “Slop” was Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year for 2025, defined as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.” The term slop is chosen for its lack of care in assembly, the notion that a cheap careless substitute will suffice at a certain scale. As digital platforms re-wrote the incentive structure for creative and cognitive production, capitalists saw an unexploited market. AI Slop, like the platforms that host it without regulation, monopolizes our collective attention. And where attention goes, resources soon follow.

The generative AI models that enable the production of slop require untold reams of human input for training, almost always stolen without permission. AI companies in turn sell the capabilities of these models as a way to produce sub-standard artificial reproductions of this cognitive labor at scale, directly competing with the current allocation of resources to the human creative labor that was harvested to train them.

AI slop disrupts and annoys us in the near term; and the backlash against it is starting to take shape. Less obvious still are the second-order effects of a creative economy where powers that underwrite creative expression, journalism, and research become financially impelled to replace human work with a poor automated alternative.

Some have compared AI and its slop to mold on food. Mold needs nutrition-rich hosts, but as invasive mold grows the host resource is slowly destroyed. Eventually, there is no new energy for it to perpetuate, and the mold dies too.

The labor losses will be outweighed by the larger narrative collapse. If AI Slop proliferates unchecked, precious few institutions will remain to determine what is real or scam; which output is gaming the platform economy or which is the work of those seeking to advance social and cultural exchange, trust, and human flourishing.

It is only through robustly-funded cultural institutions—broadly construed as organizations that produce a good or service where the quality and veracity of the output outweighs the ease of distribution and monetization—where AI slop will meet its ontological death.

How does the Slop Tax work?

Any AI company exceeding a billion-dollar valuation must pay 1% of its revenue annually. These funds go to a cultural endowment vehicle with funds managed by an independent public entity governed by a democratically appointed approval board. These funds will be disbursed at the discretion of the Board and Staff according to the categories defined below.

In one estimate, the top ten American producers of AI rake in $16.9 Trillion each year. The Slop Tax, if executed, would produce a windfall for America’s cultural workers to the tune of $16.9 Billion, roughly the same amount we allocated for nuclear energy research, the Food for Peace International Assistance Program, or The Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund’s support for navigation in federal channels serving coastal ports.

Think of The Slop Tax as a post-AI New Deal that steers the excess wealth of a small minority of AI companies back towards a vast mobilization of human creativity and cognitive production. This accomplishes two mutually aligned goals: the material basis and institutional homes for human cognitive output are protected, while the AI labs are guaranteed a steady input of new training data. They will be free to use it as they wish, given that the worst of the cultural degradation infected by AI slop has guardrails preventing the AI models’ cannibalization of human creativity and intellectual property.

Failed fixes

Given its social and economic risks, various attempts to slow, ban, or regulate the use of AI have been proposed. Many are punitive to AI categorically. The Slop Tax, however, is not a ban, but a corrective. This approach does not seek to pause or punish AI progress, as in certain cases these companies make worthwhile advances. But they must be held accountable for the damage that their AI Slop inflicts on the broader economy.

Some 20 years into various failed attempts to re-constitute Silicon Valley platforms for democratic ends we must face up to reality. Countering such an existential cognitive, social, and soon-to-be political threat requires a sovereign megastructure on the scale of the United States government. It alone can guarantee the existential security of our humanist and social institutions, ensuring they remain vibrant, democratic, and publicly accessible.

We hear about the so-called “abundance” that will be ushered in by AI from those with a financial interest in its wider adoption. You can take them at their word, or you can look around. In the years since LLMs have gained popular traction we have yet to see the trickle-down economics promised. Instea,d we see slop of previously unimaginable scale. No matter how transformative AI becomes, even if it is used for a wide array of positive ends, the mean use of AI will regress to whatever capital demands. There is, however, a surefire way to ensure that value is unlocked and distributed on a massive scale. The Slop Tax makes this law. As AI value grows, so moves new wealth into millions of hands — directly via remunerations and credits — and indirectly by being a fiscal backstop for a range of cultural and economic engines.

AI companies must be held accountable for sacrificing the basic tenets of a social contract for short-term gain. There is still time to forge an agreement permitting frontier AI to progress along its research journey while regulating its most odious externalities. A public apparatus to fortify our cultural infrastructure has never been more imperative.

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This is the foreword to Internet Sovereignty, an essay collection and print pamphlet exploring the future of the internet. I am grateful to who supported this series as a patron and whose head of editorial, , wrote this foreword.

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For years now, people have been “quitting social media” for a number of familiar and understandable reasons. These range from hating the experience of these apps and websites to feeling like they are unbearably ethically compromised.

What used to be empowering and liberating—a direct window to your friends and family or fascinating people from across the globe who share your interests—has tipped over into something stressful, gross, creepy, or even dangerous for many, many people.

And yet, it’s not like people have logged off completely and subscribed to their local paper. (I realize there is some irony in that many of you are reading this in a printed publication you’ve paid for, and good on you!) In many cases, instead of posting that joke to Twitter, a lot of folks are instead sharing it with a group chat or turning to a private space like Discord. The internet is dead, long live the internet!

The stakes are much lower: nothing’s going to go viral accidentally, no stranger will yell at you, and you don’t have to contend with a never-ending feed that’s primarily designed to maximize the ad revenue that can be generated from your time spent on the app.

I’ve seen this in my own life. My wife set up a Discord server for our friends early in the pandemic, and it has been an incredible resource for us. Even as we traveled abroad for an extended period, we were able to really stay involved in our friends’ lives—their hobbies, dreams, work dramas, children.

