Lessons from a California land-grab

Razor-sharp reporter Gil Duran has a must-read article on the "bumbling and villainous" effort to build a new city in rural California. The effort would be laughable—and not just for its name, California Forever, which Duran likens to a celebrity cemetery—if it weren't a possible beachhead for a libertarian movement to create "network states" outside the reach of democratic nation-states.

Whether or not that's the motivation, the California Forever land-grab brings to mind the recent history of aggressive, top-down market entry campaigns by tech companies. Exemplified by Uber, those campaigns prioritized market-share over listening, engaging with local communities and building real, grassroots support.

We've long argued for a sharply different approach. In our view, if you want to make meaningful, enduring change, you’ve got to build from the ground up. You've got to do the hard (and democratic) work of listening and persuading. There's no shortcut.