Building a Decentralized City with Jonathan Hillis

Transcript

foreign [Music] ation on the podcast today I've got John Hillis who is the founder of cabin cabin is a co-living and co-working Community for solar punks for web 3 people that basically allows you to live in nature and hang out with your favorite crypto friends while um co-living and co-working and creating memes together so cabin just launched and so we are celebrating the launch with a green pill episode on this episode we talk about John's experience in learning about American nature writing and learning about geology in the field environmental policy and ethics we talk a little bit about his

his solar Punk Vibes and also his affinity for Eleanor Ostrom and other theories of common pool resource management and how we put that in practice at cabin and so one of the one of the themes you'll start to hear on this podcast is the mixture of a priori knowledge which is knowledge seduced from Theory and from study with empirical knowledge which is knowledge that's deduced from practice and one of the things I just respect the most about John is that all he has a deep knowledge of the theory of managing the comments and of governance and he's putting it into practice at cabin and things get real when you co-live together there are governance problems we talk about who does the dishes in in Cabin communities who does the dishes

um is is kind of an example of a common pool resource problem that we live every day in our everyday lives so really fun episode with John is respect John so much as a thinker and a doer at the space stand that's why I think you're going to enjoy this episode Athena Dao is addressing the underfunded areas of women's health such as menopause and endometriosis Athena is a Community Driven doubt giving women a say in decision making and funding the scientific breakthroughs that impact their lives with Cutting Edge technology like molecules IP nft framework they invest in research IP that ensures exclusive licensing rights Athena Dao is Raising awareness to women's health research working alongside existing organizations so join Athena Dao today to help change the landscape of women's

health research what's up John how you doing I am doing well how are you Kevin pretty good can you tell us what cabin is and why did you start it sure cabin is a network City for online creators and remote workers so we are a Global Network of neighborhoods where you can co-live and create in nature I started it really we started it it's it's a Dao it's a community um and we started it because we wanted to build new ways of living we have seen the ways in which people um you know loneliness is is at an all-time high in the United States standard of living has been dropping for 30 years the basic costs of living things like food housing Health Care

education have been going up um and we think that there is an opportunity to go out into nature and to use the internet and blockchains as a new organizing structure for how we can build new cities that that solve some of these core problems I want to drop in a little bit to the why a little bit more in in how your thinking has been informed by some of the work that you've done in the past but maybe we can just start with the object level of where are there cabins that I can join and how would I join them if I'm a listener that's interested in getting involved yeah for sure so uh this week cabin officially launched our Network city

um which is uh starting with a set of over 20 properties which we call neighborhoods which are all over the world um uh in beautiful natural locations um where you can go and co-lib with other like-minded solar punks and uh in order to get involved you can head over to the the website cabin.city you can check out the neighborhoods you can join our community and you can become a citizen and cabin citizens are vouched for through a web of trust by other citizens and when you become a citizen that gives you access to go live in these incredible properties we also do

work stay exchange programs where you can go and help build physical infrastructure help grow food help gather people and in exchange have a free place to live as you bounce around the world and spend time with with Incredible humans in nature I recently went to metacamp which is another sort of like it it was really kind of a vacation Community but it was really fun to be in nature with all of my crypto nerd friends because I was getting the stimulation of being outdoors in the fresh air and everything and uh also the stimulation of being around my nerd web 3 friends so um it feels like this is moving from like theorizing about Network states to actually practicing

them and the word network city is kind of provocative to me the fact that you called it a network City could you tell me a little bit about that yeah sure so I think you're exactly right what we try to do at cabin is um you know live in the Practical reality of implementing these ideas and um you know we've both been interested in the idea of network States and and apologies book about that but also I think critical of a lot of the um you know ideas in that book and uh probably the the biggest thing that we are critical of is um that it's it's a lot of Theory without a lot of practice um and we we believe that cities are a

fundamentally better way to think about these structures than States um you know states where this uh this entity that formed in relation to a sort of post-kingdom world that we were transitioning into post-westphalian um era um you know in the emergence of nation states and um we believe we're going through another major change like that and rather than trying to recreate the last system states which were primarily built um you know from like a political Theory perspective to address the needs of bringing together these huge groups of people into these um you know large top-down structures

that could replace kingdoms um we much prefer to think about how to build bottom-up structures that are interdependent with their existing environments and create these fonts of human creativity and productivity and those are what cities have have always been throughout history you've got this take that I that I just love um I think it was at your Zoo's always presentation someone said to a Twitter picture of you saying uh people want to start Network States but they've never hosted a dinner party uh I might be butchering your take but I just thought that that was extremely provocative you want to tell me about that take it all yeah for sure so so yeah that's actually uh uh borrowed uh tweet from a guy named

