Patrick Arnesen, June 2022

TLDR? Executive Summary

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What is an Arcology?

• Arcology: a city and society designed to thrive in hot-house earth while greatly improving the lives of its citizens.
• energy independent, using ultra-cheap solar power via desert sun, based on next-gen perovskites solar arrays.
  • Overnight energy storage via water-gravity and grid-scale batteries.
• fully climate controlled, for temperature and humidity and air filtration, including large indoor-outdoor spaces.
• food independent, using publicly owned green houses, fish, dairy and chicken farms.
  • The city would employ democratic corporations to run them (single-payer system)
• closed-cycle: water, food and biological waste.
  • Desalination from the sea.
  • 100% food independence via hydroponics + fish + chicken + dairy farming.
  • full artificial regulation of rainfall, temperature and humidity and air filtration.
• sustainable environmental impact. carbon neutral.
• emphasizes high levels of democracy.
  • Proxy-based voting.
  • Democratic corporate structure for both government and enterprise.
• reformed economics based on democratic corporations and a demurrage-based digital currency.
  • No equity-corporations or stock markets.
  • Pragmatic balance of public and private sectors.
• likely location western Australia. Justification
  • a subway connected series of village-buildings: City Structure

This Arcology Project

proposes the tackle the following structural problems in our society.

• climate change and adaptation
• environmental degradation and over-exploitation of natural services.
• poverty, loneliness, over-work, stress, aggression, intolerance, depression, over-consumption
• late-stage capitalism
  • out of control wealth inequality
  • necessity of endless growth
  • unethical corporate behavior
  • degrading the ecosystem
• the erosion of democracy
• the demographic crisis

What

Climate-Proof Physical City Independent, closed resource cycles 100% independent renewable energy Citywide climate control Closed Loop Agriculture Car-Free Pod-based good and cargo system Public green space and recreational facilities

Strong Communities Village-based living Shared facilities strong free-to-use social and health services

direct proxy-based democracy Proxy Voting System

Democratic Corporations

Digital demurrage-based currency system

That’s far too many problems to handle at once. What are you a megalomanic?!

Focus on just one problem if you want to have any chance of success!

The realization that this intuition may actually be flat wrong is what has inspired me to start this project.

I’ve been trying to understand and search for solutions to our society’s problems for most of my life.

I’ve watched countless well-meaning organizations try to address specific problems and fail. The first one I became aware of as a child, was the ‘Save the Amazon Rainforest’ campaign; But after thousands of attempts to save the environment, our ecosystem is in worse shape than ever. Thousands of non-profits have tried to fight poverty, but we still have poverty; and after countless campaigns to clean up politics and achieve responsible public and corporate governance, our economic and political systems are more shaky than ever.

I’ve read lot about possible solutions, and thought hard about some of my own, but everything I came up with either attacked only a symptom of the core set of problems, or when a solution addressed the core itself, there was no realistic path to implementation.

Our society is a social system. It’s like a giant machine, that has slowly been constructed over many generations. Political, economic, social and technological systems mesh, like cogs and gears, enabling, supporting and reinforcing one another. Trying to reform that system one issue at a time, is like transplanting parts from an electric car into a steam locomotive. They get crushed by heavy gears and slagged by super-heated steam.

Our society has numerous mechanisms to resist change. The individuals with the most power, are also those who benefit the most from the system in its current form. They employ their power to resist anything that threatens the status quo. Politicians, think tanks, media empires are all brought to bear. Unrelenting propaganda is fed into the zeitgeist, and lies and deflections are employed without end.

More fundamental though, is the problem of world views. If you take a proposition from a Christian world-view, say: the way to defeat alcoholism is through prayer, and offer it to someone with a humanist/scientific one, it will be rejected. Ideas are evaluated in the context of a person’s pre-existing and internally-consistent beliefs. If they contradict those beliefs, then they won’t appear to make any sense. Thus an idea, sincerely proposed by the adherent of one world-view, may seem like lunacy to the adherent of another.

Our society’s problems are structural. They stem from flaws at its very core. Most of the issues that make headlines, like crime, poverty, global warming, are actually symptoms of deeper problems. Because the problems are so deep, true solutions have to cut all the way down. For example, one solution involves changing the basic nature of capitalism. But when these solutions are evaluated in the light of our existing socio-economic system, they come off as radical and impractical. What’s worse, if you tried to implement one structural reform at time, you would fail every time, because your reform would break hundreds of pre-existing economic and social systems in all the layers above it, and so the system as a whole would immediately expel the reform and restore the previous balance.

This is why so many thousands of hard working individuals and non-profits have barely managed to even slow our society’s accelerating erosion. They either exhaust their energy fighting symptoms, like a desperate knight, hacking heads off of an endlessly regenerating hydra, or they press for deep structural changes, and get dismissed as fools or worse.

For a long time I saw no way forward. I had gone fairly deep studying and developing ideas for economic and democratic reform but had found no viable way to implement any of them in the real world. Instead, I switched my focus to Virtual Reality, which was another passion of mine, and so spent several happy years working on building a VR platform while having a normal family life. In retrospect, that’s how a good life should be lived: chasing a passion, working with good people, and enjoying family.

Then it’s hopeless…

But then the 2020s happened. I read summaries of the IPCC climate change report, experienced the totally unprecedented and unexpected heat dome in the Pacific Northwest first hand, watched the massive wildfires burn through Australia, Canada, Greece and Siberia, saw reports of the Gulf Stream slowing, glacial breakup accelerating, and global deforestation accelerating, and I realized the world had much less time left to prepare for climate change than I had thought.

And so, shaking my head at the ridiculous hubris, but because I really couldn’t help myself, my nerd brain began casting about for an engineering solution to a problem that seemingly nobody had yet managed to solve.

