Backstory

New Athens was instigated by me, Jackson Solway. Unlike most About pages, used by companies to paper over the chaos and associated felonies of their early days, I’d like to share the honest backstory on this whole endeavor. It’s somewhat interesting, and transparency is also valuable for its own sake: For anyone who’s drawn to the city, you deserve to know who’ll be pulling a lot of the strings, and for better or worse that’s me.

Five of my personal interests merged into New Athens.

Education reform

First, a few years ago I fell into the world of education reform. My oldest son had reached school age, and to avoid sending him to the local public school I dropped out of the tech industry and helped found a Classical charter school associated with Hillsdale College. A local activist called us “Trump’s new ultra-MAGA Christian Nationalist school,” and I caught eyebrows from some old coworkers. Oh well.

Importantly, I led school operations and waged an 18-month bureaucratic holy war to rid the school of screens. It basically worked, reading scores went through the roof, and I got to watch hundreds of old-school friendships blossom. Still makes me tear up.

On the other hand, outside school property I watched as the world grew—and grows—increasingly mad.

One day the thought crossed my mind: What does it mean for a school to cultivate students of high character, if the world they graduate into does not value people of high character? I know that’s hyperbole, but many people in the Classical education movement share a version of this fear. I’d seen school reform work—I was living it—so I started to think, very practically, about fixing whatever the thing is that’s bigger than a school. I eventually figured that’s what cities are.

(For clarity, the school I helped start was and is secular and non-partisan. If anything, it resembles the public school I attended in Seattle in the 90’s: books, math, pencils, paper, glue sticks, passing notes, screwing around at recess, etc. And not a screen in sight.)

The grandkids factor

Second, I want grandkids. The problem is that childhood in modern America, by default, turns boys and girls into political rivals. On the other hand, if my wife and I can raise our boys to be anything besides cruel actual-racist lunatics, and they marry women who are anything besides hysterical communist lunatics, and we get some grandkids out of the equation, we win.

If we’re going to get to grandkids, I realized I needed, somehow, to help repair the soil of childhood.

Humans vs. Machines (yea, we’re there)

Third, I came up with a theory we discuss a lot behind the scenes. I’m not sure how original this is (probably isn’t), but the theory is that disputes over the proper use of technology are accelerating just as fast as the AI industry, if not faster, and may spark a major social schism in the US, if not globally. One side will adopt the digital world as the real world, and the other side will step back from life online and recommit to physical reality. Not full-meal-deal Amish, but with a fundamental skepticism, in lieu of fundamental excitement, for new tech.

This schism will scramble politics—again. This is a big prediction that may not come true, but it’s been useful to ponder in fleshing out the basic contours of New Athens.

Steering human capital

Forth, I’ve long been intrigued by what America does with its “best and brightest,” as the saying goes.

In my lifetime there have been four destinations, always a blend of a genuine call to adventure and national security strategy.

Before I was born, kids got funneled into the space race and winning the Cold War. Think: “I want to be an astronaut when I grow up!” When I was little, leaders of both political parties went all-in on financializing the economy, so the smart kids got funneled into finance and consulting jobs, notably on Wall Street. By the time I left home, with tech companies positioned to dominate the global economy, the destination was Silicon Valley. New mission: Start a company and change the world (in line with American interests).

Which takes us to today, and a big problem: The U.S. economy is all-on on AI, but AI companies do not hire young people.

When financialization led to millions of blue-collar jobs getting shipped overseas, or when software turned millions of service workers into software jockeys, at least there was still an out: get in on the game yourself by going into finance or tech.

But the AI industry truly, fully broke the deal. Not only do AI companies not hire young people, their main product, agents (and soon humanoid robots) are sold to companies as a replacement for entry-level workers…and maybe even all workers.

This tells me two things: 1) Young people are rightfully pissed, and 2) If they don’t see a path out soon, they’re going to turn to the thing all hopeless young people have turned to throughout history: political violence.

I have a better idea: before the youths finish sharpening their pitchforks and burn down the country, how about we set them to work rebuilding the America dream for themselves? Maybe build a city, or cities, in physical reality, recommitted to America’s founding values? Socially useful. Deeply rewarding. Hardest challenge there’s ever been, or ever will be. And maybe we won’t go extinct.

Have a sandwich (and don’t shoot me)

Finally, back in 2014 when I was living in San Francisco, I got scared the San Andreas fault would pop and the entire West Coast would fall into the ocean. It wasn’t just me—a bunch of scientists were saying it’s happened before and will happen again.

I Googled “prepper” and got a bunch of gun ads. The deeper you go down that rabbit hole, the more people you find with shipping containers full of ammo, fridges full of ill-gotten antibiotics, and overwhelming fear and paranoia. I made me feel bad.