And yet, as I write this towards the end of 2025, Discord, which has never really found a way to make the kind of money a tech company’s investors expect, is moving closer to offering stock and becoming a publicly-traded company. It’s hard to imagine them escaping the cycle of enshittification as described by : provide real value to users, optimize for profit, and extract value from users.

So then, is there any other way? Can we, as the titles of this publication suggest, really share digital spaces that we collectively shape and even own? These possibilities exist if you know where to look. Digital sovereignty is not science fiction, or simply a utopian pipe dream. It’s being built right now, on a variety of scales.

Would you believe me if I told you that my favorite social media platform was built by a photographer in Japan, in about 10 hours, for around $75?

is a passionate artist, author, thinker, and walker. He may be best known for multi-day walking trips through stretches of Japan and elsewhere. I’ve really come to appreciate his curiosity and openness. He has a loyal following, and he has carved out a niche for himself in creating his own art books and bespoke pop-up newsletters. In early 2025, Craig used Claude Code, an AI tool that writes real, usable code, to build his fans a simple, custom social media interface called “The Good Place”.

The features are limited—Spartan by contemporary standards—but the space is what the nonprofit product studio I work for, , would call “prosocial and public-spirited.” It’s about connection, rather than extracting data for profit. Posts and replies are limited, the feed is purely reverse chronological, and links are privileged on their own page.

Notably, The Good Place is supported by Craig’s monthly subscribers, not any sort of advertising. There is no data tracking, and posts disappear organically after a week. Craig takes feature requests directly, and his presence is visible to users—he’s paying attention, and he’s incentivized to make the experience as good and positive as possible.

The results are evident in the kind, compassionate discussion happening there daily. I’m making friends on The Good Place, and I have a lot of context for people. I value their opinions, and I feel seen there. I find the space to be useful, helpful, and fun. It’s not just recommendations for things like books and movies … someone even helped me pick out a new wallet! These experiences, unfortunately, are becoming rarer and rarer in the social media world.

And notably, new advances in technology have enabled this. As Craig wrote in a newsletter:

It’s no exaggeration to say that using Claude Code to build The Good Place (and also a bunch of other small tools and projects) is one of the most astonishing computing experiences of my life. It’s difficult to articulate how utterly empowering a tool like Claude Code (paired with malleable software, open software, open systems (i.e., not iOS/iPadOS)) is for someone like me: someone with a strong technical background who can guide the LLM, knows which questions to ask, and knows how to keep it from going off on weird tangents. (It’s like working with an eight-year-old who has a thousand years of knowledge.)

AI, like all technology, is not a panacea, and it obviously comes with a full suite of ethical and logistical considerations. But clearly, people who know how to leverage it are taking their prosocial, independent, alternate visions for social media to the next level. However, many of these projects are smaller scale, meant for a few hundred or thousand people.

Is this sort of thing scalable? Is it possible to reach the masses at the size of any of the dominant platforms? And if it is possible, I worry that if the internet becomes truly fractionalized into many, many small Good Places, we will lose some of the original value and promise of the internet. There is value to productive friction, where people can disagree in a constructive way. Beyond the filter bubbles we already have, do we risk separating into fully self-contained and self-reliant filter bubble city-states?

Maybe, just maybe, we don’t have to go fully into completely siloed communities in order to find some measure of sovereignty and ownership.

For Canadians, this question became pretty urgent recently. As President Trump seemed set on annexing Canada early in his second term, many Canadians realized their entire digital tech stack was based in the United States. Canadian designer and entrepreneur Ben Waldman told me in New_ Public’s newsletter, “annexation could really just look like an executive order that shuts down our entire cloud, or 95% of it.”

So as Canadian pride took center stage, Waldman got serious about starting an independent, Canadian social media platform, where the data and governance would reside completely within Canada’s borders.

Luckily, recently developed protocols, including Bluesky’s AT Protocol, make it possible for Waldman’s new app, Gander, to have literal sovereignty and self-ownership, and not cut itself off fully. Once set up as intended, Gander’s users will be able to post alongside the 40+ million users of Bluesky.

Eventually, they hope to expand this infrastructure to institutions across Canada, such as McGill University, in what they’re calling a “sovereign social cloud.” Similarly to The Good Place, Gander is funded by users, not venture capital, and recently raised over $2 million Canadian in a crowdfunding campaign.

This is the dream of decentralization—everyone in charge of and owning their social media experience, with connection to everyone else, on their own terms.

These new movements and technologies, including artificial intelligence and mature protocols like AT Proto, are growing in acceptance and enabling new experiments. People are eager for something new.

I don’t think we’ve gone as far in this direction as we probably should, or will. After all, as governance expert Nathan Schneider likes to point out, few online groups have as much organization as his mom’s neighborhood garden club (which has officers, bylaws, and decades of norms and expectations). What else is possible?

Could a Good Place of the future have its own constitution, with voting and elected officials and term limits? Could it be formally financialized for long-term sustainability? We’re barely scratching the surface, and so much can be done with the tech tools and ideas we already have right now.

We need far more experimentation and imagination along these lines, beginning right here, with this volume.

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This pamphlet is because I think a lot about what the internet would be like if it profited everyone who created it.

We, after all, create all of the social media posts and publish all of the web pages. And yet platforms have inserted themselves into the transaction and now earn much more as a deliverer of content, than we do as creators of that content.

Without the photos we post, Instagram wouldn’t have anything to put in our feeds. Without the web pages we make, Google wouldn’t have anything to point to. Without all of the information we put on the internet, OpenAI wouldn’t be able to answer a single question.

We create the labor these platforms earn money from. Why shouldn’t those platforms pay for that labor?

