The Empirical Turn in Voluntary Governance
Polis Labs publishes research on parallel societies, network states, popups, novel governance architectures, and civic innovation.
The current work is methodologically rigorous and participatory. We are heavily influenced by the Participatory Action Research (PAR) tradition and engaged ethnography.
The Edge City Patagonia Focus Group Study examines how local residents of San Martín de los Andes, Argentina experienced Edge City Patagonia, an experimental pop-up community held in late 2025. Where most research on these initiatives studies the international participants, this study turns to the host population. Drawing on a focus group with ten residents, it traces their path from initial confusion and mistrust through a threshold moment of direct participation to a strongly positive experience. The central finding is that the primary design challenge is not communication but participation architecture: because the event itself was what made it comprehensible, the most effective intervention is lowering the threshold of first contact.
This study by Polis Labs examines the experiences of participants in “Alphaville,” a month-long experimental community residency designed to prototype decentralized governance and network state models. Through focus group research, the study captures what drew participants to the initiative, while also surfacing their critiques and concerns across several areas. The findings offer a candid, close-up view of what it actually looks and feels like to live and work inside one of these emerging experimental communities. For anyone curious about where the network state movement is headed and what participants themselves have to say about it, this report provides rare, data-rich insight from the people who were there.
An experimental framework for decentralized conflict resolution in aligned communities of 50–200.
This P2R model lays out an experimental peer-led strategy for handling conflict and friction without managers, moderators, or centralized authority. Still being tested. Open to critique.
Why subscribe?
• Stay ahead of emerging trends and in network nations, cyberstates, parallel societies, and beyond
• Support the development of independent, future-focused research
Our Research commitments
Polis Labs does not do research in a merely academic sense. We do research for interventionist purposes, theoretical and practical, aimed at identifying what actually works for the long-term survival of voluntary communities under conditions of civilizational-scale coordination failure. Our first phase is qualitative and focused on interactive dynamics, how people actually coordinate, defect, cooperate, and self-organize, because the quantitative work only earns its keep once the qualitative ground is mapped.
We believe in voluntary order, and develop our activities with this principle over all others. We disdain coercion and recognize that the parallel society movement is based on voluntary action. We also don’t pretend the research is value-neutral. We name what we’re optimizing for, and we let the work be judged against it.
We embed in parallel societies and intentional communities, treating members as co-authors rather than subjects of the research. We follow the action research tradition of participatory engagement for the purposes of the study.
The patterns that determine whether a community holds or fractures are mostly unwritten. Our methods are built to surface them, not to bypass them.
Research, frameworks, and field reports are published openly so that network builders and pop-up architects can access critical information on the successes and failures of other pop-ups and community experiments.
We are building scaffolding for something that does not yet exist, under conditions where the existing order is doing exactly what it was built to do, and what it was built to do is no longer survivable.