CoordiNations: Shaping the Future of Autonomous Societies Beyond Network States

Evolving out of Network States, CoordiNations take a more nuanced approach to creating autonomous spaces, allowing a more diverse set of outcomes from startup cities to

What is a CoordiNation?

The concept of “Network State” has been a hot topic since the 2022 release of Balaji's book on the topic. This is not a new concept and draws many inspirational sources like The Sovereign Individual, Cryptonomicon, and Free Cities. However, I believe the term "Network State" is too limiting and implies sovereign political power. While Balaji’s framework of offline → online and small → large is accurate, he over-imposes his own ideals and ambitions, narrowing the possibilities to only those who want to create their own nation-state.

As an anarchist, I prefer the term "CoordiNation," which was coined at the recent Zuzalu gathering. It is a tiny linguistic change that immediately distinguishes the cultural differences and political systems being activated. “Nations” are often defined as “ethnolinguistic” groups, that is, a shared culture and language. “States,” on the other hand, claim to be the true voice of the nation and assert their power by having a monopoly on violence to enforce their ideals whether The People agree or not.

In contrast to nation-states, which are monopolistic power structures, a CoordiNation is a group of people with a collective identity that organizes together to live and take care of each other. CoordiNations are more similar to MicroSolidarity, using land and technology to scale by disseminating culture and gating members. Unlike Network States, CoordiNations allow for a more diverse set of outcomes for groups who don’t necessarily want to create their own sovereign political borders, from popup cities like Zuzalu to networked cities like Cabin DAO to mutualistic cooperatives like Cohere.

I’m excited for this Network State / CoordiNation movement since I’ve been a digital nomad since 2017 and have been traveling solo around the world looking for a new home. This writing is part of my own reflections and understanding of the different projects. What exactly is a Network State or CoordiNation? How are models like Liberland or Cabin DAO similar or different? What are the new modes of living, working, playing, and governing that they are experimenting with? The goal is to understand the diverse manifestations of this social organizing trend through case studies. By examining successful practices and potential pitfalls, we can clarify the future possibilities for CoordiNations to empower new cultures and ways of living. It’s also a useful resource for potential members figuring out which communities fit them best that they want to join and also project organizers to understand how members might be analyzing them and making decisions in the wild so they can better learn and differentiate from each other.

From my experience so far, the main framework for Network States still applies to all CoordiNations:

1. Create a well-defined culture and value system
2. Collect a group of people who share these cultures and values online
3. Refine and expand the culture and values
4. Organize physical gatherings to reinforce culture, values, and interpersonal relationships
5. Gather for longer and longer periods of time with larger and larger groups
6. Acquire land(s) to permanently coexist with your people
7. (optional) Be “recognized” as a nation by outsiders

CoordiNations I’m Exploring

Over the past six months, I have been traveling around the world, joining and participating in various CoordiNations that are emerging in and around the crypto community. I’ve spent a few months between Cabin DAO, Cohere, and Zuzalu between March and August 2023 and found people who energized me intellectually, spiritually, and socially in ways I didn’t know were possible. It was an experiential discovery that has led to a profound sense of belonging.

My participation varied across the featured CoordiNations. While the crypto-centric Zuzalu and Cabin DAO have familiar faces and values, my time embedded in each community has been limited. On the other hand, I’ve spent over a month fully immersed at Cohere, where I knew no one going in but felt the strongest connection to. I have only just recently been accepted as a resident of Praxis, so I don’t know much about them yet and am still in the process of joining Liberland.

I’m most interested in these particular CoordiNations because they:

1. Were introduced through friends/colleagues
2. Are in various stages of development
3. Have different cultures and goals
4. Have different methods and strategies.
5. Generally lean towards prosocial and regeneration
6. Diverse members across age, country, profession, etc.
7. World-changing mission, not just coliving spaces or retreat centers

So we can gather a sense of what truly is a “CoordiNation” by seeing the similarities between all of them, what are the most successful techniques so far, and what they/you can improve on in the continuing pursuit of creating a new nation.

Similarities and Differences

While distinct in their individual cultures, the explored CoordiNations share some demographic and values-based attributes. They all have pretty well-defined cultures, either explicitly created themselves or implicitly from the communities that they recruit from. While they share a lot of obvious commonalities - mostly 20-30-year-olds, creative knowledge workers, digital nomads, tech-savvy, upper-middle class, progressivism + classical liberalism political viewpoints simultaneously, and solar punk futurists. Liberland is more of an outlier, having older members with a more conservative/cyberpunk mindset. Of the 3, I’ve spent significant time with members individually and as a group; they are all wholesome af. They not only care deeply about each other, they care about helping others and the world. They all also have a focus on mental and physical health for their members, with some also focusing on the environment and regenerative systems. Using open-source software for their infrastructure and their laws/community codes to allow anyone to propose changes, track these changes, and automatically publish them is common but not a standard. And, of course, cryptocurrencies and DAOs are a big component of all their offerings and visions as well.

