Meet the teams set to launch New Athens.
New Athens will deploy a set of Launch Teams to guide the development of the city, each with a mandate on an important topic. The teams will be privately capitalized by investors in New Athens. Teams will act as recruiters and investors themselves, with the practical task of recruiting or the seeding businesses, non-profits, and government agencies needed to achieve the team’s mandate.
Classical Education Team
Diagnosis: Education in America—public and private—is not only expensive and bureaucratic, but demoralized and feckless in the face of AI.
Team mandate: Restore the original promise of public education in America: high-expectation instruction in the liberal arts and sciences, including instruction in basic moral rights and wrongs, to prepare students to live in—and fight for—democratic self-rule. Prioritize efforts to: increase transparency and choice for parents, remove technology from classrooms and school operations, ensure early and thorough instruction in reading, writing, and basic math, and tighten standards for student behavior and decorum.
Church/State Coordination Team
Diagnosis: The US Constitution mandates strict separation of church and state. Despite good intentions, over the last 100 years the relationship became adversarial: a power struggle of church versus state. This shift was misguided and wrong. The proper framing was, and still is, how to divide responsibilities.
Team mandate: Re-strike the balance of responsibilities held by churches (and other houses of worship) and government. Put special attention on activities commonly referred to as the “social safety net,” including healthcare, mental health, childcare, eldercare, and poverty alleviation.
Governance Team
Diagnosis: Ask 10 Americans to describe how our government works, and you’ll get 11 different answers. Half of each answer will be factually inaccurate, half will be whatever they saw on social media yesterday, and all will understate the dysfunction, corruption, and malaise regularly described by actual elected officials.
Team mandate: Reorient every facet of government around a single metric: increase the number of families that choose to live on a single income.
Build Team
Diagnosis: 100 years ago, success in the construction industry was a matter of craftsmen doing their jobs well, because their reputations turned on the quality of their work—and a careless mistake brought a man shame. Today, the industry has devolved into a circular firing squad of lawyers battling lawyers over the ability of laborers, a social underclass scorned by lawyers, to adhere to regulations written thousands of miles away by yet more lawyers. Proof: ‘new build’ is a polite euphemism for a high-price, low-quality house.
Team mandate: The path to affordability: The New Athens Corp of Engineers. A large, ultra-low-cost construction workforce modeled on the Army Corp of Engineers, equal parts discipline and craft, led by expert tradesmen and staffed by young men and women in search of adventure and an alternative to digital life. Payment: room, board, minimum wage, and, after a 3-year tour of duty, full ownership of a single-family home.
Economic Development Team
Diagnosis: Across the economy, business leaders and entrepreneurs are under immense pressure from banks and investors to integrate AI into every facet of their companies. The widely understood goal is to replace human workers with machines. Some business leaders think this is wise and good; others disagree, in part because their customers don’t actually want to use AI. A schism is brewing.
Team mandate: Create a national business hub for companies that put people before AI. Recruit businesses from around the country that have been sidelined by investors and bankers who bet everything on AI. Rip a page out of the Silicon Valley playbook and race to develop a self-reinforcing labor pool of the smartest, most ambitious professionals who put people first. Establish New Athens as the top destination for new grads looking for adventure and money, akin to Wall Street in the 80’s and 90’s and Silicon Valley since.
City Planning Team
Diagnosis: America used to build beautiful, durable buildings, neighborhoods, and whole towns quickly. Today we slowly add ugly, disposable buildings to dysfunctional, crumbling cities we used to love but quietly harbor plans to leave. The most ambitious projects in America today are now master-planned retirement communities, casinos, and data centers.
Team mandate: Design beautiful, livable neighborhoods on the principals of New-Traditional architecture and city planning, including streets and parks where groups of kids can play safely without adult supervision. Success is parents, without fear or hesitation, kicking their kids out of the house with one rule: “Be back before dinner!”
Senior Citizen Integration Team
Diagnosis: Against the example of every noble civilization in human history, in which the elderly are sought for guidance and assist in raising their grandchildren, most Americans pretend death doesn’t exist and hide the elderly in ‘care homes’ staffed by strangers. America has transformed the stage of life historically associated with wisdom and honor into a humiliating second childhood.
Team mandate: Re-enlist retirees into as many aspects of home and civic life as possible. Prioritize the construction of multi-generational housing and flexible options for in-home care. In collaboration with the other Launch Teams, bake into city life the physical and intellectual nourishment that sustains healthy aging. In particular, prioritize the mass enlistment of retirees into the school system as 1:1 tutors in reading, writing, and math.
Jobs and Ops Team
Diagnosis: The labor market is indifferent to parenthood. Long term, this is detrimental to everyone: employers, parents, children, and society at-large.
Team mandate: Use employment law and other mechanisms to make it normal and profitable for employers to offer high-quality, well-paid, part-time jobs. Specifically, create city-wide standards for 3, 6, 9, and 12 hour work shifts (in addition to the legacy 8-hour shift.) Advise employers on how to use the new shift options to create more efficient and profitable staffing models. Advise employees, especially parents, on how the new shift options can be used to shape home life around family goals, not just employer goals.
Technology Regulation Team
Diagnosis: Every sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic heroin.
Team mandate: Make use of all tools—legal, social, financial, and architectural—to enable rapid, city-wide bans on addictive and transhuman technologies. Morphine as a surgical aid has meaningfully benefited the human race; morphine as a recreational drug is antisocial. Develop a framework for making granular distinctions. Create a democratic process for making decisions to ban, un-ban, and regulate these technologies. Begin with a full ban—for all children and adults—on smartphones, smartwatches, smart glasses, and non-medical implants.
Food and Land Team
Diagnosis: Most children today believe food comes from grocery stores (it grows in the ground); that ‘outside’ is where you have to wear sunscreen (being outside is normal); and that forests are where kids get eaten by bears (just, no). Americans, like all people, do not in fact live on the internet—we live on earth. Deep friendships, a sense of place, the instinct to check in on a struggling neighbor: all depend on a connection to physical reality.
Team mandate: Make nature normal again. Seed New Athens’ culture by connecting the city to the land it rests upon, local ecosystems, and the seasons. Fight the artificial division between the ‘human’ and the ‘natural’ world. Ensure every home is within walking distance of a natural space. Set the foundation for physical health by re-personalizing the relationship between residents and farmers and prioritizing the availability of unprocessed, locally-grown food and meat.
Quick links
- The game plan – Learn about the teams we’re assembling to build the city.
- Who New Athens is for – Who we’re recruiting to move to the city, and why they say yes.
- Newsletter – Progress reports, news, and essays from our team members.
- Partner with us – Do you represent a company or organization? Partner with us.
- Join the waitlist - Indicate your interest in moving to the city.
- Get involved - Help bring New Athens to life.
- FAQ - Questions we’ve been asked, including the wild ones, and our answers.