Auroville

Article

Auroville is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between November 08, 2021 and October 09, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “Auroville, India”; “Thus, Auroville. I don’t know if it’s fair to describe Auroville as a “charter city””; “Auroville currently seems kind of anarchic”. It most often appears alongside Charter Cities Institute, Honduras, India.

Metadata

Category: Places
Mention count: 3
Issue count: 3
First seen: November 08, 2021
Last seen: October 09, 2023

Appears In

- Charter Cities Institute (2 shared issues)
- Honduras (2 shared issues)
- India (2 shared issues)
- Prospera (2 shared issues)
- Prospera (2 shared issues)
- ZEDE (2 shared issues)
- Academic Decathlon (1 shared issues)
- Achille Mbembe (1 shared issues)
- ACX Grants (1 shared issues)
- EA community (1 shared issues)
- Africa Next 50 Cities Coalition (1 shared issues)
- African DAO (1 shared issues)

External Links

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.

November 08, 2021 · Original source

Econ Americas interviewed (44-minute video) Guillermo Peña, [Orqueida ZEDE]'s Technical Secretary. He summarizes Honduras's recent political and economic history (and seems to believe things are getting better). Orchid has 400 employees already and the locals are typically doubling their income. They'll start exporting in January 2022. They'll invest $85 million over four years with 2,700 employees eventually. It's the largest greenhouse in Central America, exporting vegetables and flowers, over 160 hectares. While all three opposition parties are opposed to ZEDEs, Pena is pretty optimistic that the ZEDEs won’t be shut down, at least immediately, if the opposition wins the November election (see 35:25). Auroville, India I recently learned about this place, and it’s pretty crazy:

Inline links: interviewed

(source) Thus, Auroville. I don’t know if it’s fair to describe Auroville as a “charter city”, but it does have a charter, which says:

Inline links: source

Thus, Auroville. I don’t know if it’s fair to describe Auroville as a “charter city”, but it does have a charter, which says:

