How much does it cost to build a city? How much does it cost to seed the start of a city? There is one way to find out, and that is building it from scratch. It is much simpler than it seems with the right motivation and, in the Trump era, that motivation is definitively there. So let me make the case.

• The objective is to change the electoral map and the balance of power, six senators would be a good way to get there and that could be just the start. There is a clear path to get there.
• The cost is really not much higher than the cost of doing business and should actually be profitable as an investment. But the concentration of money, that someone like Bloomberg has, makes the scale large enough to change the political map of this country.
• Creating a city from scratch brings a large spectrum of technological, political, and ecological opportunities that would be a boon for academics that want to get involved. Some universities could even commit to bring a satellite campus there. Bloomberg university can be founded there.
• There are multiple advantages to do this at this moment in time, besides the political motivation, the high cost of living in California has already led to considerable migration that is changing the composition of other states. Companies have already started moving their offices to less expensive states to reduce costs.
• Making the strategy completely public (perhaps after the first few thousand “seed” democrats have been identified and committed to the cause via invitation-only access) is sure to lead to a very strong and ridiculous Republican backlash, that would just help the cause. It might even lead to the elimination of the structural problems altogether.
• This strategy cannot be copied by the GOP as cities, due to their social structures, will tend to vote Democrat. So this would surely backfire if they attempted it in this scale.
• This is being done in a smaller scale by the Libertarian Free State Project, they are very slowly ramping up and changing the composition of politics in New Hampshire, but if we can get to change the composition of three states, doing it this way would be a much faster and significant change than what that project would ever be able to achieve.

The place

The best way to get the most bang for the buck is to choose states with the smallest population so that a large influx of people has the most impact, this doesn’t provide many congressional seats or presidential votes but, thanks to the US constitution, a state is a state and has two senate seats. To reduce costs it would be useful to get as many states as you can at the same time, so state borders are ideal to create the city. That way the population has more than one state to live in and inter-state competitions could lead to large political and economic advantages. If you can reduce your state taxes or improve school prospects just by moving a couple of miles in the same urban area (or just across the street), wouldn’t you do it? If a state sees all of that tax income going just across the border, wouldn’t they try to attract it?

There happens to be a place that checks all those boxes and is relatively close to important areas and main highways. It happens to be in the joint borders of Montana, and the two Dakotas. That is, three low-population rural states, some at the bottom of the economic scale. This place is driving distance away from Yellowstone park, Oregon, Washington State, and Canada. Less than 150 miles from both I-94 and I-90 and adjacent to a national forest. These states are all agricultural states, some of which have been hit by Trump’s tariff war and with an aging population.

Something that cannot be underestimated is the political composition of the region. The slow work of changing local governments and ordinances to make the city a reality cannot be underestimated. So local regulations should guide how to proceed, but the size of local populations in that area should make it somewhat easier. Fallon County MN and Bowman County ND have 3000 people each, Hardin County SD has 1500. But the best part of it is that there are at least four Native American reservations surrounding the area that might see such development as a great opportunity in their backyard.

The challenge

There should be little doubt that creating a city from scratch has its problems. To sustain a large population you need infrastructure where there is none. Not only roads, water, sewers, power, but also supermarkets, gas stations, restaurants, schools, barbershops, and many other services. But in the modern era, and with e-commerce to fill the voids, this is not out of the question for a large extremely-well-funded non-profit company. Google and other companies pride themselves in offering many services to their employees, this would just be an increase by at most an order of magnitude. But this brings in many opportunities, water management can start from the most modern environmental recycling ideas, gas stations can be just for visitors as city regulations can force all of the city infrastructure towards electric transportation via local taxation of carbon use, and restricting gas-powered cars from entering the city. A really blue and green city from the ground up.

Thankfully those three states are also at the top of the list in average wind speeds across the US, so relatively small wind farms could be erected not only supplying the city, but providing plenty of excess power for the states and the region. It could create an island of cheap electrical power that would lead to the movement of industry into the region. Companies with large server farms would seriously consider bringing their servers there. Google, Apple, IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, Space X, etc. Companies that primarily employ hundreds of college educated liberals in those server farms and data centers.

