7 Observations from Cabin's New Vision Paper

Dissecting the 28-page vision & roadmap document for building a network city.

Apr 22, 2023

This week, Cabin published its detailed vision for building a network city, which is a new model for how humans might choose to live with one another.

The heavily researched, 28-page document benefits from the insights of many contributing authors over the course of two years.

I am proud of this document - it captures much of my worldview as an internet-native nomad, a third culture kid, a remote worker, an outdoor adventurer, a creator, and a fan of intentional living communities. It also speaks to Cabin’s ambition, the essence of cities, and macro-shifts across fashion, commerce, infrastructure, governance, culture, and nature.

There is certainly a subset of creators, technologists, and urbanists who will find the full read engrossing. But at 5,000 words long, I don’t expect everyone will read the entire thing. That’s fine. This Future of Living post is meant to highlight the parts of the paper that felt most compelling from my perspective contributing to the Cabin project since May 2021.

In addition to the full paper and this highlight article, I also recorded a podcast with Cabin’s founder (Spotify | Apple) about the paper. Listen wherever you get your pods or watch on YouTube below:

I am also considering writing posts about the following four topics. Let me know which of the four are most interesting to you for a full post:

Water - how much is left and who owns it?
Seasonal living - how can regular (non-rich) people create a sense of permanence across a select number of rotating geographies?
Serendipitous neighborhoods - how are communities like The Neighborhood SF created and sustained?
Third culture kids - are folks who grow up outside of their passport countries more or less likely to establish permanent roots?

Okay, now for today’s post:

Key Takeaways from the Vision Doc

Cabin is addressing many problems, but fundamentally is tackling a happiness problem. Americans are the least happy they’ve been in 50 years. Why? Because they’re lonely and stuff is expensive. Social media and cars have eroded our empathy and serendipity. The costs of essentials (housing, education, healthcare) are all rising.
”Unhappiness” is a complex problem and will required a nuanced solution (Thus, the 5,000 word paper).
A “network city” is a global network of distributed physical locations that have a shared culture, economy, and system of governance. The paper doesn’t explicitly define a network city so I thought it would be helpful to articulate it here. The vision document elaborates on each of culture, economy, and governance and how those manifest across locations that don’t share a geography (like traditional cities do).
What is generated when I asked AI to visualize a network city. It feels directionally accurate but I wish the image incorporated more nature imagery.
Cabin’s integrated products (Census and the forthcoming City Directory) provide the infrastructure for coordinating coliving and “definancialized” housing. As we’ve discussed before on Future of Living, there is growing appetite for new ways of living with each other. Coliving projects (both permanent and ephemeral ones) continue to be attractive options for folks looking to live within community - and Cabin’s intent is to make it easy to coordinate those experiments. The products (which will be live on May 23rd) also provide flexibility for traditional pay-to-live rent models and newer "earn-to-live” work-stay models.
This paper writes extensively about what Cabin is, not what Cabin is not.
1. Cabin is not a company - it’s an online community with a shared bank account, funded by its members. Cabin “citizens” vote on how Cabin uses its funds. Legally, Cabin is an unincorporated non-profit. Cabin is not primarily motivated by profit, though it will eventually need to generate revenue to sustain its product and operations.
2. Cabin is not a network state. I’ve written about network states before. Inherent to their definition is a desire for political recognition. To be clear, Cabin has no need for political autonomy and benefits greatly from the security, infrastructure, and resources of existing sovereign nations.
3. Cabin is also not (currently) a property manager nor a landowner. The organization owns no land and its products promote value accrual at the edges - meaning the properties who choose to list offerings on the forthcoming City Directory should receive the lion’s share of any money flowing through the Cabin ecosystem.
  
  That being said, we aren’t ruling out the future possibility of a Cabin-owned property. Community members have certainly expressed interest.
Cabin’s three obvious truths are worth restating:
1. We are happiest living with people we admire.
2. We can find our people online and get together in person.
3. We can live anywhere and earn money online.
Cabin is for nature-loving creators. There are many personas who would thrive in the broader Cabin ecosystem - but what ties everyone together is a desire to create and a general appreciation for nature.

Some caveats to both parts of that. Creativity is broad - we don’t mean to prescribe what creativity is. And access to nature is also open to interpretation. Cabin properties could either be immersed in nature trails in a forest 100 miles from civilization, or they could simply be in a coastal neighborhood in a major city (writes Jackson intentionally, foreshadowing his own future ambitions 👀).
This is a long-term project. The vision paper includes timelines for each of the next 5, 50, and 500 years. If successful, Cabin’s lifespan will greatly exceed mine. Vibes don’t blitzscale and Cabin is acutely aware that genuine community growth and alignment can’t be rushed.

Historical Precedents for New Systems of Living

Societies across history have formed via decentralized networks of cooperating bands of humans. These local bands, tribes, villages, and towns have developed interdependent networks of cultural and economic exchange that allowed them to thrive.

Occasionally, a tenacious group of people uses an emerging set of technologies to build an enduring new system of living. The societies that emerge during these historical periods have become fountains of human culture, creativity, economic activity, and self-sovereign governance.

Will Cabin be able leverage the internet and other new coordination tech to make the network city vision a fruitful reality for those who choose to participate?

I’m not sure. But we’re still early in the internet age. The ways in which we might use the internet to coordinate our living environments are still in an experimental stage, especially given how nascent remote work and satellite internet are. There’s plenty of opportunity to be ambitious and creative in designing how and where we live with our favorite people.