Astral Codex Ten

Sramek

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Sramek

Article

Sramek is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between September 11, 2023 and October 28, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Presumably Sramek came up with the idea and pitched the company”; “In 2015, Sramek might have reasonably expected”; “Sramek writes : Our renderings do not tell the full story”. It most often appears alongside California Forever, Chicago, China.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: September 11, 2023
  • Last seen: October 28, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Highlights From The Comments On Last Week's Model Cities Post
September 11, 2023 · Original source
Flannery started purchases in 2017. Presumably Sramek came up with the idea and pitched the company sometime before then, let’s say 2015.
In 2015, Sramek might have reasonably expected that “tech leaders are founding a city” would have positive connotations - the Sustainable High-Tech Progress City of the Future! But it took him the better part of a decade to actually buy the land, and by now the story is Evil Billionaire Elites Attempt Land Grab And Will Probably Use Their City To Spread Misinformation And Violate Your Privacy.
25
October 28, 2025 · Original source
Period where locals in the area to be annexed may protest (there aren’t really any locals except some landowners who have already sold their land to the project, so legally relevant protests are unlikely) The paperwork itself contains some exciting details. Phase 1 of the city will have 175,000 people, with the ability to expand up to 400,000 later. CEO Jan Sramek summarized the urban design as “American street grid, Spanish/Japanese superblocks, and Dutch woonerfs”. The American street grid is the logical right-angled design typical of cities like Manhattan or Chicago. The Spanish superblocks are the big blocks with courtyards in the center, typical of cities like Barcelona: ...and woonerfs are small Dutch side streets which are designed to just-barely-allow drivers but prioritize pedestrians. creating a road layer in between big car-centered thoroughfares and pedestrian-only sidewalks: The proposal also moots two additional megaprojects: the Solano Shipyard, where the new city touches the upper tributaries of the San Francisco Bay. American shipbuilding has long been something of an embarrassment, the Trump administration is working on it, and the new city would be strategically placed to benefit if the federal government could remove some of the barriers that make US naval manufacturing unprofitable. And the Solano Foundry would be the “the largest [advanced manufacturing] park in the US”. Many of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs’ manufacturing startups set up shop in Southern California - for example, Elon Musk’s original base for SpaceX and the Boring Company was in Hawthorne, near LA - just because the Bay has so few good industrial locations. The Foundry aims to change that, and aims for 40,000 new manufacturing jobs. Finally, something nobody else will care about but which is close to my heart - Jan is pursuing a partnership with Monumental Labs, a group working on “AI-enabled robotic stone carving factories”. The question of why modern architecture is so dull and unornamented compared to its classical counterpart is complicated, but three commonly-proposed reasons are: Ornament costs too much
Inline links: summarized, Spanish superblocks, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!85zv!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F12dd47a8-20ab-4699-a4e8-77c2eed30705_1024x683.jpeg, woonerfs are, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!5-gC!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6f23ae71-8eca-4cea-8ee3-8b26633be1f1_1000x562.png, Solano Shipyard, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!cZKL!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdaff879b-2364-49e3-9568-2779f28cd231_639x426.jpeg, Solano Foundry, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!APFe!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2086d0cc-0654-4c0a-80c3-3aaacbe5744e_1199x675.jpeg, Monumental Labs, is complicated
Building codes are inflexible and designed around the more-common modern styles. Getting robots to mass-produce ornament solves problems 1 and 2, and doing it in a model city with a ground-level commitment to ornament solves problem 3. Sramek writes: Our renderings do not tell the full story. Getting architecture right in a way that is also scalable and affordable is hard. And until now, we’ve been focused on the things “lower down in the stack” that need to be designed first – land use plans, urban design, transportation, open space, infrastructure, etc. But I started this company nearly a decade ago precisely because I felt that so much of our world had become ugly, and I wanted to live, and have my kids grow up, in a place that appreciates craft and beauty. This is one of the clearest examples of what I love about model cities. There are lots of things that everyone (or at least a substantial proportion) of people want, which people aren’t doing - not because there’s some strong opposition or technical challenges, but because the system is too complex/diffuse/ossified to permit change. A lot of what I love about California is downstream of its geography as the westernmost part of the western world - the people who felt confined by Europe fled to America, and the people who felt confined by America fled to California, and until recently it was an open space big enough for new experiments to grow. I think of “California Forever” as a nod to that heritage, and a test of whether some of those sparks still survive. The Siege Of Prospera In the 2010s, a conservative Honduran government decided to allow experimental “ZEDEs” - semi-autonomous charter cities - in the country. Several projects sprung up, most notably Prospera and Ciudad Morazan, and met some early success. In 2022, the socialists took over and decided to end the experiment. They were able to ban the creation of new ZEDEs, but had more trouble disbanding existing projects. They found there were two legal roadblocks. First, the founders of the ZEDE system - well aware of how sudden shifts in governments could destroy charter cities - fortified their law with constitutional protections making it near-impossible to repeal. Second, they signed international treaties giving charter city investors the right to sue Honduras for very large amounts if it tried to destroy their hard work. How do you repeal a law that says it would be unconstitutional to repeal it? The socialist-controlled Honduran Supreme Court tried their best, saying that the law had retroactively itself been unconstitutional, and so existing ZEDEs had retroactively been illegal the whole time. However, the court failed to remove the entire thicket of legal protection surrounding the ZEDE system; in particular, they did not strike down Article 94 of the Constitution, which said that unconstitutionality