Max Borders

Max Borders is a writer and editor whose subject is decentralisation: how people might cooperate, govern themselves and solve social problems without routing everything through a central authority. He is the author of The Social Singularity (2018), After Collapse and The Decentralist (2021), and writes and hosts Underthrow, a Substack publication and interview show that shares its name with his most recent book.

He directs Human Respect Labs, an incubator launched in 2025 as a project of the Foundation for Harmony and Prosperity, which makes small grants to teams working on what it calls liberatory projects, from content creators and community builders to entrepreneurs. He is also founder and executive director of Social Evolution, a non-profit devoted to solving social problems through innovation rather than legislation, and he co-founded the Voice & Exit event and the Future Frontiers conference.

He read philosophy at Appalachian State University and University College London, and came to this work through the institutes: programme director at the Institute for Humane Studies, media director at TCS Daily, policy analyst at the John William Pope Civitas Institute, and then editor and director of content at the Foundation for Economic Education, where he edited The Freeman.

The thread running through the books is the one that connects him to Free Cities: that jurisdictional competition, startup societies and network states are a practical exit from centralised governance rather than another attempt to reform it from the inside. He has written on subscription government, and on what it would take to move from a shadow constitution to a network state.