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.

Collect the Pamphlet

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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Our next pamphlet drop is here! Internet Sovereignty is nine writers thinking about the future of the internet through a digital and print pamphlet. Collect your favorite format on Metalabel to support the project.👇🏻

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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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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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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.

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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.

Now the state was earning money, not just from residents, but from commercial developers building skyscrapers. Here, the government puts a property up for auction with specifications for how it can be used. Interested companies bid for the land with a plan for what they want to do with it, and the winning bid pays a large amount of the lease upfront and gets the go-ahead to build.

Oh, and the buildings are beautiful.

In the case of residential housing, the government owns the land and the building, but in the case of commercial buildings, the government owns the land and the developer owns the building. The state, in these transactions, earns money for the initial 99-year lease, but also for any mid-lease changes. If the developer wants to add more floors or change the use of the building from what was originally proposed in the lease agreement, the government calculates how much the land value is increased by this lift and charges a “development fee” for the difference. As land goes up in value, the government earns more money from the lease.

Recently, the state has opened up for private development of housing, which has led many to believe the government is privatizing. That is not the case. Private residential complexes follow commercial rules: The state still owns the land, the developer builds and owns the building. When private individuals purchase units in the building, they collectively own both the building and the land lease. When the land lease nears its end, owners can collectively decide to sell the building (and their remaining land lease) to a developer. If they do, the developer would likely demolish the building, pay the state for a new 99-year lease, and then build and sell new units. If they don’t, the land and the building will become government property at the end of the lease. Either way, residents move to another building.

That all leases end and the land and buildings revert back to government ownership is vital. In the 1990s, a population boom meant the city needed more high-rise buildings, so Singapore pulled down a bunch of low-rise buildings and built more high-density ones instead. The city wouldn’t have been able to do this if property were privately owned. Private owners would have held onto their condos, even in aging buildings, and units would have become exorbitantly expensive as more people crammed into small buildings. Instead, the city is constantly under construction, pulling down old buildings that have come back into state ownership, and building new ones that can meet growth as it happens.

The State’s Urban Redevelopment Authority uses population growth and economic development data to create a 40- to 50-year master-plan for the city, complete with how much land needs to be developed for mass transportation, commercial and residential development, and environmental resource preservation. They plan every inch of the city, knowing when every lease ends, and coming up with plans for each block and parcel decades in advance. Reading their plans for 2026, I was struck by how the government has come up with a plan to address the need for new and more affordable housing, deciding to devote more land to building higher-density buildings. No other city can master-plan based on need this way.

Planning extends beyond property development to the economy itself. The city invests land rent earnings in a series of sovereign wealth funds. Temasek Holdings—part of the country’s investment portfolio—owns equity in nearly every company in the country, and at least 20% equity in the large companies that make up 41% of Singapore’s investment portfolio. That includes the country’s mass transit organization, airports, ports, and utility companies. To diversify, Singapore also invests 36% of its portfolio in markets worldwide, and the other 23% in asset management companies, private equity funds, and other investment opportunities.

Because the country earns so much money from rents and investments, taxes are among the lowest in the world. Singapore earns only 13.8% of its GDP in tax revenue, while the OECD index of high-income countries reports tax revenue as 34% of GDP on average. Singapore’s top personal income tax is only 24% compared to an average 42% in OECD countries, and corporate taxes are a flat 17% compared to 23% in OECD countries.1

Singapore, meanwhile, uses its earnings to provide many of the social services European countries are renowned for, and which Howard once hoped the city would provide: Healthcare is universal, catastrophic insurance is provided, and routine costs are subsidized. Schools are public and heavily subsidized through college. Childcare is subsidized, and employees and employers fund pensions through the CPF, ensuring the current generation isn’t paying for current retirees but rather into their own individual savings account.

The state also provides one social service no other nation in the world provides: Affordable housing for nearly all of its residents.

Imagine getting many of the benefits of Finland, but with affordable housing too, and at half the tax burden. People and companies around the world would line up for that.

Many do.

