Cabin is building a network city for our citizens, who span the globe and come together to colive and create in nature. Citizens have passports that give them access to coliving and residencies at Cabin neighborhoods. Over the next few years, our city will grow to 5,040 founding citizens—the number that Aristotle thought made for an ideal polis. We collectively govern our city and build a network of neighborhoods from the ground up. Over the past two years, our online community has designed and built a thriving coliving property called Neighborhood Zero in the Texas Hill Country. We are now expanding a shared culture, economy, and governance across a global network of physical neighborhoods designed for strong community, fast internet, and access to nature.
This episode outlines our core beliefs and plans to build a city. It includes
Why we’re building a city
Who we are
What we believe
How we’re doing it
Where we’re going
Exciting Cabin Updates — (00:21)
Introduction to Jon Hillis — (01:36)
Introduction to Cabin — (03:42)
The Problems Cabin is Trying to Solve — (4:28)
Why (New) Cities are the Solution — (6:12)
Network Cities — (8:15)
Cabin’s People — (8:52)
Cabin’s Colliving Neighborhoods Characteristics — (10:02)
The Three Obvious Truths — (11:26)
Truth 1: Living with People We Admire — (12:00)
Truth 2: Find People Online & Connect IRL — (12:40)
Truth 3: Live anywhere. Make Money Online — (13:13)
What “Collective” City Building Means — (14:45)
Becoming a Cabin Citizen — (17:00)
Co-Creating Culture Across Geography — (19:00)
Work-Stay Exchanges at Cabin Neighborhoods — (21:48)
Cabin’s Structure and Decision Making Process — (23:25)
The Cabin Economy — (26:24)
Cabin Exports — (28:59)
Community Growth Goals — (32:40)
Cabin in 50 Years — (34:50)
Societal Evolution Over Time— (37:29)
Connecting with Cabin — (47:43)
Campfire is brought to you by Cabin - a network of coliving neighborhoods for nature-loving creators and remote workers. You can learn more at the following links:
Website (cabin.city)
Read more urbanist content at The Future of Living Newsletter
Episode Links:
Building Cabin's Network City (The vision document)
RSVP to our (virtual) Citizenship launch party on 5.23
Pre-register your property for our City Directory
Episode Credit:
Hosted by @JacksonSteger
Guest was @jonathanhillis
Sound Engineering by @Prodcolin
Produced + Distributed by @PhilippeIze
[00:00:00] Jackson Steger: Hey there, you're listening to Campfire, a podcast where we interview leaders that are building new cities and other new models of living for digital nomads, creators, and remote workers. My name is Jackson Steger, and I work with Cabin to develop new neighborhoods and grow a community of nature- loving creators and remote workers.
[00:00:21] Listeners, it has been a minute. The Cabin team and I have been so busy working on our flagship citizenship offering, which we are launching alongside our co-living platform on May 23rd. This is two years in the making, so we've been light on podcast episodes recently and heavy on building three substantial products.
[00:00:41] The first of those products, Census, launched today. You can create your profile on Census right now by visiting app.cabin.city. Census, though, is just a seek preview of what's to come when we launch Citizenship and our co-living platform, The City Directory on May 23rd. May 23rd is also the week of cabin's two year anniversary.
[00:01:03] We're thrilled with how the community has come together in the last two years to reimagine how we live. We invite you to join us for our virtual birthday and launch party on May 23rd. It's free, really interesting people are gonna be there, and the link to sign up is in the description. Also, if you have ever attended one of our co-living events and received a physical passport, it looks like this.
[00:01:28] If you've ever received that passport, you can register for free citizenship by scanning your passport on your phone. There's a link in the description below. Today's interview features Jon Hillis, one of the founders of Cabin. Jon provides an incredible synthesis of everything we've been working on for the last two years.
