Zones: Politically Feasible Jurisdictional Experimentation
Sources: 1 • Confidence: Medium • Updated: 2026-02-12 18:54
Key takeaways
- Building a new city is described as enabling urban policy improvements because city-level autonomy is often easier to obtain than national-scale change.
- Prospera is described as having voluntarily committed to remit 12% of its taxes to the Honduran government and to disallow land expropriation internally.
- Culture is described as not reliably engineerable via top-down mission statements, but also not well-modeled as either a static museum artifact or as purely emergent from individual market choices.
- Zuzalu in 2023 ran a roughly two-month popup city of about 200 people mixing multiple subcommunities, and it functioned as a real-world experiment while leaving the question of what comes next unresolved.
- Recurring popups may regress into shorter, smaller, more generic events that converge toward conferences and hackerspaces rather than culturally distinctive communities.
Sections
Zones: Politically Feasible Jurisdictional Experimentation
- Building a new city is described as enabling urban policy improvements because city-level autonomy is often easier to obtain than national-scale change.
- Many people in the 21st century are described as needing better options for where to live due to economic, political, cultural, or lifestyle mismatches with their birth country.
- Jurisdictions that offer easy, user-friendly entry mechanisms for talented people from many countries are described as likely to gain economic benefits as immigration restrictions increase elsewhere.
- Zones are described as reducing downside risk because failures can remain small-scale compared to harms possible if the same actors controlled a whole city or country.
- Jurisdictional innovation is described as more likely to occur via semi-autonomous zones within existing countries than via new sovereign countries because sovereignty is rarely ceded and zones align incentives with host governments.
- Cooperative zone outcomes are described as requiring governance design that limits sudden state reversals while giving states adjustable numeric levers and explicit incentives for education and technology transfer to locals.
Vouching And Network-Import Immigration: Proposed Regulatory And Entry Mechanisms
- Prospera is described as having voluntarily committed to remit 12% of its taxes to the Honduran government and to disallow land expropriation internally.
- Using nationality as the primary immigration risk filter is described as inefficient and unjust compared to digital screening based on individual attributes such as work history, education, and vouching.
- Vouching is described as a mechanism where mandatory liability insurance allows actions conditional on a well-capitalized guarantor paying fines and compensating victims if harm occurs.
- Prospera in Honduras is described as attempting to test vouching-style governance at zone scale, while currently relying on a single insurance company run by the zone.
- Zones are described as potentially maximizing success by importing networks rather than individuals, including via collective visas where a government approves a tribe and then admits its member list automatically.
- Zones are described as able to help countries import valuable networks by attracting global talent and activity, and modernized entry mechanisms and vouching systems are described as potential substitutes for nationality-based risk filters and heavy regulation.
Culture: Non-Linear Evolution Model And Design Goals
- Culture is described as not reliably engineerable via top-down mission statements, but also not well-modeled as either a static museum artifact or as purely emergent from individual market choices.
- Modern societies are described as suffering from atomism and vulnerability to authoritarianism partly because intermediate institutions have weakened and global-scale communities are poorly served by local-only associations or homogenizing corporations and social media.
- Culture is described as evolving through a feedback loop among practices, incentives, leadership statements, and theories that co-adapt over time rather than following linear top-down design.
- Liberalism is described as theoretically able to support many tight-knit value communities without a single society-wide strong authority, but existing liberal societies are described as not yet producing widespread strong communities in practice.
- Cultural and institutional innovation is described as stagnating partly because it lacks strong profit motives and rapid experimentation loops unlike startups, and NFT-driven culture is described as unlikely to fix this by itself.
- A design goal is proposed for cultural evolution where cultures can compete and improve without violence and without optimizing only for short-term memetic virality or convenience.
Popup Cities: Validated Format And Operating Parameters
- Zuzalu in 2023 ran a roughly two-month popup city of about 200 people mixing multiple subcommunities, and it functioned as a real-world experiment while leaving the question of what comes next unresolved.
- A popup size of around 200 people is described as effective because it can sustain multiple subcultures while remaining socially coherent.
- Popup duration changes participant behavior because about one to two months feels like real life whereas about a week feels like a break, enabling deeper relationships and subcommunity formation.
- Popup programming is described as working best at roughly a college at 25% intensity with explicit downtime to avoid burnout and preserve organic community formation.
Popup Cities: Scaling Limits And Regression Risks
- Recurring popups may regress into shorter, smaller, more generic events that converge toward conferences and hackerspaces rather than culturally distinctive communities.
- Meaningful integration with a local community typically requires returning to the same place for years and may work better by engaging the diaspora in addition to in-country locals.
- Popups face structural scaling limits including high cost, shallow physical customization, logistical difficulty assembling many participants, and difficulty involving locals beyond superficial economic interactions.
- In popup contexts, attempts at novel governance and legal autonomy are described as often diminishing over time because short duration makes founder-led forking sufficient and reduces the payoff to legal innovation.
Watchlist
- Recurring popups may regress into shorter, smaller, more generic events that converge toward conferences and hackerspaces rather than culturally distinctive communities.
Unknowns
- What measurable outcomes (retention, collaboration output, new org formation) did Zuzalu-like popups produce, and how do these outcomes vary with size, duration, and programming intensity?
- Is the claim that Edge City (or similar pipelines) is cash-flow positive true under a clear accounting definition, and is it durable across multiple cycles?
- How frequently do recurring popups regress toward generic conferences, and what design choices prevent that regression?
- What is the smallest population size at which a permanent hub can sustain core amenities and remain walkable, and how sensitive is that threshold to local costs and infrastructure choices?
- What evidence supports the claim that returning for years and engaging diaspora materially improves local integration outcomes for popups or hubs?