But I like people, I reminded myself, so I came up with another idea: why not build a resilient community here in the good times, so when the bad times come the people with more guns than days of food will choose to join the community rather than shoot everyone and take all our stuff? I got sidetracked with young kids for a decade, but in some respects New Athens is a revival of my desire to be helpful and thus joined, rather than useless and looted.

Bonus: Writers who inspire me

Along the way I’ve been inspired by…almost everything and everyone. Recently, I’ve been enjoying the writing and speaking of Mary Harrington, Paul Kingsnorth, Jonathan Haidt, Walter Kirn, Louise Perry, Rob Henderson, Charles Marohn, Eric Weinstein, Bret Weinstein, and Heather Heying.

Bonus #2: Communism sucks

At a later date I’ll write more about my brush with communism as a teenager, where, traveling alone in China, in the aftermath of man-made famine, I did not see a single adult man over 50 years old who rose above my shoulders. I was no giant at 5’9”—but they maxed around 5’5”. I recall searching an entire shopping mall in a regional city and not finding a single shirt large enough to fit me.

A few months later I visited the S-21 prison and “killing fields” in Cambodia, where I stood in front of a 25-foot pile of human skulls as the grandchildren of the dead tugged my pant leg, begging for money.

I’ve been asked, tongue-in-cheek, if I’m “excited to be in charge of a whole city.” I don’t love the word “excited” for any of this. I fear revolution in my bones and view government, in the first place, as a magnet for psychopaths. I’d live in the woods if I didn’t have children with their whole lives ahead of them.

Maybe not the happiest note to end on, but that’s actually how this all got started.

Subscribe now

Note: I updated this post on July 13 to correct a few grammatical errors and clarify the section on steering human capital.

Subscribe now

A meta introduction

This is the first post in a series. I take notes constantly, physical and digital, that I collectively refer to as my scratchpad. Here, I’m going to grab some highlights from the past week-ish, expound for an hour or two, and post whatever I end up with.

For the uninitiated, this is in contrast to the “Founder Update,” a writing format I picked up in the tech industry. Those were basically a vehicle for founders to share private information with investors. Bluntly, I always found them soulless and performative—precisely what good writing isn’t—which offended me in a way that investors were unlikely to grok.

Another lens: you are investing in New Athens by reading this. So this is for you. And while I’m at it I’m going to have some fun.

Time to hit the phones (does anyone say that any more?)

Now that the New Athens website is live, I’m due to radically shift gears. Apart from calls with team members and a user feedback sessions, I’ve spent much of the past month heads-down. By contrast, in a past life I lived by my calendar and would regularly grind through 8–10 meaningful calls in a day. For better or worse, the pendulum is about to—and must—swing.

More complexity than I bargained for

The New Athens website is as much a writing project, as an information architecture project, as a staffing model, as a bet on particular global outcomes over the next few years. A city is many things to many people, but candidly I did not see this level of complexity coming. It took me longer than I anticipated to tease apart audiences and clarify the use cases of pages on the site. But what’s there is decent, I have a roadmap for further improvements, and, most importantly, in user research sessions nobody is getting lost any longer.

All at once, the process was exhilerating and I’m proud of the work…and I’m not sure I’d have taken it on if I knew what I was getting into. Checkpoint passed! Whew!

Who doesn’t love configuring SaaS products?

Over a three day stretch last week I poured myself into tooling. In some ways this was a good sign—I’d successfully put it off until I had enough information to do it right—but still, what a slog!

A partial list (skip ahead if you care for your sanity): I opened and/or configured accounts for Google Workspace, Fillout (forms), Notion (website CMS), Super (website host), Airtable (waitlist database and automations), 1Password (password management), and Missive (shared email imbox for the team). Add in a half-dozen domain name configuration tasks. And then securing social handles/pages, setting up profiles, and configuring notification settings on Substack, TikTok Instagram, X, and LinkedIn. (Are your eyes bleeding yet?) And then configuring notifications across tools and social platforms to flow into Missive (email tool), so everyone on the team can see and respond to activity in realtime.

Looking back, I think this was my fifth rodeo getting a basic ops stack off the ground. Every time I’ve done it, including this go-round, I have the thought, “Dang I’m pretty good—I should write a book on this!” but the closer I get to finishing, the more desperate I get to stop thinking about this crap and do something meaningful again.

I must not Slack. Slack is the mind killer. Slack is the little death…

I’m intentionally avoiding team chat apps (for now). We’re covering the base with text messages. I’ve got a lot more to say here, but for now I’ll note that Slack, Discord, and other chat apps put teams on a particular cultural path that I increasingly recognize as, at best, fraught.

Copywriting Center for Kids Who Can’t Read Good

In the run-up to publicly launching the site, I must have proofread the thing at least five times. I find this rather enojable, which is good because the site clocks in at 5500 words. That’s maybe not so much for an article, but it’s a lot of web copy. It all brought me back to my copywriting days. Oh, the memories!

