Deep Work
#024 · Takoma Park, Maryland · founded by Cal Newport
“Attention is the only resource.”
No social media in the public square. Citizens block half their calendar for focus. Email checked twice a day. The polity rewards depth over breadth.
academics, novelists, engineers, parents who want their phone-time back.
📍Takoma Park, Maryland
Takoma Park, Maryland is the natural anchor for this polity given the founder's existing center of gravity. A citizen campus there with shared housing, a kitchen aligned to the way of life, and the rituals of the community made physical.
The moral case.
Cal Newport has the social capital, the ideological clarity, and the audience to do this. The polity is the missing institutional form for what they are already living publicly.
From idea to polity.
- 01Anchor a citizen campus in Takoma Park, Maryland
- 02Open citizenship to the existing community of followers, students, or readers
- 03Charter the polity around the One Commandment as a published constitution
- 04Charter a treasury aligned with the values of the polity
- 05Apply for member-state status with Interneta after 500 ratified citizens
Why I sent you this link.
I have lived at Network School for over a year. I have watched the network state thesis go from a book to a real, lived experiment. I have seen Balaji put it to work, and I have seen what is missing.
The missing piece is a federation. A meta-layer that gives every distinct community a constitutional home, a shared census, an interoperable passport, an anthem, and a way to recognize each other as legitimate.
That is what Interneta is. The United States of Interneta. The optimistic meta-layer for network states.
Deep Work is what I think you would build, if you decided to build one. The One Commandment is what I have inferred from your public work. The site scout, the next steps, the citizenry: all educated guesses. They are wrong wherever you say so.
If any of this lands, I would love a fifteen-minute conversation. If none of it lands, I would still love your reply telling me where I missed.