Richard Bartlett I think he's the one that originally said something like that um but we we really take that to heart at cabin we believe that yeah there's a whole lot of people out there that want to start these things called Network States and and they've they've never thrown a dinner party they've never co-lived they've never you know learned how to clean up the dishes and um you know if you want to you want to talk about common pool resource problems um like start with with cleaning up the dishes in a co-living house and if you can't solve that problem you know then probably don't try to implement any more complicated governance structures increasingly one of the trends that I've been trying to do with this podcast and also in my own work is uh recognize the different types of knowledge that exist

out there so there's a priority knowledge which is deduced from Theory and then there's empirical knowledge which is deduced from practice and it's in the combination of that theoretical knowledge and that empirical knowledge that I think that we really get to grasp the whole elephant of what a crypto enabled lifestyle could be or what a regenerative crypto lifestyle can be in you know one of the reasons I was interested in talking to you is that we were nerding out about Eleanor ostra uh on on Twitter and we were originally going to do an episode about Eleanor Rostrum but now that it's four months later and comment has just launched it feels much more germane to to talk about the cabin launch and actually practicing the Commons in these cabin Network cities and so

um yeah I mean like how are the dishes done in one of these cabin Network cities like what's the combination of what we can learn from the theory and the actual practice of of doing it together and how are the commons managed at these at these cabins yeah there's a lot to uh unpack there um but let's just start out with you know like I mentioned over 20 um properties currently in our Network City all over the world and the most important thing is that each one is independently operated these are you know essentially autonomous co-living communities and so the first principle um you know is to have as much of the

decision making be done locally as possible um and so the dishes are not done the same in every Community uh and there's actually it's it's a pretty it's pretty interesting to see the like range of strategies that emerge for for addition doing um so you get everything from like kind of hard and fast like Draconian rules that everyone's agreed upon like we have like a zero zero dish sink like you know sort of the inbox zero approach to Dish doing like no one ever leave anything in the sink ever and that's just the rule um and some communities really Thrive that way you know that another very common method um in in coding communities is chore charts where you

have this sort of like rotating list of who takes out the garbage and who does what but the important principle here is that we're not like uh telling every Community how they need to do it we're letting the groups of people figured out for themselves and I think um you know that type of confederated structure um is is what I think makes for the most successful types of political structures in general um you know and we we can talk about some of the kind of like the nature of polycentric systems as well here if that would be helpful to get into the uh slightly more theoretical side as well because I completely agree there is this really important feedback loop between the the Practical doing and then the sort of lessons you you can learn from

that the next place to to dive in could be the theory of of managing the commons and you know I'd be interested to to dip into our original conversation about Eleanor Ostrom and um managing the commons and and sort of how that's informed you were taken you know maybe we could also dip into a little bit of your history and your educational background before before getting into founding cabin yeah definitely so when I went to college you know I didn't really know what I wanted to do with my life and the first term I took three classes one was environmental politics and and policy with tune mient who ended up becoming one of my really incredible academic mentors studied

under Eleanor Ostrom and really guided me towards her work um you know and then my other two were American nature writing where I was first read Walden by Thoreau and desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey and others and then the third was geology in the field where I just got to go you know take field trips into nature and look at rocks um and I think that really set me on on a course towards um being an environmental citizen political science major and ultimately doing my senior thesis on on ostrom's work um it was called empowering small groups to overcome Collective action problems the role of strategic information and driving sustainable decisions um and basically what I did was you know ran a bunch of

