Frontier

In Kyle’s notes the “frontier” is the conceptual pole opposite to “reform” in the City Building thesis: the bet that it is better to build governance and infrastructure greenfield in new places than to fix legacy hubs. City Building frames the argument as “frontier > reform” — as the opportunity cost of living in cities like SF and NYC falls (loss of community, poor city management, broken infrastructure, the rise of the cloud labor market), the timing improves for founding new cities from scratch rather than reforming existing ones. The frontier here is both literal (new physical locations, often bootstrapped on a shoestring, as with the Bluebook Cities effort) and figurative (a desire “to do something heroic” away from established institutions). The idea connects to the Charter Cities lineage and the broader argument that frontier governance can be built fresh where legacy systems can’t be reformed.

Where this appears

• City Building — the “frontier > reform” framing; founding new cities (charter cities, seasteads, network-state exits) on the frontier instead of reforming old ones, motivated by the falling opportunity cost of legacy hubs and the cloud labor market.