Progress
#010 · Cambridge, Massachusetts · founded by Patrick Collison
“Science was once faster.”
Funding shifted from grants to prizes. Median PhD age cut by five years. Citizens publish weekly, lab notebooks open, results reproducible by Tuesday.
Progress Studies fans, fast-grant recipients, scientists tired of the IRB.
📍Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge is the obvious technical play, but the more interesting move is a satellite campus in Sausalito for the bio side and one in Pasadena for the hard sciences. Three nodes, all coastal, all walkable, all within an hour of an airport. Citizens rotate quarterly.
The moral case.
Funding science via grants is a 1950s technology. Progress Studies has been building intellectual capital for a decade. Patrick has the capital and the interest. The polity is the missing institutional form.
From idea to polity.
- 01Establish the Cambridge campus and the Pasadena satellite
- 02Launch the Progress Prize program: $1M for 10 reproducible breakthroughs per year
- 03Open citizenship to scientists publishing open notebooks weekly
- 04Charter a parallel digital citizenship for distributed researchers
- 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.
Progress 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.