City from the Cloud
Building the City Silicon Valley Deserves
Shared values no longer bind cities. Cities are simply labor markets. Loneliness is malignant. People move to cities for jobs, and hope to find belonging online.
Today, we have an opportunity to reimagine cities. Software engineers built the infrastructure to support the migration of the knowledge economy from the office to the cloud. A virus catalyzed this migration. Now we can live and work wherever we choose, with whoever we choose.
With an abundance of choice, we choose to leave the metropole. We choose to build a startup society with those who share our values. Ancient Athens had 300,000 residents. Renaissance Florence had 80,000. Countless forgotten cities were far larger. The greatness of a city has little to do with its population, and everything to do with its populace.
The internet brings people together around shared passions in digital cities. Now, we can use the internet to bring people together in a city made of atoms. With 2020 technology, we can build a city around shared values with talent and vitality exceeding that of Ancient Athens or Renaissance Florence.
Building a new city from scratch is an opportunity for radical first principles thinking. Modern transportation. Modular construction. Innovative governance. Decentralized currency. Default healthy food, default exercise in nature, default human interaction, and default distributed ownership — the next Apple might be a city; Manhattan’s land is worth more than Amazon.
Tomorrow’s cities will be organized around the warmth of the tribe and the growth propelled by a unified vision for the future. We envision human potential unleashed, an aggregation of talent never before seen, enabled by the global reach of the internet.
We are building the city Silicon Valley deserves.