The most expensive part of the project could be connecting it to the main roads, transportation infrastructure, and water infrastructure. But this is something that the states themselves, as well as a federal democrat government, can help with. Having three states to choose from, two possible highways to connect to, and two lakes in two different states can create a lot of motivated competition to make it happen. But to be really viable a modest regional airport would become necessary and the main mode of transportation for a while, with regular flights to Minneapolis, Seattle, and Portland of course to further incentivize liberal immigration. Thankfully this is something that can start relatively small and grow with the rest of the city, but planing is key, with wind and agricultural farms to choose from it should be easy to avoid the eternal problems of big airports coexisting with residential areas within the city.

Of course the place is freaking cold in the winter, but with cheap electricity and adequate planning it should be able to create a covered infrastructure to handle the worst weather. Covered walkways with attached electrical transportation systems and other roads that can provide a growth opportunity to develop and test alternatives from scratch. New neighborhood concepts with electrical transportation designed into their layout from the start. Buildings and other covered living spaces directly connected with each other. Bring in Elon Musk and his Hyper Loop ideas down to scale, he would probably jump at the opportunity and bring a Tesla Megafactory to boot, thousands of extra jobs.

To compensate for the farming product losses that a project of this scale in an agricultural area could entail, new more efficient farming infrastructure could be created with the trend towards vertical and underground farming that can become highly productive with little land and water. Wind farms can also share the space with existing farming, and the presence of a city with multiple employment opportunities and efficient transportation networks can reduce the decline in the farming population and bring new innovations in farming. With very low suburban density, what kind of social structures would become possible if you could catch the subway to go from your farm to school or the theater?

The plan

Start slowly buying land in those three states with shell companies, you don’t want to let them know what is happening before it actually starts and cause a land grab and a lot of local opposition before the plans are ready. Create farming agreements that allow the farmers to remain in their homes with their livelihoods intact, while allowing spaces for the city to grow. Incentivize individuals to buy land there through social movements and zero cost loans, the point is not to make money, but to change the country (hint: Steyer has a bank). Allow farmers to become part of, and invest in, the project and not simply be displaced by it. This should reduce local opposition and outrage. All of the land doesn’t have to be contiguous, but it has to be planned well enough so that the different parts of the city can seamlessly interconnect without large income distribution gradients. Market forces and social pressures would do the rest. Total investment: could be as little as 1B$, which would easily turn a 1000% profit once the city is built.

In the neighboring regions start building wind farms. The high average wind speeds might require some specialized wind turbine designs, these turbines can be smaller to achieve the same output, more room for innovation. Of course, all of this energy would require some storage to make reliable, a large battery bank (Tesla again) would have to be put there. Total investment cost: less than 500M$ to start.

Bloomberg can start building a modern campus for his company in the area. His company is an informations company, many of his workers don’t need to live in a major city and it requires a lot of servers that happen to require a lot of electricity. It’s quite likely that a lot of his employees would jump to the opportunity to get a server farm going in the middle of nowhere. Of course, services have to be provided, so a full campus similar to Google’s but with more services (including housing) would have to be put in place to support the employees. Put the right incentive structure and you would have seeded the migration of the first few hundred workers. Total investment cost: I’d hazard a guess of about 3B$ in the first five years, much of it pure cost but it could be structured to actually make a profit.

With plenty of cheap electricity and three states to choose from it should be easy to bring in quite a few companies with server banks and other energy-intensive operations. Bloomberg would own all of it, so he can charge whatever makes sense for the power without having to deal with the states at all, the electrical grid doesn’t even have to connect with the rest of the country, although this would provide a source of revenue and stability that can scale considerably. With enough incentives satellite campuses from Microsoft, Google, IBM, Apple, Amazon, and Tesla could arrive, but only one or two of these would be more than enough as a seed.