Why it Matters – Hothouse Earth

While many of the dysfunctions of our current system, from poverty to the erosion of democracy, are unacceptable and must be addressed, I think that most of them are already well known to the reader. So for the sake of brevity, I’ll submit them here as a given.

Climate change though, is a little different. It is the elephant in the room, and the slow-moving catastrophe that our socio-economic system has brought down on itself. I think it will drive many of the catastrophes and wars this century has in store for us.

Even today, most people are unaware of the enormity and urgency of the problem. Born into, and locked into our current socio-economic system, we were unable to deal with it when it was fixable. Now, with just single digit years left to do anything about it, our C02 levels are rising.

This next section will try to spell out what we’re up against. After reading it, you will hopefully understand why a solution as radical as a wholesale retooling of our civilization around arcologies may be a necessity.

We are careening towards a worst-case hothouse earth scenario. The 2020 IPCC special report on climate change made clear that we only have a few short years left before we have released so much C02 that we will pass a ‘planetary threshold’. After that, we will begin triggering natural tipping points. At that point, natural feedback loops, with no further help needed from us, will release vast amounts C02 into the air. This will intensify the greenhouse effect, triggering yet more tipping points, and it will be virtually impossible to halt.

At this point in 2022, it’s so late in the game that the steps we’d need to take to head off this disaster are very extreme. We’d need to do things like end almost all use of private vehicles, shut down most coal plant and natural gas plants, and abandon most suburban single-family neighborhoods to resettle in dense urban cities. All of this and more would have to be completed before the end of this decade.

 Climate change: IPCC scientists say it’s ‘now or never’ to limit warming – BBC News

Steps like these are clearly not being taken, nor will they. On virtually the same day as the IPCC report was released, the US announced it was pulling out of Afghanistan. As a result, media coverage was limited. The message of the report, backed by decades of research, with a confidence level described by scientists as ‘incontrovertible’, fell on deaf ears.

This graphic, which came from the article Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene, published on Aug 2018, in the ‘Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences’ (PNAS), is key to understanding the scale of the problem. When I learned what it meant, it forced a ‘world view’ change on me and darkened my whole outlook of the future.

The Earth has historically always been constrained to zones climactic variability, represented as the troughs in the graph. Some troughs are on the cold side, corresponding to Ice Ages, and some are hot.

These troughs are stable because they are hard to leave. If the planet begins to heat up or cool down, natural feedback mechanisms will kick in to counteract the trend and keep the earth in the trough. This is represented by the shoulders of the troughs. Thus, until circumstances change, such as the concentration of C02 or volcanic ash in the air, or the Earth’s orbit, or the sun’s solar output changing slightly, the Earth’s climate remains stable, rolling around at the bottom of a trough without climbing out. Sometimes in the deep past, these circumstances stayed the same for eons, and the earth remained as ice-ball earth or hot-house earth for millions of years.

For the last 10,000 years, a time known as the Neolithic, the Earth was balanced in an unusual mini-trough that was not too cold nor too hot. This was a rare time of mild temperatures, and it triggered the development of agriculture and civilization.

Let me emphasize: our civilization only exists at all, because of this historically unusual time of mild climate. Without it, the earth would today still be inhabited by only a few million hunter-gatherers.

Unfortunately, the CO2 we have been releasing has changed the topology of the graph. As you can see along the ‘Time’ or Z axis. Alarmingly, we have already removed the ‘hot shoulder’ of our mini trough, effectively ending the neolithic age, and rolling the earth toward a hotter and less stable climate.

The horror now facing us, as the IPCC report lays out in terrible detail, is that global warming is about to trigger a series of natural tipping points, labeled the ‘Planetary Threshold’ in the graph. These natural processes, once triggered, will begin to release far more stored C02 than is normally released by natural processes.

We have identified several of these tipping points, and we appear to be on the cusp of some of them right now. In the north, the boreal forests are burning each summer at an unheard of scale, while for the first time in history, the permafrost, which had previously locked away huge quantities of C02 and methane, is thawing. In the Atlantic, in an event that nobody expected to see for decades, the gulf stream has been observed to be slowing.

Once these go, more tipping points will be triggered in a cascade. As each is reached, the warming will increase, until further tipping points are reached and so on. For example, the Amazon, under rising heat and deforestation, is losing its ability to form its own clouds and rain through evaporation. While it’s likely still a few years away, when the tipping point is reached, the forest will dry up and start to burn. The later tipping points are even more terrifying. For example, if the oceans get warm enough, they will begin to release vast quantities of methyl hydrates from the ocean floor. Methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than C02.

The cascade will be so bad that once started, even if we nail all our climate change goals, the earth will keep releasing increasingly more C02 all on its own. This will lead to the ‘hothouse-earth’ scenario. By the end of the century, the Earth could be so hot that life will be impossible in the equatorial regions without substantial adaptation.

People around the world, especially in the tropics, will endure summers where most days will see temperatures above 50 Celsius. Spikes to over 60 in some places will be common. For 1/3 of the year, it would be deadly to remain outdoors for more than an hour. The heat will trigger devastating environmental destruction. Huge forest fires will permanently change ecosystems. Desertification will run rampant. Rivers will dry up. Category 5+ hurricanes will become much stronger and more common. Droughts and heatwaves will devastate farmers. The environment will become increasingly unpredictable and hostile, making food production unreliable. Sea levels will rise by over a meter, and will keep on rising all the way thru into the next millennium, eventually leaving the majority of our cities and deltas under tens of meters of water.