Liberland has the most international geopolitical recognition. Their strategy is to get accepted into the United Nations by getting five current member states to recognize them officially. They have connections to officials in the US, EU, UN, and many other political organizations. However, this hasn’t helped them much in their relations with Croatia, who, up until a couple of weeks ago, was actively blockading Liberlanders from accessing their land, building infrastructure, and doing trade with Serbia. Although I haven’t been to any community gatherings, they feel like they have the strongest will to exist and the most coherent, if simplistic, culture and vision. This leads me to believe that Liberland has the best chance of actually becoming a thing, which is great because its legitimacy lifts up all others in the movement.

Zuzalu isn’t aiming to have a single place or organization but rather a way of creating spaces. They are building tools for people to organize popup playgrounds related to open-source technology, health, science, and social innovation. What I call “village tech”—is focused on enabling community, collaboration, and hands-on learning in physical spaces and local communities via messaging, ticketing, identity, events, calendars, polling, funding, and everything else needed for in-depth engagement from large groups of people. Even without their tech stack developed yet, Zuzalians are already self-organizing meetups, events, and coliving all around the world months after Zuzalu “officially” ended, making it more active than the other groups despite having the least coordinated effort to become a permanent physical establishment.

Cabin DAO I find the most interesting because of its decentralized approach, where land ownership is retained by individual members who voluntarily provide access to land, resources, and services. This means that all the CoordiNations can co-exist within the Cabin network while retaining autonomy. Rather than competing for dominance, Cabin DAO facilitates discovery and cross-pollination of emerging communities, similar to how Zuzalu’s tech will likely become the core stack for coordinating IRL.

Cohere is more spiritually oriented than the others; it feels more like a large family than a group of values-aligned individuals. They also focus on real estate acquisition, acting as a tokenized REIT with a rent-to-own model for members. Cohere has a dual model where the community doesn’t just take over a location but tries to integrate with the existing community to help them leverage the value of the Cohere members and services that come through the space. Part of that offering is fractionalizing and tokenizing land so existing landowners can retain partial ownership while letting Cohere and Co have skin in the game.

The variability across these early CoordiNation experiments highlights their organic nature as dynamic social organisms. Today's context of globally connected knowledge workers accustoms us to fluid asynchronous collaboration and co-creation of culture. CoordiNations represent a further evolution of these cultural conditions - enacting new modes of voluntary association and symbiotic sovereignty. As localized yet expansively networked communities, CoordiNations elude tidy definitions or constraints. Their iterative self-determination enables paradigm shifts toward human-centric societies. CoordiNations invite us into novel ways of organizing that nurture collective potential. As the movement spreads with new communities and cultures developing, we’ll learn more and more ways to congregate, coordinate, and collaborate with themselves and each other.

Creating “The” Networked State

In the unfolding narrative of CoordiNations, we find not only a reflection of our evolving social landscape but also a catalyst for the transformation of our global society. In our exploration of these dynamic social organisms, we witness the convergence of diverse cultures, values, and aspirations, transcending geographical boundaries. But what if the meta is that CoordiNations is not a concept but a collective, that there is only one CoordiNation that we each contribute to in our own way? The shared ethos of these CoordiNations—innovation, holistic health, voluntary association, symbiotic sovereignty—has already led to significant overlap between the cultures, values, and membership of Cabin DAO, Cohere, and Zuzalu, creating a meta-network.

If we continue with our earlier definition of a nation as an ethnolinguistic group with commonly shared values and practices, these aligned CoordiNations can be diverse states within a federated nation. Just as Americans from different states find unity within their national identity, can CoordiNations blur the lines, too, becoming symbiotic organisms working harmoniously while still remaining self-sufficient and autonomous? What are the boundary conditions between each CoordiNation if the land isn’t the main delimiter? What are the roles of each community within the ecosystem? How can we create a mutually reciprocal relationship without federal government intermediation? The path ahead invites us to envision a world where CoordiNations and "The" Networked State transcend individuality, giving rise to a collective force that shapes the future of human-centric societies.

Also published here.