Elle Griffin | researching the ideal society, from utopian books to real-world examples

[00:01:27] Beatrice: So I'm very happy to be joined today by Elle Griffin, who is writing The Elysian. And yeah, Elle, let's dive into it. Could you maybe start by introducing yourself and what it is that you are working on?

[00:01:45] Elle: Yes. I write The Elysian, and it is a publication exploring utopian futures through solutions-oriented journalism. And then I also started the Elysian Collective, which is a collective of writers who write on a prompt together—maybe the future of governance or the future of the internet—and we produce an essay collection and print pamphlet together, and we publish those on Metalabel. I'm also writing a book called We Should Own the Economy that I crowdfunded on Wefunder and am now writing in public for my subscribers.

[00:02:27] Beatrice: Yeah, it's really exciting. I came across your work because you were going to the Progress Conference, which I also went to this year. And it's really very "existential hope," so it feels very aligned. Yeah, because as I understand it, the reason you're doing what you're doing and exploring all these different facets of how society could be run is because you're working on a utopian novel. Is this still the case?

[00:03:02] Elle: That's how I got into it. Because I wanted to write a utopian novel, I needed to do a lot of research to do the world-building behind it. So I was like: in this book, what does the ideal government look like? What does the ideal economy look like? How is this going to work?

And so I started doing the research portion of it out loud on my Substack and was like, "Okay, so what if this..." and I just explored some ideas speculatively. My readers were into it, and they started getting into it too, coming up with ideas in the comments, and we would kind of volley ideas back and forth. I'm still doing that; I'm still writing the utopian novel and I'm still doing the research for it. But I think the research of it has led me down a lot of rabbit holes that are really fun to explore. Like, I collect utopian novels now, and I read and study them. A lot of the people who have written utopian novels also worked in government or were economists and had other nonfiction interests in world-building. And so it's just become a dual thing for me.

[00:04:21] Beatrice: Are you still working on the novel? Do you think we can expect it soon, or is it just too much fun enjoying all the rabbit holes right now?

[00:04:29] Elle: No, I think I have a premise for the novel and I was actually intending to work on it a lot. I'm only, I think, 10,000 words in, so it's still very early and I'm not sure yet if it's going to be a novella or a full-length novel. I have a little bit more research to do on it, but I am going to release it eventually on my Substack and as a Metalabel project when it's done.

[00:04:59] Beatrice: Would you be able to tease what it's about? It's totally okay if not, if you want to keep it to yourself.

[00:05:06] Elle: Yeah. I've set it up the way a lot of utopian novels are set up. In mine, a woman washes up on the shore of an unknown island and she has no memory or recollection of her past. But the people on the island seem to know her, and they're living in this paradise that seems very foreign to her—like maybe it's some far-off future that she's arrived at.

And then she's exploring this world as she's realizing the people there are exploring her, because they know something about her that even she doesn't know because she doesn't remember her past. And so we are discovering who she is at the same time that we discover what this land is.

[00:05:50] Beatrice: That's so exciting. It feels like a sort of recurring topic in your work that you're referencing back to these classic works—because this sounds a bit to me like Jonathan Swift. I know you're a big Victor Hugo fan as well, right?

[00:06:06] Elle: Yeah, I'm a big Victor Hugo fan.

[00:06:10] Beatrice: And you're also doing the political pamphlets now as well.

[00:06:15] Elle: Yes. Yeah, so now I've been doing the political pamphlets, which is really fun. I'm basically just copying all of my old heroes: William Morris and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and obviously Victor Hugo—all these people who both wrote political pamphlets and wrote novels.

And so I'm trying to do the same. So right now I'm in the process... for 2025, I was just writing as things would come to me and I would come out with them. But for 2026, I'm writing longer pieces and sending them out less often, but always as a print pamphlet because I've just grown a little bit unenthused with the internet and with my inbox filling up. I want a more analog existence.

So I've just been thinking about how my work can be that way, too. For example, right now I'm writing an essay that I'm currently on page 52 of. Normally I would break this up into a lot of smaller essays and publish them on Substack regularly. But I wanted to get the research right and understand how the pieces all fit together. I've been having historians fact-check my work and have just been trying to make this a better quality thing that can stand alone as an evergreen piece rather than this kind of short "turn it out" idea that is not fully fleshed out. And also, it's going to be a cornerstone of my upcoming book. So when I release it, it will be a much longer essay, but as a print pamphlet. That way, you might get one essay from me that month instead of four or eight, but it's this idea of getting fewer, but more quality.

[00:07:59] Beatrice: Is this something that you think we should do more of in general? Go more back in this direction?

[00:08:09] Elle: I don't know that we need to go back, and I don't know how it works for everyone. I am definitely exploring this topic in one of my upcoming pamphlets, which is about how technology can enable a more analog, pastoral existence. Because I've already retreated from the internet almost as much as I can.

I don't have social media. There's nothing on my phone except for the Kindle app and my Feedly app—like feed readers. And so I can just read; it's really the only thing I have to do on my phone. And I have it set up so that I have no email; it works on my laptop, but not my phone.