The country earns the highest scores on nearly every metric used to rank and measure countries—income per capita, GDP per capita, government effectiveness, health outcomes, livability, ease of doing business. It also has low rates of government corruption, poverty, crime, and unemployment.

Singaporeans enjoy a higher quality of life than in most cities around the world!

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This is part eight of an essay series titled “Let Cities Build Utopia.”
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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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In 1966, Walt Disney recorded a video revealing his plans for a futurist utopia—a privately built, master-planned, and fully autonomous city of the future. He called it an “experimental prototype community of tomorrow,” or EPCOT.

This was not a theme park, but plans for a real city in Florida with 20,000 residents and a wide greenbelt where residents could rent homes at lower than market rate, commute to work via monorail, and enjoy a pedestrian-designed world with lush landscaping and an abundance of recreational leisure spaces.

Though Disneyland, founded in Anaheim in 1955, was a theme park, it also served as a prototype for something grander—a testing ground for groundbreaking transportation innovations, some of the world’s most advanced robotics, obsessively engineered pedestrian flows, and aesthetically perfected urban design. City planners, transit agencies, and airport designers from around the world came to study the theme park.

Victor Gruen, inventor of the shopping mall, called it “America’s first walkable downtown.” Urban planner James W Rouse said it was “the greatest piece of urban design in the United States.”

But though Disney managed to carve a slice of paradise in LA, with perfectly maintained streets, no trash to be found, and streets repaved and buildings repainted nightly, he became increasingly disgruntled with the dystopia that cropped up around it. Cheap motels, tacky billboards, and fast food chains formed a “second-rate Las Vegas” around the park that ruined the experience. Disney studied the failures of City Beautiful and became convinced that city governments couldn’t create the prosperous neighborhoods we wanted to live in.

Instead, he’d have to build it himself.

Disney studied Bournville and Port Sunlight, read Ebenezer Howard’s book, and even designed EPCOT according to Howard’s concentric design.

By the time he published a video revealing his plans for EPCOT, Disney had spent years quietly purchasing 27,400 acres of contiguous land in Florida—the size of San Francisco—and negotiating municipal sovereignty from the state.

Promising to bring in god-like levels of money, jobs, and tourism to the state of Florida, he secured the autonomy to build roads, zone land, run police-style security, operate fire stations and EMS departments, manage utilities and waste management, build and maintain public transportation, and manage all public infrastructure. It could even issue its own bonds!

Disney’s new Reedy Creek Improvement District was granted more than city- or even county-level authority.

It was a plot of land the size of San Francisco with the powers of California!

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At the same time that Bournville was establishing an idyllic hamlet for factory workers, Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison were competing to power America’s first urban district: the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Tesla won the contract, and when Chicago debuted the fair’s “White City” across the waterfront, it became a spectacle of light. Twelve massive Westinghouse generators powered 100,000 lamps, lighting up canals, plazas, fountains, and buildings. More than 27 million people traveled to see it.

What followed was a revolution in utopian city building, but an altogether different one from England’s. If the European movement was about economic justice and the welfare of the working class, the American movement was more about private property and the aesthetic vision of industrialist capitalists. Developers used steel to build the world’s first skyscrapers, and Elisha Otis invented elevators that would take people to the top. Edison and Tesla powered our buildings, Bell Labs created telephones that connected them, and Ford mass-produced automobiles that allowed faster travel time between cities.

Cities were being improved, not by government reform, but by corporate innovation!!!

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By the time the labor movement arrived at the turn of the 20th century, there was a utopian faith that technology, more than politics, would solve worker welfare. American companies were producing washing machines, dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, and refrigerators that promised to liberate women and give them more leisure time. Automobiles made it possible for workers to live in a pastoral suburb far away from the sooty city. Radios and eventually movie theaters made entertainment more accessible to everyone.

Industrialization might have been the problem in England, but it was also the solution in America, and that came with a very different set of ideals.