When we compare the internet to the brick-and-mortar world, the difference becomes particularly stark. As Glen Weyl points out in Radical Markets, “The share of income going to labor in the largest tech companies is roughly 5-15%,” Weyl says. “Dramatically lower than service-sector companies like Walmart, where labor’s share is roughly 80%.”

“Facebook, for example, pays out only about 1% of its value each year to workers (programmers) because it gets the rest of its work for free from us! In contrast, Walmart pays out 40% of its value in wages.”

Translation: Tech companies use all of us who create the internet as free labor. Then they profit.

Our latest digital and print pamphlet is designed to think through an alternative internet. One that benefits everyone who lives on it every day.

serves as this project’s patron, supporting our design and print costs, with head of editorial, , writing our foreword. The cover illustration is designed by Nina Bunjevac with the print and digital editions designed by Patricia Faggi. We are joined by eight thinkers, each re-imagining a better internet through 10 essays:

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

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

• “Airbnb, Uber, and Meetup wanted better exit options,” with Nathan Schneider

• “The hidden labour of the internet,” by

• “The case for taxing AI slop,” by

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

• “The internet has no benches,” by

• “The internet needs ecologists,” by

• “How I disconnected from tech in 2025,” by

• “I’m boycotting big tech,” by

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

The Elysian treasury will keep 20% of pamphlet profits, with the remaining 80% split between contributors.

Thank you for continuing to support our essay collections and print pamphlets imagining a better future.

We are creating a better internet already,

Elle Griffin

Today I want to talk about the Let Cities Build Utopia project, which has been, by far, my most influential writing project to date. This series went viral in the best possible way—not in the sense that thousands or millions read it, but in the sense that nearly everyone currently building cities did.

After I completed the essay, I sent it out to a small community of about 10 people who had either helped with my research along the way or were a prominent feature of my conclusion. One of those organizations, the Center for Land Economics, even agreed to support the pamphlet as a patron and write the foreword to the series, as well as cover illustration and design costs.

After I published the series, the organization’s founder, , shared the pamphlet with a number of city-building projects around the world, as did I. Then there was the network effect—paid subscribers who joined because of the project jumped into our online community and introduced me to other city-building projects—I sent my pamphlet to each of them too. Combined, this has led to a lot of meetings.

I have so far met with the founders of seven new city-building projects, each wanting to learn more about how trusts can be used to establish new cities owned by residents. The hours I spent reading old trust deeds and lease agreements is paying off, and I was thrilled to share the finer points of trust ownership with the organizations that can actually build them. This led to further research: How should trusts and lease agreements actually be structured today? What is the ideal board composition? How can investors participate, but in a capped way, so that they eventually roll off the cap table and create resident-owned cities? How do we ensure these projects are protected from outside forces (politics and corporate takeovers) in-perpetuity?

I’ve been researching a follow-up, not just for the version of this series that will live in my book, but also for the city-building projects that can use this information to create the ideal illustrated by my pamphlet: Cities with land autonomy and revenue autonomy, that act in the interest of residents, not just property developers. We can create the next generation of these cities now, and I’m thrilled to see the research and ideas presented in my pamphlet being put to use to do so!

I don’t think any of this would have happened if the series had been published solely as blog posts. As I’m learning, packaging my work into pamphlets has benefits for distribution. Most of that local virality happened from individuals emailing and forwarding the pamphlet to one another. Being able to easily share around the entire thing—some 100 pages—without needing to send 11 blog posts made it hyper-forwardable, an easy package to share far and wide. The Bournville Village Trust even asked for a copy, which will now live in their archives! And because it’s so easily shareable, whenever I meet a new city building project going forward, I’ll just send them this pamphlet.

Not only was it exciting to see this pamphlet reach all the right people and make the impact that it did, but it was also one of the most financially successful projects I’ve published to date. All but 4 of the 11-part series were locked to paid subscribers on Substack, and the complete series was available for sale as a digital ($4+) and print pamphlet ($9 + $13 shipping) on Metalabel, as well as an audiobook ($4+). This resulted in more financial support for my work than I ever received sharing free posts with all subscribers.

This was incredibly validating as I have been testing a theory. I wanted to spend more time deeply researching the cornerstone pieces that would eventually become my book chapters. I was betting on longer pieces published less often, rather than shorter ideas published constantly. As a result, I didn’t publish anything in the two months leading up to this series as I was researching it. That was a little bit stressful as I watched paid subscribers roll off and received emails from subscribers wondering if I had hung up my hat. But once the series started publishing, I was happy to receive support from readers. Thank you so much for showing up and supporting my slow journalism!!! I’m excited to continue in that vein.

Now, let’s dig more deeply into the financials. Here’s what I earned and spent on this pamphlet series, as well as my takeaways for future projects.

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Saltaire: The company town that inspired Bournville, but was otherwise a tangent to the series

Titus Salt had a front-row seat to the worker strikes and riots that plagued 19th century England as textile mills rendered their labor obsolete. By the time his father retired and Salt became the head of his family’s textile business, their town of Bradford, England had become choked with smog, poor sanitation precipitated waves of epidemics, and workers earned exploitative wages in 14- to 16- hour shifts.

But by the 1840s, Salt had five mills of his own and decided to use his corporate wealth for the good of his workers. At great personal expense, he installed a smoke-consuming furnace to reduce city air pollution, improved ventilation in the workplace, and shortened worker hours. He started advocating for sanitation reform and pollution control at the city level, and eventually became the mayor where he put both reforms into action, despite opposition from his factory-owning peers.

