Assorted links and comments
Happy New Year, everybody! Starting things off with a bang, today marks the official publication date for The Permanent Problem. If you haven’t already, I hope you’ll buy a copy or three, and if you like what you read, let other people know. In particular, I encourage you to post a review on Amazon or Goodreads to spread the good word.
The book is roughly two-thirds diagnosis and one-third prescription — a pretty good ratio, given that most books like this are virtually all diagnosis with a single, limp “what is to be done?” chapter tacked on at the end. Now that the book is out, though, I’m hoping to flip the ratio and focus most of my attention on discerning the path forward — identifying promising developments with the potential to spark the technological, institutional, and cultural innovations we need.
To that end, let me do something here that could end up as a semi-regular feature – providing links to thinkers and doers who have valuable light to shed on the road ahead and offering a few comments of my own.
1. Vitalik Buterin, “Let a thousand societies bloom”
Interest in starting new communities, both virtual and physical, has been surging of late among members of the tech community — see here for a good overview. Inspired by the success of business startups in driving commercial innovation, the idea is that startup communities can similarly help to spark innovation in technology, governance structures, and living arrangements.
This idea has attracted considerable hostility from people, mostly to the left of the political center, who see it as a strategy to gut health, safety, and environmental regulations and replace democracy with a “broligarchy” or “techno-feudalism.” That hostility has only deepened since the emergence of a Trump-aligned tech right. As for me, though, I see the renewed interest in community-founding as a positive trend —one with the potential to encompass a wide variety of ideological and cultural approaches. I welcome experimentation in devising alternatives to and off-ramps from the prevailing consumerist and managerialist monoculture, recognizing full well that most of the experiments will fail.
One of the most interesting and thoughtful figures in this space is Vitalik Buterin, the 31-year-old Russian-born founder of the Ethereum blockchain. Among his many philanthropic endeavors, he launched the recent wave of temporary “popup villages” by organizing the two-month-long Zuzalu gathering in Montenegro back in 2023. These popup villages occupy a middle ground between a one-or-two-day conference and a permanent community, bringing together a few hundred people interested in various dimensions of both tech and cultural innovation and providing a loosely structured environment for them to work, play, and learn together for a month or two.
In a recent essay on his personal website, Buterin reflected on the popup experience to date and its potential as a seedbed for new community formation. Here are some representative snippets:
One common critique of modern society is that it is at the same time atomistic and authoritarian: there is a lack of intermediate institutions, in between individuals and states, that give people needed services and community. In the critics’ story, this makes society:
Lack a feeling of community, become uncaring, and fail to provide public goods that are too local or group-specific for states to notice
Become homogeneous - “glass and steel skyscrapers with Starbucks everywhere”
Become vulnerable to takeover by dictators
All three problems stem from the fact that we have too much of a two-level structure: individuals, very powerful large-scale actors like states, and nothing else….
So what would a successful “intermediate institution” of this type, adapted for the needs of the 21ˢᵗ century, look like? I will propose my answer. It needs to be some kind of neo-tribe or other institution that focuses, and meaningfully innovates, on the thing that humans do that isn’t generic: culture….
Another problem with top-down attempts to shape culture, especially more coercive ones, is that the whole strategy has very low galaxy-brain resistance. While declaring top-down “the culture I wrote down in this document is better than what you have now, so I will impose it” may at times be the right thing to do (see: the anti-smoking push, federally-driven anti-segregation in the 1960s USA, etc), the problem is that it’s too easy for someone to get convinced that their own culture, as they understand it, is great, and then use it as an excuse to dominate others.
On the other hand, many people make the mistake of over-identifying culture with the purely aesthetic, subjective and group-identity-oriented parts of culture: food, music, dance, dress, architecture styles, and ignore the parts that are functional, whose success or failure drives the success and failure of civilizations. This can lead to an over-egalitarian and stagnant “culture as museum” mentality: every culture is equally as good as every other culture because aesthetics are ultimately subjective, and so there is no such thing as cultural improvement - instead, the only goal is preservation….