Because of the increasing stresses and disasters and food shortages, worldwide productivity will decrease while private and national bankruptcies will increase. The resulting hyper-inflations, famines, rebellions, wars and refugee crises will keep and hold the media’s attention, drawing it away from the real issues. This will likely paralyze humanity into inaction and put civilization in a downward spiral. From now on, every decade is likely to be a fair bit worse than the one that preceded it.

By the end of the century, several billion people will need a new place and a new way to live.

The final horror of hothouse-earth, one that is very important to understand, is that it will last for much longer than our civilization has existed. After hundreds of years, the warming trend will eventually level off, and C02 concentrations will stabilize, but the natural cycles that remove C02 act over geologic time. Until the C02 is expunged, the earth will settle into a very deep and stable climactic trough, and there it will remain, swelteringly hot, probably for many tens of thousands of years. By the time hothouse earth comes to an end and the climate returns to something like normal, the great pyramids in Egypt would have long since eroded down to nubs and been lost under the desert. After that we still wouldn’t be out of the woods. Our unusually comfortable neolithic trough will have long been erased, and the earth would likely return to its default behavior of cycling between global ice-ages and warm spells.

Hothouse Earth is represented on the diagram as the deep trough in the front, representing the near future. There are two paths shown. The swivel to the left from where we were in 2018, is one where, with drastic action, we retool our entire civilization almost overnight. The path to the right, business as usual, more or less, puts us over the threshold in just a few years.

For more details on the IPCC report, tipping points and hothouse earth, see this excellent paper: Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

An old solution, reborn

This spring (2022), I was watching a YouTube video: Why 95% of Australia is Empty, and it occurred to me that you could probably succeed at colonizing the outback, where conventual civilization had never managed to take hold, if you took advantage of the latest green technologies, such as cheap solar power, modern green-houses, desalination, and grid-scale solar storage, to build what would essentially amount to modern Arcologies.

If you could house people comfortably in the outback, you could take advantage of the constant sun to build big green solar, aluminum and steel industries, while almost eliminating C02. Colonizing the outback this way would take the immigration pressure off of Australia’s eastern regions, where cities are getting over-stuffed and natural resources strained.

It then occurred to me, that such a city would be exactly what’s needed if you wanted to live comfortably through hothouse earth.

Arcologies are an old idea. The term was coined by Paolo Soleri from the combination of the words Architecture and Ecology. The first detailed design was probably the Old Man River Project, by Buckminster Fuller. To date, no full-scale arcology has ever been built. Like most of the other attempts to solve society’s structural problems, I think they failed because they were attempts to graft an alien concept onto our pre-existing socio-economic system.

Is the case for Arcologies stronger today?

In the 20th century, Arcologies were pitched as a more efficient way to house people in better living conditions. They were also justified as a solution to environmental sustainability. However back then, sustainability was more of an academic concept, and could rarely influence real-world decision making. The benefits and the risks didn’t add up.

… but unlike the 1980s, today we’re faced with increasingly terrible heatwaves and unpredictable weather patterns. The free, natural services that we’ve spent the last 10,000 years depending on, are no longer reliable. A crop could fail one year due to excess heat, the next because of drought, and the third year due to pests, leading to a permanent state of food insecurity for billions. Heat waves also cause massive fires and over-tax our electric grids, leading to regular brownouts.

The features of arcologies that make them environmentally friendly: green energy, water and waste recycling, closed-cycle food production etc, are also exactly the features that would make an arcology resistant to the impacts of climate change, since they rely on fewer natural services.

They could be lifeboats for humanity all around the tropics. In enclosed cities, residents could happily raise a family, eat good food and look forward to a bright future, while the baking furnace outside is reduced to a comfortable summer’s day by tinted glass and city-wide climate control.

This is great but…

In our current socio-economic system, arcologies might as well be alien motherships.

An arcology is mal-adapted for our market-based economic system. Its closed-loop systems all demand centralized coordination, systems-based problem-solving, steady-state economics and attention to quality. High levels of consumption and acquisition would be incompatible with a city where most durable goods are shared, and where food and healthcare are public services. This would be a problem for our current system, which above all, requires growth.

Companies would be constantly trying to privatize public services, or to erode them, so they could substitute their own products in their place. To do so, they would corrupt government and the Arcologies social systems. The need for GDP growth would directly conflict with the Arcologies natural mandate to close resource loops, increase efficiency and lower costs. Thus even if arcologies would be great for adapting to climate change, they would inevitably be economic failures.

Interconnected Systems: the heart of the problem could be its solution…

Although arcologies don’t fit in well with conventional economics, they would be just perfect for an economy based on a demurrage based currency, a private sector populated by democratic corporations, and with a strongly democratic government, geared to maximize the wellbeing of residents. All of these are wonderful ideas – and have no place in our current system.

Our envisioned monetary system is one where the value of money remains the same over time. An apple that costs 50c today, would still cost 50c, even decades into the future. However, to encourage trade and investment, and to allow us to balance the speed of the economy and the value of the currency, a constant trickle of money is automatically subtracted from the balance of every purse, equal to a few percentage points (annualized) of the balance. This is demurrage. At the same time, a redistribution mechanism continually redistributes another small amount into every purse, but this time, amount redistributed is the same for all purses.

This form of currency can help an economy to comfortably be run at low-growth or no-growth, while steadily improving social wellbeing. With this kind of money, and being under the democratic control of their workers, companies would no longer be forced to prioritize growth and profit over everything else. They would be free to act ethically, in accordance with the will of their employees.

In a system with high levels of public services, people wouldn’t feel forced to maximize their income over other life choices, just to pay for their basic needs. Those needs, including food, would already be freely delivered by city services, and using them would feel as natural as using a set of stairs in a public park. Thus people could choose quality over quantity, and leisure over income.