If our benevolent factory owner turned town mayor sounds a lot like Jean Valjean in Les Miserables, well he has good reason to. Injected into this moment comes Charles Dickens critiques of poverty (Oliver Twist, 1838), Karl Marx’s demands for socialist control as a solution (Manifesto, 1848), and in 1845, Benjamin Disraeli’s middle path, a novel called Sybil, in which a benevolent factory owner sees himself as morally responsible for his workers’ welfare. This idea formed the basis of “One-Nation Conservatism,” which Disraeli preached and philanthropist-industrialists made their creed.

Salt, for one was a Christian Congregationalist; he believed wealth was a trust from God and intended to be used for the good of his community. In 1853, he opened a new mill in a neighboring borough that was not only the largest factory in Europe at the time, but also included worker welfare decades ahead of British industrial norms. Surrounding the mill were rows of quality stone homes built for workers, each with its own toilet and plumbed with clean water—a rarity at the time, especially among the working class. Public bathhouses ensured sanitary conditions, and schools provided education for children decades before it became a national standard.

At the mill’s opening, Salt gave a speech to great applause. It was covered in the paper. “Far be it from him to do anything to pollute the air and water of the district,” it reported. “He would do all he could, and he had no doubt he should be successful, to avoid evils so great as those resulting from polluted air and water; and he hoped to draw around him a population that would enjoy the beauties of the neighbourhood, and who would be a well-fed, contented, and happy body of operatives.”

This was just the beginning of what would become an increasingly ambitious project. Salt hired an architectural firm to design, not just the factory and homes, but an entire village designed in the Italianate style, with parks and gardens and curated spaces for leisure along the river. Soon after the mill’s opening, he added fair-priced shops, recreational facilities, and social welfare institutions like hospitals and almshouses for elderly workers. Saltaire quickly became one of the most beautiful towns in the world, and a good quality life for all who lived in it. Workers from surrounding areas vied for a job at the mill and a chance to live in the village with their families. At its height in 1871, more than 4,000 people called it home.

When Salt died in 1876, 100,000 people lined the streets for his funeral, most of them workers for the company. It was one of the largest demonstrations of worker respect for any industrialist in British history.

The village faced ups and downs in the hands of following owners until, like many industrial towns, it declined alongside the industry in the 1930s. But the aesthetically beautiful town would endure as a testament to one of capitalism’s earliest utopian experiments—in 2001 it was named a UNESCO world heritage site and continues to thrive as a residential village with a preserved historic district.

At the 1867 Paris Exposition Universelle, the city was presented as a shining beacon of industrial philanthropy and worker welfare, and newspapers across the continent idealized Salt’s approach. This struck a chord with fellow Congregationalists, but also with the Quakers, particularly the chocolatiers George and Richard Cadbury….

Bournville: Not just a worker paradise, but also a social experiment in virtue

Creating an abundance of leisure activities, George Cadbury believed, would also create a better person.

“In trying to help these men, who were hard at work all day, I very quickly discovered that when night came, the only thing offered them was the saloon,” Cadbury told a reporter. “In some way I must get these men back to the land, and that is why I locate six of my cottages on an acre, planting fruit trees at the bottom of each garden…I am sure that the employee when at work on the land is away from the public house.”

Bournville was a dry city, where the closest thing for workers to do was use the swimming pool, play sports in the village green, or garden their land. This he thought, would create a better citizenry. “For the sake of the state, the citizen should be at his best, and it is the business of the state to maintain conditions conducive to his bodily welfare,” he said. “I strongly desire that the dwellings shall occupy one quarter of the site, the rest to be used for gardens and open spaces… and I want the rent to be so low as to attract the laborers from the slums, but not in any way to place the tenants as recipients of charity.”

Burnham’s Plan of Chicago: A social city that would never work in America

I read Daniel Burnham’s Plan of Chicago in its entirety, and could have written a gigantic section on it alone. Instead, I paraphrased it down to only a couple sentences. What I think was most interesting about the plan is that an early draft of it contained a social welfare mission similar to Ebenezer Howard’s. In his plan, Burnham warned that the city would need to address affordable housing just like London was.

“Throughout the civilized world there is a great forward movement in the direction of transforming cities to adapt them to the improved conditions of living which the people everywhere are demanding, and which, moreover, they feel that they have the power to enforce,” Burnham wrote. “Chicago has not yet reached the point where it will be necessary for the municipality to provide at its own expense, as does the city of London, for the rehousing of persons forced out of congested quarters, but unless the matter shall be taken in hand at once, such a course will be required in common justice to men and women so degraded by long life in the slums that they have lost all power of caring for themselves.”

Burnham recommends the city address affordable housing and that hospitals be provided. “Among us in America hospital service has grown up piecemeal,” Burnham laments in his draft. “The vast amounts of money that hospitals and their equipment cost have been frittered away. There has been no concentration of effort and no well designed general scheme connected either with their erection or operation… Has the time come for the state to take up this matter as a whole and deal with it in a comprehensive manner? The health… of the individual is as important to the state as is the safety of his life, limb or property.”

He thinks the city should build creches for mothers who can’t watch their children during the day because they need to work. He even aims to design more transparent police stations, “so arranged that the policeman can do nothing to any prisoner while hidden from view.”

He removed the bulk of his social agenda from the plan before publishing, perhaps to better appease an American capitalist audience, but there was little hope an American city could provide such services anyway.

The Plan even includes a legal section in which a lawyer laments the lack of action they can take. “Extensive municipal and governmental works are more quickly and easily executed in those parts of the world where the legislative authorities have a free hand than they can be under a system of rigid constitutional restraints.”

