Nodes Digest #000 | Welcome
The network state movement finally has a digest. Here’s what we’re building and why it matters
Made with ❤️ from us, by Wagmit, Cookie, Eric, & Michael (Parallel Citizen)
📸 Snapshot
Somewhere right now, a charter city is negotiating its next jurisdictional agreement. A popup city is onboarding its first residents. A group of builders just secured funding for a governance experiment that didn’t have a name six months ago.
This is happening every week. Across dozens of projects, hundreds of contributors, and multiple continents. The problem isn’t that the network state movement is too small to follow. The problem is that it’s gotten too big to follow casually.
Próspera is navigating international legal battles while expanding operations. Network School has drawn attendees from nearly 100+ countries. Zuzalu sparked a wave of popup cities from the Balkans to Southeast Asia to Patagonia. New special economic zones are being proposed. Governance frameworks are being drafted, tested, and iterated on in real time. And a growing cohort of founders, researchers, and nomads are building alternatives to the 400-year-old nation state model; not as theory, but as functioning projects with residents, revenue, and legal standing.
Keeping up with all of it has been, until now, a matter of following the right accounts, reading the right Substacks, and being in the right group chats. We think there should be a better way.
That’s why we built Nodes Digest.
What is Nodes Digest?
Nodes Digest is a curated roundup of the network state ecosystem. The projects, policies, tools, ideas, and people shaping the future of how humans organize and govern themselves.
Each issue filters signal from noise across the space. We track and monitor 100+ active projects, newsletters, social media accounts, and event calendars. Every item update in our digest acts as a pulse on what is going on, and why it matters.
We cover network states, charter cities, startup societies, popup cities, seasteading, special economic zones, free cities, jurisdictional innovation, governance design, and the tools and infrastructure making it all possible.
We don’t cover price speculation, generic political commentary, or hype cycles. We’re here for what’s being built.
What to Expect
Each issue of Nodes Digest is organized into sections designed to give you a complete picture of the space without wasting your time. Here’s a preview of what you’ll find:
📸 Snapshot — The big picture. A short narrative overview connecting the dots between the week’s most important stories, followed by the top headlines.
☊ Nodes Pulse — Updates from the projects we actively track on our dashboard: milestones, expansions, fundraises, upcoming popups and events. If something moved the needle for an established project, it’s here.
☋ Network Experiments — New and emerging initiatives worth watching. These are early-stage projects that may not be on our radar yet but are experimenting with network state principles in interesting ways.
🗳️ Governance Stack — Legal, policy, and institutional developments. New SEZ proposals, jurisdictional updates, regulatory shifts, compliance frameworks. The real-world governance layer where code meets territory.
🔗 Tooling & Technology — Infrastructure enabling coordination: identity systems, governance platforms, digital residency programs, transaction tools, and the emerging stack that connects digital communities to physical presence.
💻 Research & Developments — Academic work, preprints, and open-source projects at the intersection of law, code, and governance innovation.
📖 Essays & Long Reads — The best longer-form writing from community thinkers. Substantial Substack posts, new book releases, and essays pushing the intellectual frontier of the movement.
🧠 The Hivemind — Social media highlights: significant threads, notable posts, debates, and discussions from X and Farcaster. Including dissenting views and fair criticisms, because a movement that can’t handle scrutiny isn’t worth following.
🔎 Nodes Spotlight — A brief feature on an active builder or creator in the space, putting a face to the work being done.
Why This Exists
The network state ecosystem has a discovery problem.
There’s no shortage of activity. There’s a shortage of aggregation. The builders are spread across various social media websites, blogs, podcasts, and calendars. If you’re deeply embedded, you can keep up. If you’re not, you miss most of it. And if you’re trying to evaluate the space from the outside: as an investor, researcher, journalist, or curious newcomer, the barrier to entry is unreasonably high.
Nodes Digest exists to lower that barrier.
We’re not here to advocate for any single project or ideology within the movement. Some readers will be most excited about charter cities with formal legal agreements. Others care more about popup experiments and temporary autonomous gatherings. Some are focused on the governance stack, others on the technology layer. All of it belongs here.
Our position is simple: the world benefits from more experimentation in how societies are organized. We track that experimentation. We report on it. We let you decide what matters to you.
About NSNodes
Nodes Digest is published by NSNodes, an independent and open-source platform serving as the connective hub for the network state ecosystem. Our dashboard aggregates popups, events, jobs, societies, funding, and tooling for builders in the space.
The Digest is one layer of that infrastructure: the narrative layer.If nsnodes.com is where you go to find what exists, Nodes Digest is where you go to understand what’s happening.
We don’t take sides on which experiments will win. We make sure you know they exist.
Get Involved
Subscribe for free to get Nodes Digest delivered to your inbox.
If you’re building in this space and want to be on our radar, or if you think we’re missing something, reach out. We’re always expanding our coverage.
→ Explore the dashboard at nsnodes.com
→ Join the conversation on Telegram
→ View our open-source work on GitHub
Welcome to the feed. The movement is already underway. Now you won’t miss it.
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