And so I've retreated from it as much as I can. But the touchpoints I do have with the internet, I think, are extremely invaluable. Like being able to connect with readers online and being able... we have a Slack channel where we can discuss things in a kind of more ongoing way. So I like the community aspects of the internet and I like the publishing aspect of the internet, but I just think the noise is terrible and I think the algorithms do bad things for us. I think, in general, the way media is right now is a detriment to society rather than a benefit. And so I've been just trying to explore how I can create a publication and a media company that I feel is a benefit to society rather than a detriment.

[00:09:48] Beatrice: Yeah, it feels like there are some people going in this direction now as well, with Works in Progress or something like that, where they are really focusing on very high quality. I feel like it's more suitable if you have a long-term vision and you don't have to just focus on the topic of the day. So there are pros and cons to the different ones, right? But as you can tell, I'm very curious about your novel. What made you want to write a utopian novel? Because I think we live in a time where most fiction focuses, or leans quite dystopian, if it focuses on the future.

[00:10:39] Elle: If it's like sci-fi related or anything. I have this document that I call a "personal canon" of all the literature that has most affected me, and I have it broken into two categories. And they're basically in the categories of the novel I was working on at the time.

So my first phase in my life was Gothic literature. I wrote a Gothic novel. And while I was writing this Gothic novel, I was completely immersed in Catholicism, Gothic literature, French Gothic literature in particular, American Gothic literature, Southern Gothic. And I was studying—I was pursuing my graduate studies in Mariology, which is the study of the Virgin Mary. And this kind of... I was doing iconography projects, recasting the Virgin Mary for modern times with these kind of haunting portraits and doing these kind of art projects that were in this vein.

I was at home recreating 1800s cocktails that would've been served in a New Orleans bar and reading these old diaries of nuns who lived in New Orleans in the 1700s. I think I still have them there; there's a little nun book right there. But I was really interested... and I think it was also that phase was very... I had gone through a very significant depression in my college years, and so I was coming out of that and I was focused on this personal development.

That kind of all fits in with Gothic literature because Gothic literature is very philosophical. How do we think about The Count of Monte Cristo, or you think about Dracula, or you think about even Les Misérables or the more classic Phantom of the Opera? You have this kind of character that's really misunderstood or haunted or has this mysterious thing about them they're trying to figure out.

And so that was this kind of phase of my life where I was really immersed in that. And then when I finished my Gothic novel, it felt like I was done with that phase. Gothic literature is all about the past and castles and darkness and poverty and all these kind of darker forces. And I was like, "Okay, so what is the lighter forces version of this?"

And so I finished my graduate studies, I finished the novel, and then I was like, "Okay, now I want a lighter phase." I want to focus on not the past, but the future. I want to focus on not the dark, but the light. I want to focus on not self-development, but societal development. And I left my Catholicism behind and became a humanist. I left this darker, more dystopian literature and went to utopian literature.

I started by reading all these old utopian novels and I was just like, "These are so cool because they incorporate all of these things." What does a better future look like? How can we make society better? What are even the religions that take that for humanism—in some cases, Buddhism—and what are the forces that create that? And so that was my new phase. I've now been in that phase for a few years now, but it's been... so, it was drawn by the novel. The Gothic literature phase and the utopian literature phase, I feel, are polar opposites but like complements. And yeah, now my research is all in the utopian vein, which is really fun.

[00:14:37] Beatrice: Wow. Yeah, there's so much to talk about there. I heard you speak about Mariology before also. I'd never heard it before I heard you talk about it, but I love that it exists. Basically, it's always fun when you hear about these things where you're like, "Oh, someone is spending their life studying Mary, that's amazing." And also the nuns in New Orleans and everything. Yeah. Okay. So that's a really interesting journey from the Gothic novels to the utopian novels. In your digging into all of these utopian novels, is there anything that you think has been a recurring lesson? Maybe it's either in terms of the conflicts that tend to exist in these utopias or what actually seems to be the real utopian part of it—like the really nice parts.

[00:15:42] Elle: I think my favorite utopian novels are a trio that was written at the turn of the 1900s. The first one was Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy; he was an American writer and he published it in 1888. The second one was by William Morris, News from Nowhere, published in 1890. And the third one was published by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1915 called Herland.

What was interesting about these three utopian novels all coming out so close to each other was that they were all in some ways socialist, because that was the movement that was going on at the time—how do we improve the worker plight? But the first two at least take place in the year 2000. And so they're imagining what the year 2000 would be—the first one in America, the second one in London—and then the third one is its own land.

But what's interesting is they're grappling with what should that future look like. Edward Bellamy is very high-tech. There's an orchestra playing in the center of town, and somehow the music is piped into our homes so we can all listen to orchestra music playing right in our homes, all of us in town. There's a big, beautiful, monumental building in the center of town that is essentially an Amazon warehouse where you can get literally anything you could possibly want. And it's made and comes right there. It's this post-scarcity world.

But then you have, two years later, a response directly to Edward Bellamy from William Morris saying, "I don't want this high-tech future. I want pastoral, stone masonry buildings." Everybody is an artist and carving a wood pipe for fun; there's no schooling, and all the children learn by living. It's very "return to the land," return to artisanship.

