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Supper, place, village, city, state

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There's a basic playbook for building startup societies. It goes: supper, place, village, city, state. You start with dinner, and coordinate your way to something bigger. Over time, you can grow large structures of human coordination—maybe even new types of cities or states. Traditional suppers, places, villages, cities, and states are built around a geographical location. They share cultures, economies, and governance structures (however formal or informal), but most of all they share the same physical place. This sense of place ultimately defines the community—if you moved every resident of Austin to rural Idaho, it would be hard to say that it was the same city. Network suppers, spaces, villages, cities, and states also share physical space, but the specific locations where they gather are secondary to the culture they gather around. They are communities drawn from the internet to colocate IRL. A sense of place is still deeply important to network communities, but if they all reloca

There's a basic playbook for building startup societies. It goes: supper, place, village, city, state. You start with dinner, and coordinate your way to something bigger. Over time, you can grow large structures of human coordination—maybe even new types of cities or states. Traditional suppers, places, villages, cities, and states are built around a geographical location. They share cultures, economies, and governance structures (however formal or informal), but most of all they share the same physical place. This sense of place ultimately defines the community—if you moved every resident of

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