Meatspace Matters
Meatspace is where we spend all our time, even when we’re online. In the transition from Nation State to Startup State, the framework described in Balaji Srinavasan’s syncretic memeplex The Network State, the concept of “land last but not never” is key. We are made out of meat and all our networked and digital interactions begin and end in our meat, most notably the grey foie gras inside our skull.
An archipelago of land as a necessary component is a helpful prod to TNS memelords and Startup Society founders to avoid the trap of the theoretical, the virtual, the solely online. The essential TNS requirement of crowdsourced land also provides an optimistic and value-creating framework for thinking about group-owned land, as compared to cheesy time-shares, corny hippie communes, and theophilic kibbutzes. As with many ideas introduced in TNS, “land last, but not never” comes with a baked-in moral innovation.
Cloud-first makes it easy for founders to launch their Startup Community. Land-last brings their solitary commandments down to earth. Crowdsourcing land leverages new TNS form factors for collective action, such as the Startup Society and the Network Union.
Land Locks
Group-owned land is a force multiplier for alignment of burgeoning Network States, especially with regard to reinforcing value and vision and attracting new members. It’s a place to visit. A recruitment center. Safehouse. Offsite. Homebase. HQ. The Shire. Zion. The Promised Land. BTC Citadel. Ashram. Monastery.
It should be prioritized by TNS creators because buying property is much more complex than launching a Discord or a DAO. It’s also proof that the Startup Society is serious about building something new and viable, with true peer-potential to nation states, i.e the values-driven networked meatspace archipelago described in TNS.
My insight about the TNS land last, not never meme is that it can be done (because i’ve done it) and in the doing it will accelerate the rise of TNS.
While I was still living mostly in Mexico City, some friends and I purchased a 1,500-acre ranch in Northern California. This was in 2008; over the past 15 years we’ve built a community of 25 families. Group-owned land creates shared responsibility, concerns, and upside. It’s a place to meet, cultivate, and coexist. We named our community Cayetana after a colorful local character whose name spans our land’s jurisdictional transition from Spain to Mexico to the United States.
If you search for “group-owned land buying service,” you’ll come across many articles (mostly bank blogs) extolling the virtues of co-owned properties (and the banks’ competitive mortgage rates!). But I could not find any community or startup whose mission is to help groups come together and purchase land for use as the base of a community. You can stay in an airbnb or a hotel, buy a timeshare or invest in a REIT, but there’s nothing that guides you step by step through the process of buying land as a group.
Memelords to Landlords
The TNS crowdsourced land meme has already incepted the founders of dozens of Startup Societies and Network Unions. These TNS memelords with their persuasive pitch, ie. their one commandment and its moral innovation, are the ones who need to prioritize staking a claim to some land and persuading their members to join them.
There are many burgeoning network states (TNS dashboard here, another list here by The Incognita an open source directory of network states with more/better links). Some of these embryonic Network States have websites. Some have manifestos. Some are developing real estate projects and seeking investors. Some own land in special economic zones. But none make it easy for startup societies to check the Network State-owned land box. It’s time for that to change. It’s time for words to become (land) deeds.
It’s time for TNS founders to start thinking about group-owned land, starting small, something inexpensive, i.e. not in a big city, and something useful, i.e. arable land that can be cultivated to produce food. We are talking about group-owned farmland— 40 acres and a Rule.
The TNS Creators writing cohort is excellent, but we need a crowdsourcing land cohort too. TNS memelords have listened to all Balaji’s podcast appearances. They are active in the discord. They’ve digested The Network State, hyperlink to hyperlink. They’ve published essays with the help of the amazing TNS Memelord Essay Generator. But how many of them have ever purchased real estate, let alone participated a group-owned land purchase, much less organized one, much less governed and improved the land, or created a liquid market for members to enter and exit by selling their shares? Rhetorical run on question, but I hope you get my point.
We need a crowdsourced TNS Memelord real estate tool to bridge this gap. Without it, I fear TNS will come to mean The Non-existent State. And I’m the founder leading the way by productizing what we’ve built at Cayetana.
Commune Conundrum
The problem is buying land as a group is complicated and relatively uncommon compared to other forms of real estate transactions. When my friends and I decided to purchase the 150- year-old dairy ranch that would become Cayetana, we evaluated a variety of purchase, ownership, and management scenarios. There were no easy templates to follow for structure, financing, or governance.
We were a group of startup founders, bankers, business guys, and lawyers, and it was still challenging to agree on the best path to closing on the purchase, improving the land, adding to the membership, and creating revenue streams to cover operating costs.
But not thinking about it is failure mode, i.e. landless lords lose. Aspiring Network State founders who procrastinate the crowdsourcing of land might discover that land last becomes land never and all their meetups, Discord threads, and essays were all just in service of organizing another metaverse. Infinite online worlds vs. finite terra firma— one commandment is arguably just aspirational words without a parcel for the commandment’s followers to call home.