Here is the new idea that has me so excited: Many of the candidate solutions, architectural, technological, social and economic, for the world’s deepest problems, that on their own have no place in our world, if combined, could be made to support one other, in the same way that our current socio-economic systems re-enforce each another today. You can’t gradually turn a steam locomotive into an electric car through gradual reforms. Instead, you should simply use the locomotive to bring in parts as you build the electric car from scratch.

A new currency, regardless of its advantages, needs an economy, or its useless. Democratic corporations need a compatible monetary and legal system, or they’re reduced to economic fringe phenomena, and sustainable, green cities with high levels of social welfare, need an economic system that isn’t constantly going to war with it.

Any system needs to be internally consistent and self-supporting, or it will collapse. Trying to reform the old system gradually just destabilizes it, and so reforms fail. The solution could well be to build a whole new system, with its own unique set of internally consistent, mutually-reenforcing, legal, social, political, economic and technological components. These components would all need to be thought through together, in the context of each other, and brought into the world as an integrated system.

Thus, we should try to build the world an arcology, complete with its own unique digital currency, legal code, democratic political and corporate systems, and high levels of single-payer social services. Such a system, unlike any of the incomplete fixes of the past, might actually have a chance of working.

A Step into the Future

This would all be wonderful to achieve. Like the transition from medievalism to industrialization, success here would amount to no less than the next stage of social development. Moreover, the structure of the social systems within an archology would unleash powerful, positive forces, that would naturally lead arcologies down a path to greater progress.

Here are a few examples:

Continuous cost reduction

Once established, an arcology would feature a democratic, local government, with the mandate and opportunity to improve the wellbeing of its residents. One natural way to do this would be to lower the cost of the no-charge services the city provides to its people, such as food, education and healthcare, by improving the publicly owned systems (that is, the processes, IP, automation and physical infrastructure), used to deliver them.

The city would already be using the single-payer model, where it hires private, democratic corporations to run those systems, thus it would be natural to hire R&D teams, using the same model, to improve them. The savings achieved could be used to lower taxes, increase social services, or to free up yet more funding to make the delivery of services more efficient still. Thus a virtuous cycle would be kicked off that could gradually lead to high levels of automation, and a true post-scarcity society.

Note that from day one, the design of the arcology would already inherently allow for a better lifestyle at lower cost. There would be no cars within the city, so a resident might just occasionally rent one when traveling outside. Without cars, and with the ‘many eyes’ of the village keeping them safe, children would be able to wander freely and meet up and play with their friends by themselves. This would reduce the time spent on supervision. Without big cars, the road network could be reduced, and parking spaces and garages would be unnecessary. Food would be prepared in public kitchens, so apartments will only need minimal kitchenettes, and village laundries, lounges, cafes and playgrounds, would mean that everything from washing machines, stoves, to footballs, could be owned communally, thus drastically lowering the size and cost of every apartment while increasing convenience.

Also, crucially, cashflows would be treated in the monetary system as specific, insurable, tradable, financial instruments. Cashflows would behave like little steams, constantly trickling value between purses, and connecting all the purses into a network. If you took a job, your pay would trickle in (and your taxes would trickle out) by the second. An insured cashflow would be just as good (in fact in some ways, better) than cash on hand, and such a system would allow an advanced economy to run smoothly, without the need to ever borrow large, interest-bearing principal sums. Freed from paying interest on houses or business loans, an individual could save up to 40% of their entire lifetime earnings.

Long Term Investing

While it’s too big a topic to go in here, due to the economics of net-present-value, we’ve known for ages that interest-bearing money (like we use today), strongly favors short term investments over longer term ones, even when the longer term investments have a better payout in absolute terms. Conversely, negative-interest bearing money, ie money with demurrage, does the opposite. History shows that societies that employed demurrage, generally built things to last and invested for the long term. This makes education, social development, environmental restoration and long-lasting infrastructure look financially desirable, and arcologies would naturally invest in these things.

A leisure society

In today’s world, the need for endless economic growth forces everyone except those at the very top to surrender all their productivity gains back to industry. Increasing leisure time is not an option. But this will not be the case for arcologies.

A new generation will grow up immersed in a new culture. As children, they’ll find themselves part of tightly integrated villages, surrounded by friends and family, where people would naturally know their neighbors, and bump into and help one another every day. Their habituation will be profoundly different from ours, and so the values they develop and the society they will want to build will also be very different.

In adulthood, the next generation will work in democratic corporations, owned and controlled by themselves and their peers. If they so choose, their companies can continue stay about the same size, filling about the same niche, while keeping the same customers happy, and taking in just enough money to cover expenses and salaries (and maybe a nice bonus once in a while). As technology improves and the productivity of their companies increase, they’ll be able to exchange that windfall for more leisure time, instead of investing it into growth.

This might sound odd in the context of someone living in today’s world, but with advanced computer services, small apartments, most of the necessities of life delivered free of charge, old age, daycare and healthcare guaranteed, and no need for cars or other large purchases, the burning need for more money might not be felt as strongly as the desire to spend more time with friends and family, or to have time to work on personal projects outside of the work. Besides, growth is a risky strategy. It forces companies to risk much on new ventures and untried stratagems. If you’re part of a well-oiled machine that delivers the good life, why risk it all on a high growth strategy? Better to defend your niche by investing a bit of the surplus on further improving productivity or your product, and cash out the rest as reduced hours at work.

Such a trend toward every greater efficiently and ever more leisure time, will allow us to lead increasingly fulfilling lives, without sacrificing environmental sustainability.

Mincome will develop naturally

As the city and its democratic corporations invest in efficiency, there will be less need for labor. Our society looks at that future with dread, fearing large-scale unemployment and ever-increasing inequality, but in an arcology, it’ll be viewed as a victory over drudgery.