We can see this contrast plainly when reading two utopian novels of the period, one written in 1888 Boston, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, and another written in 1890 London, William Morris’ News from Nowhere. Both novels imagined the year 2000, but the English one imagines a nostalgic Garden City aesthetic, with tranquil boat transportation, and no factory in sight; while the American one features architectural grandeur, music piped from central orchestras into every home, and Amazon-like warehouses providing for our every need.

If London dreamed of an anti-factory, anti-metropolis, pastoral paradise, Boston dreamed of a pro-progress, post-scarcity, techtopia!!!

My great-grandfather spent 50 years inventing lightbulbs for Edison and my family still has his paychecks, signed by Thomas Edison, hanging on our walls—it’s his wife’s wedding ring I wear. There was a mythos then, passed down to us today, that Americans could create a better future with our own ingenuity—with companies and research labs and governments that funded innovation rather than social welfare. Even after the Great Depression hit, the government used its money to fund ambitious highway projects, the Hoover Dam, and the Golden Gate Bridge—feats of engineering and skill that would keep people employed, rather than housed. At the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, General Electric debuted Futurama, a near future model city with a vast highway system, automated cars, and modern cities.

These ideals bettered American lives, but they didn’t build better cities.

There was some interest in the European models in the US. Bournville and Port Sunlight were widely reported on in the press, and a few American capitalists were inspired by their “welfare capitalism” mission. Milton Hershey, for one, built a chocolate town in Pennsylvania where he established a school that, to this day, owns a controlling stake in the chocolate company and a share of the profits. (If you’re counting, that makes three philanthropic chocolate towns in our story so far).

Ebenezer Howard even had a contemporary in the American Frederick Olmstead, who traveled to England to study the company towns; then returned to design parks systems for Boston, Buffalo, Louisville, and Seattle; and eventually helped found the National Park Service. He even designed the landscaping for the White City, and his sons went on to design America’s version of Letchworth: The philanthropist-funded towns of Forest Hills Gardens, New York; Marimont, Ohio; and Torrance, California.

Unfortunately, every town built by capitalists and investors in America were eventually sold off as private property, not held in common by a trust. And this would become a recurring theme.

After the success of the White City, the exposition’s designer, Daniel Burnham, became the poster boy of a new city revival movement—dubbed “City Beautiful”—and was inundated with requests to design the Washington Mall, as well as the cities of San Francisco, Chicago, and Cleveland. His 1906 plan for San Francisco was one of the first master-plans drawn up for an American metropolis, imagining the city as an epicenter for arts and culture, with a third of it reserved for parks, and an Athenæum in the hills with a monumental statue looking out to the water!

His 1909 “Plan of Chicago” featured wide boulevards, a walkable city center, and a public promenade along the waterfront. He thought modern sculptures and architectural marvels, as found in the ancient cities of Paris or Rome, would set American cities apart from the rest of the world, and that walkable city centers surrounded by nature would re-create the paradise so loved at the Exposition. “The Lakefront by right belongs to the people,” Burnham wrote in his plan. “Not a foot of its shores should be appropriated to the exclusion of the people.”

I read both plans in their entirety—the Chicago plan is massive, with plans for every street and block, and comprehensive plans for public transportation systems and funding. Hundreds of municipal agencies met with Burnham weekly for more than 18-months to build it.

None of Burnham’s city plans were built.

Chicago didn’t have one planning authority, but hundreds of municipal governments and committees, which themselves had to report to a web of state and legal jurisdictions. And the city didn’t have one land owner, but thousands of property owners with competing interests. Chicago would have had to purchase massive amounts of land using eminent domain to make Burnham’s plan happen, and no municipal entity had that kind of power, much less the tax authority to raise funds to do it.

After the 1906 earthquake destroyed 80% of San Francisco, the city had the opportunity to build Burnham’s plan from scratch, but couldn’t take it. Property owners wanted to recoup their losses now, and weren’t about to let the government delay their projects or take over building. The Southern Pacific Railroad controlled land downtown and had no interest in using it for Burnham’s plan. The city was held hostage by private property owners who wouldn’t give a single inch for the sake of master-planning utopia.