And then the third one is Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who knew both of these men who wrote these novels and was friends with William Morris's daughter. And she goes, "You guys are both crazy. The men would never create these futures. Only women could create a future where we have a good society." Like, men are the reason why capitalism is the way it is. So she creates a utopian novel where there are no men at all, and the men have all gone off to war and died. So now there's just this community of women.

And so instead of capitalism, they created this community collectivism that provides for everyone. They have trees that have been genetically engineered for years to produce—like every tree produces 20 different kinds of fruit that everyone in the community can pick and make things with and share with each other. And she even has these hilarious men that come in and find the land, and the first thing the men do is like, "Oh my God, we should cut down all these forests and build hardwood. We can make a fortune." So she's saying it's the men that are exploiting this all and making it so that this doesn't work for everyone.

And I think that these three are interesting because all three of these novels are prescriptive in a way. You don't read them and you're like, "What is the plot of this story? Where is this going? Where's the intrigue? Where's the conflict?" In all three of them, you're just learning about the land. And they were intentionally written that way because they were letters to each other being like, "You're wrong. Here's what the ideal looks like."

And so they're very cool and they're very seminal and I love them so much. And they were extremely popular in their day. Edward Bellamy's book was the most popular—it sold a million copies in the United States. So they were very popular despite having the plot be like, "I'm a person walking around this town and learning about it."

But I think to bring that back in a modern age, it can't be quite as prescriptive as that. And there have been some modern attempts that have gone in that same vein, like "I'm a person wandering this new town and learning about it." But what I'm trying to do with my own novel is see: can I incorporate that old model that lets us learn all about what this future is like—and shares my worldview of here's what an ideal economy, ideal government, ideal future could look like—while still having a plot-driven story? Which I think is essential to the revival of utopianism in modern times.

There's a reason why dystopian literature is so popular: because it's very fast-driven. You can have a really rousing plot with these evil villains and these terrible characters and this terrible world that needs saving. And so that's what I'm trying to see—can I incorporate the old models with the feel of a new fantasy novel?

[00:21:03] Beatrice: I very much look forward to reading it. And yeah, I very much agree that that's probably the way to get the point across—to do it packed into a really good, engaging story. And also, I love the book recommendations. I haven't read any of them, so they'll go on my "to read" list.

[00:21:29] Elle: They're so good.

[00:21:30] Beatrice: Yeah, it sounds like a must-read. And last question on your novel: are there any of these little rabbit holes that you've gone into, or lessons from these utopian novels, that you are applying in terms of the world-building? Is there something that you already know is going to be a really important part of the world that you're building?

[00:22:02] Elle: I have a general idea, because it's also a fantasy novel. I have a general idea of what the government is and what the economy is. And I know what the mythology is. I've set it in the world of a kind of future Asia, and I've used all Asian mythology. So I'm basing it off of the myth of the Eight Immortals from Chinese mythology, and these are the individuals she meets there. So they're these kind of mythical beings and there are magical powers, but magical powers are actually a very advanced technology. And so I'm incorporating this kind of "past meets future."

Really where I'm at with the novel is I need to build out the plot a little bit more and the main character's story. I know who she is, I know how it's going to end, but I just have to flesh out... I know what the world generally is, so I just have to flesh out a little bit more of the plot building.

[00:23:14] Beatrice: Yeah. Interesting, very interesting. And like we mentioned, you have done so much research in preparation for this. Actually, I think let's dive into some of your pieces. I know, for example, you wrote this one piece that was on "if US states had the same autonomy as EU countries." Could you talk a little bit about why you wrote that and what you think that could actually unlock?

[00:23:49] Elle: Yes. I think US federalism and EU federalism have been very fascinating experiments. And I would like to take the best of both worlds. I think the US does things too federally, where the majority—60%—of our tax dollars go to the federal government, who then has to redistribute them for a very wide population that doesn't agree with each other on anything and has very different ideas about the way that they want to live.

And I think that is a big detriment to us, and I think that's why the US keeps swinging wildly on these kind of political pendulums. Because whatever president is installed has the exact opposite plans for America that half the country doesn't want, or even more.

And I really think that we don't need to split the US into a bunch of independent countries to be able to create something smaller and closer to home. We literally only need tax autonomy. So if the only thing the US did was abolish or change the 16th Amendment so that taxation happened by each state instead of by the federal government—and then a portion of each state's economy went to the larger federal layer, as it works in the EU—then I think that states would be better off.

Texas could decide to be a low-tax state and operate exactly the way that Texas wants to. And Vermont could become an entire social state and operate that way if it wants to. If it literally just had the ability to raise its own tax dollars and do what it wanted with them, it would be able to.

And we see some examples of this. For example, New Mexico recently launched universal childcare as a state rather than as a nation, because that's something that state wanted to do, but other states wouldn't want to do that. But states are very limited by their ability to do this because they have little control over their own dollars.

The poorest US state is Mississippi, and a lot of people say we couldn't do this because the federal government returns so much money back to, for example, Mississippi. But Mississippi is still richer than Italy. And Italy still provides universal healthcare to its citizens. So there's no reason why Mississippi couldn't do that for its own state members if it wanted to—if it had power over taxation. And in fact, it has tried to pass certain things that would help its community, but it can't because, federally, the other states don't want it.

