“Shakerism was a bottom-up, bootstrapped religious movement. It was a community first project that gathered people with a common set of goals and worldview. It then leveraged the talent, resources and time of this dispersed community to build out a coordinated network of villages in the image of their ideals. Shakerism came up as people before product. Its strength was in developing enough ideological and social consensus amidst the community. This enabled the creation of a coordination system, which allowed all members to effectively pool together what they could bring to the project to make something that was more than the sum of its parts; to develop a sustainable economy and a functional governance system that allowed the community to live out its image of the good life during its days on earth.”