The Dao of Trump’s Freedom Cities
How an obscure campaign proposal could reshape ownership, land, and nature
After Donald Trump announced plans for up to ten new “Freedom Cities,” to be built from scratch on public land by winners of a contest, the policy debate about this idea was typical for the Presidential campaign: shallow-to-nonexistent. But what if this plan really does represent a meaningful new world-view about land, cities, people, and nature?
There are many good debates to be had about Freedom Cities.
Some people could say that Freedom Cities are an idiotically preposterous idea, on par with Trump’s old proposal to buy Greenland, while others could see him as a creative force unfettered by DC conventional wisdom.
Some people could argue that Freedom Cities, one of Trump’s few concrete proposals to make housing more affordable, will be “ultra-low-tax and low-regulation zones,” while others could argue that the global templates for new cities are heavy on central planning.
Some people could say that such a program would inevitably be a corrupt vehicle for tech-bro fascists, while others could say that there’s a broader corruption in which Progressive institutions have infiltrated every facet of American life, including anti-corruption laws.
Some people could argue for frontier mythology, while others could point to the violent, racist, colonial background of federal land acquisition.
Some people could say that public land is nature’s land, while others could say it’s public infrastructure.
I wish more people were explicitly having these debates, and taking both sides seriously. But here I’d like to do something different: explore what might happen if this proposal succeeds—and what that might imply about Americans’ relationship to land.
Of course much would depend on the judges of the Freedom City contest. If they value DEI, sustainability, and traditional urbanism, a Freedom City could be a Progressive's wet dream. If they value experience, scale, deep pockets, and connections, the winners could be gigantic real estate/construction firms, a sector I know little about but which apparently includes companies such as Trammell Crow, Greystar, Bechtel… and The Trump Organization.
Yet if the judges come from the strain of libertarian idealism, techno-futurism, and crypto-curiosity in the Trump/Musk movement, at least one Freedom City might well be awarded to somebody promising innovative governance and organization. We’re not just building new construction here—new cities. We’re building new ideas about cities.
I believe that one such new idea is ready to step forward.
(This is where I pause to say I have no inside information. I don’t know anybody involved in any of this. I’m just trying to take new ideas seriously and connect them together, like a fan proposing NBA trades by dialing up ESPN’s Trade Machine.)
The Dao is Chinese philosophy’s absolute principle underlying the universe. But a DAO is a Decentralized Autonomous Organization. Sounds really boring, right? And worse, it’s a crypto concept. But please, stay with me—or maybe just skip two paragraphs ahead.
The blockchain is the technology that powers Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Whereas traditional currencies are controlled top-down by a nation, the blockchain allows Bitcoin to be “ruled” bottom-up by the market of people who own it. A DAO is similarly blockchain-powered, and could govern things other than currencies. For example, if it were legal, you could govern a village using a DAO instead of electing a mayor and town council. (I’ll skip discussing the claimed benefits, such as transparency, and the tools that allow it to act, such as smart contracts.) If it were legal, you could run a company using a DAO instead of employing a president and board of directors. If it were legal, you could own land using a DAO instead of a person or a company.
Existing laws present many hurdles to that legality. With one exception, in one state. Wyoming has explicitly declared that a DAO is a form of limited liability company (LLC). That potentially gives a DAO many diverse rights, including the sometimes-overlooked right to own land.
As far as I can tell, the law has spawned just two actual on-the-ground land projects. There’s a weird up-and-down story in a place called Story. There’s also a story of boundary-pushing idealists in a place called Clark. In Clark, an organization called CityDAO was set up as an explicit proof-of-concept for landowning DAOs. It bought 40 acres of high-desert property out in the middle of nowhere.
This property has none of the obvious features that would make it a “city”—rivers, ports, railroads, freeways, natural resources, or nice weather. All it has is its innovations in land ownership and governance. But maybe, today, those are enough to make a city succeed? As a CityDAO proponent told Cowboy State Daily, “When 1,000 people own pieces of land next to each other, suddenly a city emerges. People need to govern themselves and agree what can be built, where to put roads, how to fund public goods. Land is the beginning, but a city is inevitable.”
CityDAO wants to govern that inevitable city using the blockchain. A skeptic would point out that practical issues abound. As an article in Motherboard detailed, at the time of purchase in 2021, the various investors in CityDAO seemed to have little wisdom or expertise when it came to real estate investing or infrastructure development. One person who worked for a (non-landowning) DAO described it as a “group text with a bank account.” CityDAO was later hacked, with members losing up to $100,000, and its website is currently down. A skeptic would ask why this structure should be inherently better at city management than traditional formats like… you know… democracy.
