Building the physical layer for a digital generation.
The remote work revolution stopped halfway. We freed labor from the office. We did not free it from the landlord, the city, the grid, or the supply chain. A generation now earns its income from a laptop and pays it back, in full, to systems it does not own.
Project Basalt is the next move.
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The next decade rewards ownership of the physical layer. Cloud-native work created mobility. Mobility created rootlessness. The asset class that compounds for the next generation of remote workers is not equity in someone else's company — it is land, power, water, and governance they own outright.
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The infrastructure to do this is now cheap. Starlink solved rural connectivity in 2022. Solar plus storage broke €1/W in 2023. Land in Eastern Europe trades at a fraction of EU averages. The bottleneck is not capital or technology. It is willingness to do unsexy work for ten years.
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Most attempts at this fail at governance, not infrastructure. Communes die because two people can't stand each other and there is no system. Network states die because nobody actually moves. Co-living brands die because the operator extracts the rent. We are taking a fourth path: a sociocratic operating system, version-controlled in public, designed to survive founder turnover and to fork to new sites.
A self-sustaining village of remote workers, on land we own, governed by a written constitution we wrote, with a measurable path off external power, water, and eventually fiat currency.
Not a retreat. Not a brand. Not a movement.
A working settlement under construction, run by the people who live in it.
The asset is the operating system. The Alpha Site at Drinić, Bosnia and Herzegovina is the first instantiation. The OS is designed to fork.
If, while reading this, you are not already asking how soon can I move, you are not the candidate.
We are looking for engineers, operators, builders, tradespeople, and high-skill remote workers who:
- Earn from a laptop and want their hands on something real.
- Have lived in three cities and felt at home in none.
- Read this repository and recognize it as the thing they would have built themselves, given another year of saved evenings.
Cost to apply: a one-hour form. Cost to be declined: nothing. Cost to never apply because the timing felt wrong: the rest of your life paying somebody else's mortgage.
Most projects in this space optimize for attracting members. We optimize for filtering them.
A cohort of five who survive Phase 1 is worth more than a thousand-person Discord. We are building the kind of place where the people who arrive are the people you want as neighbors for thirty years. The vetting protocol is intentionally demanding because admission is, in practice, irreversible.
Three structural choices we believe matter:
- The OS is the asset. Every system here is open, version-controlled, and forkable. We are not selling access to a clubhouse; we are publishing a method.
- Maintenance ranks equal to growth. A society that builds faster than it maintains collapses. Sweat hours on upkeep earn the same rate as sweat hours on glamour work.
- Exit is a normal event, not a betrayal. Members own portable shares in a legal entity, can leave at any time, and are bought out under terms negotiated before anyone joined.
- Not a startup. There is no exit, no acquisition, no IPO.
- Not a sovereign-citizen project. We comply fully with the laws of the host jurisdiction.
- Not an ideology. We do not require shared belief beyond the Manifesto.
- Not a charity. Membership requires labor, capital, or both.
- Not for everyone. By design.
Phase 0 — Digital Cohort. May 2026.
The operating system is published. Two founders are committed. The Alpha Site has been identified and is under evaluation. The treasury is opening. We are not seeking investors. We are seeking the next three to five members who would have started this themselves if we hadn't.
In this order:
- MANIFESTO.md — what this is and why.
- GOVERNANCE.md — how decisions are made.
- ECONOMICS.md — how value enters, accumulates, and exits.
- BUDGET.md — what each phase actually costs.
- VETTING.md — how members are admitted.
- CHARTER-PHASE-0.md — the founders' six-month delivery commitments.
The total reading load is roughly 90 minutes. We do not consider applications from people who have not done it.
Submit Stage 1 of the vetting protocol via the application form: (form link will be published with the first public funnel — see vetting/application-stage-1.md for the questions in advance).
We respond to every serious application within 14 days. We say no often. When we say yes, it means something.
| Phase | 0 — Digital Cohort |
| Founding members | 2 |
| Alpha Site | Drinić, Bosnia and Herzegovina (under evaluation) |
| Legal entity | d.o.o. formation in progress |
| Treasury | Opening |
| Trial Members | 0 of target 3–5 |
| OS version | v1.0 (May 2026) |
Open a GitHub issue for substantive questions about the OS or the project. Application materials are submitted via the form, not in issues.
The OS is open. The land is real. The seats are limited.