[00:01:46] And this episode is thick, thick, with 10 Cs thick. We've got Cabin citizenship, co-living, creating, Census, all the Cs, and so much more. While we've recorded episodes about Cabin in the past, we imagine this will be our most substantial and evergreen episode to date. Ultimately, our conversation today asks the question, what is Cabin's vision?
[00:02:09] And how are we executing it? Campfire is, of course, produced by Cabin, which is building a new kind of city for creators called a network city. Our community is developing a global co-living network of physical locations that we call neighborhoods. If you want to live or create cool things near nature with other thoughtful people nearby, you can learn more about us by visiting cabin.city.
[00:02:33] Alright, help you enjoy the episode. Take it easy. We'll see you on the trail.
[00:02:40] Jackson Steger: Jon Hillis, welcome back to the Campfire.
[00:02:43] Jon Hillis: Great to be back here.
[00:02:44] Jackson Steger: Last time listeners heard from you it was August 2022.
[00:02:49] Jon Hillis: Wow. Feels like ages ago.
[00:02:51] Jackson Steger: Yeah. I've given an intro, so folks know that this episode is going to answer the question, what is Cabin's vision? And, past episodes have certainly touched on it, but this episode will be entirely focused on it. Structurally, I intend to ask you questions in a pattern that mirrors Cabin's Vision Document, a heavily researched community stress tested 25 page document that we published this morning. If listeners would like to read it and follow along as we chat, you can find the link in the description. Generally, our conversation will cover the who, what, where, why, and how of building a new kind of city and where we are going over the next 5, 50, and 500 years. So, with that, let's get right into it. Jon, what is Cabin?
[00:03:42] Jon Hillis: First of all, I just have to say this document that we're gonna be talking about has been an incredible work of co-creation. And while I will be sharing some of these ideas, document itself is intentionally being published by Cabin and not by any individual author because many hands have contributed and many minds have contributed to putting this thing together over the past two years and painting, you know, a picture of Cabin’s Network City and where we're going with.
[00:04:13] Excited to share some of that with you today. Cabin is building a network city for our citizens who are remote workers, online creators who span the globe, come together to co-live and create in nature.
[00:04:26] Jackson Steger: And what problem is Cabin trying to solve in this city vision?
[00:04:33] Jon Hillis: So, we haven't really built new cities in a long time.
[00:04:37] Some of the most recent large cities in America are places like Phoenix, which was founded in 1868, and cities that have been around longer, places like San Francisco, are notoriously are slow to change. If you look at historical photographs versus current photographs, they're sometimes almost indistinguishable.
[00:04:59] And even places that have grown and changed in the past 50 years are mostly suburban environments that have been built around cars and disconnected single family homes. And so, all of this contributes to the fact that Americans are currently less happy with their lives than they've been in the past 50 years.
[00:05:18] And if you try to unpack that, there seem to be two main causes. One is increasing loneliness, and the other one is decreasing standard of living. And, increasing loneliness has been an issue over the past 50 years as American social associations of the 20th century, like the Rotary Club, Boys Scouts, et cetera, have declined.
[00:05:38] And, this also coincides with the rise of car-centric suburban living and standard of living have also been dropping. So, American life expectancy is at a 25 year low. Meanwhile, the basic costs of living, housing, food, education, healthcare have doubled over the same period, even accounting for inflation.
[00:05:56] And so, at Cabin, we think that it's time to go back to the basics, try something different, and try to build a new type of city that works better for people.
[00:06:09] Jackson Steger: Yeah. Why is a city the right way to solve that problem, and what are the sort of collision of trends that make you confident in that solution?
[00:06:17] Jon Hillis: So if you look throughout history, typically the major eras, particularly of Western civilization, seem to have happened and emerged at times in which there was a new set of technologies that democratize things, and then people came together within these city environments and built new ways of living. And so, whether you look at the Early River Valley civilizations or emersions of Greek city states or the Medieval market towns, the New England townships of early America, they, they all follow a similar pattern and we see a new set of technologies unlocking a new way to build cities that we think can help solve some of these core problems of how people live.
