Sandbox villages

The parenthesis is the substantial part of the definition. A sandbox village need not be geographically defined, which detaches the idea from every existing version of the intentional community and from the seasteading and charter city proposals Marsh treats as attempts by the wealthy to dissociate from their negative image. What is being tried out is governance and collaboration, and both can be tried among people who never share a location, since her framework has nations existing across borders and generations, user groups constituted by whoever is affected by an action and stigmergic collaboration operating without any shared physical space. The purpose is experimental rather than exemplary. A sandbox is somewhere to find out whether something works, which implies that failures are expected and that no single design is being advocated in advance. That fits her general position, since the fourth age of nations is described as a potential society rather than a specified one, and her governance proposals are mechanisms rather than a constitution. It also fits her objection to systems argued from first principles and then imposed, which is what she says went wrong with democracy and communism alike. The word village supplies scale without supplying place. A sandbox is small enough that a failure costs little and the results are legible, which is the same reasoning behind splintering into nodes rather than growing a single system.

Intentional communities, from 1800s utopian settlements to modern ecovillages, are the traditional form and are almost always geographically defined. Regulatory sandboxes in finance and technology give the term its current sense of a bounded space for controlled experiment. Charter cities and seasteading propose new jurisdictions, and Marsh treats those specifically as dissociation by the wealthy rather than as experiments. Digital communities and network states are the nearest non-geographic parallels. Her version differs from all of them by combining the experimental framing with the absence of territory, which removes both the exit costs of a physical community and the sovereignty claims of a new jurisdiction.