At this point I branched out to communities who diverge from the norm, whether this means they live by alternate laws to whats considered convention in the land they occupy, or the separate themselves form the societies from where they came.
Examples:
Slab City, California City with no infrastructure in the middle of the desert with no rules.
Pitcairn British owned Island in the middle of the pacific ocean. Has 30~40 inhabitants and is governed under British and New Zealand law, however in reality these laws and culture is governed by the people who live there.
Tribes (worldwide) Tribes are essentially a small group of people who have their own rules and habits which are respected by the
One of the approached to materialise this project could be a nomadlist.com type platform to provide a database of potential
I see the audience for this type of product similar to that of nomadlist.com, individuals who can and want to breakaway from their broader circle of friends and want to get away and explore new ways of living.
The problem with Slab city, mentioned earlier, is there is no infrastructure. It barely had dirt paths, no electrical grid, no sewage system, and barely any way-finding. Ghost towns have all these in either working or repairable condition.
For the output of this project I could extend on the idea of nomadlist to dive into the freedom aspect of it. Exploring different measures of freedom people could have over their lives. What people consider rights and freedom varied and this could be visualised and compared globally. Below are some examples of measures of freedom.
Screenshot from https://www.heritage.org/index/heatmap
This is an interactive map that tracks a series of measures across a percentage scale, viewable over time. Its a bit difficult to use, especially since clear selection doesn’t restore to the default state. But this along with the other graphs available on the site give a very clear visualisation of legal governance and personal freedom globally. There are issues with these rankings, they all have slightly different top rated free countries and they fail to quickly adapt to changing contexts. For instance on the above website Hong Kong is rated the № 1 freest country, which as of current is clearly untrue. On the RSF ranking Hong Kong is down at № 73. But ranked № 3 on the World Population Review.
Common freedom indices often rand a country freedom by the level of democracy or authoritarianism. However, when you consider cases such as charging unrealistic amounts of money to call an ambulance or even charging mothers personally for contact time with their newborn, the US doesn’t rank so high. These more personal, less data rich markers are missing in many of these freedom stats and visualisations. An opportunity for improvement.
Finally there are places that have had traditional territorial disputes and are not stably governed by a country, but are no remote that it is more practical for them to govern themselves on a day-to-day basis. Such as the Swedish run Svalbard and British ruled but New Zealand influenced Pitcairn.
https://app.stitcher.com/splayer/f/421006/64949793
Svalbard is an island in the artic circle currently part of Sweeden, however has had claims by several nations due to its proximity to other nations and strategic position in case of war. Being so remote has resulted in it becoming semi-autonomous simply by its remoteness from the mainland.