…And the knowledge must not be lost! I can see it now, future me sitting the boys down, maybe they’re in middle school, dad passing on the essential distinctions between ad copy, brand marketing, conversion landing pages, audience segmentation... Eh, I can feel their eyes rolling already. Nevermind.

Until the next round, y’all. —JCS

The vast majority of feedback has been positive, in the “Looks cool!” and “Nice work!” vein. I’ll never turn that down, but a handful of comments went deeper or were constructively critical.

I have every reason to consider every reaction I can get my hands on, even from trolls. Reactions are gifts, at least in this early stage of the game. I’m also keen to grapple openly with what I hear. That’s how problems get solved—so we’ll just start doing that today.

If I responded meaningfully to the original comment I’ve included that here, too.

Last bit: If a comment was relayed to me privately, I’ve removed identifying information. I’ve also fixed the especially gut-wrenching spelling and grammatical errors. —JCS

“Smartphone-free utopia? Take my money.”

From a woman who has worked in tech for the last 15 years.

“I don’t know how I feel about no smartphones. I have family overseas and I don’t think they’d be happy if they couldn’t reach me quickly.”

From a graduate student.

“I changed to black and white for a while on my phone. I want those lawsuits showing how addictive social media and cell phones are to make some kind of difference, but I’m not sure what will happen.”

From a mom who moved from California to the Midwest to be closer to family and childcare.

“Does new Athens have a health commissioner yet??”

From a public health research scientist. Edging for the job right off the bat. Nice.

“What a shithole.”

From a thread on Hacker News, a forum popular in the Bay Area tech community.

My response: “It might be. Or it might not be.

I mean this in all sincerity, if you’re having that reaction, I invite you to join the waitlist to move to the city.

I’ve come to believe that people are mean and dismissive online (as you just were) not because they, and you, are mean and dismissive people, but because at a fundamental level there’s nothing to do on the internet. The few things we manage to do, or build, or change online are a whiff of shit on the breeze compared to the adventure, meaning, and risk of interacting with real people in physical reality.

You will benefit from moving to the city because building something in the real world with people you depend on, and who depend on you, will make you a better, happier human. Please consider it.

The waitlist form is here: https://newathens.fillout.com/waitlist

“This attempts to formalise a role for church/faith based enterprises in the welfare state. That’s political.”

From the aforementioned forum thread.

My response: “Yes, you’re right: it’s political. The whole thing is deeply political. I worked in tech in SF from 2010–2020 and one of the big mistakes of the era, IMO, was pretending that certain topics weren’t political. Or that they were no longer political because of “progress.”

In 2020 my wife and I moved to rural Appalachia, where her parents live, because they were excited to help with childcare. Without getting into the pros and cons of city vs. rural living, or blue vs. red culture, I can confidently report that many (most?) topics tech people consider non-political are all people here want to talk about—because here those topics are considered THE MOST IMPORTANT political questions of our times.

I don’t think I’m saying anything you don’t know. I guess I’ll just reiterate: You’re right, it’s political. And I’ll add: As it’s always been.

FWIW, my hope with New Athens is to strike a new balance that’s wild enough to cause hard-core partisans to pause and think, get everyone thinking from first principals again about big issues that got stuck in the culture war trap, and, at the very least, be transparent about what we’re doing so that people can self-select in or out in good faith.

“Many people with deep pockets have tried to do this and failed, from Sidewalk Labs to YC new cities to California Forever. Worth talking to all of them to figure out how you’ll best the odds and potential landmines along the way. Rooting for you!”

From an investor based in San Francisco. This last comment came my way pre-launch, but it’s good so I’m including it here.

My response: “My strategy is to start by building massive traction with boring, normal middle class Americans and use that as leverage to get over political and regulatory hurdles. No fancy renderings, no billionaire backers (yet), no promises of Smart City Utopia or not having to pay taxes or any of that. AND you’re right that I need to talk to others.

This team is setting out to build a new mid-sized U.S. city—the first great American city for families. That sure is a nice tagline, and one day I hope it’s warranted. You can read about our plans at MoveToNewAthens.com. But while I’m no scrooge (quite the opposite!), my overall feeling in this moment is now the real work begins.

In lieu of a manifesto, I’m going to keep this intentionally short. As a team, we’re betting on execution. All of us have plenty to say, and we won’t shy from publishing long essays in the future. But right now there’s a whole lot to do off-screen, nobody follows this account yet (it’s brand new), so I’m going to cut this off.

In the version of the future where we’re successful, and New Athens is a thriving city anchored by thousands of young families, I hope this launch post can serve as an example: when the payoff isn’t clear, put down the screen and go talk to a real person. Which I’m about to do in 5, 4, 3…

Wish us luck, y’all. Onwards and upwards!

—JCS

Visit the launch website