As productivity advances, the city’s demurrage-based monetary system would naturally support a gradually increasing level of minimum income for everyone. It’s design is inspired by nature’s hydrological system. Rainfall distributes water over the dry land, then streams drain the land into rivers of increasing size, and eventually water accumulate in big lakes and seas. Then evaporation lifts the water from those big reservoirs and redistributes it again over the land. Note the amount of evaporation is proportional to the size of each body of water, but the rainfall redistributes the water more or less evenly. Demurrage works in the same way. Money is regularly subtracted from every purse based on its size, while money is redistributed into all the purses evenly, regardless of their balance.

At first, the demurrage would be minimal, probably less than 5% annualized. But as the economy develops, employment dwindles, and money pools in the purses of big companies, the demurrage rate can be increased, forming a natural redistribution mechanism that, in concert with the arcologies no-charge public services, would constitute a form of mincome. As money would get back into the hands of consumers, companies would still have paying customers, and the economy would keep ticking over.

In a ‘late-stage’ ecology, as most services are fully automated, and mincome becomes sufficiently generous to support most desires, money may well recede from public consciousness into the background, just book-keeping, to be handled automatically by computers. The resulting society, freed from work and want, and with most the corrupting influences associated with scarcity and trade banished from normal life, could begin to resemble the utopian futures envisioned in our science fiction.

It should be noted that under our current economic system, no such utopian path seems possible. Instead we face ever greater levels of inequality, government corruption and environmental destruction.

…but this is madness. How on earth could you build such a thing?

It’s a go at 10%

I’m of the opinion that, if this idea has even a 10% chance of success, then it must be pursued, since the rewards for success are so high, and the stakes for failure so terrible. If society continues to do nothing, then we’re doomed to continue living in an increasingly dysfunctional world, with suffering and misery for billions.

War, triggered by resource crises, will be endless. We’ve already seen the beginnings of it in Syria, where a drought caused a civil war that destroyed the country. The war in the Ukraine will soon show us what a global food disruption will look like. I don’t think it will look pretty.

Of course, we’ll never know what the true odds are. If we’re convinced that Arcologies are workable and maybe even essential to adapting to a climate-altered world, then I think the right thing to do would be to move forward with the assumption that the goal is achievable. We’ll do our best work, lay our best plans, recover from setbacks, and learn from them, until the world finally shows us exactly why it can’t be done. Perhaps, to our surprise, we’ll find that it never does, and that we get an Arcology built after all.

Building Arcologies in the Real World

As described, the first arcology, would be a whole city, built gradually, from scratch. It’ll also need its own legal code, immigration policy, monetary system and a private sector where companies are controlled by their workers. Within an arcology, all these systems would support and reinforce one another, hopefully leading to a stable and happy society.

But the arcology still needs to get built and it needs to maintain good political and economic relations with the outside world. If we can’t envision a relationship that works to the advantage of both the arcology and its host nation, then it doesn’t matter how well an arcology might work in isolation. It would never be tolerated within the existing system.

It looks like this challenge can be broken into two parts:

1. How do you convince the right people in the existing system to fund the construction of the first Arcology? This part is covered under the ‘Phased Plan’ section below, which attempts to lay out a funding and development plan.
2. How would you co-exist with the current system? We’ll cover that topic here:

Co-Existence

During all the phases of pre-construction, construction and regular operation, the arcology needs to offer its host nation a good deal. Although there are many good locations worth considering, Iceland for example, for our purposes here, I’ll stick to using Australia as the example host nation.

Australia might be good candidate for several reasons:

• The outback includes vast stretches of arid, barren, flat, coastline that does not have much economic value to Australia today. By letting us use that land, Australia would pocket rents with very little risk.
• The outback receives an enormous amount of sunshine and is rich in minerals, perfect for powering the arcology and feeding its industries.
• Australia’s government is stable, democratic, immigration friendly and relatively approachable.
• Australia is limited in exploiting the outback’s mineral and solar resources by the expense of supporting workers in such a remote and hostile environment.
• Australia feels threatened by China and would welcome an increased presence in its west and an increased tax base for military spending.
• Australia has been feeling the effects of climate change more than most other first-world nations. Lately, they’ve suffered heatwaves, droughts, and very serious forest fires; Australians may see the value of climate adaption earlier than people from other nations.

From these observations come the outline of a deal. It might look something like this:

“Hey Australia, how would you like to have a brand-new city in the Australian outback? We’ll build one near the coast, somewhere where there’s just barren land today. We’ll bring in 50,000 highly motivated, educated and skilled workers from all over the world. We’ll use a novel economic strategy to build up significant green power, water, food, construction and production resources in an area where such development would normally be impossible. Local mining companies could buy food, water and power from us at good prices, and hire our residents for their workforces. We’ll pay for the land and pay taxes to your state and federal governments.

“The new city will increase Australia’s sovereignty in the area, increase its international exports of power, steel, hydrogen, aluminum and other materials, and could support a greater military presence in the country’s underpopulated west. Best of all, we’ll be providing our own funding, to the tune of billions of dollars, much of which will be spent within the Australian economy, stimulating businesses locally and all over the country. The construction will be bonded, so if we fail, there will be money set aside to clean up. There’s no risk to you.

“In return, we need a few considerations: Don’t tax our residents directly. Instead, tax the arcology as a whole for the services it receives from the nation, such as national defense, international diplomacy, local infrastructure such as roads and bridges and ports, and so on. Don’t tax us for the services that would normally go toward education, old age pensions, municipal governments and the like, because we’ll cover all those internal services ourselves, in our own way.

