How will new countries attract (& keep) citizens?

What tomorrow's city builders are learning about equity, loyalty, and community.

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. 👇🏻

“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.