Pullman: A masterpiece in city planning, but a complete failure at social welfare

I first wrote about Pullman as a utopia before I read the book about it and realized it wasn’t. Like Saltaire before it, the railroad town was built for workers just outside of Chicago, and for several years it was absolutely a worker paradise. The owner and founder George Pullman even built a special traincar to transport guests from the Chicago Exposition to the town, and people marveled at how beautiful it was.

I reduced it down to a paragraph in the final essay, a cautionary tale of what happened when the wealthy industrialist cut everyone’s pay, but didn’t cut their rents. Employees were screwed twice, by an employer who was also their landlord, and were fired for attempts to unionize!

Disney Robots are cooler than Chinese robots but have nothing to do with cities

When the World’s Fair came to New York City in 1964, Disney Imagineers built a whole warehouse for their next advancement: Humanoid Robots. My dad attended the fair as a seven-year-old and still remembers watching a robotic Abraham Lincoln deliver the Gettysburg address to an awe-struck audience!

Today, Disney humanoids—built for entertainment rather than manufacturing—are some of the most advanced robots ever built. While China’s 2025 Robot Games showcased remote-controlled robots stumbling over steps, Disney’s “stuntronics” can perform aerial acrobatics—flipping through the air for Marvel-like superhero stunts. If you haven’t seen them in action yet, I beg you to watch the videos. 👇🏻

Pandora’s Na’vi Shaman robot, built for the Avatar-themed “Na’vi River Journey” attraction is one of the most lifelike humanoids created, able to move its face and body in the fluid way of a human, rather than the rigid mechanical movements of an automaton. Videos of the robot without its skin are equally impressive, showing the ways its hundreds of muscles form lifelike expressions.

I found these an impressive and fun tangent on Disney, but they ultimately had nothing to do with city building.

Thee aren’t the only anecdotes from the cutting-room floor, I deleted a large section that I am now developing for a future essay. In the meantime, let me know if you enjoy reading the deleted scenes….

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Thanks for reading!

Elle Griffin

Thank you so much for following my long-form essay Let Cities Build Utopia, which was serialized in 11 installments over the past six weeks. You can still support the series by collecting the print or digital pamphlet here. 👇🏻

Collect the Pamphlet

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

• Foreword: Land should be a public good—not just private property by

• 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

A special thank you to this project’s patron, the Center for Land Economics, which supported my ability to spend three months writing one essay, as well as hire illustrators and designers to bring it to life! Their newsletter , was a godsend to me while I was writing this piece, as was their founder who answered a lot of my questions along the way.

Thank you so much for reading and supporting this project! I’ve been diligently working on our next one while this one published and I’m excited to debut our next pamphlet soon.

More to come,

P.S. For further reading, here are the primary sources I used to research this series. 10% of pamphlet profits are being distributed to those I could get ahold of.

Marginalia

• Scottish Islands

  • Isle of Eigg Heritage Trust

  • Stornoway Trust

  • Community Land Scotland

  • “Who Owns Scotland?”

• Saltaire

  • Saltaire, World Heritage Site

  • Sybil by Benjamin Disraeli

  • Special thanks to Colin Coates, Saltaire historian

• Bournville

  • “A ‘Trust’ for Social Benefit” by WH Tolman

  • Bournville Village Trust Charity Overview

  • The Model Village and Its Cottages: Bournville by W Alexander Harvey

  • Bournville: Model Village to Garden Suburb by Michael Harrison

  • Bournville Village Trust, 2024 Statement

  • Bournville Village Trust photographs: DanielCallicott@bvt.org.uk

• Ebenezer Howard

  • Garden Cities of To-Morrow by Ebenezer Howard

  • Letchworth Annual Report, 2024

  • The Building of Satellite Towns by CB Purdom

• London

  • Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing by

• The US/Georgism

  • Progress and Poverty by Henry George

  • “Progress and Poverty” , , and

  • “Urban Proxima” by

  • Report on a plan for San Francisco, by Daniel H. Burnham

  • Plan of Chicago by Daniel Burnham

  • The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs

• Disney

  • The Original Epcot

  • The “Florida Film”

  • “How Disney Became One of the Largest Transit Agencies in North America” by

  • The Imagineering Story, Disney+

• Singapore

  • Urban Land Rent: Singapore as a Property State by Anne Haila

  • Government Financial Statements, 2024-2025

  • Singapore’s Annual Budget, 2024-2025

  • SLA Annual & Sustainability Report 2024-2025

• China

  • Journal of Special Juridictions

  • “The Shift Towards Increased Autonomy in Special Jurisdictions” by Journal of Special Jurisdictions

  • Breakneck by Dan Wang

• Sen̓áḵw

  • Sen̓áḵw Website

  • visited the building site last summer and took some pictures that can be viewed here.

• Community Land Trusts

  • On Common Ground by John Emmeus Davis, Line Algoed, María E. Hernández-Torrales

• Company Towns

  • Pullman by Kenneth Schoon

  • Fordlandia by Greg Grandin

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This is part of “Let Cities Build Utopia,” an 11-part series on the future of cities. Collect the complete series as a print pamphlet, digital pamphlet, or audiobook. 👇🏻

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If we want to create more utopian cities, we should borrow from the models we’ve explored so far in this series.

Communities should buy cities (Scaling Eigg)

Eigg and Stornoway, alongside 500 community-owned territories in Scotland, have created Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities at scale, as well as given us a path to create a whole lot more of them. In the year 2000, only 52,354 hectares were community-owned in Scotland, but today 208,597 hectares are community-owned.

That’s roughly 6,727 hectares a year being put into community trusts. Imagine what would happen if other countries decided to do the same?

