The Stoa
#032 · Bastrop, Texas · founded by Ryan Holiday
“Obstacles are the way.”
Citizens read Marcus Aurelius before checking email. Death is contemplated weekly. Anger is metabolized in journals. The polity holds the long view.
athletes, founders, anyone who has read Meditations more than once.
📍Bastrop, Texas
Bastrop, Texas 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.
Ryan Holiday 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 Bastrop, Texas
- 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.
The Stoa 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.