Wanted to reshare this post from Hickman on X:
https://x.com/shagbark_hick/status/1979187449277358392
Realistically, any vision of "reviving a small rural town" requires several things:
1. A "core" of perhaps six men working in concert
2. A town with very-very-cheap real estate and *ample* cheap housing
3. The six men making a pact to all buy property at the same time -- and vowing to stay for 5 years at least
4. The six men also working to obtain influence in local institutions (town council, police force, utilities, downtown businesses)
5. The six men agreeing to keep things absolutely quiet until they've acquired real estate -- and then boosting the town by name in their respective online circles.
6. Their efforts must also be individual in nature, not collectivized under a single company, banner, name, or public mission statement.
This is what I might call "the flash mob model" of small town revival. It does several things all at once; it keeps the place off the radar of the general public until the time is right, it "shocks" the local status quo in a distributed, decentralized way, and it establishes a "hard core" of first-settlers that can make it easier for others to move to that town later.
The biggest challenge of deploying this model is finding 6 footloose men with an interest in settling somewhere remote, depressed, dysfunctional, and with long periods of foul weather. They must also each independently have enough free cash to purchase a house and hopefully also some kind of commercial real estate. IF you can get that started -- you seriously stand a chance at injecting some life into a dying town, and turning it into the kind of "destination" that is much-needed amongst thinking people in the USA.
These are the fruits of a recent discussion I had with a friend of mine who has, like me, thought about these kinds of things for many years.
But again, finding six men -- thinking men, and at that, thinking men with savings -- who wish to commit several years of their life to a distressed town in Upstate NY is not easy. Of course, the fruits the project could bear could really be incredible. I genuinely think that by shifting the energy we find in the better corners of this website to the IRL, offline space -- and giving that energy a definitive, very-low-cost outlet in Upstate NY -- we could do an immense service both to this place and to American intellectual culture at large.
Realistically, any vision of "reviving a small rural town" requires several things:
1. A "core" of perhaps six men working in concert
2. A town with very-very-cheap real estate and *ample* cheap housing
3. The six men making a pact to all buy property at the same time -- and vowing to stay for 5 years at least
4. The six men also working to obtain influence in local institutions (town council, police force, utilities, downtown businesses)
5. The six men agreeing to keep things absolutely quiet until they've acquired real estate -- and then boosting the town by name in their respective online circles.
6. Their efforts must also be individual in nature, not collectivized under a single company, banner, name, or public mission statement.
This is what I might call "the flash mob model" of small town revival. It does several things all at once; it keeps the place off the radar of the general public until the time is right, it "shocks" the local status quo in a distributed, decentralized way, and it establishes a "hard core" of first-settlers that can make it easier for others to move to that town later.
The biggest challenge of deploying this model is finding 6 footloose men with an interest in settling somewhere remote, depressed, dysfunctional, and with long periods of foul weather. They must also each independently have enough free cash to purchase a house and hopefully also some kind of commercial real estate. IF you can get that started -- you seriously stand a chance at injecting some life into a dying town, and turning it into the kind of "destination" that is much-needed amongst thinking people in the USA.
These are the fruits of a recent discussion I had with a friend of mine who has, like me, thought about these kinds of things for many years.
But again, finding six men -- thinking men, and at that, thinking men with savings -- who wish to commit several years of their life to a distressed town in Upstate NY is not easy. Of course, the fruits the project could bear could really be incredible. I genuinely think that by shifting the energy we find in the better corners of this website to the IRL, offline space -- and giving that energy a definitive, very-low-cost outlet in Upstate NY -- we could do an immense service both to this place and to American intellectual culture at large.