Here, we must remember, there was an inherent distrust of the government. Many Americans crossed the Atlantic to get away from more oppressive European ones; they weren’t about to hand power to a central authority. If European socialists thought governments should own land on behalf of individuals, American capitalists thought individuals should own land without government intervention, and that produced very different societal results.

American cities grew rapidly, which meant property owners got rich quickly. The frontier became a wild west land grab, with wealthy industrialists buying up land in the cities and railroad barons buying up land along the train routes. Land became scarce and expensive to buy, and cities wound up with lots of empty lots they couldn’t build on. Workers in San Francisco or New York might live eight to a flat while the neighboring lot was empty, the private investment of some American capitalist.

It was in this vein that Henry George proposed a land rent model more favorable to Americans: In his 1879 book Progress & Poverty, he advocated, not for government-purchased land, but privately-owned land that was taxed by the government to fund social welfare. Specifically, he thought only the unimproved value of the land should be taxed. That is: An empty lot in the middle of San Francisco is worth more than an empty lot in the middle of the desert, and thus should be taxed more. No individual made that land more valuable, society collectively did, and thus no one individual should benefit from that land, but society collectively should.

This was different from how property taxes in the US and ground rents in England worked at the time. Both taxed a property’s total value, including any buildings on it. If property owners developed their land or otherwise improved the buildings on it, they would pay much higher taxes for increasing the value of their property. This penalized growth and development, and created an incentive for speculation, with private land owners buying up property and sitting on it for decades as an appreciating asset.

George thought we could fix the problem, not by taxing development, but by taxing the full value of the land beneath it. That is: If the land (without buildings) would rent for $1,000/month, then the landowner would pay $12,000 in taxes each year. That might sound high, but homeowners and commercial developers would benefit from this transaction—taxed only on the value of their land, not buildings too. And both could build whatever they wanted on that land untaxed, with unlimited earning potential. It was only the speculators who were penalized—it would be too expensive to sit on vacant land, and thus property owners would have to do something productive with it or sell it to someone who would.

The city, meanwhile, would earn much more income as it grew.

Imagine how rich San Francisco would be today if it earned rent on all of its land each year. The answer is: Very rich.

George believed these taxes should go to the city—not to state or federal governments—and that’s already how taxes worked back then. In the early 1900s, cities were funded with property taxes, states were funded by multi-city infrastructure projects like railroads, and there was no income tax yet—the federal government was funded only with tariffs and consumption taxes on alcohol and tobacco. George’s land tax then, was not a revolution but a minor reform to the way cities were already funded. He even thought we could replace all of the other taxes with just this one, a single tax that didn’t penalize American industrialism or capitalism, just the unearned value of the land beneath it.

George’s book became a bestseller, and his idea for a single land tax—called “Georgism”—was immensely popular. But governments didn’t adopt it. America was entering its Gilded Age, and the country’s largest landowners weren’t about to allow their investments to be taxed so highly. They branded George a “socialist” even though his plan preserved private property. They martyred him as a “tax the rich” radical, even though his plan wouldn’t tax their wealth or assets, just the land that owners did nothing to improve. When George ran for New York City Mayor, campaigning on a land tax that would fund the entire city, real estate owners threw all their weight and money behind his opponent, who would do no such thing.

Indicative of the movement, a board game invented to teach Georgism in 1904, became “Monopoly” when the Parker Brothers licensed it. In the original game, players paid rent into a public treasury that benefited all players. This was meant as a cautionary tale against the other way it could go: With one landowner buying up all of the property and extracting rent from the rest of the players. When Parker Brothers developed it, obtaining a monopoly became the goal of the game, not the path to avoid.

By the early 1900s, the Gilded Age had reached its height, and workers were destitute and striking. Then, as now, the cities leaned liberal. Workers lived in the cities, which meant cities were where the unions formed and the socialist movements rose. George’s run for New York City mayor served as a close call for conservative landowners in the suburbs. If they didn’t want their assets taxed (or worse, appropriated), they needed to take power from the more liberal cities.

