New Athens founding story

In a nutshell, everything in America started sucking all at once. And a city is the smallest social unit at which everything can be fixed all at once. Not too big, not too small—just right.

Progressives are world-class builders of world-devouring technology, who aren’t mean per say but can’t be bothered to distinguish good from bad, helpful from dehumanizing. Geniuses without vocabulary for asking essential questions of life. The benality of evil came from here.

Conservatives aren’t crazy, and some are brilliant, but they’re terrible at doing things that scale and often let their (warranted!) paranoia get the best of them. Which rthen leads to ill will, isolation, and statis. light bulb was at a classical schooland realizing all lessons were getting harmed the moment students walked out of the building. it’s possible to build pockets of resistance, like a classical school, but they’ll always get bullied back to the mean. nobody knows what to do. no vehicle for putting your energy into. nothing hard enough.

but this is that.

In the 2010's I founded a few different companies in SF. The most interesting was a branding agency that helped startups (and big companies like Google, and VC firms we've all heard of here) recruit employees based on the cultural objectives of founders. In short, I saw a rare, surprisingly careful flavor of hypergrowth unfold across a dozen or so companies.

Then I got disillusioned. I moved to rural Ohio. Lifestyle and money played a role (it's pricy to raise a family in the Bay, if you haven't noticed), but my fundamental complaint was over the questions that very few tech people ask, namely "we can build X, but should we?"

When my oldest son turned four, I became obsessed with the education system. I quickly learned our local schools were...how to put this diplomatically...unspeakably arrogant and a temple to intellectual laziness. So I helped start a classical charter school associated with Hillsdale College—that bastion of conservatism so many of my tech friends loved to hate. In this new world I grew a whole new community of whip smart, curious, and humble (yup) people who were nonetheless very, very bad at building organizations.

New Athens was born from this stew of cultural experiences and observations of our political moment, especially the on-the-ground strengths and weaknesses of Democrats and Republicans. Through it all, believe it or not, I never particularly disliked any person I worked with. The radical leftists, the arch conservatives—they all had something to say, and when I stopped to listen, which I actually did on occasion, it was a rare day I didn't nod along with at least some agreement.

The ah-ha came soon enough. I was stumbling around dozens of ideas. But one phrase, "raise a family on a single income," started changing conversations. It reminded me of the feeling of finding product-market-fit, back in my tech days: eyes would bulge. "That—fucking THAT. I want THAT." That was the vibe. And then the next moment people—and truly, I mean everyone—would either laugh or grow sad, or both, and tell me those days will never come back.

I'll shamelessly admit I guzzled the "Make Something People Want" Kool Aid in the 2010's. (Not sure that's still being served in AI-land.) In a sense, New Athens is an exercise in taking "raise a family on a single income" to its logical extreme. And it turns out, a lot of people, and companies, and governments, and maybe even humanity itself, stands to benefit if I/we/America can figure out how to deliver. To come full circle, yes, we SHOULD build this.

Last thought for now: If you've got a sharp eye, you'll notice that the entire city, as it's currently laid out, is an enormous staffing model and vehicle for people who know more than I do on dozens of topics. If that describes you, shoot me a DM or email me at jackson@movetonewathens.com.

Jackson

From a run-in with the horrors of communism as a teenager, to a decade as a founder in SF, to a more recent foray into the Classical education movement, I've...been around. And I've simultaniously, though perhaps strangly, yet to make any enemies (that I'm aware of). New Athens is, finally, the one idea I've shared widely in my personal network almost everyone wants for themselves.

For the decade prior I'd idolized the Make Something People Want ethos. But I'd slowly realized there's a prerequisite: founders must want the best for their users. And too many founders, and tech people generally, did not know what they themselves needed to live full lives.

, those glorious years I dedicated to the quarterly performance of corporate America

. We began as a response to the problem of online brainrot—my own