WagonDAOA Place to Call Home
The Wagon Box in the small town of Story, Wyoming is the place to get away from the din of The Machine. With lodging, a library, restaurant, tavern and café, all within earshot of rushing streams, and 20 beautiful acres near national forest trails, you can rest, read, write, fish, explore, and meet other escapees or any of the local characters.
But, more than a privately owned resort or a non-profit retreat center, The Wagon Box is forging a new kind of place. It will be owned by a distributed community of thoughtful men and serve as an intergenerational commonwealth of conversation, learning, adventure, and investment, as well as an oasis of art, music, and story.
The old social fabric of small-town and urban burroughs has been shredded by a series of new technologies. Vast impersonal hedge funds are absorbing neighborhoods and turning them into rent machines. Cottage industry itself has been turned into an international commodity, and the political apparatus is largely a system for converting fear and confusion into control. And yet there must always remain hope. Nostalgic laments, anti-technological and anti-corporate vitriol get us nowhere. We must forge new institutions within these realities that are based in gratitude and rooted in loyalty and connection. The Wagon Box will be a project along these lines, but also place where folks can have this conversation of how to live sanely in strange times, and how to work together toward a bright and heavenly future.
WagonDAO IV — Join Us
We are hosting a gathering in October. Folks from across the country will meet up for a week of fun times and great conversations around the table and campfire. There are presentations scheduled on literature, theology, cryptocurrencies, community building (urban and off-grid), post-liberal politics, alternative education projects, and more.
The goal is to build lasting friendships, to open opportunities for economic collaboration, and for guys to broaden their understanding and appreciation of philosophy, art, music, building and fixing things, adventure and exploration. We want to consider ways of forging new patterns of living, using the best that we have from the past and the present. It is a strange and terrible but amazing and beautiful time in history and if you want to face it with thoughtful friends of all walks of life come to the Wagon Box. You won't regret it.
Our Mission
The WagonDAO is an countermodern, intergenerational investment group that funds projects with a broad spectrum view of profitability for its members. It is guided by the wisdom of the past and the best innovations of the present, toward a future of truth and beauty through the collaborative education and loyal interaction of its members. It acts as a catalyst and clearinghouse for ideas, an incubator for projects, and a community for the interaction of folks from different paths with the common pursuit of freedom and abundance.
“Maybe the real treasure is the friends we made along the way.”
The course of human history has been a quest for freedom, yet it has proven to be as much a quest to define it as to achieve it. It seems intuitive that freedom is connected to power and prosperity, but the example and teachings of Christ permanently upset this relationship, teaching a path to wealth possible through renunciation, and to supremacy through submission: on an individual basis.
“For what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?.” Mark 7:36
Recently, social atomization has paired with technological innovation to open new models of social and economic activity. In this environment, the natural inclination to work to increase one’s comfort, security and social standing brought many in the 1st world to the odd place of being more wealthy than ever by some material standard, but without free time–the leisure to contemplate, pray, study, converse. Even those with leisure seem often to lack purpose. These are not new problems; from Chesterton to Houellebecq to the kitsch platitudes attributed to the Dalai Lama, similar sentiments are everywhere. But what do we do about it?
One temptation is to judge the path civilization took and to try to reverse it. “The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race” may be true, but we don’t really know what the alternative is, or was, and we won’t; we have no standing to cast judgment on the past, and can only scavenge it for parts. Another is the temptation to march toward a grand historical epoch of economic social structures that supersede family, religion, and obviate vice through correct material relationships. These and other temptations look far out at the broad paths that open up behind us and ahead of us, but the narrow gate is Now.
For all this bleakness there is much light and life and truth, and people everywhere are looking and trying and building and thinking. Solutions ranging from localized ideological communities to the Network State, a noble but stunted blueprint in that it combines the associative principle of peak corporate realism–the Network–with the apparatus of impersonal subjugation: the State, are being built as we speak, and yet these leave us wanting. One problem with self-selected communities is that voluntary relationships are often made rationally and so are inherently unstable. Rationalism makes for good engineers and great lawyers, but bad architecture and worse legislation. Inversely, the ballast of any healthy relationship between a person and property, or between persons, is ultimately irrational, or superrational. As Nassim Taleb put it: If you know why you’re friends with someone, you’re not.
So how do you build a community intentionally but superrationally? How do you manage an investment fund sustainably and surreally? How do you edit a publication without ideology? One solution is to arbitrarily anchor it to a place, but without the baggage of full time residence. Intermittent interaction, shared ownership, rotational residencies, and the responsibilities of stewardship, rooted in IRL connection at one location. In our case, the Wagon Box in Story, Wyoming. A meeting place, a refuge, an aspiration, and ultimately, an asset. A powerful foundation from which prosperity, exchange and life will grow.