And so I think there's a real benefit to be had if states had tax autonomy. EU countries raise their own taxes, do their own things with them, and decide how their countries are run, and just remit a small portion of that to the larger EU to have this kind of federal layer. While I think we could still learn from the things that the EU doesn't do as well—like maybe the EU would be better off with a continental military rather than individual country militaries, and they're starting to create these structures. So I'm interested in a way that we could take the best of both worlds, and the easiest way to do that in the US would be through tax autonomy.

[00:27:24] Beatrice: Yeah. This is one of the things I really appreciate about your work: you're actually trying to reimagine systems—the social systems that we have—and systemic change. And I think this is very undervalued; I feel people have very little hope or belief that it's possible to change these things. But I think this is the first step: just what could it look like if we did it? And what would be the benefits and trade-offs?

And the other thing that I know you explored, that's a bit in the same vein, is these "a la carte federations." Do you want to also explain a bit what research you've done on that?

[00:28:11] Elle: Yeah. For example, in Europe, when they were creating the EU, I read a lot of books about the various thinkers who, when they were putting together the EU, had various ideas of what the EU should look like. Some people thought it should look exactly like the United States, where all the countries become states in a federal government. Other people were like, "No, it should be more ad hoc."

And one of the writers I loved—now I'm not going to remember his name—but he wrote that there shouldn't be one EU, there should be hundreds of EUs. And you can see this, for example, in the Schengen Agreement. For example, certain countries have decided that if you are a member of this country or a citizen of this country, you can also cross borders and live in this country. And you'll still have your healthcare, you'll still have your pensions and all of your social services, but you can move to another country and we'll have open borders between them.

And over the years, the Schengen Agreement—more and more countries have joined and said, "Okay, you can move freely between these countries." That is not done at the EU level. That is just an agreement between us. It was small at first; it was like five or six countries at the beginning, and then more and more countries joined.

That was a federal layer—essentially an agreement between multiple countries around border control. But the EU (or the EUs) is—I'm going to take... we're going to wrap everything into one big giant layer that's going to decide not just borders, but also taxation, how we're going to handle our economies, what our regulations are around fishing... it's so wide-ranging. It's like healthcare, monetary policy, and international trade. And you're like, "How is this one thing doing all of these things?"

And that was essentially the problem the UK had with the EU. England was like, "Okay, I'm for a lot of the things that the EU does, but one thing that doesn't make sense is their fishing policy," because England had all coasts and so they had the most fishing of any other country in the EU. And so for the EU to smack all these regulations around fishing on England—when that was their primary source of a huge economic gain—they were like, "We don't... there's a lot of things that we value about the EU, but that's not one of the things that we agree to."

And so they had these nitpicks with various things that they didn't like the EU for. And why couldn't the EU have been like the Schengen Agreement, where you don't just have one big super-government that manages all aspects of government, but you have a healthcare EU, and you have the fishing EU, and you have the Schengen and border agreement, and you have the Paris Climate Agreement? That's all these different countries, and you have a bunch of various federal layers that countries can be a part of or not be a part of.

It isn't one thing, but many things. And I think that this could benefit a lot of countries. I think that it could also be a condition of various nation-states redrawing our boundaries. For example, if the US states had tax autonomy, the US could essentially say, "Even if you wanted to be a fully independent country, you also agree to—in exchange for us letting you do this—you also agree to be part of NATO, for example." And then all the member countries have to be responsible for a certain amount of military investment and things like that. So I think we would really benefit from federalism that's a la carte rather than an all-encompassing federalism. And we do have that in a lot of places—they exist already.

[00:32:34] Beatrice: Yeah. I think—because that's another of your pieces that you've written, is the one that's on, I think, the "New City State." Is that a similar federated model, or is that slightly different?

[00:32:54] Elle: I think that we could move to a Mondragon model. The Mondragon is the world's second-largest cooperative, and it's actually 92 independent companies that are all cooperatives, meaning the whole company is worker-owned. The workers vote for their leaders—their board—and the board picks the CEO. So essentially, the workers at each company own the company and thus earn profit-sharing as the company grows, and they also elect their leaders.

But the companies... each individual company might struggle on its own. So they devote a certain portion of their profits to a larger organization, Mondragon, which is essentially like a kind of holding company of all the cooperatives. And so all the cooperatives put a percentage of their profits to the parent company, and the parent company, in return, provides benefits for the employee-owners of all the companies in the portfolio.

And so what's interesting about that is, for example, 10 years ago, one of the companies had to close. It was an enormous company. And if that company were in the US or elsewhere, that company would've folded and those 2,000 people would've been laid off. Instead, because they were a part of the Mondragon organization, the Mondragon organization was able to say, "Okay, we're going to move you to the other companies in our portfolio so you won't ever be unemployed. And if you need training for that new job, then we'll provide the training for you at Mondragon University," which is another one of their cooperatives in their umbrella.

And so it's created this self-sustaining economy. And it's even more self-sustaining because Mondragon is headquartered in the Basque region of Spain and is the largest employer in the Basque region. The Basque Country is an autonomous region, which I think... I think we should have a lot more autonomous regions.