“Because our system runs differently, applying Australian regulations won’t work. We’ll need a legal and economic autonomous zone, so that we can run set up our own rules and run our own economy and monetary system. Don’t worry, we’ll fully support the United Nations universal declaration of human rights. Personal liberty will be deeply baked into our constitution.

“Treat our currency as money and not a taxable investment asset like you do cryptocurrencies, and give us some input in selecting international immigrants to live in the city, so we can select for the skills we need to be successful.

“Oh, and if we pull this off, we’ll have pioneered a way of life that could eventually allow all Australians to thrive, no matter how bad global warming becomes. Might not be a bad insurance policy against the future, huh?

Sure, it’s a big ask, but there’s lots of precedence for legal autonomous zones around the world, and for Australia, there would seem to be a huge upside.

Phased Plan

Big problems require big solutions and working up to the construction of a multi-billion-dollar city will take years. At first glance, meeting the expenses and challenges seems impossible, even laughably so – but by thinking it through, and maximizing our tools and advantages, it’s possible to see a path forward.

Here’s a high-level outline of what such a path might look like.

Phase 1: Ideation

In this phase, the idea and message will be fleshed out, validated and made credible. This is the phase I am currently involved in. It will be important to build a community of advisors with many perspectives, to validate and refine the idea, but also to eventually lend credibility for the next stages.

Deliverable: a polished idea and message, ready for mass consumption.

Phase 2: Building a Social Movement

Before the city can be built, a powerful social movement must be raised. We could bring a powerful message of hope to a world sorely in need of it.

Dysfunction has now advanced to such a degree that countless millions of people are feeling despair and hopelessness. We have all watched in horror the progression and reaction to Covid, police shootings and the Black Lives Matter movement, the near coup on January 06, recent wildfires in California, Australia and Greece. The ‘Lie Flat’ movement in China that has now become the

the ‘Let it Rot’ movement. The war in the Ukraine and the upcoming global food shortages it will cause, is only the latest grotesquery. Many of us are grieving the loss of the promise of progress, and the loss of a chance at a better life for the next generation. Our recent politics and social movements have been those of anger and resentment.

Imagine then, that in this environment, an organization emerges up with a message of real, actual hope; for a future in which people don’t only survive the worst the worst that can be thrown at them, but actually thrive, where they can look forward to a better, more fulfilled life then they have now, where they can expect their children to lead better lives than they did, and where true social progress, including the solving of most of the profound social ills we suffer from, is finally a possibility.

I believe that some people would grasp onto that kind of hope. A group with such a message could inspire an enormous following. They would be like a sort of anti-demagogue; seizing people’s attention not with hate, but with hope. That hope, properly leveraged, can be turned into political action and support fund raising.

2.0 Community Building and Online Presence

In this phase, still mostly working on my own, I would produce content via blogs, podcasts and YouTube, manage a Facebook and a Discord group, open a Patreon account, and attempt to build credibility and a community. During this phase the message would be refined, and thru accumulated content, be made accessible to the general public. The most distilled version of this message would be in the form of a detailed book proposal.

Deliverables:

• accessible online content effectively communicating the idea of the Arcology and the message of hope.
• an online community of supporters, a list of prospects for the nucleus of a foundation
• a successful book proposal and a publishing deal.

2.1 Book publishing and talk circuit

The presence and size of the community created in the first part of this phase will help sell the book to publishers. In this phase, the book is written, then published in paperback, ebook and audio book. I suspect a book is necessary for the establishment of credibility. It will also serve as a guide for later planning phases.

This will hopefully open doors to the talk show circuit and opportunities to speak at conferences.

Deliverables:

• established credibility as an expert
• the concept of the arcology becomes known to a broader zeitgeist
• Introductions to potential big-fish donors, and door-opening institutions such as UN Habitat and universities.
• An expanded social movement, large enough to support the establishment of a foundation.

Phase 3: Establish a Foundation

The foundation would be run by professional staff of area experts. Still funded mostly through donations and media revenue. The foundation would begin to do the R&D necessary to construct the arcology, but it would focus most on developing the necessary software to run the democratic corporation and the digital currency, which is needed for phase 4.

The foundation would begin to negotiate with potential host nations, form alliances, and site a location for the first Arcology.

It would also begin vetting future prospective residents of the arcology.

Deliverables:

• A staffed foundation of experts
• A strong media team
• A strong income stream of donations and media income.
• Minimal software stack to run a demco and currency.
• A growing list of vetted future residents.

Phase 4: Establish the Arcology Democratic Corporation

Once the minimal software stack is up and running, the foundation will establish the democratic corporation (a demco) that will be the arcology’s government. Applicants who meet the requirements will become members of the demco, and sign agreements for a payment plan. This plan will be broken into tranches of increasing size, and will be in the form of cashflows to the arcology. To fund these cashflows, the residents will buy credits through the arcologies forex trading system, to fill their digital purses. This will generate hard currency for the demco, while also kickstarting the arcology’s own digital currency. The first cashflow will be small, perhaps $150/month, with a minimum population of 50,000 that would still come to at least $7.5M/month, and would go a long way toward funding planning and startup expenses.

Once the demco is running, the foundation would merge with it, with the foundation employees forming its full-time staff. At this point, the demco would be run by, and be legally responsible to its owners, the future residents of the arcology.

Not only will the demco provide a real cashflow, but it will also act as a working prototype for the private demcos that will come later.

Deliverables:

• A running demco with a ticking monetary system, and the software needed to run it.
• Signed contracts with the residents.
• An income to the demco of several million / month from the residents.
• A detailed technical plan for constructing the arcology
• Signed agreements with a host nation.

