cryptoleft

Really interesting and in-depth article.

I’ve been reading about for-profit cities for a couple of years now, and the concept just sounds really wrong to me.

Really interesting and in-depth article.

I’ve been reading about for-profit cities for a couple of years now, and the concept just sounds really wrong to me.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/28/magazine/prospera-honduras-crypto.html

@vocdoni, prev. Bitcoin Magazine | Purple #203 | Cohost: /diy /anthropology /vote /biohacking /cooperatives

I would not want the average city to be a profit-making corporation, but also I feel a strong default negative instinct against anyone arguing that there should be exactly zero of a thing in the entire world. Institutional diversity is good.

I completely support the idea of diversity of social arrangements, for me we need even more diversity in the world (or more freedom to experiment).

But it’s difficult to me to see profit-driven cities accountable to their inhabitants and not to profit margins. If the goal of a city shifts from public interest to maximizing shareholders and investors value, I can imagine that in the mid-long term there will be a big disconnection between the city’s leadership and the citizens real needs. Especially in moments of stress/change/crisis.

Universality is key and to me it’s hard to see how it can exist in a city controlled by shareholders rather than its citizens.  When governance is driven by those who have a speculative interest holding shares of the project (and lots of times the peoele with vision gets replced by investment groups) the interests of the broader community are typically in a second term.

Do you have any thoughts on how a for profit city could find this balance?

I actually think Prospera itself is underrated on how much it already has some serious olive branches to non-financialized governance.

Far less than many would like, but far more than what one might think would come out of a crew of private-cities people.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/prospectus-on-prospera

Thanks for such a complete article, is sometimes hard to find content like this

Many of the ideas are very interesting and even some appealing to me, especially the reduction of bureaucracy & having more room to implement social experiments.

And even if I have many criticisms on this project in many sides (and I strongly believe that capitalism is incompatible with democracy and the common good, unlike the free market, which can be), I still like that these experiments exist and I'm interested in seeing how they evolve. In any case, I also see these projects like oases in many ways, like as bottle gardens. So even if Próspera succeeds in many ways, I will remain critical if it’s used as flagship propaganda to suggest that this model can be expanded globally. (eg, in Spain, there’s a “communist” town called Marinaleda often used as a model, but I also see it as a bottle garden)

I actually visited Liberland a few years ago as I'm fascinated by social projects. It's a shame it hasn't been successful.

Network States

In principle a hybrid model should work best, and before that, prob. will see both models compete to certain degree: market mechanism works to find out best solution most times. 

Problem w/ those governance models & design innovation is: 

1. existing governance models: if u cannot benchmark it, u cannot tell which one works better and which one doesn't. imagine if we have a dashboard for governments like the one for us stocks: https://www.tradingview.com/markets/stocks-usa/market-movers-all-stocks/ and what findings will be made on governance? Lack of transparency data is a problem. 
2. governance model innovation: too much at stake (e.g. property law is not only economic design, also rooted deeply in respective jurisdictional culture-many weird, strange British property law cases), too long to figure out what works and what not, a whole governance model innovation feedback loop take at least 1 yr, most likely yrs to review and revise. This could be where we put AI simulation in good use: https://altera.al/

adding my original reply to @vitalik.eth on my quote cast in here as this conversation is so interesting! https://warpcast.com/casslineth/0x4ac5c6c7

love to have an irl one at some point, maybe devcon 😂  hard to discuss in long threads here