rulings could not be enforced retroactively. So as far as anyone can tell, the current status of ZEDEs is that it is illegal for them to exist, but also illegal for the government to take any action to remove them. On their way out, the Court ordered some penalties against “companies that became ZEDEs”, which is not really how this works (companies can found ZEDEs, but they don’t become ZEDEs; this is like saying “companies that became cell phones”) and which therefore nobody has tried to collect. Why did the government’s case end so farcically? Honduras-watchers suggest that the Court was trying to balance its obligations to the government, to the integrity of the legal system, and to practicality. The government really wanted an anti-ZEDE victory to present to its voters. The integrity of the legal system made it hard to apply ex post facto judgments. And practically, the whole case ran up against the second layer of protections the ZEDE founders built around their project: the investor treaties. If Honduras were to end ZEDEs, ZEDE investors could sue in international court. Prospera’s investors have already sued for $11 billion - a third of Honduras’ GDP. The case is currently tied up in international courts, with the delay being amenable to both sides; the government expects to lose, and the Prosperans would rather keep the suit as a threat they can hold over the Hondurans’ head than actually get a judgment in their favor - which would be bad PR, and which they expect Honduras would not pay. (also, although the Trump administration hasn’t taken a firm stance, Prospera seems like the sort of thing they would like, and Honduras is nervous about offending them too badly) Since the government doesn’t seem to be able to legally shut down Prospera, they’ve resorted to harassing it - especially trying to debank it. This might have worked, if not for the fact that a certain $4 trillion weird Ponzi casino industry has always imagined itself as having a fig-leaf purpose of “what if a utopian libertarian island-city got debanked by a repressive socialist government and could only save itself if there were a entirely new kind of financial infrastructure totally different from the regular one?”; although I imagine they were just as surprised as anyone else when this exact scenario suddenly played out in real life, nobody can deny they were extremely prepared for it. So the attempted harassment has fallen flat too, and the government doesn’t have a lot of options. Further developments hinge on next month’s big election. The candidates seem like a colorful bunch: Polling has been contradictory: …with Rixi Moncada (socialist), Salvador Nasralla (liberal), and Nasry Zablah (right-wing) all making strong showings. My impression is Moncada would be worst for Prospera, Zablah best, and Nasralla somewhere in the middle. Meanwhile, my contact in Prospera reports that life in the city continues as normal, with most residents relatively insulated from the lawfare happening around them. They are up to 300 registered companies, a nearly-full office tower, a few residential developments under construction, and frequent conferences on relevant topics like crypto and biotech. From Techbro To Sherbro Sherbro, Sierra Leone. A place synonymous in the popular imagination with the phrase “Sherbro, Sierra Leone”. Population 30,000. Size 230 square miles (or “just a little bit smaller than Singapore”, according to its boosters). There are too many places named “Freetown”. And not enough named “Kissidougou”. Siaka Stevens is the grandson of Sierra Leone’s first president, also named Siaka Stevens. He grew up in Britain, worked in business and finance, then went back to his family homeland as an adult. Moved by the poverty he saw around him, he decided to start a charter city. He recruited the help of Idris Elba, a famous British actor of Sierra Leonean descent, and together they started a company to build Sherbro Island City. The usual Dubai and Singapore comparisons were made. Maybe due to Stevens’ government connections, they got an impressively broad concession from the government - the Charter Cities Institute has compared it to Honduras’ ZEDEs, among the most autonomous charter city legislation in the world. From the podcast: Okay, so there are seven governing board members and the agreement specifically states that they are strictly from the private sector. SAP, our company, will choose four of the board members and the chairperson and the government of Sierra Leone will choose three. That’s the seven member board. And underneath that is a similar structure to municipal corporation. We have fiscal and legislative autonomy. English common law, very robust investor protections. The best way to kind of describe it, a similar situation, mean, Hong Kong now actually, and it’s a similar setup to Hong Kong and China’s relationship in the early eighties, where you have a special administrative region that is very autonomous, but sovereignty is held by the main Sierra Leone country. So it’s an innovative kind of new system of governance. Stevens calls the island a “greenfield” site, but it includes a town (Bonthe, population ~10,000) and an ethnic group (the Sherbro people). Yup, that’s definitely an ethnic group. I have honestly never seen a group this ethnic before. A+ at being ethnic (source). It’s slightly unclear whether Bonthe and other inhabited areas are within the SEZ, but it looks like maybe they are, and Stevens means he will mostly be building the new Singapore-style smart city on uninhabited parts of the island, with Bonthe as an early base for transit and development that he hopes will benefit but otherwise remain unaffected. Various local chiefs seem to be mostly in favor, as far as we know. The big problem for these island charter city attempts is infrastructure. You eventually want heavy industry and high-value-add manufacturing, but how do you build up enough civilization - transit, power, labor, amenities - to support these expensive enterprises? Every charter city has its own solution - gambling in Grand Bahama, regulatory arbitrage in Prospera, political alignment in Praxis. Sherbro’s plans include: A hub to lure the Sierra Leone diaspora back to the country (Google says the Sierra Leone diaspora is 336,000 people, most of whom are probably not digital nomads or jet-setters)
Inline links: writes, next month’s big election, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!l_xq!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0e3c5722-3adf-42c5-adaf-1b764f17a88c_954x744.png, has been contradictory, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!8egi!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F599bd553-836b-4c70-8128-5ae37cb6b4fc_675x517.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!UMhi!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd5972e52-4f45-41ea-a520-a17cd78b7d8d_762x721.png, Sherbro Island City, the podcast, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!w7Zj!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb01bfbd8-7896-4274-946e-fe0659c9cd5a_920x613.jpeg, source