During election night coverage for the 2018 mid-terms a curious commercial began playing out about growing up, a sandbox, and a desert.

To the surprise of my household the commercial ended with the splash logo: “Blockchains LLC,” and they were building a blockchain-based city in Nevada.

Manna

Upon only hearing the broad strokes about the project I couldn’t help but be reminded of the excellent near-future dystopian/utopian short story by Marshall Brain: ‘Manna.’

The story begins with a chain-restaurant automating various management tasks through a virtual robot called Manna v1.0 — an autonomous system that speaks through headphones to employees and micromanages their tasks.

The novella quickly moves onto subsequent improvements to Manna that end up replacing middle-managers, and ultimately all managers across the retail space. Employees themselves essentially become meat-robots: with every task broken down step-by-step by the Manna system.

Blacklists of under-performing employees are created and shared between Manna installations, leading to a growing sector of the “unemployable.”

Soon enough the software extends beyond retail and with each improvement the generated wealth from efficiency improvements accumulates upwards.

Ultimately the protagonist ends up living in a concrete-jungle city with his friend, unemployed, subsisting off of the automated world around him without any input.

Then to his great surprise he’s visited one day by a representative from The Australia Project. It turns out that a forward-looking visionary had sold virtual shares at $1,000 a piece some time in the past, and the protagonists father had bought two shares.

The Australia Project raised nearly a trillion dollars and proceeded to buy out a significant chunk of the Australian wilderness, building an egalitarian techno-society where resources were shared freely due to the massive automation creating a pseudo-post-scarcity economy.

Moving there, he discovers that their advances in robotics, nano-technology, and computer science have created a utopia. In the end he finds fulfillment in living a simple life working on a hobby he comes to love.

The Nevada Project?

Jeffrey Berns appears to be undertaking an incredibly similar vision based on linking AI, nano-technology, and 3D fabrication with blockchain technology.

Such a place could be a proving ground for emerging post-scarcity economic principles like rapid production of goods at incredibly low energy costs.

Three projects are already aligned against Blockchain LLC’s mission:

Custody of Digital Assets

Digital Identity

Information & News

Beyond that Blockchains LLC has announced that they want to share revenue with employees, residents, and investors — this is a co-op harkening back to the days of early Utah Territory settlement.

In fact, the wilderness itself isn’t so wild; the land surrounds and neighbors big tech holdings like the Tesla Gigafactory.

Summary

What if the first viable enclave of blockchain-based society emerged in the domestic United States?

Jeffrey Berns believes in it, as attested by the $300 million of his own money sunk into the project so far.

Hopefully his vision is aligned towards the heavenly sort of Manna — that is to say — the substance miraculously supplied as food to the Israelites in the wilderness (Exodus 16), rather than the soulless Manna of Marshall Brain’s futurism.