What comes after the nation-state?

And how can we build safety nets without borders?

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. 👇🏻

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.