Still, even democracy was once a new idea that faced practical hurdles. CityDAO is now trying to solve these problems—on land that looks a lot like the federally-owned high plains that could be made available for a Freedom City. Wouldn’t at least one Musk-appointed judge in the Freedom City contest be very interested in a DAO-based proposal? Such a proposal would claim to do more than address the housing shortage—it would promise a whole new relationship between people and cities. And, thus, between people and nature. It would be the biggest natural story of the millennium.
Would it work? I doubt it. In the end, I’m with the skeptics: I believe that success today requires a scale of expertise that a DAO can’t accumulate. Although I understand that some people don’t believe this, and that the story of Bitcoin bolsters their case.
If it won’t work, does that mean we shouldn’t try? I’m agnostic. The US government has seeded lots of weird ideas, from the Louisiana Purchase to Tang, and some of them have worked out. Even the failures have led to lessons.
Is any of this likely to happen? I doubt it. (Again, I have no inside information.) The Freedom Cities concept got some press when Trump first announced it in March 2023, then mostly crickets through the campaign, and scarce (if intrigued) mentions since.
But assume for a moment, if you can, that voters were motivated by—not misogyny, racism, cult of personality, revenge, or fascistic tendencies, but—a desire for change. Change in government leaders. Change in post-pandemic attitudes. Change in culture. Change in red-tape burdens. Change in the way average citizens relate to an array of elite institutions that seem to have so much control over their lives. Change in a perceived tyranny of expertise. In that case, a Freedom City developed by a distributed autonomous organization represents the absolute principle underlying that universe of change—its Dao.
Discussion:
Last week’s story was our most popular ever. This week’s story is rather different! But I’d like to think it ended at a useful place. I hope you agree.
My deep thanks to the local Wyoming journalists and tech journalists who have tracked this story over the past three years (as shown in the links above). Their work matters!
Thanks, John, for a thought-provoking newsletter.
You have enumerated some of the loose ends and pitfalls associated with this idea or really set of ideas. As you know, the idea of new cities (an idea that combines Utopian thinking, the drive for profit, and happenstance in varying proportions) is not new in the West or elsewhere in the US. The creation of cities on public lands by independent (distributed and autonomous) entities (organizations) is not new. There is for example, Cody. Created from scratch by William F Cody and his associates and investors (for whom a few Cody streets are named - Beck, Rumsey, and Salsbury). They were autonomous and self-organizing. And they were plagued by all the practical realities of people living together resulting in the immediate creation of a municipal government.
The notion that 1,000 people owning land (and maybe living on it, that part isn't clear, but this being America, one has to assume that some who buy in will be speculators whose interests are not the same as those of the residents) in close proximity will somehow spontaneously create a functioning community is supported by no evidence nor even any credible theory of human behavior. It seems too kind to even call it wishful thinking.
People will bring structure with them - in the stories they know about how to live together - and if what they bring is a story that freedom = autonomy (as opposed to equalling connection), which seems likely in this case, they are going to share the fate of past attempts to create new communities based on new princples. How many of the communes that sprang up during the back to the land movement are still around? And those communities were at least nominally founded on the ideal of people coming together, not the idea that the blockchain (may as well say the invisible hand because that is what the blockchain is about) will automatically mediate relationships.
It is not impossible that the current discussion of using Federal lands for community-building could lead to some interesting efforts. It seems more likely given its origins that it will lead to more sprawl consuming more habitat. But if something good comes out it, it will not be because its organization was distributed or autonomous (both terms that in this context push against the idea of organization, creating an ugly, but not unfamiliar dynamic), it will be because whoever made it happen was telling a story of connection and cooperation.
PS: There is, by definition, no supply side solution to the housing "crisis," as the advocates of using the public lands to build housing would have us believe. Just as there has been no supply side solution to any other problem since the idea gained currency in the Reagan-Thatcher era (one would think that if it were going to work 40 years would be long enough to see that). That doesn't mean that current efforts to increase housing supply and, especially, choice should be stopped - there are other good reasons for them - but our current system offers no incentive to solve the housing problem. No one will invest in more housing if they believe their return on that investment will be too low. As soon as rents soften, they'll stop building. Free land (and its not really going to be free) could prolong the willingness to invest, but it won't result in so much building that the cost of housing falls very far. The only people served by that happening have no power to make it happen. The only solution to the housing crisis is ethical, not economic.