⛏️Why Now?

Ipê City was born out of a deep frustration with the stagnation and even deterioration of Western governance and culture.

Governments and state institutions are rapidly declining, marked by a lack of basic service quality, increasing bureaucracy, escalating human rights violations, infringements on individual freedoms, infrastructure deterioration, a failing basic education system, inflation, and a myriad of other failures.

And why have these problems persisted for so long and are now even worsening?

Because the vast majority of public management and societal governance is carried out through monopolistic state institutions. And although these institutions played a significant role in past centuries, they are entirely obsolete structures for the digital age.

The premises on which the nation-state was originally conceived, such as:

❌ high communication costs,

❌ high barriers to mobility and switching costs,

❌ strong citizen ties to geography, and

❌ information scarcity,

are no longer realities. We live in a

✅ real-time connected world

✅ primarily digital economy

✅ with remote work is becoming the norm,

✅ cultures are being shaped and influenced through the internet,

✅ social networks and financial systems transcend jurisdictions, and

✅ various other profound transformations that are incompatible with nation-states.

Therefore, just as analog companies were replaced by tech startups; mainstream media was replaced by social networks; fiat currencies were replaced by digital money, and then cryptocurrencies; we can also expect the fundamental political and civic institutions to be replaced by their digital-native counterparts.

Hence, Network States and Startup Societies as the main key components of this revolution.

Why?

Because State institutions are monopolies and, as evidence suggests, cannot be reformed. Therefore, the only alternative is to emulate that of the business world. Start small in a clean slate, innovate in some of the governance layers, and then scale up.

Essentially, the same strategy adopted by all technology startups in recent decades that disrupted entire legacy industries. But this time, startups will not transform an economic sector; instead, they will evolve the political, governance, and civic stack industry.