[00:07:08] This tech stack stretches across all of the pace layers of civilization. So, if you look at everything: the growth of remote work, the creator economy, increased urban cost of living, the tech stack of satellite internet, solar power and modular housing, self-driving cars, the kind of governance layer of DAOs, blockchain leviathans, cultural trends, and internet-native communities, the development of squad wealth, the solar punk or artistic movement, and the ways that humans are gonna need to pretty quickly respond to changes in nature, like climate change and biodiversity loss. You know, all, all of these things when we add them all up and see where they're headed, what we see is an opportunity to build a new type of city. That is designed around these trends. And so, we believe that cities are built around the dominant technology of eras, and for the past century, that's been cars and for the next century we think that's gonna be the internet.
[00:08:10] And the internet is not all in one place. We don't think cities need to be either. So, we're interested in building a network city, which is a city that's physically decentralized across a network of locations and has a shared culture, economy, and governance structure that ties those locations together.
[00:08:28] Jackson Steger: Listeners can't see this, but just took my jacket off. It's getting serious on this podcast. I love the intersection of all these shifting pace layers. I think that the design space generally for the future of living is massive and so exciting to see how an internet native city will evolve. But I'm curious, that's a little bit about the what, uh, I wanna shift a bit more to the who, when you use the words “we” to describe Cabin or you just talk about Cabin, who are the kinds of people that may find themselves building as a part of the Cabin vision?
[00:09:01] Jon Hillis: So, Cabin started initially with a group of online creators called the Creator Coop. And just as the world was starting to reopen from the pandemic in 2021, we met together at a cabin in the Texas Hill country and dreamed up this idea for a residency program for creators governed by an online community. That week, we launched a crowdfund and brought together 101 people who made donations to support this residency program and collectively vote on creators to come out and participate. And from those initial residencies, a DAO was born, and there are now over 500 people who are holders of the ₡abin token, which we use to collectively govern our organization and thousands more people who are following along with our story, part of our Discord, contributing and helping us build this new city.
[00:09:58] Jackson Steger: And, so that's a bit about the people. And then also I'm curious to learn a little bit more about the physical neighborhoods. So, we'll talk about Neighborhood Zero a little bit later in the show, but when you think of the network city as being made up of independently owned and operated co-living neighborhoods, what are like characteristics that those neighborhoods share.
[00:10:18] Jon Hillis: So, we try to keep a pretty open ended perspective on what makes for a Cabin neighborhood, but there are a couple kind of fundamental parts of it. The first and most important one is a strong community, the second is fast internet, and the third is access to nature.
[00:10:36] And, what we believe is that by combining these three things, we can start to create more affordable, higher quality, more flexible housing options than exist in traditional cities because we can start to build these very nourishing, community-centric environments in areas with lower cost of living and more access to nature that still allow members of our communities to participate in the outside world through remote work and through access to the internet.
[00:11:08] And by combining these factors, we think we can offer a new way of living. That has not been really available or possible before the internet. And that brings us to, to the idea of obvious truths. As a community, we've rallied around these three obvious truths, which are things that are, as the name would suggest, obvious, but that haven't actually changed how people live yet.
[00:11:37] And we believe that in the coming years and decades, these obvious truths are going to allow people to live in a new way. So, the first of those is that we are happiest living with people who we admire. And this idea, which we adapted from our friends at Radish, a co-living community in Oakland, listeners of the pod may know Phil Levin from previous episodes who founded Radish.
[00:12:03] The idea that we're happiest living with people we admire is, you know, almost so banal that it's easy to forget how far from that most of us choose to live. Most people choose to live in these very atomized environments where they don't know their neighbors very well. And it doesn't have to be that way.
[00:12:24] You can choose who sits around your campfire with you, and at Cabin, for us, that means surrounding ourselves with kind, thoughtful, creative, open-minded, playful, and generous people. And by doing that, we become better people ourselves. The second obvious truth is that we can find our people online and then get together in person.