Instead of keeping culture the way it is, or reforming it from the top down, why not embrace the wisdom of accumulated individual choice and freedom?
Here is how I would argue the case against an overly purist version of this approach. There are many things that require “immersion” to succeed: lifestyle habits, local public goods such as air quality, work habits, lifetime learning habits, limitations on use of technology, etc. Doing anything truly interesting and unique requires “depth”, and substantial collective investment and effort to create an entire environment oriented around better serving those needs. These things cannot easily be done by an individual, or even by a corporation, because corporations face too much pressure to “meet users where they are” - and so we get everyone drinking Coca Cola (or getting addicted to outrage-driven social media, or ....)
And so I think we need a different path. What we want is a better “world game” for cultural evolution: an environment where cultures improve and compete, but not on the basis of violent force, and also not exclusively on low-level forms of memetic fitness (eg. virality of individual posts on social media, moment-by-moment enjoyment and convenience), but rather on some kind of fair playing field that creates sufficient space to showcase the longer-term benefits that a thriving culture provides….
The Zuzalu-verse is actually one of the better proto-examples of this. It is organized around a particular set of values: the “Ethereum canon” of open source, freedom, decentralization and a positive-sum attitude toward humanity, idealistic hacker culture, concern about health, etc. The Zuzalu identity is demonstrably not universal. Many people who frequent the Zuzalu-verse reported finding themselves out of place at Network School, which is organized around principles that are similar on paper, but very different in their “vibes” - and undoubtedly others feel the same way in the other direction. But there isn’t a fixed “One Commandment“, or even any specific written-down mission and vision statement….
Truly instantiating a culture with any level of depth requires not just talking about the culture’s themes, but actually living them. This requires deep immersion, instantiating the culture’s values and aesthetics and practices at a level that goes far beyond a few decorations and posters….
This is all why I think it is a critical part of digital tribes to have long-lasting physical spaces. Physical spaces allow a culture’s values and habits to be instantiated in a much deeper way…..
There’s a lot more of interest in this essay — I encourage you to read the whole thing. And while you’re at it, you might check out Buterin’s 2023 essay “My techno-optimism,” in which he stakes out a position on the thinly settled but solid ground between doom-mongering and naïve boosterism.
2. Scott Alexander, “Should Strong Gods Bet on GDP?”
Buterin’s essay quotes from an August 2025 essay by Scott Alexander on his popular website Astral Codex Ten. I had missed that essay, and I’m glad I’ve now corrected that oversight.
In the essay, Alexander addresses the longtanding charge that liberalism ultimately undermines human flourishing by undermining our commitment to community. He starts off by providing the stock liberal response:
Yes, part of the good life is participation in a tight-knit community with strong values. Liberalism’s shared values are comparatively weak, and its knitting comparatively loose. But that’s no argument against the liberal project. Its goal isn’t to become this kind of community itself, but to be the platform where communities like this can grow up. So in a liberal democracy, Christians can have their church, Jews their synagogue, Communists their commune, and so on. Everyone gets the tight-knit community they want - which beats illiberalism, where (at most) one group gets the community they want and everyone else gets persecuted.
“On a theoretical level, this is a great answer,” Alexander writes. But…
On a practical level – is it really working? Are we really a nation dotted with tight-knit communities of strong values? The average person has a church they don’t attend and a political philosophy that mainly cashes out in Twitter dunks. Otherwise they just consume whatever slop the current year’s version of capitalism chooses to throw at them….
Probably fewer than 10% of Americans belong to [a tight-knit community with strong values].
Are the rest not interested? Happy with mainstream culture? They don’t seem happy. 90% of articles on social media are people talking about how much they hate mainstream culture, sometimes with strong specific opinions about what improvements to make. But it never seems to occur to these people to join together with like-minded friends and secede from it. Why not? Why don’t conservatives live in trad whites-only farming villages on the Great Plains? Why don’t YIMBYs live in dense walkable towns sprung up from the forests of Vermont? Why don’t people who hate smartphones/social media/AI live somewhere that bans all of those things?