So they have this kind of state autonomy that I've been talking about, where they can set their own taxes and have their own rules and regulations. A lot of their law came from cooperative law from Mondragon. And then the Basque region, which is earning tax dollars from the various cooperatives and companies in their region, then remits a portion of their earnings to Spain. And Spain is using that to have a national military and healthcare and various social services for all of Spain. And then Spain is remitting a portion of its income or GDP to the EU, which is the larger body.

So I think that kind of layering—with the economy being a self-sustaining, self-providing thing at the local level where each of us live and work—is really cool. And I think that could operate inside various other autonomous layers that just, in turn, support the larger group. So I think it's a very interesting economic model.

[00:36:18] Beatrice: Yeah. I'd never heard of it before, but I like the Mondragon thing and everything. It's definitely inspiring. So across these examples, there's a very clear pattern: you think it would be good to move more towards these sort of federated models. Why do you think that would be good? And how do you think... do you see any signs that we're able to move more in that direction now? I'm thinking a little bit like: for example, would new AI tools help do this better? Or are there any other tools that we have at hand now that could actually make this maybe more possible now than it was historically?

[00:37:09] Elle: I don't know if technological tools necessarily are what we need, but all of this research has led me to believe that the smallest possible government is the best one. And so I would personally like to see city government being the one that has the most authority over our lives, with the state having a little bit less authority, and the country having a little bit less authority, and the federal layer having a little bit less authority.

So right now, we have it backwards, at least in the US. The federal layer has the most authority, and then the state, and then the local, which is opposite to how I think it should be. And that's true in Europe and a lot of the rest of the world as well, where the city has less authority than the state and then the nation.

So to flip this model, again, I think it comes down to taxation. In the US, a city like San Francisco or Chicago, for example, doesn't have the power to tax its own city and say, "We're going to take in these tax dollars and we're going to use them to do this with the city." Instead, everybody who lives in the city is taxed at the federal level, which remits a certain portion of earnings to the state, which remits a certain portion of earnings to the city.

The city and the state can raise some funds in the form of state taxes, sales taxes, and income taxes, but it's such a small portion. And then they have to raise everything else with property taxes or else our private incomes. Most of the services we need take place at the city level: we need schools, we need hospitals, we need retirement homes, we need daycare centers, we need libraries. These are all local services, but they have less money and less ability to make money than the larger levels.

So I think some creative taxation could solve this. For example, I think there should be a combination between a land tax and a sales tax, and we abolish income tax altogether. And basically how this could work is, at an ideal level—and this one maybe is a little bit possible—Singapore has land taxation down.

Essentially, they own 90% of the land in their country, and they rent it out either to commercial developers or residentials. 80% of Singaporeans live in government-built and owned housing. If you live in a condo in Singapore, the government owns the building and the government owns the land the building is on. You can buy a lease—a 99-year lease for your specific unit—from the government. And the government is earning that as income.

And then if I eventually decide to turn around and sell my house 20 years later, I'm selling actually a 79-year lease. This is very fascinating because the cost of the property is actually going down over time. So by the time you have a one-year lease left, that's worth nothing. So if you have a one-year lease left, then a person could buy that one-year lease and then buy a 99-year lease "top-up" from the government, and the government earns money again. So basically, the government is earning money as a landlord, renting out all of the land on its property.

And because of this, Singapore provides the same social services that you can imagine any European country has: healthcare, all the schools, and all of the social welfare we've come to think of. But they're the lowest-taxed wealthy nation in the world. It's a 20% tax rate because they're able to self-fund themselves through land, which is essentially the land tax.

So I think if each city could "own itself"—which would be crazy in the US because they would have to use eminent domain to basically buy up all the property, or they could implement a kind of more traditional Georgism, where they say, "Okay, you own the land, but the tax on the land is so high that it's almost like paying rent," and those tax dollars go to the local city government instead.

In this way, each city could have a steady income stream and use it to provide all the services of a city. And then if we combine that with a sales tax that is much higher in city centers and then gets much lower as you move outside of the metropolitan area—what this does is it allows anybody who's in the city, even if you don't own land there or you don't live there and are just visiting, to pay taxes into that city. But if you go out farther into the more rural areas, those taxes are much lower because there are much fewer services outside of the cities. You could pay almost nothing for sales tax out in the country.

And I think what that could do is, one, allow immigration to be really easy. One of the main problems with immigration isn't actually immigration or the space to host immigrants; it's funding. And if every immigrant into a place was paying taxes into that place almost immediately upon being there, then you wouldn't have that problem.

And then two, it allows you to solve the rural-urban divide. Right now, a lot of states in the US are taken hostage. I live in Salt Lake City, and Salt Lake City is very Democratic—extremely blue if you look at a voter map. But the surrounding areas are extremely red. And so the state of Utah as a whole is Republican and votes Republican and has four Republican Congress members. But that divide does a weird thing to the balance of the overall country, because then you're saying, "Oh, Utah is red," when in actuality the city is blue.