Satisfy the need for recreational spaces with covered infrastructure that functions regardless of the weather. Bloomberg park, Bloomberg arena, Bloomberg theater complex, Bloomberg recreational center, Bloomberg arts center, Bloomberg mall, etc. All interconnected with covered walkways and electrical transportation at the center of the city expanding across three states. This also opens up the areas around the center for residential buildings, schools, office space, and commercial space while minimizing traffic congestion in the future as the city grows. Three separate city centers, one in each state, interconnected with transportation infrastructure and parking spaces serving the government, park, and adjacent areas. Total cost: starting with just one city center and a park with some covered areas should be around 1B$, but clearly it would slowly grow in size and scope by an order of magnitude as the central feature of the city, most of it tax deductible.

Once the seed is planted and a population of a few thousand people with high income moves in, a whole service infrastructure would naturally arise to serve the need. The workers to build all of this, provide the services, and maintain the infrastructure would be attracted by the higher paying jobs in one of the least expensive and best planned places in the US. People would require places to stay so rental properties would be required from the start, with free rent as incentives for the first movers. Total investment cost: less than 500M$ to start.

Just as companies provide hazard pay on top of their salaries when people move to a dangerous area, Bloomberg could provide civic pay for the first few thousands that make the sacrifice. Universal Basic Income with a purpose. This will be temporary as once the cities are primed the process would advance on its own and living costs would come down as more and more momentum builds. Total cost: 2000 people, $1000/month for 10 yrs, 250M$.

To have the most impact in the least amount of time it might make sense to concentrate the efforts within just one state, while making sure to hoard all of the land necessary on the other two so that the city can grow in an orderly fashion and without a marked geographical wage division. The most important aspect is the state of residency, so this concentration can be just for housing while the rest of the distributed infrastructure grows. Without legacy constraints and designed from scratch, it can become the most modern and innovsative city in the world. Reaching 10000 people or more in as little as 5 years is within the realm of the possible, and with a low-density distributed urban area in place with advanced transportation infrastructure into the adjacent rural areas, those people can become a very large influence on the region.

This plan is just a very basic idea and an extremely risky one at that, although many parts of it can stand on their own. But people much smarter and with much more money than me can work on making it a reality. It just needs help from a few friendly Billionaires, and it should cost less than 10% of Bloomberg’s fortune (or a couple presidential contests) to get it going, most of it as a very profitable and productive investment. I bet both Bernie and Warren would be happy to give him a tax break on his wealth tax bill if he gets all of this going. Not to mention that he could be mayor of three cities at the same time.

But who are we kidding? Bloomberg would never go for something that would directly affect the oligarchic class to which he belongs, as a persistent Democrat majority in congress would, but it doesn’t have to be him. Steyerville, Muskopolis, Buffetia, and Gatesville all sound perfectly fine to me.

Traditional framing methods are not enough, the massive avalanche of noise has to be countered, the weather reports could provide a guide, gamification could provide new sources of revenue.

There is a prevalent issue with the way Trump and Republican politicians behave, it’s the basic axiom of populism: experts, meritocracy, and facts are no competition for popular opinion. That’s why they create an alternate reality where up is down and the sky is red and where actual facts have no standing while opinion, confirmation bias, and twisted interpretations take their place [1]. That’s why “the mainstream media” is creating “fake news” and are “the enemy of the people.” That is why there are information channels that are dedicated to maintaining and extracting massive profit from this alternative reality (Breitbart and Fox News come to mind), society be damned.

But that is also why they (particularly Trump) tend to generate an avalanche of outrageous “information” that keeps the mainstream media chasing its tail. It’s impossible to cover yesterday’s craziness when today’s craziness is even more outrageous. And all of the craziness makes it very hard to cover the actual outrageous things they are doing. That’s why they can get away with the destruction of basic democratic principles, there is way too much noise for people to be able to pay attention and react. I have seen this movie before, it’s the same tactic that was employed by Chavez in Venezuela. The media never knew how to deal with it and democracy was slowly dismantled under their noses while Chavez laughed at them running around like decapitated chickens. This is a common theme behind the rise of of populist and nationalistic regimes.