In 1907, the US Supreme Court passed Dillon’s Rule, giving states authority over cities and taking away their ability to levy taxes, capture land rents, and establish welfare systems.

Georgism was effectively dead.

Except where it had been enshrined in trusts.

In 1894, the Fairhope Single Tax Colony had been founded by Georgists in Alabama, and in 1900 so too was Arden, Delaware. Both towns held land in common and earned land leases that they recycled into the public good. These towns were closer to England’s company and philanthropist towns than George’s own ideals—residents still had to pay taxes to the city and state—but they continued to prove the land rent model could fund cities.

And that trust ownership was the only way cities could survive the whims of politics.

By the early 1900s, wealth inequality had reached its breaking point and progressive reformers like Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson advocated for a national income tax instead. This became a populist rallying cry. When America passed the 16th Amendment in 1913, giving Congress the ability to establish a national income tax, it was a tax on the rich. Ninety-seven percent of the country paid no tax at all, while the highest earning brackets paid 7%.

As in Europe, tax rates were subject to politics. The top marginal rate increased to 77% when the Fed needed more funds for war and fell to 25% under conservative parties, only to rise back up to 63% after the Great Depression. By 1943, World War II was on our doorstep, and the federal government passed the Current Tax Payment Act to fund it. What was once a tax on the rich now became a tax on everyone—80-90% of Americans now paid income taxes, instead of just 3%.

After the war, America never went back.

There were a lot of good things about the federal income tax—for one, it funded social security in 1935—but the 16th Amendment radically reshaped the United States. Cities, which were once the richest and most powerful entity in our lives, were now poor, with little power of their own. The federal government, which was once small and tariff-funded, was now large and wealthy. Though Americans once prided themselves on being a nation of independent colonies, now they had achieved the opposite: A large centralized government with sole power over the coffers.

The contradiction is that cities are our most productive entity, but also the poorest. Cities are rich in GDP, but poor in public goods. Most of the money we make still happens in cities, and most of the services we need are still local ones—hospitals, schools, day cares, libraries, retirement homes—the kind George and Howard wanted each city to be able to self-fund. Instead, the bulk of our earnings, and thus powers, are given to the federal government, and we’re left to fund local resources with dwindling state budgets and private spending.

To this day, San Francisco can’t build housing—it doesn’t own any land. And it can’t build new trains whenever it needs them—transportation money comes from state and federal grants, which must approve every expenditure through years of state and federal compliance. San Francisco can’t even hire enough police officers—the city is short 500 officers—because private property has become too expensive to attract them into the city. Since the cost of housing is so high, so is homelessness and street disorder.

As a result, San Francisco is far from a utopia. For being America’s most future-thinking city, it is also its most dystopian, with aging buildings and infrastructure, stores that have locked down all their merchandise because of rampant shoplifting, and the terrible reality of having to step over people sleeping in their own urine on the sidewalk. I spent a decade living and working in the Bay Area—nowhere else in the world have I had someone spit on my jacket as I walked by, or throw a brick at my car while I was at work.

San Francisco may be full of people building inspiring things, but every investment in the city only improves land values that the city cannot capture.

Gains flow to private landlords, not city residents.

Despite every attempt at master-planning utopia, the Washington Mall was the only place where one of Burnham’s plans was implemented in its entirety. Washington DC is not just a city, but also a state, and thus owns its own land and can use its own tax dollars to build whatever it wants without private property owners or competing city or state governments compromising them away.

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This is part five of an essay series titled “Let Cities Build Utopia.”
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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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After companies built the cities of Bournville and Port Sunlight, and gave them to residents, the social reformer Ebenezer Howard was inspired to systematize the model.

Cities had been poorly run for decades, and now industrialists were creating better ones all across England. Howard wondered whether it was possible to create similarly planned communities without relying on a single benevolent industrialist. In his 1898 book Garden Cities of To-Morrow, he outlined a plan in which small satellite villages were funded by social investors, owned and master-planned by a trust, and anchored by corporate tenants that provide work for the area.