[00:12:44] There are a whole lot of people on the internet, and they gather into these easily identifiable groups, and by coming together online, putting up our bat signal, identifying like-minded people, and then getting together in person, we can start out from a really strong base through which we can then build deep IRL relationships where we can break bread and be present and immerse ourselves in a physical environment together. And finally, we believe in the obvious truth that we can live anywhere and earn money online. So, this is something that has really changed since the pandemic that's completely shifted the cultural Overton Window on remote work. There's been a 5x increase in Americans working remotely over the past five years, and this is accelerating changes in the nature of the firm and in the type of lifestyles that are available to people. And we believe that by being able to live anywhere and earn money online, we can stay connected to our work while traveling around to different locations all over the world and living with these like-minded people who help make us better people.
[00:13:56] Jackson Steger: Yeah, so much to unpack there, and I really appreciate the way in which you go through the three obvious truths. Like I think about the second one, people meeting in person and becoming friends online is like this trend that was very true as I grew up and in the last 10 years. But now it's, it is the opposite.
[00:14:16] People find their dating partners online at a really increasingly high rate. And so why not find your friends online, your mates online, the people that you choose to be around the campfire and have those aligned interests? Seems more and more plausible. And certainly, I'm familiar with working remote, and I am very happy living with three roommates that I admire here in Los Angeles.
[00:14:42] We've talked about the what, the who, the why. I wanna start getting into the how. So, when you say that we're collectively building a city, do you mean that literally?
[00:14:55] Jon Hillis: I do, yeah. Everything we've talked about so far, I think anybody could probably nod along at home with and say, yes, the world is changing in these ways.
[00:15:06] I think what makes the Cabin community special is that we're actually doing something about it. We are actually coming together in person and building new ways of living around these principles. So, over the past two years, our online community has designed and built a full-time co-living property called Neighborhood Zero.
[00:15:27] So those residencies that I was mentioning earlier, that were the root of our founding story, have now evolved into a fully-fledged co-living property with eight bedrooms and bathrooms across three cabins, an outdoor spa, community gathering spaces, an area for van lifers, on 28 acres of the Texas Hill Country that has become this rotating dinner party of Cabin Co-livers and also a couple Long horned cattle that live out there on the property as well.
[00:15:58] And everything out at Neighborhood Zero has been built by members of the Cabin community. Over the last two years, groups of people have come out and participated in build weeks and residencies to create this living environment. And that example is just the beginning of the network that we're building. We're building out a network of physical locations like Neighborhood Zero, and these neighborhoods can list offers for co-living, residencies, build weeks in Cabin City directory and Citizens of Cabin’s Network can apply for the offers live in the neighborhoods, and participate in residencies and help collectively build our city through a co-created culture, governance structure, and economy.
[00:16:51] Jackson Steger: So, I know that we're gonna formally announce citizenship on May 23rd, but for those listening, maybe you can give a little bit of an alpha leak. What exactly is a citizen and who might be a good citizen of the Cabin community, and how might they become one?
[00:17:09] Jon Hillis: So, citizenship is a subscription membership that gives members of our community access to Cabin's neighborhoods, and not just anyone can become a citizen. In order to become a Cabin citizen, you have to get vouched for by an existing citizen.
[00:17:28] So we started out by distributing citizenship to some of earliest supporters of Cabin, including participants in the original residency, crowdfund, people who have at least a thousand ₡abin tokens and people who have earned a Cabin Passport Card by participating in our programs, and those people became the core for deciding all future citizens and vouching for additional people to join our network.
[00:18:02] And by creating this vouching system, we have set our community up to grow sustainably and to grow in a way where everybody joining has some connection to this incredible set of people who seeded the community. By being a citizen, we view it not just as membership that you can earn, but a set of responsibilities that you have as well.