um simulations of a sort of like tragedy of the commons environment and then ran some experiments with um with college students playing this game where they were doing Collective Resource Management um and and tried to use this experimental framework to you know understand how people could overcome Collective action problems because what I'd you know learned from from uh my time in political science classes was that um political theory was like stuck in these ruts and I think we're now really seeing this play out in um you know our our current political parties in in the US and and globally um where there's just this like you know

right left tension and where we like can't break out of it um and I think the conclusion that you know I came to after reading the work of Austin and others was um you know her Nobel lecture from 2009 is a fantastic piece of work called Beyond markets and States polycentric governance of complex economic systems and you know she has some some kind of like core um things that she she explains in that but the key part here is um how do we create systems Beyond markets and Beyond states which has become this dichotomy that um you know a lot of our our political thinking has been stuck in um and her answer is that we run actual

experiments and we look at actual empirical examples um primarily from non-western societies and from non-state structures like cities in which you see these polycentric governance systems that allow us to think about how to manage not just public goods and private Goods but perhaps more importantly common pool resources and and Club Goods yeah I'm wondering if we could if we could get into a definition there so polycentric uh just deducing from the word means there's multiple centers so poly uh means multiple and centers means uh means many so is that like how in America we have City councils we've got the state government we've got the

federal government and to some extent there's the U.N and and sort of like NATO and all of that kind of stuff it's an example of polycentric governments yes I I think so I think certainly the you know the United States the the founding fathers of the U.S understood the importance of these like confederated structures um you know even going back I think some of the at like Rousseau um you know even though he he was kind of uh a lot of his writing ended up being responsible for for what ended up you know kind of turning into nation-state structures I think he understood that there were actually better um ways of doing things and and he left some breadcrumbs in his writing that pointed to um you know these sort of like

confederated structures that like what you're describing um I actually have my my copy here of um of Austin's Nobel lecture uh and so I'll just flip to the page where she's talking about polycentric structure that only on podcast days next to your computer or or every day you know I have been carrying uh this one around in my backpack for a little while but I I definitely whipped it out for for this podcast yeah um uh so but you're totally right yeah so so she says polycentric connotes many centers of decision making that are formally independent uh from each other and um she specifically calls out that um you know medium scale cities small to medium scale cities tend to be more

effective uh because they have better examples of these she also wrote extensively about irrigation systems and I think irrigation systems are um a particularly fascinating example because uh I believe that they are the emergence of you know the first Cooperative large-scale uh you know human structures that that turned into cities coming out of the river valley empires of of sort of ancient civilization um and I I think irrigation is like a particular a good example of how you can develop these types of systems but let me make this more tangible again because we've we've gotten you know a bit into

the theoretical side so I'll talk about like what makes cabins governance polycentric you know versus how um a lot of of you know Dows have been operating so that the sort of standard um way that those have been you know structured for the past couple years or at least things calling themselves Dows is um you know like a a single vote you know token weighted voting thing where it's like here's a proposal and you either vote yes or no on the proposal you know and that's kind of the whole governance mechanism that is not polycentric um it's not particularly useful um because it's a very low information density form of of governance you're just getting like yes no votes on things

it's very binary um whereas you know where I think we're headed with uh these sort of Cooperative online governance structures is towards polycentric system systems like like what cabin does so one layer of that is what I described with cabin neighborhoods where you know each neighborhood is independently um operated and and sort of autonomously decides most of their things locally but then you need some way to kind of like Stitch these things together for us that is um our city directory which is a token curated registry it's essentially just a collectively managed system where members of the community can go and vote on you know which neighborhoods should be ranked higher which outposts you know should become neighborhoods and

um you know so so that's sort of like another uh example of of like a governance game that we play as a community um you know another one is our citizenship system which I mentioned uses a web of trust vouching Network so existing citizens have to vouch for people to become citizens that is a different Center of of governance right another governance game where each citizen has is the power to decide on new citizens similarly our roles so if you want to come build things at a cabin neighborhood if you want to grow things at a cabin neighborhood you can earn skills roles reputation and identity within the network that's represented

