Post Nation—our next pamphlet drop is here!
Seven writers explore a world after nation-states.
Our next pamphlet drop is here! Post Nation is seven writers exploring a world after nation-states. Collect the digital or print pamphlet to support the project.👇🏻
You can also follow the series right here, where I’ll be publishing the series in eight installments over the next four weeks. All essays will be free to all subscribers, with paid supporters at the Collector tier receiving this and every print edition we publish. Post Nation has already been sent your way!
Seven writers explore a world after nation-states
This essay collection is because I don’t think giant superpowers will create the future we want. I think lots of micro-sovereignties will.
Small pockets of utopia can upend the world order—they have in the past, and I think they will in the future too. I’m not alone—I’m joined by six thinkers who, through this collaborative essay collection and print pamphlet, explore a world after nation states. We’re talking about what might cause their downfall, how micro-sovereignties might emerge in power and influence, what they might look like, and how they could join federal governments à la carte.
Coming up in the series:
“What comes after the nation state?” A foreword by our patron, Sondre Rasch, CEO of SafetyWing
“America created the world order—what happens when it leaves?” By Mark Lutter, founder and Executive Director of Charter Cities Institute
“You should own stock in your city,” by Jeff Fong, author of Urban Proxima
“How will new countries attract (& keep) citizens?” by Michael Skinner, author of Savvy Cities
“Fractional ownership works for Banksy paintings—not cities” by Elle Griffin, author of The Elysian
“Why new countries should rent land—not buy it” by Julien Starr, founding director of Startup States Society
“What will the first internet country look like?” by Eman Zabi, author of Thinking in Public
“How should we tax internet countries?” by Madison Karas, Plumia fellow
“Let states choose their federal governments” by Elle Griffin, author of The Elysian
SafetyWing serves as the patron of this issue. The organization provides a social safety net for a global citizenry, and I am grateful for their support of our design and illustration costs. The cover illustration is by Emiliano Raspante with the digital and print pamphlet designed by Patricia Faggi. Pamphlet sales go directly to contributors—the Elysian treasury keeps 20% of profits with the rest split between contributors.
If you’re new to The Elysian, this is all part of our mission to bring pamphleteering back. Just like the Enlightenment era thinkers who came before us, we’re exploring a utopian future through essay collections and print pamphlets. With this pamphlet I’m also excited to debut the Elysian Shop! This is a new custom-built platform where you can purchase all of our pamphlets, our printer will immediately print and ship orders as they come in, and contributors will immediately receive profit shares according to each product’s split. All profit sharing splits are transparent on each product page.
This new shop is much more efficient than our previous publishing on Metalabel. For one, we no longer have to pay Metalabel’s 10% fee, which makes each project more profitable. For another, shipping is calculated based on the weight of each pamphlet, the number purchased, and the location you are shipped to, rather than Metalabel’s flat rate, which means rates are accurate and I no longer have to subsidize shipping fees when prices don’t line up. Most excitingly, profit sharing happens immediately upon purchase and is transparent the whole way through!
The new shop is our first step toward a publishing platform that shares profits with contributors and, hopefully soon, readers too!!! I’m working toward a reader-owned media ecosystem and this is a foot in the right direction.
I hope you will join us for this collection—read the essays, respond in the comments, support the pamphlet at the price point that works for you, and drop by one of our office hours calls along the way!
This is our last collaborative pamphlet for the year. The next several pamphlets are personal projects I am working on independently, and will debut as long-form essay collections and pamphlet series over the summer and fall in the vein of Let Cities Build Utopia. I’m currently studying entrepreneurship in Italy, attending Quaker services, volunteering for a global communitarian aid network, and reading about companies that give ownership to communities in research for a wide variety of series. I’m excited to share those with you next.
Thanks for reading and thinking with me,
Elle Griffin
Our giant, centralized systems will never build the future we actually want. In my novels, Arca of Itharion and The Auroral Weaver, I explored this exact crisis: while a benevolent, global quantum intelligence coordinates the planetary scale, the real, breathing heart of humanity only survives in the small, local pockets of sanctuary—the micro-utopias—that we build on a human scale. Like your revival of the print pamphlet, true sovereign storytelling has to bypass the monopoly of the giant platforms and go direct from writer to reader. The battle for a better future is fought in these small, independent spaces.