Patri Friedman is the founder of Pronomos, the leading venture capital firm investing in charter cities, startup societies, and other “future governance” projects — the institutions that will update and supplant the Westphalian system. We recorded a members-only Q&A with him on the project of carving out autonomy and creating new states.

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As we discuss on the call, the task has two components:

* Land. Someone has to establish the relationships, agreements, legal frameworks, and public infrastructure for autonomous communities.

* People. Someone has to build the communities themselves — groups of people with a shared vision that is sufficiently compelling, and drawing a population of sufficient scale, to draw a critical mass to the new polity.

Patri is primarily focused on the land — supporting projects like Prospera, which has established significant practical autonomy on an island off the coast of Honduras.

As we discuss on the call, the problem with a “land-first” approach is drawing committed people to the project once you’ve laid the groundwork.

Experiments with “special economic zones” and alternative governance have to be conducted in out-of-the-way places, usually in developing countries for whom relatively modest economic incentives are meaningful.

Digital nomads are almost always the first to support these projects — and obviously you don’t want to dismiss or alienate early supporters — but such people are defined by their disinterest in planting roots and embarking on the long, difficult work of founding a new community.

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“Pop-up cities”, conferences, parties, etc. have drawn big crowds, but those crowds never seem to distill down to any permanent presence or community, because the crowds don’t actually have that much in common — certainly not the kind of trust that makes people want to raise children together.

If you’ve ever tried to build that kind of bond with other people (psychologically normal people, anyway) you realize that it doesn’t just happen — not even with people you like, who share your politics, etc.

But a “people-first” approach has its own challenges.

Through EXIT, I’ve found the type of people that I know I could build with, but they live in 50+ cities in 9 countries. They’re surrounded by extended families; they have deep friendships, and so do their wives and kids. They feel attachment and responsibility to the place they live.

They’re pillars of the community, builders, investors; they’re in it for the long haul. That’s exactly the kind of person you need to build something new, but its precisely those traits that make them difficult to uproot — and it’s not obvious that we should do that, even if we could.

We’ve accomplished a lot over the internet — we’ve launched businesses, run incubators and boot camps, organized conferences, raised millions of dollars — but our families can’t get to know each other on Zoom. Our kids can’t have a remote campout, or a remote boxing class, or a remote first kiss.

So we have to learn to build in diaspora.

The joke in the Network State space is that many of the guys writing essays about founding new cyberpunk nations have not demonstrated the capacity to pull off a successful dinner party.

In order to reach the critical mass that allows for genuine autonomy (things like genuine “special economic zones” or “city states”), we have to start with the basic social rhythms that help like-minded people to find each other and create local relationships.

Instead of trying to get our guys to detach from their local communities, we want them to lean into their natural impulse to lift where they stand. We want them to merge their local networks and become part of the load-bearing architecture of their communities.

The small wins pay big dividends.

The average EXIT guy experiences a massive improvement in his quality of life if he just has a handful of families with compatible values that get together once a month.

We’ve gotten that far in Salt Lake, DC, New York, Houston, Dallas, Austin, Seattle, Nashville, Denver, Minneapolis. We’re almost there in San Francisco, Las Vegas, Columbus, Indianapolis, Atlanta, and Boston.

These small clusters become nucleation points for new professional, civic, and social activities that make our guys stronger. And in the event that their local situation becomes unsustainable, they’ll have enough organizational practice and experience with one another to make an efficient exodus — and they won’t have to do it alone.

The only way to get to the epochal, historical moves that we need to make is to bank wins that make sense from where we are right now.

We need to connect with all the admirable, excellent, problem-aware guys we can find, and we need to make small, personal bets on each other — creating the shared history that will allow us to rely on each other in coming days, when knowing who your friends are will be a matter of life and death.

Your future, and the future of your nation, will not be defined by faceless ideological forces — it will be defined by personal, human relationships: who you know, and who knows you.

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EXIT News

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* Last week (11/25), we had an excellent presentation on Albion’s Seed, Anglo-America, and ethnogenesis from an EXIT academic whose domain of study is the throughlines of Anglo-American culture. Recording coming soon.

* Last night (12/2), we heard from Devon Eriksen, author of Theft of Fire. It was a great conversation on building an audience, the importance of taste (and ego, and shame) in worthwhile creative pursuits, and the future of Our Thing.

* Next week (12/9), we will have an internal call on the political and economic prospects for the US, how we can adjust to headwinds, and what we can build to support each other.

* Other Calls:

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* 12/6: Atlanta, GA. (Cummings area). Christmas party: see #Southeast channel.

* 12/12: Nashville, TN.

* 12/13: Columbus, OH.

* 12/15: Dallas, TX.

* EXIT cocktail hour for Salt Lake City (12/6) and Dallas/Fort Worth (12/15) available behind the paywall on las week’s post. EXIT cocktail hours are a great way to get to know your local EXIT guys and find out if full group membership is right for you.

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Is it a place or a people? (Patri Friedman)

EXIT Podcast (private feed for [email protected])

Is it a place or a people? (Patri Friedman)