June 28, 2022 · Original source

The giant silver golf ball at the center of the EPCOT theme park. Compare to the giant gold golf ball at the center of Auroville. I think someone should create a conspiracy theory about this. In the end, all Disney had was a forty-square mile corporate fiefdom, on which they built several cities. Overall they seem pretty nice, although more because of the magic of walkable urbanism than the magic of Disney. Celebration, Florida. But earlier this year, Florida passed a law banning schools from teaching LGBT topics to young children, which the media dubbed “the Don’t Say Gay Law”. Disney did some corporate activism against the law, the Florida government got mad and brainstormed ways to punish Disney, and the best they could come up with was to re-establish state control of Reedy Creek, which DeSantis officially did last month. Disney has sued the state, but it looks like it’s just over some debts and the lawsuit is unlikely to prevent the dissolution. You get socialists in power, they dissolve charter cities. You get conservatives in power, they also dissolve charter cities. All I want is one government that doesn’t dissolve charter cities! Is that too much to ask? Hello, Afropolitan Last year venture capitalist and thought leader Balaji Srinivasan introduced the idea of a “network state”. With the advent of social networks and cryptocurrency, as well as increasing polarization leading people to group themselves more by ideological cohesion than geographic proximity, maybe people could group themselves into nonterritorial state-like communities. And although these would seem pretty thin compared to real states that have monopolies over use of force in real geographic areas, maybe some of them could use charter-city like systems to eventually buy land and graduate into full statehood. (is this just the Hive System from Terra Ignota? I think so, but probably with fewer major governments being controlled by weird brothels.) Anyway, Afropolitan has taken him up on this. They share a name with a landmark essay by Achille Mbembe (founding a country based on an especially good essay also sounds like something that would happen in Terra Ignota, as does history being changed by people named things like “Achille Mbembe”), arguing that Africa needs to re-invent or re-define itself or something. The founders of Afropolitan-the-company have taken this idea of a trans-national African diaspora and turned it into an "African DAO [and] digital nation...building a network state to unleash the maximum potential of Africans around the world". They write: The nation-state experiment has failed for Black people worldwide. It has yielded nothing but poverty, genocide, police brutality, ethnic strife, inflation, weak government, and the failure of our ecosystems. All people who call themselves free have a fundamental right to create the society they want by choice collectively. As the internet enables us to shrink space and form bonds across the planet, no person should live in a society by accident or force. …and go on to list a four-step plan to create the society of the future. Step One is to sell NFTs “representing the mythology of our new nation” . Step Four is “a[n] extensive system of charter cities akin to Singapore or Hong Kong”. In the unlikely chance that you care what Steps Two and Three are, you can find them here. Why should you take them seriously? I am not at all claiming that you should. I am only claiming that “sell digital tokens representing mythology, but eventually this turns into a country” is the most Terra Ignota thing ever. Also, at least the founders have good aesthetics: But also, some people are taking them seriously. VCs including Balaji Srinivasan has invested $2 million. The group claims to have 50,000 followers on Clubhouse. They’ve been featured on TechCrunch and (very briefly) Marginal Revolution. I would, however, briefly challenge their claim to be “the first ever Internet country”. People have been building Internet countries as long as there has been an Internet. I’m not sure which was actually first, but I know the Kingdom of Talossa has been online since 1995. A 2000 New York Times article on the Internet country phenomenon profiled Talossa, but was already able to give six other examples. And although these were perhaps easy to miss, Danny Wallace started the Kingdom of Lovely, a “partly Internet-based project that claims a small amount of territory”, on a widely-viewed BBC documentary in 2007. I myself got involved in an online country project back when I was a teenager in the early 2000s. Although no venture capitalists appeared to give me giant bags of money, it got a few dozen “citizens” and some fun government institutions before finally petering out around 2015. I guess what I’m saying is - I’m available as an Internet country building consultant with fifteen years experience. And no, I don’t accept payment in NFTs. Oh, You’re Still Here? Meanwhile, in Honduras, it isn’t all legal doom and gloom. Prospera has also been making real progress, as measured in pretty photos. Two Roatan resorts, Las Verandas and Pristine Bay, have joined Prospera. The ZEDE law saying that landowners can voluntarily annex their land into a willing ZEDE: Las Verandas Pristine Bay Prospera is also building a high-tech wood processing factory that will eventually produce parts for its other construction efforts: Current construction progress Planned final appearance And its first multi-story apartment buildings: Current construction progress Planned final appearance It will also be hosting gene therapy company Mini Circle, which runs clinical trials for innovative medical procedures. Granting that many of its studies (treatments for HIV, muscular dystrophy, obesity, etc) seem great and important, it perhaps seems suspicious that they would want to do this in a charter city? The company writes that “the cost of running a trial in Prospera is less than 1/1000th the cost of the United States”, which seems good in ways but does not entirely allay my concern. I was originally worried that they would be experimenting on Hondurans or something, but looking at the site it looks like they’re recruiting worldwide and would probably fly Americans (or whoever else) to Honduras for the therapy. Their site features a quote from friend-of-the-blog Alex K Chen, who says: Minicircle's bioscientists have one of the most enlightened risk taking calculi I have observed anywhere. In an environment where extreme hesitance to take any risk holds back scientific progress, they have the openness to imagine, try and measure just about any legal intervention putting them in a very strong position to both produce a significant measurable decrease in the human rate of aging, and to inspire more people to do what they never thought was possible. I think the only way this could get more mad science points is if it used the phrase “small-minded fools”. Mind you, I think mad science points are good, I just hope everyone else sees it that way and my optimism turns out justified. Also, apparently the clinical trials have NFTs, because of course they do. At least they’re not commemorative NFTs - they seem to play a load-bearing role where they help participants be incentivized to complete all the necessary tests. Also, low-cost eco-residences! Shorts 1: I previously mentioned the scam/fiasco/insane-idea of Hammer City, a planned black nationalist city in the Rocky Mountains. I knew it had failed, but I didn’t know exactly how. Now Colorado Sun has investigated. The proximal reason it failed was because the black nationalists started moving their paramilitary onto the land before they had officially bought it, the owner called the cops, and the cops removed them. The Hammer City team has not given back any of the $112,000 which they raised from extremely credulous donors (without using NFTs, even!) 2: The Charter Cities Institute continues doing the long-term ground-level work necessary to create long-term well-grounded charter cities which will be much too boring and responsible for me to write silly profiles of. Some of their most recent work has been with the Africa Next 50 Cities Coalition, which “convenes and mobilizes key stakeholders who are dedicated to harnessing Africa’s rapid urbanization for human prosperity”. 3: Also, CCI founder Mark Lutter has left the organization to start a charter city of his own, no public details yet. CCI will be looking for a new executive director. 4: Speaking of Disney, they’ve been building on their model city expertise and magical storybook branding by creating planned communities around the US - Story Living By Disney, starting with Rancho Mirage California. Realistically it just looks like a very nice planned community, but this planned community comes with the option to have people make fun of you forever for living in a Disney community as an adult. Predictions for this month: Prospera is still substantially a functioning ZEDE in 2025: 70%

Impact Market Mini-Grants Results

October 09, 2023 · Original source

Devansh Mehta has some kind of cool idea. I cannot say with confidence exactly what the cool idea is. It seems to be using blockchain-based hypercertificates to create an impact market in investigative journalism in India - based in Auroville, a New Age holy city which has transcended money in favor of giant gold golf balls.

Devansh Mehta has some kind of cool idea. I cannot say with confidence exactly what the cool idea is. It seems to be using blockchain-based hypercertificates to create an impact market in investigative journalism in India - based in Auroville, a New Age holy city which has transcended money in favor of giant gold golf balls. Many people like Devansh’s idea. He was selected as a “Next Billion Fellow” by the Ethereum Foundation and has received previous grants from Gitcoin Grants and the Plurality Institute. He has clearly put a lot of work into this. He has some great videos and explainers talking about what he’s doing:

Astral Codex Ten

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Astral Codex Ten

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