Phase 5: Construct the first Arcology

At this point, we have a functioning demco, signed contracts from hopefully a few thens of thousands of future residents, and a detailed plan for building the demco and agreements with contractors and a host nation.

Now, the second tranche of cashflows will come due, with residents paying in more like $500/month, for a minimum income of about $25M/month or $300M/yr.

It’s likely the arcology can be gradually constructed, with only a handful of buildings under construction at any given time, and where a building would house one more village units. In that case, the second tranche would only kick in for the residents whose buildings are being actively constructed. This will means that our capital costs can gradually increase, and we don’t need all the financing to build all the villages right away.

My hope that the second tranche of income should provide a strong enough base for the demco to begin issuing bonds to fund the construction, probably one round every 6 months. I don’t know yet how much money will be needed, but if $150K were needed per resident (so roughly $300K per apartment assuming an average occupancy of 2 per unit, a fully built-out 50,000 person arcology would eventually need a total of $7.5B to complete construction. The cashflows from the residents would be calculated to be enough to service the payments on the bonds. Note that there are major opportunities to save cost by investing on in-situ production of basic building materials on-site. See cost saving ideas and Order of Operations.

Once the a building has completed construction, the final tranche for its residents will kick in, and they’ll begin making payments on the order of $2000/month. This should be affordable as they would then be living in the arcology itself, so they would no longer have any external housing costs. This cashflow will see the bonds paid through to maturity and would fund the gradual finishing work on the arcology.

There are several advantages to having the demco issue bonds rather than having residents take out mortgages. Because an arcology has never been built before, regular mortgages will be unavailable to regular individuals. Also, those individuals would be coming from all over the world, and so may not have any local credit scores in the host country. But the arcology itself can issue bonds that can be bought by anyone. Also, by using cashflows in the new monetary system, the new economy can be kicked off long before the arcology has been completed, and can then be used to cut costs and raise more money during construction.

Secondary to the bond issuances, the arcology would continue to accept donations by various means, and it could use the new currency to make this easier and more effective. For example, see Funding Through Donations.

The work invested in building a social movement and the foundation’s media arm would now become key to selling bonds.

population	50,000
cost per person	$                  150,000
total cost	$       7,500,000,000
bond interest	4%
max bond interest cost	$          300,000,000
per resident	$                      6,000
cost per resident pe month	$                         500
total / month	$            25,000,000
total / year	$          300,000,000

Bond buyers could be grouped into the following categories:

1. Individual enthusiasts who want to see the arcology built, including rich future residents.
2. Investors who want to see the arcology established for personal reasons.
3. Companies working near the arcology that would benefit from the arcologies presence and industrial potential. This might include mining companies who could use a new workforce in the outback.
4. Big fish philanthropists. Elon Musk may be especially of note here, since in many ways, the Arcology would be a pretty good early prototype for a mars colony. In exchange for a large bond purchase, Musk could be guaranteed rights to all the IP that gets created to run the arcology. (Not clear if Musk should be named personally in this paragraph)
5. National governments who could benefit from arcologies being around
   1. Rich nations who want to avoid refugee crises
   2. Tropical nations who one day want their own arcologies to house their own people.

Deliverables:

• The world’s first true arcology, running on the demco economic model.
• Validation of the concept.
• The IP and expertise needed to build and run an Arcology.

Phase 6: Develop the demco economy, improve the arcologies services and build more arcologies.

At this point, the arcology will have been up and running for a few years, and will hopefully have proven a success. 

During this phase, residents will create their own private demcos under the legal jurisdiction of the arcology. Some of these demcos will bid for service contracts put out by the arcology itself, such as running greenhouses, maintaining the various engineering systems, providing medical services and education and so on, or doing R&D to improve services. A second group would open private business such as restaurants and shops. A third group would do business in the wider worlds, offering consulting or IP development services, and finally, a fourth group would work to develop local resources around the arcology such as green power and mineral extraction.

All of these demcos and all of the residents would pay taxes to maintain the arcology, in the form of cashflows in the arcologies digital currency. They would also trade among themselves using that currency. This would allow us to establish a true, democratic economy that would be a model for the rest of the world.

As the arcology reaches maturity, the expertise and IP it has developed can be used to facilitate the construction of many more arcologies around the world, creating a big business opportunity for consultancies. Hopefully the second arcology built would be a much larger, more refined version, incorporating all the lessons learned, and would act as the true prototype for the arcologies that follow.

As their benefits become clear to everyone, arcologies should become a sought after lifestyle. If a major portion of the world eventually chose to live this way, it would finally allow us to begin taking the stress off of the world’s natural systems, allowing them to gradually restore themselves to a healthy state.

The end result would be a highly automated, leisure-oriented society, living in balance with a lush natural world, much like societies portrayed in utopian science fiction.

Deliverables:

• The construction of arcologies worldwide
• The prevention of billions of deaths from war and famine
• The peaceful transition to a democratic economy
• The eventual restoration of earth’s ecology
• Arcologies colonize the solar system instead of equity corporations.

Necessary Preconditions

To the best of my knowledge, while all of the various puzzle pieces I have discussed above have had various supporters and evangelizers in the past, nobody has yet proposed that a solution is only viable if we put all these pieces together in the right way, to form a whole new kind of society with its own unique socio-economic system. Likewise, I have never heard a plan proposed to actually get us there.

However, for success, you must have more than just a good plan. You must also know exactly when and where to put your plan into action. So let’s now turn to identifying the necessary preconditions that would need to be in place for this plan, or something like it, to succeed. Are they in place today? …or if not, what developments should we be on the lookout for, if we want to get our timing right?

