Marginalia
#012 · Fairfax, Virginia · founded by Tyler Cowen
“Find the talent. Then bet on it.”
A polity organized as a perpetual talent search. Emergent Ventures grants on demand. Reading lists in every cafe. Complacency is taxed.
auto-didacts, polymaths, weird-good 23-year-olds.
📍Fairfax, Virginia
Fairfax is George Mason's home and Tyler's center of gravity. The Mercatus Center, Emergent Ventures, the Marginal Revolution office. Anchor citizens around an expanded Mercatus campus with shared housing for grant recipients, daily seminars, a cafe with reading lists pinned to the menu.
The moral case.
Talent is the most undervalued asset in modern civilization. Marginalia is the first polity engineered around finding it.
From idea to polity.
- 01Expand the Mercatus campus as the founding node
- 02Open citizenship to Emergent Ventures grant recipients and their referrals
- 03Charter the polity to publish a weekly talent dossier of incoming citizens
- 04Charter a treasury that funds 20 EV grants per month, paid in stablecoin
- 05Apply for member-state status with Interneta after 500 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.
Marginalia 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.