[00:18:29] So every one of our citizens receives some ₡abin tokens to participate in collective governance and has exclusive access to the listings in the city directory, as well as access to our annual gathering and other partnership, perks, merchandise, et cetera.
[00:18:48] Jackson Steger: Yeah, you, you mentioned gatherings, and I wanna touch more on. You talk about how the Cabin community is co-creating our culture, our governance, our economy. Maybe we'll just go into each of those briefly. How can we co-create culture across geographies if we have co-living neighborhoods in India and in Texas and everywhere in between? How might that common culture permeate across borders?
[00:19:19] Jon Hillis: So, we think of culture as something that's co-created at our virtual and physical gatherings where we come together in roles, and we build lore. And it all starts with the gatherings. You can build culture online, but the richest culture we've found is built in person. And so, the core of Cabin really is about coming together in person, at permanent, physical neighborhoods and other events where we can spend time together and where we can develop our roles in the community. We talk about Cabin as the world's first IRL RPG, an in real life role playing game, where you can join one of our roles and earn levels and develop skills with those roles that allow you to contribute to building our network city. So, these roles are things like builders who build physical housing infrastructure in the built environment of our neighborhoods; gatherers who bring people together and create containers for our culture; naturalists who grow plants, animals, systems that support the natural environment; creators who produce art, content experiments; caretakers who start new Cabin neighborhoods, and these roles are managed by guilds, which are self-governing pods that, you know, grant different levels to people over time based on the skills that they demonstrate in contributing to the physical building of our city.
[00:21:05] As we come together in these roles, we develop lore. So, there's a lot of fun lore filled rabbit holes across the greater Cabin universe. So, things like, uh, buried treasure chest, some non-fungible longhorn cattle, one sauna teams, the ceremonial distribution of hats. And these are all examples of lorecraft.
[00:21:28] And we, we try not to take ourselves too seriously, but we do take idea seriously that we're building a collective culture, and we build that culture through the memes of production.
[00:21:42] Jackson Steger: Yeah. You mentioned these different roles, which are very interesting, and how when we were talking about neighborhoods, you talked about these work-stay exchanges that different roles might be able to do at different neighborhoods.
[00:21:55] Can you just give an example of what one of these might look like, either at Neighborhood Zero or somewhere else?
[00:22:02] Jon Hillis: Sure. So, a great example of this was a member of our community named Charlie, who came out to Neighborhood Zero to participate in builder residency. And during his time at Neighborhood Zero, Charlie wanted to build a tiny cabin and a bath house and some other community infrastructure.
[00:22:26] Charlie is an architectural engineering student in Canada. He’s just about to graduate, and he was able to use one of his co-op terms to come to Neighborhood Zero and not only build a new tiny cabin for the community, but also create a series of YouTube videos documenting his build process and his time co-living at Neighborhood Zero to share with the internet. And that that's an example of the type of residency that we intend to continue developing. And the goal for these residencies is to create opportunities for de-financialized work-stay exchanges where people can contribute their skills and their labor in exchange for free housing.
[00:23:13] Jackson Steger: Yeah. And while you're there, you can search for the buried treasure somewhere in the Texas Hill Country.
[00:23:18] That's right. Cool. So that's a little on culture. Let's talk then about governance. So, Cabin's not a company. What is Cabin and how is it organized, and how are decisions made?
[00:23:30] Jon Hillis: Yeah. So, since the beginning, since that original residency program, that kicked it all off, Cabin has been structured as an internet-native community that self-governs using a set of on chain tools.
[00:23:45] So we're what some people would call a DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization. And what that really means is just that we use some of the primitives built on top of blockchains to collectively govern our public treasury and also to play what we call polycentric governance games. So polycentric governance is this idea that great governance structures are not necessarily top-down, highly prescriptive, single mechanism constitutional governance, but instead, are these more emergent bottom-up structures that have many centers, polycentric, that have many leaders and many governance processes that are built for the needs of accomplishing specific things within the community.