The media has quite a bit of blame in all of this. Their attraction to shiny objects, ratings, and the horse races requires them to present today’s outrage instead of dedicating time to carefully analyze what is going on. The viewer’s attention span is limited, they have to keep the conflict going so that we would pay attention. A different model that does not require that conflict and horse race aspect must be found. That job is left to the ever declining newspapers and magazines that only the informed minority reads, leaving the uninformed majority to fend with the avalanche of misinformation on their own. No wonder that it’s very common to hear: “I don’t trust the media, they just serve lies.”

But there is a more problematic aspect to this, it creates an alternative reality market. The market that has led Fox News and right-wing radio to thrive. People that live inside the alternative reality need their beliefs catered to. Fox News is happy to oblige and get advertiser’s money to do so. No wonder that it has been found that people that watch Fox News are less informed than people that watch no news at all [2]. Making actual fake news is easy, you just need to create something out of thin air and have a choir to repeat it to the masses. Numerous alternative fact mongers can make a fortune peddling the lies they concocted, while real journalism requires investigation and corroboration. That’s why a lie has travelled around the world in the time the truth puts on its muck-wading boots [3]. Twitter and Facebook just make it even worse.

One effective way to deal with this is satire, there is a reason that many people can be better informed by watching the Daily Show or listening to Wait Wait don’t Tell Me on the radio. Chris Hayes, a membed of the real media, already has his Thing 1 & 2 satirical news segment. The problem with this format is that it is narrow in focus, takes too much viewer time and preparation, and it’s not for all tastes as it’s clearly one more example of “Liberal Bias.”

So we have to come up with a way to cover the daily craziness and the alternative reality universe in a way that is (1) entertaining, (2) comprehensive, (3) documents its evolution, and (4) leaves time for real news. I propose we look at the weather report, participatory competition shows, simple easy to understand measures, and the fast ubiquitous flow of information through social media for an answer.

The Weather Report Model

The weather report takes little more than 30 seconds of a news program, yet it’s able to convey a lot of information with a few graphs and numbers. This is short enough and informative enough to make it entertaining with no need for conflict (although it might involve some theatrics). This doesn’t mean that it should be all of the coverage, some topics might merit some in-depth analysis, but it makes it possible to adequately and fairly cover everything in just a few minutes, leaving plenty of time for the more important stuff.

The media could thus condense most of what comes out of Trump’s mouth into a few statistics. Categorize and classify the lies under a few catchy names, and reporting on Trump’s twitter feed can become as simple as:

23 Tweets today, 20% on the “I’m not a crook” category, 30% on the pure Bullshit category, and 48% on the “I’m better than anyone” category. We’ll be covering that interesting 2% later in the show. That brings the accumulated bullshit for the month to 856 Tweets…

Trends and statistics can be extracted, graphs can be plotted, and predictions can be made:

Trump is traveling tomorrow to Germany, we predict a 75% chance of bullshit divided into the following categories…

This removes all of the punch and just makes a joke out of the whole Trump strategy.

The same strategy can be applied to Congressional Republicans in general and to Fox News or the right-wing media as a whole. Once the format is implemented it can lead to its refinement and evolution. It might be perceived as non-serious at the beginning, but it would slowly become prevalent as the outrage machine gives it free publicity. Do note that this strategy could not be easily emulated by the Pervaricating Right, as that would imply that they would have to expose their viewers to real news to do it. Thus highlighting the conflict with reality where currently their viewers perceive none.

This is the report from The Alternative Reality: today’s main topic was how the Ukranians meddled in the elections, which had 80% of the coverage. Second, with 10% came how North Korea just made a marriage proposal to Trump, and Qanon dropped today to only 9% of the coverage. This graphic maps how those topics where distributed among the main players, including the Russian Bots in Facebook and Twitter, of note is that Fox only had 22% of truthful news today, hitting a new low for the month of November…

For the viewers that are more interested in specifics, online web coverage can take the slack, directing the viewer to actual sources and fact checkers. A simple QR-code on the corner of the screen can allow anyone to follow along the story and see the data behind the labels and closely examine the graphs and trends. It will become a fun game, a water cooler conversation starter, and even some betting pools might arise around it. All of this would increase the flow of information through society, particularly information of how the alternative reality is developing. Light is the best disinfectant.

