What is this?
This is Future of Living, a multimedia publication exploring new (and sometimes radical) models for living. Early editions of this newsletter will focus on network states, startup cities, and coliving, but “new models for living” is intentionally broad. If this kind of content attracts an audience, we can expand later to include stories on climate tech, AI, the modern nuclear family, and other fun stuff.
Why make content about the future of living?
A few trends have dramatically expanded the design space for how we live.
Demographic: Remote work and the evolving gig and creator economies have enabled the growth of a new digital nomad class, armed with location flexibility and irregular travel cadences. Some folks estimate there will be 1 billion digital nomads by 2035. This group of people is not interested in signing 12 month leases - the market will need to create new convenient models to cater to them.
Social: We make friends in fundamentally different ways than we did 10+ years ago. Many meet online through social media, tokenized digital communities, or video games. Others still break bread over dinners at coliving communities, hacker houses, workcations, or after group classes that they booked online. There is an opportunity to blend the new ways we work and play with the ways we live.
Infrastructure: An emerging tech stack of satellite internet, solar power, self-driving cars, and modular housing enables builders to scale sustainable properties almost anywhere in the world.
Governance: Startup cities, network states, & decentralized autonomous organizations have created new models for aligning incentives and influencing behavior. We can coordinate democratic initiatives using communication tools designed for the 21st century.
Natural: The effects of climate change have never been more apparent. Wildfires rage from Australia to California. Floods cripple Bangladesh and Germany. Many of our energy, water, and food systems will need to be redesigned to be sustainable and resilient. This is fueling a renewed interest in building local regenerative systems
Policy: Much of the United States has restrictions governing the kinds of developments that can be built in its cities. It’s more difficult politically to build multiplexes or multifamily homes than it is to build single-family homes. Often our choices seem to be skyscrapers or sprawl. This might be changing. People are fighting NIMBYism. A new California law signed this Wednesday enables retail property to be converted into affordable housing. Policy changes both domestically and abroad are allowing for important (albeit incremental) change.
Scientific: Ongoing developments in CRISPR, deep tech, and the space economy are still unlocking ways to reorient how we live in ways that we can’t even fully imagine yet.
This newsletter will explore the intersection of these trends and how they are shifting the tectonic plates of our living structures and norms. They rhyme with Stewart Brand’s pace layers and with other realignments throughout history.
This is a hopeful and ambitious publication. To any would-be readers out there, I invite you to join me in reimagining how we live.
PS. Why use Substack?
Substack’s suite of multimedia tools give me maximum versatility. I can use whichever content medium best helps me make my point. Sometimes that may be an essay. Other times, it may more appropriately be a podcast, video essay, or 12-second TikTok dance (unlikely). Email isn’t subject to an algorithm. It’s consistent. I can use Substack as an umbrella publication to curate editorially-aligned content across all the other channels where I create.
Email is still king. An email list remains the most portable audience. Everything else is tied to a specific company’s platform. If I go hard on making TikToks, all of that work might go away if the FTC or Apple decides that TikTok is too great a national security risk and removes it from the app store.
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