through hats protocol uh as as these you know nft roles that have levels associated with them again this is another polycentric form of governance it's these very simple governance mechanisms that have different uh you know distributed sources of power across the community that are specific to the context of the type of power that that you know matters so it seems like you're you're putting this into practice um in a big way uh at cabin I mean and I think that one of the things that I just want to highlight here is how friend Center these things are to actually be co-living uh with people and to be using crypto based governance with

with them so um it's not like where it's a it's a doubt like you you live separately and you engage on a governance forum and it's all sort of theoretical um but it's actually like very existential when you're when you're IRL with these people and that's what I think is most impressive about the cabin Network city is that you're you're putting these tools to practice in in a place that's very you can't just put it out of sight out of mind when there's dysfunction um and and so I think it's quite profound that um that you're doing that and I guess I'm wondering um like what are the most interesting governance things that have happened as you've launched these these the neighborhood zero and in the first couple cabins yeah it's a good question

you know I think um co-living is uh a kind of wild thing where you know you talk to anyone that's tried to run co-living communities particularly if they've done it over any significant period of time and um there's both like incredible you know Wonderful stories of people coming together and then often you know some some like real horror stories of like uh things not going as planned or you know it can really only take one one person um to make for a really challenging living situation and so what we try to focus on first and foremost is um just like bringing great people into the community and I know that sounds so

simple but like the core of communities is people the core of good governance is is good people um and so if you can just focus on like having a really high bar for who you bring into an environment um you know to live with you and then build the sort of basic systems that allow people to be the best versions of themselves and you know it really doesn't even matter that much like which specific systems you choose as long as they have um legitimacy and and like um the capability to accomplish your goals within the group like I gave with the the example with you know different coloring communities have different ways

of doing dishes but the key thing is that everybody feels good about how the dishes got done um and so you know as long as you can like maintain a really high bar for the people and then just put the basic systems in place that everybody understands and agrees to um then I I think you can get really incredible outcomes in in terms of the relationships that get built um and just the like the cross-pollination of of creativity and energy that that can come out of those communities one of the other things that I think is sort of an interesting intersection of of crypto and IRL living is this idea of roll cards and passport stamps that you all have so the roles that I see on the website are caretaker

Builder gatherer naturalist Creator and resident and so recognizing that people have different ways of contributing that are complementary to each other and enshrining that in the product I think is is pretty interesting as well yeah we we started out with this idea very early on at Cadman um called uh like manifest your role and you know we saw that this worked really well initially to have people come in and just be like I want to do this thing right and I think when you're a small community at the beginning when you're attracting like really um you know uh autonomous people who who can come in and like Define those roles and it uh sort of Greenfield environment that's great but at some point

um what we realize is that you do want people to manifest their own roles and their own contributions but you really need to give them Frameworks to do it um and that's where where our roles came out of um and those those roles uh you know represent the things that are most important for actually building the solar Punk future that that we want um you know people who can come out and actually help learn or or contribute to um building housing building infrastructure growing food um and I think these are skills that not a ton of of like um you know people have anymore and and uh but but they're actually skills that like a lot of people can have and it turns out YouTube is like chock full of

amazing videos on how to build things and how to grow things and um you know we we have a network of people who are really amazing at um at these skills and it I I think we're increasingly with um you know with where AI is going and um with uh you know like the things that remote work unlocks we're headed towards a world where many more people um are going to be able to start working with their hands again in ways that that I think can be deeply fulfilling I have lots of friends who are software Engineers who um have started taking carpentry classes at their local Community College because um you know I think writing software can be a lot of fun um but it can also you know be a lot of

fun to just get out there and like get a hammer and some nails and build a thing that that has some permanence to it uh in a way that's much harder to achieve with software yeah I mean I think that might be an accident for the listener if you're someone who builds software and works digital um if you the next time you build something physically whether it's carpentry or um Pottery or some other thing just sort of reflect in your mind about the difference between the embodied experience of building versus building with your mind and with your keyboard I think that there's probably something profound there to to think about and but one of the things I think is really interesting about about cabin is this intersection of the IRL skills and being in nature but with high technology it