And that's true of a lot of cities around the US. Why not allow cities to have their own tax autonomy and provide the services they want to provide to their citizens, while also allowing the outskirts and the more rural areas to have lower taxation and have the more limited services that they want and benefit from them? So that's my idea as a way to have more income at the local level and then gradually cede that to larger levels over time, flipping the model.

[00:44:29] Beatrice: I love hearing about how there are also other models actually happening already. I think that's really inspiring and it also makes it feel like it's actually possible to do things in another way, which is a good reminder. There's not just one way to do things.

Do you think, because based on these proposals that you're putting forward... to some extent, I get the feeling sometimes that we're moving more and more into a monoculture globally because of the internet? I grew up in Europe, but I feel like I grew up on American culture very much because of Hollywood exporting the big movies and stuff. Do you think, if we connect it back to utopian futures and where we want to be heading, do you think that it's important to preserve cultural diversity? And is there something we could be doing to do that better?

[00:45:47] Elle: It's hard because my husband and I recently did an 18-month "travel the world" trip because he had a non-compete in his industry, so he had to take 18 months off work. So we just decided to go travel the world. In a lot of ways, sometimes I felt sad. Visiting Japan, for example—we spent three months in Japan this spring. And my romantic notion of Japan in my head was kimonos and little parasols and these quaint villages and this rocky coast and the tea huts. And there is some remnant of that there, but mostly it's modern block buildings with a lot of people living there.

There is a culture in that it's different from the US; you're not just leaving a store without talking to someone. There's a very different way of interacting with people. So there is a cultural difference, but it doesn't feel like very much of a difference. It feels like, "Okay, we're still getting along in the modern world that feels very much like home."

And so while we were there, I felt nostalgic for the era of travel in which Commodore Perry is knocking on the door of Japan and being like, "Whoa, look at this culture! This is crazy! Everyone's wearing kimonos here and doing these bathhouses." And the Japanese people were like, "Oh my God, look at this ship with these giant cannons!" It was being opened up to the world, and there was this kind of crazy cultural exchange.

I was reading a book while I was there that was written by an American Civil War soldier who traveled to Japan shortly after it was opened. So the book is from the 1800s, and he was having this amazing travel experience in Japan that I could never have had. Nobody speaks his language; it is literally night and day.

And so I think there is a nostalgia for the cultures that developed in isolation when none of the countries had exposure to each other. But I also feel like that, ultimately, is a bad thing. I think it's better that everybody mixed and was able to see each other's culture and learn from each other and be like, "Oh, I like that you guys do this. Oh, I like that you do that. We'll take that; we'll do that too." And we've mixed and mingled our cultures together. I think that ultimately is better for humanity because we're getting along better and we're not constantly at war with each other or trying to steal each other's borders. Obviously, there's still some of that, but it's not to the extent that it used to be.

And I think that we're going to have to reshape culture not along ethnic or isolated country lines. Instead, we're going to have to redefine culture in the things that we're interested in. For example, I'm part of a Mahjong club. I volunteer for a group locally—it's like a political organization. I'm part of this Substack community that's all other writers and readers, and we're all talking and getting together.

When I travel, I'll go to a yoga studio and I'm like, "Oh, these are all my people," and they'll tell me where to go get organic food. We have these little tiny mini-cultures. My sister is a video game engineer and she loves video gaming. She has these communities with other people that are into video gaming, and they'll get on their headsets at night and video game with each other. And then she'll go play Dungeons and Dragons with a group of friends in the city on a monthly basis. Her culture and the way that she's living her life is very different from my culture and how I'm living my life. But we're in the same country, we're the same ethnicity, we're the same family. We have these tiny little micro-cultures depending on our interests. And I actually think that is a healthier future for us than an ethnic culture. You can even see that playing out right now with the way that people are thinking about Jews or Muslims, and you're creating this weird ethnic group or religious group orientation of somebody—and that is so harmful. And so I'm more interested in a future where we think of culture differently.

[00:51:00] Beatrice: Yeah. I think that's a really good point—that the old categories don't really make sense in the same way anymore. And it's probably also easier to coordinate if we're similar, or if we're able to learn from and take the best terms of all the different ones. And yeah, I guess there are some ideas like Balaji’s Network State idea and things like that.

[00:51:34] Elle: That culture, yeah. I was thinking about it—I did a surf camp in Hawaii and I was there for a month. And it was so interesting to be part of that culture for... like, the surf culture there is way, way different from the way that I live my normal life. And that was so fun to be part of. And who's part of that culture? Indian women, Japanese people, white people. It was not ethnically... none of these cultures are ethnically divided, but we can still go experiment and see them and be part of these other communities. I think that's healthier.

[00:52:12] Beatrice: I love that. We'll have a "surf nation."

[00:52:15] Elle: It doesn't need to be a nation—that's the thing.

[00:52:21] Beatrice: It'll be on the water. Yeah. So I think many of us are having this feeling now that we're on the cusp of rapid... we've already had rapid advances in AI development. And so it's really time to think about what we want to do with that. And I know that this is something that you've had some explorations in as well. You wrote this piece on, for example, "Who should control AI?" Do you want to just develop a bit on your thoughts on that?