[00:24:38] So, what that means for us is that, um, you know, our kind of core DAO governance is done using our governance token, ₡abin, which allows people to submit governance proposals and use quadratic multi-choice of voting, which is a more equitable way of allowing people to vote on those proposals, to govern our public treasury.
[00:24:57] But we also use the token for other things, like governing the city directory. So that network of neighborhoods that we were talking about is collectively governed using a very simple token curated registry: basically just a list of all the places that count as neighborhoods that people that hold ₡abin can vote on.
[00:25:17] But because it's a polycentric system, we don't just use the ₡abin token to govern everything. We also distribute power and responsibility to Cabin's guilds, the self-governing pods that manage the roles we were talking about earlier, like builders, naturalist creators, gatherers, caretakers, et cetera, and our citizens, which collectively govern themselves through the web of trust vouching system that I was describing a bit earlier.
[00:25:45] Jackson Steger: Yeah, I mean, I think that having that web of trust vouching system, having the guilds control how roles develop and which roles develop within the ecosystem, and those polycentric governance games that you list, are gonna be what allow cabin to have a longevity, both beyond my lifespan, beyond your lifespan, that that allow us to last hundreds of years if we do everything right.
[00:26:10] We'll talk a little bit more about that time horizon in a second, but first, just to wrap the internet native city piece of this. We've talked about culture; we've talked about governance. Most cities I can think of have strong, thriving economies. How does that work for something like Cabin?
[00:26:27] Jon Hillis: Yeah. Cities are historically the source of new types of economies and maybe even the only way to create new emergent economic systems.
[00:26:37] And we're very early on in, in developing our economic systems at Cabin. And I think one thing we try to be very careful about is not centrally controlling or planning our economy. If you look at the current state of the global economy, an incredible amount of it is dependent on a small group of people at the Fed making adjustments in a single number: the interest rate, and that ends up having these massive economic consequences. And rather than building that type of top-down economic structure, we are trying to grow emergent local economies around the principles of import replacement, reciprocity, and regeneration. So, there's a great book called The Economy of Cities by Jane Jacobs, where she describes how economic systems get built for cities.
[00:27:33] And the kind of core idea of that book is something called import replacement, where she describes how cities grow by importing goods, creating the capacity for replicating those goods internally, and then exporting the locally produced surplus, which earns more in imports, and this allows cities to create more complex and valuable goods and services over time.
[00:27:56] The internet allows for a new opportunity in terms of how to think about import replacement in the context of network cities. Historically, if you wanted to start a new city, you had to cold start an economy, you had to literally start from scratch and try to build up a set of exports out of agriculture or whatever else you could do locally.
[00:28:19] And that's not the case anymore. Now, network cities can be developed via remote work, and so they can stay economically connected online and use that to bootstrap the financial basis for the community. So that starts to unlock some pretty interesting things. You can import income, attention, goods, and then use those things to build a local economy. At each neighborhood you can build homes, you can grow food, you can make meaning together, and you can build resilient local capacity while continuing to stay connected online.
[00:29:01] Jackson Steger: And then what would be— if income, attention, and goods or what you're importing. What are you exporting?
[00:29:07] Jon Hillis: So once you've imported those things and once you've started to use them to build local resilient capacity, then you can export more abstract and valuable economic goods.
[00:29:20] So, you can export remote work, you can export content that you're creating a about the building. You can export skills that you've developed locally, maybe to other neighborhoods or back to the existing economy, you can export relationships and the value of meaning that you've created among the connections between people in the community.
[00:29:43] And so that's like importing of more basic economic primitives and exporting of more complex economic primitives is at the core of the idea of import replacement. But the goal here is not just to like import and export from the existing economy. That's really just a framework through which to think about how these economies can be bootstrapped across neighborhoods.