To my mind, questions like this point to the clearest and potentially fatal weakness of my vision of a much more decentralized and pluralistic future anchored in vibrant and cohesive face-to-face communities. And that is the fact that for decades, even centuries, the overwhelming majority of people have been voting with their life choices against such a future. Granted, the experience of recent decade has been sour enough to generate a great deal of discontent — but still, what is the basis for imagining that people are about to execute a 180 degree turn?
Scott offers an intriguing and IMHO reassuring answer, positing a U-shaped relationship between wealth and commitment to community. Tight-knit communities are the default option in poor societies, for the simple reason that nobody can afford to move away. But liberal capitalist societies to date have occupied a middle ground between, in Alexander’s words, “so poor you can’t leave” and “so rich you can be wherever you want,” and in that space there are strong economic incentives to prioritize career and economic well-being over sharing your life with the people you love and share values with.
Such reasoning leads precisely to the line I take in The Permanent Problem: we’re not yet rich enough to achieve at a macro level the kind of work-life balance that true mass flourishing requires. Here’s how Alexander puts it:
I also see people say that if we avoid paperclipping, technofeudalism, and the other obvious ways a technological singularity could go wrong, the next thing we’ll have to worry about is some kind of crisis of meaning, where we all sit back and collect UBI and consume slop in a spiritual wasteland.
The optimistic perspective is that if this is so bad, what’s to stop you from joining the Amish? Or some sort of pseudo-Amish who live in an eternal 1990s? Or your own Amish-inspired sect who have whatever set of technological and social relations you think are optimal?
And the obvious counter is: there’s also nothing to stop people from doing that now. But they don’t. So whatever mysterious force prevents it now will continue to prevent it after the singularity.
But I think that force is just economics. Most people have to work a normal job, which prevents them from running off to Hypothetical Amish Country. Replace that with post-singularity economic relations - maybe UBI, maybe something else - and new options become available.
As I’ve argued recently, this is the kind of framing that can transform “abundance” from a technocratic policy agenda into a full-blown social movement.
3. Timour Kosters, “Edge City 2025 Community Letter.”
I learned about the popup village phenomenon by getting invited to speak at one: Edge City Lanna, which took place in Chiang Mai, Thailand during October-November 2024. Edge City is an outfit that organizes popup villages around the world; one of its co-founders, Timour Kosters, had subscribed to my Substack and reached out to me to come to Chiang Mai and speak about human flourishing. I ended up staying there for a fascinating week.
I had no idea what to expect when I got there. I did know that the popup scene was heavily populated by people involved with crypto, which I was deeply skeptical about. I had never bought into the idea (popular in the libertarian circles I’ve traveled in) that cryptocurrency could become an alternative to fiat money; what was left, it seemed to me, was little besides creating new opportunities for speculative excess and outright fraud.
When I got there, though, I met a bunch of people deeply interested in the pro-social potential of blockchain technology — in particular, how it could be used to decentralize decision-making and foster new kinds of organizations and communities. And there were lots of people there who had nothing to do with crypto: they were there to meet new people, learn new things, and figure out how they could play a role in building a better world. I was really struck by how idealistic and intellectually open everyone was: this was a group of people who were excited about the future and how to make it better. When people found out about my work, what started as perfunctory introductions regularly turned into hour-long conversations. I found the whole experience invigorating, even inspiring.
Timour just recently posted his year-end review for 2025. Here’s how it kicks off:
As Edge City approaches its second birthday, we find ourselves in the middle of an exciting transition.
The early days of Edge were about proving we could create something new: month-long popup villages where scientists, technologists, artists, and builders live and work side by side. Environments designed for health and serendipity, where new ideas for society can take root. Multi-generational communities where kids run around while their parents prototype the future.
We proved we could build that. Over the past two years, we’ve hosted gatherings for thousands of participants across four continents, welcoming builders and families from 100+ countries.
We’re now shifting our attention to what actually gets built inside these environments; the incubator side of society incubator. The experiments are working, the community is deepening, and increasingly, real things are emerging.
Read the whole thing to find out more about this fascinating and promising initiative.