Shire SAAS
We closed on Cayetana toward the end of 2008 when every financial institution in the U.S became insolvent and then persuaded Congress to bail them out for “the good of the world economy.” It was unclear what would happen after that or whether the entire U.S platform was being destroyed before our eyes by crony capitalism. Even so, I remember not thinking twice about wiring my share of the purchase price. A big chunk of land not too far from an urban hub seemed like the safest bet I could make, especially because it was linked to a community of friends.
How to fill this farm-sized gap in the TNS memelord knowledge base. The answer is right out of the TNS playbook:
Like a startup (and unlike a small business), a startup society is a small group with ambitions of doing big things.
It’s a Startup Society dedicated to productizing the crowdfunding of group-owned land for TNS founders, members, and memelords. It’s a crowdsourced startup that’s building a tool for crowdsourced property purchases.
It starts with one commandment: Land of Our Own.
It aspires to a product that makes crowdsourcing land as easy as possible, first for TNS founders and memelords, and then for everyone and anyone, even if they’ve never heard of TNS. This is the most efficient way to spread and manifest TNS memes— productize and startupify them, crowdsourced startup creation.
The group-owned farm solution begins as a coin-gated community, then a paid newsletter, an online guide, and ultimately a fee-based service that makes it easy for groups to form according to shared values and vision, i.e., guided by one commandment. There would be both ownership and access rights to consider. Is it a time-share? What entity owns the deed? An LLC, as in my experience with Cayetana? DAO-owned is the most transparent, but RegCF requires a one-year lockup, so there needs to be some centralization for crowdsourced land purchases that look like securities, which most of them will. The solution might eventually evolve into a liquid marketplace of ownership and access interest in TNS land.
The solution would leverage all that I and others with similar land-based community experience have learned with regard to purchasing, financing, refinancing, managing, improving, creating revenue streams, and governing group-owned land. And it would share the upside with everyone who helped it grow and evolve into a sustainable, fast-growing, cashflow-generating Startup Society, and maybe even an overarching Network State in its own right.
In 2023, once more we find ourselves in an unpredictable world, with inflation, recession, over-regulation, hot wars, cold wars, and irresponsible government, all fomenting economic chaos. Never has an investment in land-based community seemed like a better investment option as late capitalism and the U.S. empire transitions to whatever comes next.
GroupFarm: Land of Our Own
So what’s the upside of having read this far and maybe even being persuaded that GroupFarm is a viable, perhaps even indispensable, Startup Society in TNS startup society universe. The upside for you, dear reader, is as great as you’d like to make it.
Dogfooding is the way to go with this, as with all digital product development. This Startup Society should validate its own process and prove itself by crowdsourcing a land purchase for and by its own members, i.e. a homeland for farm-and-ranch loving memelords contributing to and helping to grow the Group Farm Startup that productizes the land crowdsourcing tool. Cloud first, then farm/ranch, then proven product to offer to the TNS community and beyond.
If you’ve been lucky enough to have an experience in group-owned property like mine with Cayetana, then please join to add your resources and information to the repository and participate in the dogfooding, as well as the creation of guides, newsletters, and other paid services.
Earn the GroupFarm closed-loop token, LND, for helping GroupFarm grow. Redeem the LND you earn for access to the GroupFarm coin-gated Discord and Monthly Meetups, or to apply to be a Co-Founder.
Grow your upside in proportion to your LND-compensated contributions and then redeem LND for ownership of the crowdsourced Group Farm that results from our dogfooding.
Call for Co-Founders.
During the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns, when even public beaches, hiking trails, and parks were closed, my land-based community enjoyed the fresh air, hiking, biking, swimming, hunting, and cultivation of our group-owned property, no masks or vax required. We had farm fresh vegetables, fruit, beef, eggs, wine, and honey from our cultivation of the land.
Being a member of Cayetana has been one of the most consistent sources of joy in my life. During the pandemic Cayetana was freedom in a world of mandated restrictions, community during the great isolation, sanity in time of top-down crazy.
Memes can come true, they can happen to you, if you’re TNS at heart.
Share this essay with TNS Creators and Memelords. Let it incept their fertile psyches and persuade them that land sooner than later is a true, helpful, and valuable spin on the TNS meme, an essay and idea worth spreading.
Join the embryonic Group Farm Startup Community, collaborate, and earn upside in the form of our closed-loop coin: LND.
And if you feel Founder Energy rising in you at the thought of building a fast-growing, cashflow-generating startup that makes it easy for TNS land mandate to be realized, well then please apply to be a Group Farm co-founder.
If you've seen Harold and Maude, that great movie of non-conformism, transcendence and freedom, you might remember this exchange between the two main characters that sums up a TNS memelord’s responsibility to aspire to become a TNS landlord:
Maude: "The earth is my body, my head is in the stars...Who said that?"
Harold: "I don't know."
Maude: "Well, I suppose I did."
I did. We can. LFG!