[00:30:05] The real goal here is to replace some of the existing economic structures with new economic structures within the context of neighborhoods, and those structures can be built around the ideas of reciprocity and regeneration. Western economic, legal political systems are largely designed around private property, and we believe that there's some great examples from history, particularly from indigenous wisdom around economies designed for gifts and for reciprocity.
[00:30:36] And so this sort of de financialized workday exchanges and housing built around those workday exchanges, as well as other forms of reciprocity, shared meals, shoutouts, sprags, do-ocracy can all become a part of these gift economies that allow our community to create deeper relationships, meaning value among them.
[00:31:01] And the result of all of that can be regenerative local capacity, and whereas the existing economy abstracts anything other than like highly measurable, quantifiable financial value and results in sometimes extractive systems that deplete resources over time, we can start to build neighborhoods around regenerative economic structures that build capacity and resilience sustainably across a bunch of different independent locations, which we believe is gonna be a really important part of how humans start to combat issues like climate change.
[00:31:40] Jackson Steger: I feel like we've gotten a really comprehensive overview of how an internet native city works in regards to its culture, its governance, its economy. We've talked about one specific— Neighborhood Zero when on May 23rd when we launched citizenship, folks will see other perspective neighborhoods that will appear in the city directory.
[00:31:59] So now I wanna talk about like how that growth happens over time. We've talked about on this show in many episodes now, I've tried to coin this term vibe scaling, and have also expressed that I'm very wary of venture backed vibe scaling. We've raised money from our community and know that vibes don't blitz scale, but we also know that a city requires some level of dynamism and a threshold to really have the impact on the scale of a hundred thousand or 500,000 or a million people.
[00:32:35] So, you mentioned we're giving citizenship to those early a hundred plus, 200 supporters of Cabin in our earliest days. Over the next five years, what would success look like in terms of the number of citizens that sign up and the number of neighborhoods that populate the city directory?
[00:32:53] Jon Hillis: So, in the next few years, we are hoping to grow to an initial group of 5,040 founding citizens.
[00:33:03] And the reason we chose that number, it may sound like a sort of absurdly precise and specific number, but it's the number that Aristotle thought made for an ideal self-governing polis. And he had a lot of kind of silly reasons for that. It's a highly divisible number: you can split it up into lots of different groups of people, and it's the number of people you could probably reasonably fit into a physical location to hear a speaker back in in the days before microphones.
[00:33:34] But it's also a good number, we believe, to aim for in the next few years because like you said, vibes don't blitz scale, and we want the cabin community and our network city to grow. But we don't wanna grow too fast, which is why we have started with this incredible group of initial citizens and put the power in the hands of those citizens to vouch for additional people to join the network.
[00:34:01] So each citizen can only vouch for up to five other people per year to join. And that sort of puts an upper limit on our growth rate. But if all of our citizens vouch for a couple other, citizens per year, we'll get to that 5,040 number in the next three to five years, and we think that's a good milestone for long-term community sustainability.
[00:34:25] We'll be able to support our existing fellowships that provide the product operations, community building needs for Cabin on an ongoing basis if we have that many citizens, and you know, that'll provide a good milestone and jumping off point for us to grow towards our much larger and more ambitious long-term goals.
[00:34:49] Jackson Steger: Let’s talk about those long-term ambitious goals. So, we just did the next five years, maybe let's scale this up in progressive orders of magnitude. What about the next five decades or the next 50 years? How might a network city look like in the year 2073?
[00:35:07] Jon Hillis: Yeah, 2073 feels like a long time from now. I think if you're building a city that's really like a minimum length of time on, on which you can reasonably plan.
[00:35:17] Jackson Steger: Well, they do say that Rome wasn't built in a day.
[00:35:19] Jon Hillis: They do say that. Yeah. And Cabin won't be either, but in 50 years we can probably make some pretty good progress. Over the next 50 years, we wanna co-create a network city of over a million people, concurrently living together in permanent intergenerational communities across a global network of neighborhoods, deeply embedded in their natural environment. And so, when we start to envision what that will look like, neighborhoods may range in size from just a handful of people living together in a signal Cabin to thousands of people in larger scale settlements that are dense, walkable, regenerative environments.