Community right-to-buy laws are already under consideration in Wales and the UK, and could easily be implemented by countries worldwide as one after another creates a wave of community-owned neighborhoods, towns, and even cities!

We could create a world of self-sufficient micro sovereignties!

As in Scotland, if the United States passed community right-to-buy laws, localities with strong communities would convert first.

The island of Maui, for instance, already has several community land trusts that could be expanded this way. After fires demolished the city of Lahaina in 2023, a CLT was created to secure the land for locals before developers could buy it all up and build hotel chains. They’ve so far purchased 13 parcels, with Maui’s County Council authorizing up to $5 million to secure shorelines for permanent public use. The county will contribute another $3 million, with United Way contributing $1.5 million. This is in addition to the Na Hale O Maui Community Land Trust, which owns another 50 leasehold homes on the island. There’s no reason public dollars couldn’t be used to expand trusts and even purchase commercial properties, with hotels and tourist infrastructure paying land rents that support locals and local development, rather than private property owners on the island.

With community right-to-buy laws in place, islanders could even push for the right to own their islands. The Hawaiian island of Lanai, for one, is 98% owned by the billionaire Larry Ellison who owns most of the island’s commercial buildings—including two Four Seasons hotels—and serves as a landlord to most residents. Why shouldn’t islanders organize a Lanai Trust that could express interest in the property, and raise public funds to purchase it on behalf of residents if he or an heir puts it up for sale? If the island eventually becomes abandoned, neglected, or harmful to the community, the trust could be granted eminent domain to force the sale.

Just as Scotland helped Eigg buy itself back from its billionaire owner, the United States could help Lanai become community-owned. It would be an Eigg revival!

Even without public funds, communities around the world could form trusts and buy themselves up—this could even be how we save main streets! Towns like Bozeman, Montana; Bend, Oregon; Ashland, Oregon, or Brigham City, Utah could establish trusts that slowly buy up Main Street real estate as well as surrounding residential areas, and support their town’s local economy through land rents. Cruise ship ports or tourist towns like Vail, Park City, Aspen, and Jackson Hole could start with Community Land Trusts that ensure affordable housing for locals, even as they expand to buy up all the tourist infrastructure that could fund local infrastructure, not hotel chains that own all the land.

Where land has been destroyed, as in the fires of Los Angeles, the community could buy the land together and decide for themselves what they want to do with it. Where land has become depopulated, communities could collectively purchase and develop it for their use. New Orleans has the highest vacancy rate with 22.9% of homes abandoned. Detroit isn’t far behind with 21.9%. A trust could aggregate the land and develop business and residential districts just like Sen̓áḵw, with skyscrapers and infrastructure and affordable long-term leases that might attract businesses to move in and revive residential communities. The same could be done in depopulating cities like Cleveland, Baltimore, Buffalo, Gary, and Youngstown.

We could convert a lot of the world’s land to autonomous communities this way, and even speed up the process by eliminating some of Scotland’s constraints. Scottish communities must have funding ready the second land goes for sale, a constraint that makes adoption difficult. A public land bank could fix that by funding projects upfront and allowing communities to assume ownership over time, drastically increasing uptake.

At its current rate, Scotland would be 70% community owned in 1,000 years, but with innovations that encourage community ownership, 70% of nations could feasibly become community-owned in the next 200-300 years!

Investors should fund cities (Scaling Letchworth)

If development groups like California Forever want to buy up land and build new cities, we should let them do that… on the condition that the land is held in a trust on behalf of residents and community stakeholders. Investors can still invest in a “California Forever Trust” and earn (capped) dividends from land leases. The trust can still master-plan a new city with expansive residential communities and a walkable park network. But residents and businesses inherit the town and ultimately benefit from its long-term economic growth, not private property developers who sell it all off to private commercial and residential owners.

I’d imagine the state of California would have been much more willing to grant autonomy to California Forever if the land was held in a trust on behalf of Solano residents. The city initially withdrew a ballot measure that would have allowed the city to bypass zoning restrictions, and residents have picketed the development, attempting to block the organization from purchasing their farmland. But if the land was given back to the community, just as Cadbury donated Bournville to a community trust, why not grant the city zoning control—residents could earn land rents for it and become self-sufficient, and would benefit from the city’s development and growth!

Not only that, but by putting the city in a trust, it would become immortal, able to survive centuries without political backlash, just like Bournville, rather than becoming another suburb for wealthy property owners.

Privately developed paradises around the world could do the same. We know from history: The trust is one of the most sustainable and resident-benefitting forms of governance cities can use. It should be a condition of their autonomous development!

Cities should own land (Scaling Vienna)

Cities should own land, just like Vienna and Singapore. Some cities are achieving this by building from scratch, Battery Park in Manhattan, for example, or the state-owned city of The Point in Utah. We need much more of these.

Closed prisons are actually a great place to build them. New York has closed more than 20 prisons in the last 15 years, and recently proposed closing another five. Since the year 2000, 21 states have closed at least one correctional facility, and all of them have established commissions to figure out what to do with a bevy of state-owned properties.

Why not make them all cities—built on city-owned land?

So far, New York and Massachusetts are planning to sell the land to private developers, which is a missed opportunity. Only California is taking advantage—the state’s Surplus Land Act prioritizes public land for affordable housing, and a separate Excess Sites program identifies excess state-owned property for housing projects. The state even launched an interactive map of state properties, and developing entities can receive long-term ground leases from the state to build housing on them.

All of these states, however, should give the land to the city.