[00:53:02] Elle: Yeah. The thought behind the piece was basically: there's been an interesting debate on AI where we've been watching it play out with OpenAI in particular. They started with this unique nonprofit-founded model where there was a nonprofit organization that was not economically benefiting from the company but was in control of the company and could say, "This is the path we're on. We want to make sure this is developed ethically, doesn't put a ton of people out of business, doesn't cause harm."

But that didn't go well, because at some point, the nonprofit isn't familiar with the day-to-day business. They don't know what's in the code and how it's being developed. And so at some point, they were like, "Sam Altman is lying to us. He's hiding stuff. He is acting like maybe this is more harmful than we realize." And so they fired him.

But then all the employees who work day-to-day in the code were like, "No, don't do that." And they had this outroar and they were like, "We need Sam Altman. We're all going to leave and follow Sam Altman to Microsoft if you fire him." So then OpenAI had to come back and be like, "Okay, nonprofit control isn't the best." And they've experimented with these various models. Now, I think they've landed at something where the nonprofit does control the board but also benefits economically from the company as a shareholder. But the company is still an independent organization; it's a Public Benefit Corporation. In this way, it's been watered down a little bit. And they still have a board of shareholders that is essentially investors.

And so there is now an economic incentive, as there is in most companies, for the company to work in the benefit of investors rather than in the benefit of the nonprofit. And so what my piece was saying was there's a middle ground between these things. Obviously, companies shouldn't be controlled by investors who only have the profit motive in mind. That does a lot of bad things, like making sure Boeing planes aren't well developed so they fall apart in the air because they needed to buy stock buybacks, and so they're taking shortcuts that actually hinder the company because they want this investor game.

But the nonprofit one isn't good either because they don't know what's going on. So my thing was to say: the employees should actually be the deciding authority, because they are in the code every day. They know whether Sam Altman is developing ChatGPT or OpenAI to be in the best interest of the world. They're building it themselves.

And in fact, it has always been the employees who were most outspoken at every turn. It was initially the employees who said, "No, the nonprofit board should not fire Sam Altman." And then later, when Sam Altman made these changes to the company structure, it was employees once again who quit the company and went to the press and said, "They're developing this unsafely; it should be nonprofit controlled."

And so it was always employees who knew and had a pulse on the company and whether it was to the best interest of the world. I was just saying the board of the company should not be investors, and it shouldn't be a nonprofit. It should be decided by employees. Employees should be on the board that decides whether to fire the CEO or not. They're the ones who know.

And there are already organizations that work like this. Ginkgo Bioworks was the one I mentioned in the article, but also UPS has this kind of stock structure where employees have the voting authority. The way that it works is employees have the majority of the voting shares—each employee share has 10 times the voting power of an investor share. So investors might have more money in the pot and more shares, and they'll earn more financial upside for investing in the company, but the employees have the voting authority. Even if they hold less stock and benefit less economically, they have more say in the board.

And I think if you look at the history of companies, this really proves out because in every case—in every company that turned out to be unethically run—it was an employee who became a whistleblower. So the employees know, and we might not give them the opportunity to have that say.

[00:58:01] Beatrice: And are there any limitations to this? Because if I think... are employees always informed, do you think? Or do you need some system in place to make sure that they have the relevant information? Because I could see that if you're an employee at a big company, you don't really think about how the company is run, or you don't really think about that if you're low down in the ranks. Does it weigh differently or something like that?

[00:58:40] Elle: For example, at cooperatives that do this—where they are voting for leadership—what I've found is that in most cooperatives, including Mondragon, including Stocksy (I was just talking to them on the phone), at any given annual vote on these things, only about 15% of the employees actually vote.

And what they both told me was: if they feel the company is being run well, then they don't really care to have a say because they're like, "The company's being run well." But if the company is being run poorly and they see that, they'll say that year there will be like an 80% turnout of the vote. Because suddenly, when things are not going well, people want to have that say.

And so there is an education component. Cooperatives will tell you they have to constantly be educating employees, and they hold shareholder meetings—just like you would have a shareholder meeting for investors—they hold shareholder meetings for the employees because they're also shareholders. They educate them and say, "Here's where our income is at, here are the revenue streams, here's what we're thinking about for investment, here's what we're thinking about for product-market fit."

And so they're aware of the decisions being made at the upper level. And if they're like, "Okay, that seems like you're making the right decisions, just go for it." But if you're not okay with it and you're like, "I've been in this and I think this is not going well," then you show up and you have a say. And I think that actually works really well, and certainly works better than having investors who also don't necessarily know the ins and outs of the business and are not necessarily making a super informed decision. They're just saying, "Is this going to impact my revenue?" which is a much more limited stance. Whereas the employees actually are like, "Okay, but is this going to actually improve the company for the long term?" So I do think it's a better power [structure].

[01:00:41] Beatrice: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It's not that they have to weigh in on every little thing. That makes a lot of sense. On the AI point again, I think I saw you touch on something that I thought was very interesting: that AI could help make us wise, not just efficient. Is that something you want to expand on a bit?