Each village would be owned and governed by a trust, which would use the money to buy up agricultural land along the train route and build a master-planned community. As in Bournville, the trust would earn revenue from rents—residential, commercial, and agricultural—only this time there would be no private property sales eroding incomes, improving upon the Cadbury model. Profits would be used to pay back investors, capped at a 4% return, as well as maintain and beautify the city and public garden spaces. Most importantly, revenues would “provide a large surplus for other purposes, such as old-age pensions or insurance against accident and sickness.”

This idea was radical, and among my favorite of the industrial welfare reforms proposed at the time. According to Howard’s model, the village becomes our social benefactor, not the national government. And the benefits residents receive—schools, hospitals, retirement homes, etc.—are funded through rental income received locally by the village, not national tax dollars. Because the community is governed by a charitable trust, it autonomously governs in the interest of the community. Each village provides for its own, taking on the business of running cities and navigating social reforms, which the government had so far proved inept at doing.

Here we see the benefits of capitalism providing the welfare of socialism, to a village that self-governs as in anarchism, through a trust that pays for it all with land rents. “To achieve these desirable ends, I have taken a leaf out of the books of each type of reformer and bound them together by a thread of practicability,” Howard says in his book.

Property rights, he realized, are often more powerful than government rights, and he aimed to take advantage of that. “Garden City is in a greatly superior position,” he said, “for, by stepping as a quasi public body into the rights of a private landlord, it becomes at once clothed with far larger powers for carrying out the will of the people than are possessed by other local bodies, and thus solves to a large extent the problem of local self-government.”

That local government becomes much more important than the national one in his scheme. “The rents were,” he says, “not to be levied by a central government far removed from contact with the people, but by the very parish (in my scheme the municipality) in which the people reside.”

Amazingly, Howard didn’t just write about this idea; he tried it out.

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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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In the late 19th century, the social reformer Ebenezer Howard thought small communities should entirely self-govern—that we should create a world of self-sufficient city-states, each turning a profit so they could provide everything residents needed, including social welfare.

Howard’s idea wasn’t a new one. In fact, he was inspired by a wave of company towns that had already done it. Bournville, in particular.

The Quaker chocolatiers George and Richard Cadbury had a front-row seat to the worker strikes and riots that plagued 19th century England. By then, cities had become choked with soot, poor sanitation precipitated waves of epidemics, workers earned exploitative wages on 14- to 16-hour shifts, and children worked in unsanitary and dangerous conditions. But the brothers had the goal of “alleviating the evils which arise from the insanitary and insufficient housing accommodation supplied to large numbers of the working classes, and of securing to workers in factories some of the advantages of outdoor village life, with opportunities for the natural and healthful occupation of cultivating the soil.”

So in 1893, the Cadburys purchased 330 acres outside of Birmingham and hired an architect to design Bournville, a factory town with worker cottages built in the Arts and Crafts style. Rents were subsidized by the Cadburys and set below market rates, with 10% of the land reserved for gardens and recreational spaces including outdoor swimming pools, tennis courts, and soccer pitches. The community was surrounded by an abundance of trees and landscaping, and each home had its own garden plot.

They called it the “Factory in a Garden.”

Not only did workers move into a pastoral paradise, with an idyllic setting straight out of a fairy tale and affordable cottages so picturesque they might as well be gingerbread homes, but they were granted pensions, life insurance, and paid holidays. It might have been the most beautiful town with the best-treated workers in all of England—and this in a village owned by a company!

But this was just the beginning.

In 1900, just five years after the village’s first houses went up for sale, George Cadbury did something truly revolutionary. He gifted ownership of the entire estate—then comprising 330 acres and 370 cottages—to the newly established Bournville Village Trust, effectively transferring ownership of the village to the community itself.

The city was no longer owned by a rich benefactor, but by a trust that would ensure the best interest of residents in perpetuity!

This formed a quasi social state for residents.

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