If there’s one thing we know from the long history of city building, it’s that cities that own their own land are much better off—they can master plan depending on the needs of the city, and have a revenue source that can fund its wellbeing for centuries. Almost every city built by a larger state or national government failed as they appropriated city earnings for state and national use, and future politicians ceased investment in the cities they built to save taxpayers’ money.

Where cities and communities already have land sovereignty, they should use land rents to develop a revenue source, like Sen̓áḵw. Many Native American tribes already control large plots of contiguous land with sovereignty over zoning and building, as well as the ability to generate land rents through it. Why shouldn’t those tribes create a bunch of Sen̓áḵws around the country The Cahuilla Band of Indians in and around Palm Springs might be the best-positioned to do so. They already lease land to hotels, apartments, and commercial buildings, and could expand with residential communities and mixed-use development they don’t have to ask permission to build. Tribes near Seattle, Tacoma, Scottsdale, and other urban centers could do the same with the help of capped investors.

Cities should have tax autonomy (Scaling Georgism)

Where cities do not own land, states should at least grant them tax autonomy. Cities should be able to earn a profit, and use those funds for the benefit of residents.

San Francisco, New York, Chicago, and major metropolitan areas with expensive real estate are unlikely to be purchased by trusts or owned by the state in the next 100 years. That means the world’s largest cities will continue to be owned and run by thousands of private property holders, not to mention a host of state and federal interests, rendering them unable to master-plan or invest in a better future for residents.

We already know the solution to that: Either municipalities should have tax autonomy, as in the Basque Country and Switzerland. Or they should be able to use property taxes that way, via Georgism.

If cities do not own their land, residents should still benefit from it.

Cities already earn revenue through property taxes, and they still work just as they did in George’s time—taxing both land and buildings, with heavy caps that ensure cities can’t earn more revenue even as land values soar. Now there are movements to give cities much more control: Pennsylvania has already split property taxes in two, assessing the land value and the building value separately. Several US states are trying to do the same, including New York, Colorado, New Hampshire, Virginia, and Washington.

If we split property taxes in two, cities can raise land taxes even as they decrease building taxes. Even if overall property taxes remain the same for residential owners, this one step would make unused land too expensive to own and push speculative owners to either develop or sell. Owners who choose to build would increase the wellbeing of our cities—studies show that Pennsylvania cities build 13% more housing and start 12% more businesses where they have split-rate property taxes. They also improve old buildings or replace them with ones that can house more people, just as Singapore does. Owners who choose to sell could create community-owners faster.

As cities grow and develop, and the urban core becomes more valuable, the city earns more rent to invest in the community.

San Francisco, for example, could become entirely self-sufficient. The city’s budget was $15.9 billion in 2025, with roughly $3 billion of that coming from state and federal transfers, and about $4 billion coming from property taxes. At a modest 5% annual land rent, the city could raise $25–30 billion per year—nearly twice its current budget—while eliminating the need for state and federal grants.1 With that money, the city could buy land, develop comprehensive transit structures, or fund housing developments for police officers, nurses, and teachers that would allow the city to finally have the staff it needs to effectively maintain the city.

Cities should earn the bulk of tax revenue (Scaling the Basque Country)

Raising land taxes is not enough. Cities, after all, can’t raise taxes too much without also decreasing state and federal taxes. Our overall tax burden would be too high!

That’s why we also need state tax reform. And here we must ask: If cities across the country have tax autonomy and use that revenue for the benefit of their residents, what might we need state and national governments for?

I tend to lean toward Howard’s most radical and ideological bent: If the whole country is a bunch of self-sufficient cities, then states and nations can be much lighter weight. Here I would model a form of Georgism meets the Basque Country: Cities earn money from land rents, states control all other forms of taxation, and states remit a percent of their economy to the federal government.

If the city earns land rents, it would be able to support everything it needs without state and federal grants—including housing, hospitals, schools, transportation, robust master-planning with green space, beautiful architecture, and city design. If the state controls all other taxation—including income taxes, corporate taxes, and sales taxes—US states would be able to support social services like healthcare and education and social security, as well as law enforcement and courts, just as EU countries do.

If states remit a percent of their economies to the federal government, just as EU countries remit a percent of their economies to the EU, it could fund national defense, foreign policy, currency and central banking, international coordination, as well as higher law enforcement and courts. Personally, I would start the remittance at 17-20%, so the federal government can still operate on its current budget during the transition period. Over time, as the nation pays off its debts and hands social welfare programs like Social Security over to the states, the federal remittance could become much smaller, perhaps only a 5-10% allotment.

As in Switzerland, this would make cities and states the richest and most important governing bodies in our lives, and the federal government would become much smaller.

It would also mean city mayors and state governors become the more important governing bodies in our lives—not the US president—and this is something we have the voting power to affect. In this future, the city and state get way more money and autonomy, and the nation gets much less. This would disrupt a large federal government that tries, and fails, to be everything to everyone, and replaces it with something much closer to what America’s founding fathers once imagined: Fiscally autonomous city-states supported by lighter-weight states, and an even lighter-weight nation.

In a world of self-sufficient cities, we would create many different kinds of utopia—the island of Eigg is very different from the cities of Bournville or Vienna or Singapore—that’s the point. Our local communities should represent the needs and wants and desires of the people who live in them, not property developers who extract that benefit for themselves or governments far away from us who can’t create the ideal life for everyone.

Cities need autonomy.

Autonomy should benefit residents.

That’s how we create utopia.

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Thanks for reading Let Cities Build Utopia. This is the final installment of the series!