[01:01:06] Elle: Yeah. There's this common thread of the idea that the internet is making us stupid. And you can feel that if you ever have gone on TikTok and you see how quickly it devolves into weird things. Or even on YouTube, there's a hilarious concept that if you go to YouTube for self-development, pretty soon you'll be a political radical because it just takes you into these funny places.

And same with even shopping. For example, if I type in "black sweater" in Google, it'll show me all these items that it has decided are the ideal things that show up for me in Google Shopping. And a lot of them I hate—the first things that come up are Temu and Shein and all these fast fashion companies that I am morally against and would not buy from. And yet they show up at the top because of whatever algorithm Google is deciding. So it's making these decisions not based on me and my interests, but on some other economic interest.

And so I think this is behind that "enshittification" of the internet. Same thing with TikTok: it wants you to stay on there as long as possible, so it's trying to give you content that's going to just suck you in and have you in this mindless scroll.

My husband was saying he just did a trial of Apple News this week, and he was like, "The news it was showing you was such terrible quality." It was pulling from these totally disreputable news sites and showing up with these crazy bombastic headlines. It was trying to make me a political radical because it's showing the most terribly dramatic things.

And all of that seems like it could be fixed. Because with—and this seems to me a very good use of personal data—for all the data all of these platforms have about me, it should know that I only buy things from artists. Most of my purchasing comes from Etsy. And now on Etsy, you have to really scour to make sure it's an actual artist because there are all these mass-producers on there as well, pretending to be small artists. So it knows that's the kind of thing I spend money on. It knows what I'm buying at grocery stores, the kind of food that I'm buying; it knows the brands that I'm interested in.

If I type something into Google, it should also know what I'm reading, what publications I trust, what I'm paying for—it should know. And to an extent, my ChatGPT now is insanely aligned with all of my interests because I do so much research on there. Whenever I write in something, it knows immediately who I am and is like, "Okay, you might be interested in this based on your previous stuff." And it does a great job of recommending books to me—better than the [rest of the] internet could.

So there's a way that we could use the internet to ensure that it only returns the things that I want it to return, rather than the things it wants to return. And that would actually be the more economical choice. What if each of us had that choice? Because I think when you ask people what they want to do, they're not like, "I want to be watching mindless dribble on TikTok." They're like, "I would love to be able to watch a film that really resonates with me and that has a really complex message and a lot of nuance."

But that's different from what they actually do. And it's the same thing with food. You can say, "I want to eat healthy and I want to eat organic," but then if the only thing in front of you is chips and a bunch of processed food, then you eat the processed food. So why can't we redesign the internet to make us wiser instead of stupider and to align with what our higher selves want and not what our base selves want? And that is doable with our private data and with AI.

[01:05:29] Beatrice: Yeah. That was... your ending point was what I was going to say, basically. I think that it's also this great option or possibility to align with what your higher self wants, rather than just when the algorithm feeds you something and you're just automatically drawn into it.

I want to go on one last little tangent before we wrap up, which is—we mentioned Victor Hugo a bit in the beginning. And like I said, he often comes up in your work. Why do you find him so inspiring? And if you were to recommend... I've never read anything by Victor Hugo, but where would you recommend I start?

[01:06:14] Elle: Oh, definitely Les Misérables. Les Misérables is just a masterpiece of all masterpieces. It is so beautiful. Every line is philosophical wisdom. The characters are rich and make you want to be a better person. And the setting is the political turmoil and economic turmoil that he's grappling with and trying to find an answer and solution to.

And so I just feel that he really figured out how to pair his worldview and what he wants society to do and to show you the good and bad of politics, of religion—of the things that he's facing in his day—but to find a path through it through his characters. These really emotionally rich, poignant characters.

And so it's narrative-driven, it's plot-driven, it's character-driven, but it's also extremely philosophical and extremely Victor Hugo's worldview. He's writing during an incredibly politically tumultuous time with the various Napoleons coming into office in France. And I just think that he manages to do all of the things that I'm doing in piecemeal ways—like an article here about economics, a novel here—and he manages to incorporate them all into one novel that's a masterpiece. And I just think that's brilliant.

[01:07:51] Beatrice: That's great. Yeah, I have my Christmas reading.

[01:07:53] Elle: Okay.

[01:07:56] Beatrice: So final question is just: if you think of what would be an "existential hope" vision of the future? Like, what would be the dream scenario for you? Best-case scenario for the future.

[01:08:09] Elle: I think it's just a lot of what we've talked about today. It's very small government that is remitting money and authority to various larger governments. A kind of world of autonomous city-states that still support layers of federal governance ad hoc. Small communities, and each of us within those communities forming smaller cultures and subcultures. And all of us being able to just benefit from that world because we're all shareholders in it and we're all owners of the economies that we live in. That's basically it.

[01:08:51] Beatrice: Yeah, I love it. Basically giving people more personal stake and influence in the world. Thank you so much, Elle. It's really been a pleasure to dive into your work. And like I said, I really appreciate it because it is quite unique to imagine these types of systemic changes, and also just feel like I learned a lot about how there are options out there. So thank you so much for doing what you're doing and for coming on the podcast.

[01:09:27] Elle: Thanks for being interested in all my weird, geeky hobbies.

[01:09:32] Beatrice: Of course.