feels very high technology but also high localist and and um in in high nature and I think that's an interesting combination of skills and mindsets that um are in college uh this woman the that I was friends with at the time was like how can you be both high-tech and high nature at the same time it's like are those incompatible or are they not but it's it's cool to meet other people that that are also are also high-tech in in high nature and it feels like what be fair to say that the the cabin Community sort of Trends in in that direction or is that just your personal philosophy as as a founder and someone who studied environmental science coming up no I think that's very much uh not not just

my philosophy but but uh broad philosophy within our community and I agree I don't see those things as at odds with each other in fact I see them as deeply complementary um what I find is that um you know there's only so many hours a day I can sit in front of a computer there's also you know only so many hours a day that that I can like sit there uh with a wrench like fidgeting with a broken pipe um and uh but I can do both of those things in the same day and they actually like um help me feel better about the other one because they're they're just so different um and so I I see them as very complimentary and I think this is part

of what's what's beautiful about cabin's Network city is that um you know the reason why people want to live in cities is because they want to be around other really smart interesting ambitious people working on Frontier technology but you know the type of people who are interested in Cabin uh they do want that but they also want to touch grass they want to go outside they want to be in touch with with the natural environment they want to learn from the natural environment um and and now you can do both this doesn't need to be an either or Choice like it's historically been and I think that's actually going to make the frontier technology even better because the best lessons we can learn are you

know lessons from nature which has been building bottom-up evolutionary systems for way way longer than you know we have well take me forward five or ten years if cabin is maximally successful what do things look like in 2033 when I invite you back to the green pill podcast at that point it took me forward 10 years if you're maximally successful what does it look like yeah I I look forward to this future um because I think it's a future that isn't just bright for for cabin but you know hopefully it is brighter for Humanity um what we're trying to build is little islands of of Sanity around the world and I think in the next five or ten years

um at cabin and and also through lots of other you know bottom-up uh groups communities building new neighborhoods and and new solar Punk Network cities what we're gonna see is um exactly this a a highly local um you know also Frontier Tech movement of solar punks that are um you know bringing together the pace layers of of civilization that are bending in this direction so you know if you look there's a great um concept from from Stuart brand called voice layers that um you know talks about the ways in

which the layers of civilization infrastructure governance culture Commerce and nature all sort of change at different speeds and I think what we're seeing right now is that with um you know everything from the uh prevalence of satellite internet solar power modular housing self-driving cars at the infrastructure layer you know Dao's Network cities blockchain leviathans at the governance layer digital Nomads internet native communities the solar pump movement at the culture layer all of these things are going to add up to help us solve some of the core problems that have emerged over the last century at the natural layer like climate change and biodiversity loss as well as the the

kind of core issues I I mentioned at the beginning around loneliness and and around standard of living so you know I don't know if we're going to solve all of this in the next five to ten years but where I do think we're going to be is at a world where um you know hopefully uh millions of people are going to be returning to this old new way of living um going back to Lifestyles where they're more in touch with small groups of other humans that they're collaborating with on a daily basis where they're more in touch with nature um and where you know we're starting to um take some of the the things that have not been going well over the last you

know 50 years um and and reverse those Trends in a way that uh just makes people happier and and healthier and you know I think one of the things that that I see is if you're maximally successful then it's probably one of the first examples of a true Network State Network City in the biology and definition of uh purchases land together and I think that there's a lot of dows that have not gotten to that place in which they're actually physically co-loaded kidding together and and and so um in that way I think the cabin is a is a Pioneer in in Dallas becoming more

physically embodied in the biology and vision of of network States so um in that way I think it's leading the leaving the charge totally I really appreciate that and I I think that's true um you know I think what I would say there is that um you know like I mentioned we're still sort of ambivalent about the idea of of network States um particularly in terms of the uh sort of component of territorial sovereignty and and a monopoly on violence that seems to be at the core of the idea of a state um so you know if you think of like Network States as um sort of an L1 uh to use a blockchain analogy you know with kind of base layer

security um we're more interested in building l2s um on top of existing States these interdependent systems um and these systems that to your point prac you know practice um from the beginning in a in an you know in person nature like get together find your crew you know find your squad online but then I would encourage anyone that wants to to do this stuff to try to actually manifest you know real places and real groups of people um that can start to explore some of these ideas and my guess is that where we're all going to end up here is um that there will be these you know incredible networks and

