Primer: Why are our cities stagnating and what can we do about it? In this episode of On The Other Side, Jon Hillis of Cabin introduces his concept of the Network City, compares it with Balaji’s Network States, and situates it with what Cabin is building in the world today.
Background
- Is building Cabin, a global network of co-living neighborhoods that are out in nature and have high-speed internet
What Is A Network City?
- Started thinking about the idea of a network city 2 years ago
- A city is just a densely settled area with clearly defined boundaries, whose members work on primarily non-agricultural tasks
“Cities are really about people and relationships between people.”
- Jon Hillis
- Throughout history, people have come together to build new economies and ways of life
- In the US, the youngest major city, Phoenix, was founded in 1868
- Cities have been stagnating for the past 100 years
- Trying to figure out how to reverse that trend and create new types of cities
Stagnation Of Cities
- People are less happy with their lives than 50 years ago
- The two main causes are increasing loneliness and decreasing standard of living
- People have blamed the decline of social associations, suburban living, and the rise of social media for this sense of loneliness
- The cost of housing, food, education, and healthcare in the US has increased over the last 30 years, accounting for inflation
- Cities have stagnated due to regulation that drives the high cost of living
- There’s a long history of people rejecting the high costs of living in urban areas and moving back to other areas
- The difference is that this time, we have a new tech stack that enables us to go outside urban areas and build something different
- The main reason why people live in cities is because that’s where the jobs are located
- This is no longer the case as people can work remotely
- When you combine remote work with developments and infrastructure like satellite internet, solar power, DAOs, etc., opportunities to build network cities are created
The Impetus For Creating A Space
- As a kid, he spent a lot of time in online communities
- Was involved in the Boy Scouts and found a deep sense of community there
- When he went to college, he found a community of people living in an exurban residential living environment
- When he left college, he did a start-up with his best friends from college
- After that, he joined Instacart and was there for 6 years
- He experienced burnout
- His boss, David Hahn, advised him to go on a holiday
- While on holiday in Thailand, he reflected and realized that he was passionate about communities
- Left his job at Instacart to build a cabin in the woods and invited other cool people from the internet to join him
Balaji’s Network States VS His Network Cities
- Network states are very theoretical
- Cabin’s distinct advantage is that they are building from the ground up and learning through that process
- He has a lot of respect for Balaji for making high-conviction bold predictions that often turn out to be right
- Need to have more open and nuanced conversations in this area
- Helpful to imagine a 2 x 2 matrix:On one axis, you have single locations vs networks of locationsOn the other axis, you have territorial sovereignty vs layer 2s being built on top of existing states
- On one axis, you have single locations vs networks of locations
- On the other axis, you have territorial sovereignty vs layer 2s being built on top of existing states
- Historically, city and state building has been focused on a single location
- The internet enables us to maintain distributed communication and coordination networks. This is the root of both the idea of network states and network cities
- The other axis is where they differ:The end goal of network states is territorial sovereigntyNetwork cities are interdependent entities/L2s of the world
- The end goal of network states is territorial sovereignty
- Network cities are interdependent entities/L2s of the world
- In the last decade, city-building attempts tended to be built around special economic zones from a top-down approach
- Over the past 10 years, people have become more open to the bottom-up approach of creating polycentric governance structures
What Does Living In A Network City Look Like?
- The initial cohort of people living in Cabin are primarily digital nomad types in their 20s and 30s
- They are the ones that can most easily pick up and move to a new spot
- If you are going to build a city, it cannot just be a city of 20 and 30 somethings
- Jane Jacobs has written a lot about diversity being one of the key defining factors of cities
- There’s a classic truism that it takes a village to raise a kid
- Living in a community of people makes it easier to raise kids, socialize them, and trade-off parenting duties
The Infrastructure And Culture For Network Cities
- Jane Jacobs made the case that the core built environment is what creates the culture and that there is a need for different types of housing in terms of price points and styles to support different living arrangements
- Right now, their environment is largely traditional co-living where individuals come together into a community
- There are tools that are making communal living easier over time:Advancements in generative AIAn educational environment where kids are supported/mentored by older kidsPersonalized AI tutors
- Advancements in generative AI
- An educational environment where kids are supported/mentored by older kids
- Personalized AI tutors
- Sometimes, people leave and come back again. This is healthy and natural for a city
The City As An Emergent Framework
- In the history of human civilization, new technologies come along to enable people to create a new way of living
- People gather in small groups and build villages, cities, and federated networks of cities
- Eventually, centralizing forces like kings or nation-states come along
Building Your Own Infrastructure Vs On Top Of Existing Ones
- The most important question is to ask which laws you actually care about changing
- If you start from the libertarian perspective that all laws are evil and the slate has to be wiped clean, it will be very difficult
- If you start from, practically speaking, what you care about, then you can take a different approach
- Their first co-living neighborhood is in Texas because it has minimal building regulations
- In contrast, the direct democracy of San Francisco has too many regulations
- One of their goals at Cabin is to produce 10x cheaper and better housing than what’s available in urban areas
On Monopolizing Violence
- Practically speaking, he likes to avoid dealing with violence as much as possible
- Small groups of people can solve problems in more peaceful ways
- People can create different enforcement mechanisms that are more peaceful (e.g. rely on the blockchain)
Conference At Zuzalu
- Was a fascinating conference
- Was an experiment in co-living and pop-up city building. It’s still going on in Montenegro
- Was there for the new cities and network states week
- The goal was to bring in incredible minds to discuss some of these big ideas
What’s Coming Up At Cabin?
- Recently rolled out their vision document
- In a few weeks, they are going to launch their citizenship and city directory
- Citizenship is Cabin subscription membership and it is distributed through a web of trust
- Citizens will be able to access their city directory which has both co-living experiences and work/stay exchange residencies
- Cabin members can earn different roles by contributing to their cities:Builders building the physical environmentNaturalists who help grow regenerative systemsGatherers who bring people together
- Builders building the physical environment
- Naturalists who help grow regenerative systems
- Gatherers who bring people together
- They are rolling it out in their Census app and it is structured as a token-curated registry that’s managed by the DAO
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