Daily Balajisms - HIMBY and Building Man

Sprawl is good. Building culture is good.

The “Yes In My Back Yard” (YIMBY) pro-housing movement is popular nowadays. In the context of big cities and dense areas, it usually means building vertically - more skyscrapers to fight NIMBY-ism. Balaji Srinivasan has a different take – building horizontally is much faster and cheaper. This is how American settlers did it. Hence HIMBY.

People will object immediately that the frontier has closed, and we don’t have enough space, and sprawl creates traffic jams and long commutes. So why would be HIMBY feasible and desirable today? Balaji says often, that the internet truly begun in 2020, as we went digital-first, and even remote-first (at least for a time of the Covid-19 pandemic).

Remote work, as an important cultural and moral innovation, combined with tech like Starlink, can help sovereign collectives to crowdfund territory and build new hacker-houses, cul-de-sacs and even towns in the middle of nowhere. These could be even car-free, or self-driving only, using Boring company tunnels underground and leaving the city for pedestrians.

Balaji @balajis

HIMBY > YIMBY > NIMBY Building is good, and vertical building in dense cities is better than nothing, but *horizontal* building in the middle of nowhere is better still. Burning Man has ~70k temporary units up in a few days. What could Building Man look like, if not temporary?

jin @dankvr

- enormous permitting process to build skyscrapers - horizontal sprawl is good - v1 startup cities looks something like burning man / cities of the wild west - one story, roads between them, can move around, much more dynamic geography aligns with much of my VR inspo / designs https://t.co/ZCYuErMWeL

Balaji says that Burning Man is ok, but we need Building Man. Something like the Olympics for builders. People attending Burning Man can create around 70 thousand units within a few days. The festival is something like the American experiment in Communism, with money-less gift economy. But once the festival is over, people go home.

Balaji says that there is a continuum in time and alignment of such communities. People meet online and they form offline bonds. It can be a meeting of two people for one day. It can be a festival or a workshop that takes a week. It can be an online/offline course. But what about building something more permanent, what Balaji calls reverse diasporas?

We might need reverse tornados for that - a metaphor for web3. Crypto started Wall Street-first, which is odd. American settlers have built churches and farms first. Today, this would be analogous to universities and Main Street (small businesses) being built first.

Often we hear a criticism that web3 is a closed bubble and its enthusiasts cannot connect web3 to the real economy and physical stuff. But Balaji explains that crypto is like Internet in 2000, still very early.

Once the decentralized finance (DeFi) and decentralized science (DeSci) scale with new tech stacks, they might play a huge role of reverse tornados – helping to build physical stuff in remote locations with speed, instead of destroying things. 

Communism actually might work on a family/clan level, as mutual trust is high. Central planning might even work on a larger scale, enabled by AI. At least that’s a provocative thesis in Balaji’s book The Network State – a section titled “China Can Make a Pencil”.

But web3 brings a crucial innovation in terms of democratizing equity investments. Equity facilitates alignment of all parties. And crypto-REITs (crypto Real Estate Investment Trusts) will enable people to collectively own their newly built towns and network archipelagos. It is like a v3 that can beat both capitalism and its discontents.

Because a community is more than a market and cannot be replaced by the state.

Home = alignment.