Upadaria

We are casting a vision for the future in which people can build distributed freedom cities as private developments and subscriber-based networks within an area. People who love freedom, want success and prosperity, and desire to fulfill their own dreams, need a way to connect and collaborate in a larger area network of relationships and associations.

 

Together, these networks and nodes basically resemble the emergence of a large city that is self-contained, self-sustaining, and comprehensive in its scope of services and resources. It is a city distributed within and among all the communities of a specific area but that, despite being distributed, is for all that still a fully functional city serving its netizens, online-based subscribers, and the public.

 

The Freedomist is all about unilateral actions to promote real freedom and prosperity that leaves nobody in any demographic or community behind. The distributed freedom city concept takes the idea of a privately developed free city, as if it was an entire city created intentionally on freedom building principles and ideals, and distributes it throughout an area in the form of a digital platform and distributed facilities where its netizens can gather and access activities, social events, services, and resources.

 

Instead of one city in one single place, parts of the city, as facilities that provide services or even clustered housing developments affiliated with this virtual city are distributed all over, here and there. Parts of the distributed city, in the form of physical facilities and hubs, exist here and there in every village, township, town, county, or other municipality in its service area. The netizens include eResidents, eCitizens, Freeholders, Ecclesians, Peers, Electors, and Nobles, which are different types of subscriptions based on freewill participation. These netizens of the “virtual-to-local” distributed city live throughout the area, some in clustered housing affiliated with the virtual city and most wherever they already lived before the city came into existence.

What does the city offer? Through an economy of some scale, pooling of resources, and the ability to connect thousands of people for mutual benefit and profit, the city could meet most basic human needs of its netizens (what all the different subscribers are called) and ensure the protection of their rights, persons, and property from all harm. This is mostly through legal aid, practical mutual assurance among members, clubs that meet different needs, including a safety and home security cooperative, lobbying governments, viting en bloc, and a strong media presence and web presence.

 

While our distributed cities may be owned/developed and managed by a local chapter organization of our society, as the administrator, they will serve a broad and pluralistic community of freedom builders and freedom seekers. This is the private city concept wherein the administrators serve the netizens as clients and customers whose free market demands form the basis of a truly democratic feedback loop. The city serves its netizens, not the other way around, or it goes bankrupt.

 

A freedom city is a city ruled by the Bill of Rights and the core ideas and principles of freedom for all with a strong foundation of virtue, liberty, and independence. A distributed freedom city is basically a virtual-to-local community of people within a larger area who act in harmony to build freedom for themselves and for others.

In our terminology we call these Upo Shires, using the term shire from the Middle Ages to denote an area that is within a larger Duchy or Kingdom but which is also more or less self-reliant and self-governing as well self-sustaining. The term Upo denotes the fact these distributed cities would adhere to the UPDR ideals of governance, among other concepts and practices. In old England a Shire was equivalent to a County, more or less, so we often use the term Freedom Shires to describe a County wherein most to all local officials adhere to the spirit and intent of the US Bill of Rights as the highest law and standard of the land.

 

But a Upo Shire as a distributed freedom city isn’t a County, it is a virtual-to-local community that resembles a freedom shire, only it’s private and being part of it as a netizen of any kind is strictly based on freewill participation. Imagine a service area for a Upo Shire, as a distributed virtual-to-local “city”, including around 12 or so Counties. Imagine then a new county was formed, based on a city, with its own name and identity, only instead of being in one place, parts of it, from its facilities and core infrastructure to its people, are placed within each of the constituent communities within all of the Counties.

 

Conceptually this can be difficult to fathom. The reader who thinks maybe this is a literal physical city or that it is just a virtual or imagined city without substance would be understandably confused. Our concept is different than those but also somewhat like those cities. We ensuing a city that is is planned, like most cities, albeit in stages and phases, with various types and levels of both virtual and physical developments arising both from the city planners and administrators on one hand and private initiative by netizens and constituent entities or subdivisions on the other hand.

Above is an illustration of service area for a distributed Upo City, with buildings, hubs, and netizens distributed throughout a larger area that includes all or parts of 20 some counties and more than 700,000 people.

Setting up the virtual space and holding local gatherings to impart the vision, gather city-builders and leaders, and creating a master development plan to guide both virtual and physical developments is the first major stage of development for such a distributed private city. In our case, we will gather people through an international platform called “The Virtual Commonwealth of Upadaria” (VCU) and, from those who become Peers of our international society, a core area chapter organization will emerge which will take on the city-building responsibilities.

 

As with everything we share, your idea of a virtual-to-local distributed city may differ from ours, and in a given area just as there are multiple physical cities, there may be multiple distributed private cities, although one hopes these multiple private cities, if they are freedom cities at heart, will cooperate and collaborate with one another.

 

These distributed private cities are real things, as we envision them: they will have some sort of city-center or hub, perhaps the size of large village, and multiple smaller hubs, little villages, all over as well as various facilities to serve their netizens. The city, as an incorporated entity, will own land and property. In our case, the lands are owned by a land trust operated by an area chapter organization for our mutual benefit, missions, and refugee support society, which local chapter acts as the private developer and administrator of the city.

We envision the proliferation of multiple distributed free cities, even in one area, as a step toward creating permanent and robust alternative institutions that protect the rights, persons, and property of their netizens, advance a free market, and grow prosperity.

 

As noted, and to reiterate, a key aspect of a private city is that it’s not a democracy, it’s basically a private entity that has clients, the netizens, who use the power of association and how they spend their money to give ongoing feedback within a free market environment. This is a perfect democracy: the consensus of the clients is always dynamically shared with the provider who either serves their needs or faces a loss of netizen subscribers.

 

Your version of a distributed freedom city may be more like a traditional city in its governance. Our version does have a governance structure and indeed a city government, but real ownership of assets isn’t democratic in the classic sense, it is the pure democracy of the free market.

 

The city itself starts as a sub-network within the virtual platform of Upadaria, but its physical aspects include an area chapter community of our society, a land trust, mutual benefit corporations, clubs, and other entities chartered and/or licensed by the area chapter organization.

 

The deliberate creation of these distributed freedom cities, whether or not it is through the Upadaria Platform as a catalyst and a local society chapter as the project developer, is the next evolution in the cause of advancing freedom for all that leaves nobody behind.