[00:35:56] And I think the idea is that Citizens will have a combination of different living environments that they can opt into. Some of those will be more focused on permanent living. Some will be more focused on flexible living arrangements. Many will probably be highly specialized niches within the community.
[00:36:15] That may be designed around specific roles or specific scenes who can vibe check each other via our Census, the roles, and passport stamps, and other markers of identity and reputation that we develop as a community. I think one thing that's pretty clear on that time horizon is that increasingly cabin neighborhoods will be designed around the full cycle of life stages.
[00:36:40] So we expect to see, for instance, rapid expansion of Cabin neighborhoods designed for groups of families living together within the next decade.
[00:36:50] Jackson Steger: We've talked about how some of these unique housing experiences could be designed on this show, and we're excited to keep exploring that with other people building within this future of living bucket. The year is the years 2023. The United States, where we both are right now, is almost 250 years old. Let's imagine 500 years from now that we've Cabin has grown and prospered for two United States’ worth of time. Just paint a picture of how maybe societies evolve over time and how the technologies, like you mentioned at the beginning, enable that sort of evolution and can we even conceptualize something like a network city will be like in 500 years?
[00:37:37] Jon Hillis: Yeah. If 50 years is long, then 500 years is certainly very long. But I, I think if you're gonna try to build a city, then definitely it's a time horizon that needs to be considered.
[00:37:49] And I think that one of the principles at the core of Cabin is thinking on long time horizons. On one hand, you can look at something like the United States around for about 250 years or so. Uh, on the other hand, you can look at the last 10,000 years in which we've seen the total development of cities and a bunch of different periods of how different types of cities have emerged. And those periods, for instance, in the sort of like classic Western historical canon, you have ancient civilizations, kind of classical era, medieval era, modern era, um, getting shorter over time because progress is accelerating, and so it's obviously very hard to predict what 500 years from now looks like. But we do try to draw a lot of inspiration from those historical examples, and we have studied the ways that new democratizing technologies have led to new types of cities and decentralized bottom-up structures of peace and prosperity to emerge in each of those eras, as well as in a plethora of examples in the non-Western canon, in which there's been an incredible diversity of human governance structures and social contracts. And we believe that this moment in time, this period in which we're seeing the emergence of computers and the internet and blockchains are providing a new opportunity for a new set of democratizing technologies to allow us to build new types of cities. And if you look 500 years ago, the largest cities had hundreds of thousands of inhabitants. Now the largest cities are over a hundred times bigger than that, and most humans live in urban areas. If we are successful in building that million-person network city over the next 50 years, then over the next 500, we can reasonably expect that billions of people will become citizens of these new network city structures, and that this new way of organizing ourselves can hopefully help increase peace and prosperity in the same way that it has as part of these big eras of history in the past.
[00:40:10] Jackson Steger: I can't think of many things more worthwhile than democratizing peace and prosperity to every corner of the world. Yeah, on a more reasonable time scale, we're focused on that more affordable, higher quality, more flexible housing options than you can get in traditional cities, and really, I believe that by designing for community amenities and access to nature, we are offering unparalleled quality for the price.
[00:40:38] Thanks to everyone who continues to follow along on our journey. Jon, if someone would like to become a citizen or they have a property that they think could be a solid neighborhood listing in the city directory, how should we direct them today?
[00:40:56] Jon Hillis: Yeah, you can head over to our website, cabin.city, where you can learn more about a city directory, about citizenship, about the roles that you can join. From there, you'll be able to hop into our app and our discord and get started on the path to becoming a cabin citizen.
[00:41:19] Jackson Steger: Thank you so much and thanks to everyone for listening. Another fun episode with you, Jon. Appreciate you joining us.
[00:41:24] Jon Hillis: Yeah, thank you.
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