I believe that in order to make a go of it, this arcology project would need to be launched in an environment in which the following things are possible:

1. Pre-construction, the arcology would need financial support by donations, probably for up to  5 years continuously.
2. The arcology would need to find buyers for $ billions in bonds through the construction phase
3. A legal autonomous-zone must be granted by the host nation.

Funding

The funding requirements are clearly challenging. It’s clear that the awareness raising phases leading up to the creation of a foundation, and the funding for the foundation itself, will need significant support from donors. Some income can be generated from media sales, but the majority will still need to be donated. It will likely take several years to raise awareness to the point where we can vet and sign up all the future residents, and to write the software needed to power the demco that will form the nascent city government. From then on, the residents can cover perhaps the majority of the costs of the foundation, though costs will ramp up as the foundation gets into the weeds of the engineering and planning work.

Then, when it comes time to raising bonds for construction, we have to be honest that it will be nearly unprecedented and historic financial action. Before the 20th century, startup financing by bonds was common, but today, it has largely been supplanted by equity financing – something that we explicitly need to avoid if we’re to build a healthy society, based on worker-owned enterprises. While there should be enough income to service the bonds, and a good plan for building the arcology and repaying them, this will still be big risk for the bond buyers.

One rough analogy that come to mind are the funding of the intercontinental railroads. The investment was equally massive, speculative and strategically vital, and were ultimately financed from a combination of land grants, government subsidies, and bonds.

This didn’t happen right away. It took years before the government was ready to pass the bills necessary for the project to move ahead. It would likely never have happened at all, were it not for the strong support and excitement for the railroad among the general public, and the powerful marketing campaigns that stoked it.

The public was not roused by appeals to the financial benefits. Instead, they were energized by ideology and the prospects of nation building. In public speeches and newspaper editorials, their excitement was stoked with visions of progress and opportunity: A shining ribbon of steal connecting coast to coast, knitting the nation together. Easy access to the gold fields of California and the rich, farmlands beyond the Mississippi. The great nation of America, rising up to claim its destiny.

The arcology is also a nation-building exercise of a sort. It seems likely that would also benefit greatly from support of the general public.

Legal Autonomy

In its economic, social and political systems, there are some fundamental, but very key differences between an arcology and our current society. Without them, it would not function. This means its body of laws will necessarily need to be different as well. If an arcology also needed to conform to a host nation’s preexisting legal codes, it internal systems would be twisted to the breaking point. Those preexisting codes, after all, were designed for a different system.

For example, consider income taxes: If taxes must be paid to the host nation’s government, in the host nation’s own currency, then that requirement would likely create a Currency Reserve Crisis that would devalue the arcologies currency and destabilize its economy.

Similarly, innumerable corporate and labor laws on the books are written with the assumption that companies are based on equity-shares, and that labor and shareholders have competing goals. In a society where all companies are owned by their employees, with no shares to be found anywhere, many of those laws would make no sense, their application would distort the arcologies commerce.

Thus the arcology would need the autonomy to run under its own unique set of rules.

Unfortunately, legal autonomous zones are not easy to set up. Since the arcology would violate numerous statutes, an autonomous zone cannot be made by executive authority. Exceptions would need to be enacted legislatively.

How could this be done? Taking the example of Australia, it is a Westminsterial parliamentary system. After an election, the party that wone the most seats in the House of Representatives will usually form government. If necessary, they’ll use alliances another parties to secure a majority of seats in House of Representatives and if possible, also in the Senate. The government will set the parliamentary agenda, and for the most part, it will push through legislation with a simple majority. About 90% of the bills proposed by government get passed. non-government members of parliament can also propose bills, but they are much less likely to pass, or will take far longer to make it into law.

Thus, to pass legislation for an autonomous zone, the most likely path would be to gain the attention of the ministries that would need to be involved (and there would be several, including the ministries of finance, environment and water, industry and science), negotiate with them and convince them of the value of supporting an arcology on their soil. Then the heads of those ministries would draft the bill and submit it to parliament. Given that there are always far more possible bills than a government has time to pass, the government will need to be convinced of the value of this bill.

Note that it might be possible for a king or dictator to grant an autonomous zone by fiat, but if you were to set up in such a country, then the arcology would exist only at the king’s pleasure, which might be gone the next day, or a nascent arcology might suddenly find itself faced with an unreasonably large hand, stretched out for money, before its ready to support such generosity. Faced with these risks, it would be harder to get people to commit financially. Good residents, who had the education and energy to buy in and contribute, would be harder to find, as would be buyers for the billions in bonds needed to finance construction.

The need for a Social Movement

To be successful at funding the project, attracting residents, and establishing a working relationship with the host nation, it seems clear that an influential social movement and awareness raising campaign will be absolutely vital. However, such a movement will only be successful if it’s launched in the right place and at the right time. Do the necessary conditions exist today? I don’t know. I’m not sure I know what to look for yet. Much more study will needed before we can identify with confidence, the right circumstances in which to act. 

This is a topic that I’m still trying to get my head around. Some general factors that will likely determine success, would be the level of awareness, urgency and agency you find in the culture, and how much work is needed to elevate all three.

Brainstorming: Preconditions for Social Movement

What Next?

This project is still very much in the ideation phase. This essay/intro page and the supporting one-note will continue to evolve as I learn more and gather feedback from others.

Here are some follow-up steps for you to consider:

Please poke through the other sections of the one-note for more details. There you’ll find ideas and thoughts, some fairly well baked, others still in the oven.

Please send me your feedback. Did you find this line of thinking convincing? What doubts or questions did it raise in you? What advice do you have?

Please pass this one-note on to others you think would have a useful perspective to lend.

What happens next will very much be determined by the feedback I receive.

Contact: patrick@thearcologychannel.org

Notes And Pages