This is the center of the Great American Experiment.
We propose to reclaim an abandoned town in the center of the North American continent and make it our own. The town of Everything, Kansas.
This is where Jefferson's Yeoman farmer, carved from the living wood of American forests, came to grief. The high water mark from which the tide receded, land that refused to be inundated.
In the open sky above, jets fly past. This land is ignored with an in-flight movie. The American continent becomes a network of cities. In the distance is the howl of steel belted rubber on concrete, the interstate highway. The American continent becomes a substrate for logistics: weigh stations, road crews, fuel depots. Instead of land, it becomes distance and time.
Capital seeks to protect itself. Capital protects itself with the destruction of the real.
We reject reducing a continent to hours. We reject distance and time. We reject reducing the continent to anything. It is irreducible. It cannot be subjugated, domesticated, pacified, occupied, or commodified. It is not flyover country, a truck stop, a tourist board, or a highway map. It is not cattle country, an aquifer, or a wasteland. It is not a drilling site for natural gas or a site for strip mining coal and copper. It is not a sweeping panoramic background for our heroes to walk against in the foreground of five minutes of film. It is not a national park that you drive through in your car, popsicles melting on the back seat. The continent is not a vacation. The continent is the Frontier of the real.
This Frontier is a force like gravity, wind, and sun. It is America sleeping.
The Frontier has been brought to the edge of death - overgrazed, overblown, overrun. The water has been pumped out. The gas and oil have been pumped out. The native populations, animal and human, have collapsed. This irreducible whole was parceled out and measured with a spreadsheet.
The Frontier has been reopened. We have opened it. It is ready for a new discovery, with new tools and a new definition of success.
In a thousand cubicles, people enter an imaginary town everyday. In a thousand cubicles, in a space circumscribed by a perimeter measured in inches, a thousand people build a town they wish they could live in. What could happen with a perimeter of miles?
You could live there now! There is a town out there, with our name on it! It is waiting for us to find it!
Life cannot be a hobby or a pastime, something penciled into a planner for an hour on the weekend, between mandatory commutes and shopping. To truly live, we demand access at the root. We demand taking the real in our hand, soil between our fingers.
They offer toil for invisible cash. We offer good work for a utopia of the tangible. They offer packaging - corrugated cardboard with four color printing and injection-molded styrofoam. We offer homegrown tomatoes, ripe off the vine. They offer you a hamburger on white bread, the ground muscle of one hundred different cattle, under a heat lamp. We offer bison under the sun, facing into the wind, the walking land.
They are offering numbers on a piece of paper. Numbers as security against a constellation of fear. We are offering you something you can live inside!
Technology driven by a global market is a global disaster. Luddism is a pathetic fantasy. This is not Colonial Williamsburg, the Society for Creative Anachronism, or smashing your computer in the street with a hammer. This is the Arts and Crafts movement, Taliesin, Dymaxia, Arcosanti, and the Bauhaus. This is appropriate technology, green thinking, machines doing what machines do best, people doing what people do best.
They are offering you a phone bill, a power bill, a car payment. We are offering ubiquitous networking, a bandwidth cooperative, wind power, solar power, composting toilets, organic farming and ranching, software development, a movie theater, clean manufacturing, a car-free zone, an artist's colony, a new school, a university, an opera house.
We are offering an end to the fiction of the nuclear family. The family was stolen as an excuse for suburbanization, the murder of the sidewalk, and the colonization of the living room. We are offering the rediscovery of aunts and uncles, cousins and nephews, friends and neighbors. We are driving a bulldozer through proscribed correctness, broadcasting live from Squaresville, and leaving room for human reality and happiness in its place.
We are offering you a chance to stop complaining. We are offering you the chance to lead by example. We are offering you the chance to say fuck work, let's make something.
We need everybody! We need teachers, craftspeople, engineers, artists, builders, scientists, programmers, farmers, firefighters, mechanics, and doctors. Mothers and fathers, sons and daughters. We need people with strong backs and open eyes. We need people that can rediscover adaptability. People who are ready to become human again.
We reclaim the American town for ourselves! This is town as dialog. Town as art. Town as action. Town as event. Town as life.
You could have this tomorrow! A town inhabited with friends, a fabric of community woven from space age spin-off materials - something feather light and indestructible. Something warm in the winter, cool in the summer, strong enough to turn the blade of a knife, handsome enough to wear to your wedding!
This tomorrow is about room to breathe. This is about a horizon for the eye, air for the lung and soil under foot. This is about the first real freedom of your life. This is about awaking the sleeper.
Sleeper or Pioneer? You decide.