The science of voluntary order
thesis
Voluntary governance is the foundation for peace, prosperity, and human flourishing. Coercive, brittle institutions are buckling under shocks they cannot absorb, much less correct. The task is to build coordination primitives that hold consent and planetary preservation as nonnegotiable.
Research agenda
How governance forms emerge from the bottom up, how individuals engage with novel rules in these nascent community formations, and how exit rights keep the resulting systems honest.
Constitutional design, dispute resolution, resource allocation, and membership rules for opt-in communities that function without coercive authority. Building the governance menu.
Constitutional design, dispute resolution, resource allocation, and membership rules for opt-in communities that function without coercive authority.
Drawing on Ostrom, Hayek, Buchanan, and Scott to build rigorous theoretical foundations for decentralized, jurisdictionally competitive governance that scales without hierarchy.
Primary data from pop-up cities, network state residencies, and intentional communities. Empirical research on governance sentiment, conflict patterns, and coordination capacity.
Open-access models
Polycrisis Risk Model
An interactive, scenario-based model mapping nine interlocking civilizational systems, from geopolitical stability and energy resilience to governance legitimacy and biodiversity.
The model rests on a working hypothesis: the polycrisis is not a primary set of phenomena but a series of downstream outputs. Structural game-theoretic failures, the multipolar traps Schmachtenberger and others have mapped, boil over into coercive governance regimes when voluntary coordination breaks down at scale. Those regimes generate the cascade dynamics we recognize as climate breakdown, AI risk, information collapse, etc.
Move sliders, watch collapse probability update, and see why parallel societies must be built now, rapidly and globally.
Benchmarking governance structures across economic freedom, exit rights, and epistemic freedom dimensions
Research outputs
Participatory, boots-on-the-ground research with existing parallel societies, intentional communities, cooperatives, and historical analogs, documenting how communities actually govern themselves without coercive authority. Free to the public.
Live pilots with partner communities and PolisHubs, where the lab proposes a governance configuration, deploys it, and reports on what happened.
Theoretical papers, design documents, and comparative studies that articulate Applied Human Governance as a discipline and Synousiology as the science.
Concrete artifacts communities can adopt and adapt: governance templates, dispute resolution tooling, consent mechanisms, polycrisis models, and decision-making structures.
Recent Posts
Compliance Is Not Legitimacy: Key Lessons from Network School's Malaysia Exit
AUGUST 5th, 2026
A post-mortem on the eviction, and a field guide for what comes next
Through Local Eyes: When a Pop-Up City Comes to Patagonia
JUNE 4th, 2026
Preview of the Edge City Patagonia Focus Group Study (San Martín de los Andes, Argentina); Full Study Available
Pop-Up City Findings: Minding the Decentralization Gap
MAY 13th, 2026
A snapshot of the Alphaville Focus Group Research; Full Study Available
PolisHubs handles the hands-on work
Polis Labs produces the research. PolisHubs, our affiliated for-profit consultancy, takes that research into the field, working directly with network state founders on governance architecture, coordination audits, and community design.