Governing through Blockchain: Techno-Communes (Preview)
The Political Orphanage
Andrew Heaton
4.9 • 1000 Ratings
🗓️ 17 February 2026
⏱️ 15 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Jonathan Hillis is the founder and caretaker of Cabin, a network of co-living spaces which link up and vet members in other communities via blockchain technology. His "neighborhood" of intentional living is in beautiful Texas Hill Country an hour outside of Austin, where he lives with friends in a hub-and-spoke model of private accommodation surrounding communal social spaces.
He's the former CTO of Coinbase, and you can see how his tech background influences his obsession with scalability (we talk about Metcalf's Law, and the optimum size of "one sauna teams") as well as the non-financial elements of blockchain to that end. It actually reminds me a bit of Neil Stephenson's Franchise-Organized Quasi-National Entities or "burbclaves" in Snow Crash.
Cabin strikes me as a kind of libertarian commune (though neither Hillis nor myself ever uses the term). It's big scattered geographic network of modular co-ops you can plug into and out of. Vetting community members is a big thing in communes, and Cabin relies on blockchain technology and somethin akin to personal Yelp reviews to allow people to skip up from Austin, TX to like-minded communities in Santa Fe or Portland, or wherever.
He joins to discuss his model, and what day-to-day life is like living in an intentional co-living community.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. |
| 0:27.4 | Hello, and welcome to a bonus episode of the political orphanage. |
| 0:35.3 | This is part two of Commune Week, although I think today's guest would not refer to himself as a member of a commune. |
| 0:36.2 | More on that later. We're going to stay local to Texas for a little bit while longer on yesterday's episode. |
| 0:41.8 | You met my new friend who is an entrepreneurial but decidedly granola polycule type. |
| 0:48.0 | The kind of person you would think would be in Austin, the sort of fun, you know, multicolored hair sort. We're going to meet the other |
| 0:56.5 | kind of person that lives in Austin today because we're going to go out west to Hill Country |
| 1:01.2 | and meet Jonathan Hillis, former tech guy, former CTO of Coinbase. And not surprisingly, |
| 1:08.2 | his approach to intentional living is more methodical, technological, and scalable. |
| 1:13.9 | He's the founder of Cabin, a decentralized autonomous organization, which I went out to visit |
| 1:20.0 | and interview him at shortly before leaving Austin, Texas. Enjoy! |
| 1:26.7 | My guest today is Jonathan Hillis. He is the founder and caretaker of Cabin and has graciously invited me to Texas Hill Country, about an hour outside of Austin, near the hometown of Lyndon Johnson, to see this interesting community. |
| 1:44.3 | Hello, Jonathan. |
| 1:45.1 | Hello, welcome out here. |
| 1:46.3 | Thanks for coming out. |
| 1:47.3 | Where am I? |
| 1:48.1 | What is this thing? |
| 1:48.9 | What am I at? |
| 1:49.8 | Yeah, you are at Cabin's Neighborhood Zero. |
| 1:53.3 | This is the first property in Cabin's co-living network. |
| 1:58.4 | And it started about two years ago with a community of online creators |
| 2:04.4 | who wanted to come out into nature and make things together. And over the past two years, |
... |
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