For this to work, the presentation has to be as transparent as possible. Leave no room for any mistake, correction, of misinterpretation to be used against it. Particularly when the rate of information flow is at a level the makes mistakes quite likely. That makes absolute and blatantly obvious transparency key. It’s not enough to issue a correction at a later date, or to put a hard to see footnote at the end of the article. It should be a clearly demarcated, standardized, and visible section of any associated data point. Something that can be seen alongside the heading of the article itself, and in article listings.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics is a good model to follow for this, always providing preliminary information on its monthly reports, and revising it up or down for a few months afterwards. This guarantees the immediate flow of information, and more accurate historical information on which to base predictions. People know that the initial information is flawed and the direction the previous information was corrected, so they adjust their expectations accordingly. This is particularly powerful as cautious journalism would probably err towards the direction of giving the alternate universe the benefit of the doubt, thus making most corrections in the “wrong” direction.

Of course, this idea can be taken forwards using a model similar to the investigative organization Propublica. There are already several individual attempts that are trying to combat the problem. To provide browser plugins that classify news sites in a truthfulness scale, to modify search results and social media streams so that fact checking is front and center. All of these ideas can be incorporated into a larger organization with the resources to deal with the problem. An Alternative Reality Watch Bureau of sorts.

The game show model

If you introduce the possibility of audience participation into a news segment (or create a game show roughly modeled after Wait Wait don’t tell me), you could exploit the dynamism it introduces to lead the audience towards being informed. QR codes to specialized sites, tweets with tags, SMS codes, polls. phone calls, dedicated game apps, actual prizes and the possibility of interviews, live comment streams. All the tools that modernity gives us. TV Networks are always looking for a new show, Chris Hayes has partially adopted a Late Show feel to his latest nes innovation. News Networks could jump into the bandwagon.

Audience participation could decide the topic of the day, which of all of the crazy stuff the audience wants to hear a more in-depth coverage of. An audience poll of what’s the wackiest Fox segment or Breitbart article. Participants could gain the prestige that Jeopardy participants get, and the public would start following their performance, and getting actually informed in the process.

The game show model could be brought fully online and even create a whole new market segment for the distribution of information. Gamification is a modern tool that has been proven useful for the teaching of languages, for expanding charity work, and for other social endeavors [4]. Maybe it’s time for actual news to enter the fray. Compete with other users, create different teams: the CNN team, the MSNBC team, the NPR team, the Fox News team. Create an artificial incentive for people to become informed.

This is a market segment that the providers of real news could excel at, new app categories and revenue streams could be created out of it. Something that they are sorely in need of at the moment.

How can this be done?

It should not be that hard. It would have to start from one of the more left-leaning networks such as MSNBC. They could hire John Stewart and some of the Daily Show people as consultants, I am sure they would come out of their retirement to help create something like this. The networks already have plenty of people that can compile statistics and polls, and the fact checking sites and newspaper divisions could surely be invited to participate in the generated social media traffic.

The challenge would be to make it serious enough for it to have lasting presence and influence. With just the right dose of humor to get people hooked. It would be a large project overall, but it doesn’t have to start that way. Small segments like the Thing 1/2 segment of Chris Hayes or his new Friday format could start testing the waters. Put them in specific time slots on TV and online, so that all can become aware at the same time.

Serious media outlets have to do something like this to deal with the noise avalanche that comes from the president, his party, and his propaganda outlets before the 2020 elections start in earnest. It is their social duty. Democracy itself might be in peril if they don’t act.

[1] The Fact Act — Restoring Science Integrity
[2] How Fox News Changed American Media and Political Dynamics
[3] Misinformation Propagation in the Age of Twitter.
[4] Does Gamification Work?-A Literature Review of Empirical Studies on Gamification.