um overlapping confederations of you know solar Punk places and and communities all over the world um but that by the time we get there we're probably not going to call them States because uh they're gonna you know look pretty different from our existing state structures I'm wondering if there's anything that I didn't ask that you that you want to tell me I feel like you just have this breadth of a priori knowledge and also empirical knowledge and a lot of experience in the space so is there anything I didn't ask that that you want to tell the audience yeah um you know I I would uh also we touch some on um you know the kind of political Theory uh around um the translate the left right divide

and we talk some about austrum's work one thing that you know we didn't touch on that I'd really encourage anyone interested in this stuff to dive more into is um the history uh cities and in particular um you know the history of the emergence of cities across both Western and non-western civilization um you know if you you look at just to start with Western Civilization the kind of like major periods um that that historians typically use Ancient classical medieval you know modern um across each of these eras you you see a set of Technologies we talked about irrigation you know for for the kind of first cities that moved out of ancient

civilization but similarly you you see you know the way that the alphabet and Naval trade led the Greek city-states and Federated groups of city-states that eventually led to the Roman Empire similar thing in the Medieval Age with Market towns and trade leagues um you know in the modern period with the printing press and New England towns and um you know I I think we're seeing now the same thing with um computers internet blockchains leading to to this new way of building cities um and what's really important to understand here is that these things start out you know with these Technologies and these decentralized movements um and then Federate and centralize over time and so uh you know the the history

is obviously very long and and complicated um but if you you know can can try to understand the ways that those structures emerged and then the ways that they um became sort of centralized and ossified I think we we can at least attempt to avoid um you know some of the problems that led us to to where we are now and and um you know build things a little bit differently this time around uh uh new types of leviathans one of the things that this might be really reductionist from from what you just said but uh but I'm just gonna go with it anyway because hey the internet's full of memes and they're all the the simpler the better uh cities came before States in in our meet space Evolution and so in a way I

feel like Network cities coming before Network States sort of sort of follows from that is that true reductionist no I think that's exactly right and and I think that um yeah that that's a helpful way of looking at the world because um it points to the fact that like you have to start with this bottom-up uh way of doing things and um there's some I believe it's skulls gaul's law maybe that you you know if you want to build a complex system it has to evolve from a simple system that the same thing is true here there's way too many people you know trying to design these perfect um you know top-down systems that look great on paper or look great on you know scale models that you can look at but

this was exactly the Trap that you know we we have fallen into in the last century is this kind of high modernism uh and and you know I think what you just described is much more of uh uh meta modernist approach of um you know starting with the small groups of people building the city's uh before you try to like engineer some uh massive system for for everyone all at once are you saying before I started a network State I should try to have a dinner party and see if I can live through that with other people that's exactly right well we can't uh we can't end the episode on uh on a post but uh I I do think that this idea of gals law and in starting small and and

growing bigger and growing the muscles from there is uh is is quite profound so um maybe we'll start with dinner parties and then we can we Network dinner parties then we've got Network local communities and network cities then Network States and I think cabin is a great place for people to build those muscles so people can go to cabin dot City and they can and start getting involved in the cabin ecosystem and they can also follow you on Twitter at Jonathan Hillis uh and we'll have links to both of those things in the show notes um any parting words or any other final thoughts before we wrap uh just a huge shout out and thank you to you and the the green Polk Community um you know I I think we first met at the first M con and and that was the

first time where I was really with a group of people that um you know knew and believed in ostrom's work and the way that I did and um the first time I was exposed to the idea of the green pill and to the idea of um solar Punk and I think these are really crucial memes for for this world that we're building together um and so yeah it just had been very inspired by by your work and by this community so um thanks for having me on the Pod yeah thanks I'm inspired by all of the creators in the regen web 3 ecosystem and we're all standing on the soldiers of Giants and um I know that you've done a lot of great work on the commons and I think cabin is just really Galaxy Grand so really appreciate you coming on and

telling us about cabin and for the listeners you have my hearty recommendation to check out cabin dot City and get involved all right I think we should wrap there and peace of love everyone [Music] foreign [Music]