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

Collect the Pamphlet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tier 1: Mandatory Infrastructure

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

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

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

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

• Infrastructure test: Is this foundational to other services?

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

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

Tier 2: Citizen-Directed Allocations

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

Qualification criteria for Tier 2 services:

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

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

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

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

• Innovation potential test: Does this allow experimentation?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Collect the Pamphlet

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

—Daniel Bell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The evolving purpose of the state

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

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

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

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

The digital state of nature

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What an internet country is not

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

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

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

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

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

So, how then will the first internet country emerge?

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

What, then, would it look like in practice?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can an internet country have a national identity?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Collect the Pamphlet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anything less than independence can be taken away

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The legal architecture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which means countries are becoming products.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What if governance worked more like app permissions?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Give me land, lots of land (value)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Collective ownership of urban life

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

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

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

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

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

A rising tide that lifts all ships

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beyond the welfare state

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Emergence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Post-war order

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The future

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Only one made it back.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hard things grip you.

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

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

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

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

What happens when your life no longer fits inside them?

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

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

So we did.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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