This is part of “Let Cities Build Utopia,” an 11-part series on the future of cities. Collect the complete series as a print pamphlet, digital pamphlet, or audiobook. 👇🏻

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As I’ve established in this series so far, Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Prospera aren’t the only case studies we should look to in pursuit of the “city of the future.” We should also look to Eigg, Bournville, Letchworth, Vienna, and Singapore.

All of these cities are autonomous, with the power to raise and keep their own revenue, but the former uses that autonomy for the benefit of investors and national governments, while the latter use that autonomy for the benefit of residents.

If we want to create the city of the future then, the ideal city needs:

1. Real fiscal power (they can raise/keep revenue).

AND

2. The benefits of that fiscal power should flow back to residents.

Some cities in the world have 1, like Chinese SARs and SEZs, and they have been studied far and wide as examples of city building. But a few have both 1 and 2, and they haven’t been studied enough.

Thankfully, we have modern case studies there too.

Hong Kong isn’t the world’s only special autonomous region. The SAR structure has also been used for public benefit by the Basque Region of Spain, Greenland and the Faroe Islands in Denmark, and potentially Bhutan’s new Gelephu Mindfulness City. And California Forever isn’t the only investor-built town, an indigenous tribe in Canada as well as the State of Utah are already building much better ones.

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This is part of “Let Cities Build Utopia,” an 11-part series on the future of cities. Collect the complete series as a print pamphlet, digital pamphlet, or audiobook. 👇🏻

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My essay series so far has argued for a revival of the city-state: Fully autonomous, self-governing cities, with the ability to master-plan and raise their own revenue.

But here we must realize: Autonomy is not enough.

Hong Kong, for instance, is a Special Autonomous Region (SAR) with near Singapore-level autonomy over land and taxation, even as it exists inside a larger nation. Like Singapore, Hong Kong started out as an island under colonial rule and uses a near-identical land rent scheme.

But Hong Kong did not create the same quality of life that Singapore did.

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While I’m here, my time zone is a bit wonky. Office hours this month will be held Fridays at 9am Singapore Time or Thursday evenings in the US at 5pm (PT), 6pm (MT), 7pm (CT), and 8pm (ET). Come prepared with to discuss my utopian cities series, Network School, or another topic you’ve been thinking about.

Here are the links to sign up for March office hours:

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This is part of “Let Cities Build Utopia,” an 11-part series on the future of cities. Collect the complete series as a print pamphlet, digital pamphlet, or audiobook. 👇🏻

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Unlike any other city on earth, Singapore is also a country, which gives it full authority over land, master planning, and taxation.

The government even owns 90% of the country’s land, which means every person and business leases property from the state through 30, 60, and 99-year leases. More than 80% of the city lives in social housing.

For the first time, we can see Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City at scale, and wow. It works!

Singapore was a British Colony before it became a Japanese stronghold during World War II. When external forces withdrew, the island tried to join Malaysia but was expelled for fighting for racial equality and shared economic prosperity. Suddenly independent in 1965, with no natural resources, massive unemployment, and a severe housing shortage that quickly dissolved into slums and squatter settlements, Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew passed the Land Acquisition Act, which gave the state full authority to appropriate private land at a discount.

The city began claiming land and using its Housing Development Board to build residential buildings on it. As each new building went up, units were sold as a 99-year lease. By then, citizens already had access to the British-installed Central Provident Fund (or CPF), a mandatory savings account that could only be used for housing, healthcare, and eventually retirement. Now they could use it to buy new leases. Just as we might take out a mortgage to buy a home, Singaporeans could take out a mortgage to buy a lease, and even use their CPF account for the down payment!

This created Howard’s housing scheme at scale, and one of the most unique land and building rent models around the world. If an individual purchases a condo with a 99-year lease and decides to sell it 20 years later, they’re selling a 79-year lease to the next person. They might still earn a small profit on the sale if the location has become more desirable, but by the time there are fewer than 49 years on the lease, the property declines in value. By the time there is one year left on the lease, it’s worth nothing.

When the lease ends, the unit and building revert to state ownership, which usually tears down the building to build another one, selling 99-year leases once again.

This system is unlike any other in the world. Housing is not an investment or a retirement plan—buying and holding real estate means holding something that ultimately goes down in value. The only reason to purchase a lease in Singapore is because residents want to live there at an affordable “set-by-the-government-not-the-market” rate. The government, meanwhile, uses that rental income to build more housing and earn more revenue.

The real money started coming in when the state began auctioning 30, 60, and 99-year land leases to corporations.

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This is part of “Let Cities Build Utopia,” an 11-part series on the future of cities. Collect the complete series as a print pamphlet, digital pamphlet, or audiobook. 👇🏻

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Vienna is one of the few cities in the world that is also a state. And the only state that owns a significant portion of its own land.

When the Habsburg Empire dissolved in 1919, Vienna was suddenly a very large city with a lot of land holdings. But unlike every other dissolved crown, their new democratic government didn’t sell all the land off as private property. Instead, they built 400 housing schemes with 64,000 flats, as well as parks and gardens for workers to enjoy.

They were able to do this because, as a state, Vienna also has the unique ability to tax its citizens. They immediately installed the Wohnbausteuer, a property tax that scaled depending on rents and apartment size. Large luxurious apartments were taxed as high as 20% and provided a revenue stream the city could use to invest in massive housing projects. The city’s high productivity during this time meant that money was spent immediately on land and buildings—assets that would always remain in city hands.

They built better than England too, with all the collectivist values of their socialist ideology. Each housing block circled a courtyard greenspace, and came with laundries, bathhouses, kindergartens, libraries, cooperative grocery stores, and healthcare facilities. These were master-planned communities with all the social welfare goals Ebenezer Howard once imagined!

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