Let a Thousand Societies Bloom

2026-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

source: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025/12/17/societies.html</p>

Overview</h1>
Let a Thousand Societies Bloom</em> (December 2025) is Vitalik Buterin's most detailed essay on the network societies space since his 2022 review of Balaji's The Network State</em>. Written after two years of real-world experimentation — Zuzalu, ZuConnect, the Chiang Mai Archipelago, and many independent spinoffs — it moves from theory to a concrete framework for what these communities could become.</p>
The essay names four interconnected entity types: Tribes</strong>, Hubs</strong>, Zones</strong>, and The Archipelago</strong>. Together these are meant to form a new layer of intermediate institutions between individuals and nation-states.</p>

Intellectual Lineage</h1>
Vitalik lists the prior traditions feeding into this movement:</p>

Balaji Srinivasan's The Network State</em></a> (2022)</li>
The coordi-nations</a> / networked nations movement</li>
Phyles</a> — David de Ugarte's transnational cultural-economic networks</li>
Seasteading, Liberland, Sealand</li>
Charter Cities Institute</li>
Estonian e-residency</li>
Bhutan's Gelephu Mindfulness City</a></li>
Freetown Christiania, Walt Disney's EPCOT</li> </ul>
What We Learned From Zuzalu</h1>
The essay draws practical lessons from the original 2023 experiment:</p>

~200 people (Dunbar's number) is the right size.</strong> Large enough to sustain subcultures; small enough for everyone to know each other.</li>
1–2 months is the right duration.</strong> "A week is a break from your life; two months is your life." Longer stays change people's orientation from tourist to resident.</li>
"A college at 25% intensity."</strong> Enough programming to stimulate people, not enough to exhaust them. Explicit no-event windows recommended.</li>
The Chiang Mai model.</strong> "5–10 popups, each independently bringing 30–300 people, co-located in the same city around the same time" — coordination without centralized control.</li> </ul>
Limits of popups:</strong></p>

Short-term rental is expensive; you negotiate in an unfamiliar market.</li>
Hard to create depth of cultural environment in 40 days.</li>
Involving locals non-superficially requires returning for years.</li>
Without legal staying power, governance experiments are limited to "forking" (someone unhappy can just start a new popup).</li>
Risk of regression: over time, popups trend shorter, smaller, and more generic, approaching ordinary conferences.</li> </ul>
Framework</h1>
Tribes</h2>
The central new concept. A tribe is a 21st-century intermediate institution organized around culture</strong> — not geography, ethnicity, or religion. Tribes address the "atomistic yet authoritarian" critique of modern society: we have individuals and states, with too little in between.</p>
Tribes differ from corporations (profit motive homogenizes) and social media (scales by appealing to everyone, reducing distinctiveness to zero). A tribe is explicitly not</em> trying to become a megacorporation.</p>
Key function: cultural innovation</strong>. Tribes experiment with norms, rituals, aesthetics, diets, governance — and successful experiments spread through the Archipelago.</p>
Hubs</h2>
Permanent physical nodes — as opposed to popups, which move or dissolve. Examples mentioned:</p>

Frontier Tower</strong> — permanent node</li>
Crecimiento</a></strong> / Aleph (Argentina)</li>
4seas</strong> — two nodes in Chiang Mai (one city, one mountain)</li>
Balaji's Network School</a></strong></li>
Vitalia</a></strong> (Honduras) — already split into two forks</li> </ul>
Hubs provide what popups cannot: long-term residency, stable infrastructure, the ability to build culture that deepens over years. The standing risk is "regression to the mean" — becoming a glorified coworking space.</p>
Edge City</a> is noted as having "perfected a pipeline" for running popups and being cash-flow-positive — a model for sustainability.</p>
Zones</h2>
Legal governance experiments: regions where a host country grants special regulatory conditions to attract innovation. Vitalik's proposed policy palette includes:</p>

Open immigration via vouching</strong>: instead of state-regulated immigration, vouchers from established community members serve as the gating mechanism — more trust-based, less bureaucratic</li>
Democracy experiments</strong>: novel voting mechanisms, liquid democracy, participatory budgeting</li>
Urban governance innovation</strong>: flexible zoning, community land trusts, new ownership models</li> </ul>
The question of why countries would host zones: economic development, prestige, tax revenue, technology transfer.</p>
The Archipelago</h2>
The connected network of Tribes + Hubs + Zones, loosely coordinated across geography. Each node maintains its distinctiveness; the network provides mutual support, shared tools, and cross-pollination.</p>
This is the long-term vision: not a single new city or country, but a distributed layer of culturally specific, experimentally rich communities that remain legible to each other.</p>
Relation to Existing Concepts</h1>
Concept</th> Relationship</th></tr></thead>

ZuVillage</a></td> Canonical popup format; the starting point for Tribes</td></tr>
Hubs</a></td> Direct instantiation of Vitalik's "Hubs" concept</td></tr>
Archipelago 2024</a></td> Chiang Mai co-location model, now a named template</td></tr>
Phyles</a></td> Historical precursor to Tribes</td></tr>
Network State</a></td> Related tradition; Vitalik's approach is more pluralistic and less sovereignty-focused</td></tr> </tbody></table>
See Also</h1>

Why I Built Zuzalu</a></li>
Zuzalu</a></li>
Vitalik Buterin</a></li>
Hubs</a></li>
Pop-Ups</a></li> </ul>

ZuZone

2026-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

ZuZone is the connective layer for the Zuzalu ecosystem — "a shared home where permanent hubs and pop-up cities come together, learn from each other, and grow as one global community." The project was born out of the decentralized ZuVillage movement and aims to keep it aligned, supported, and transparent without centralizing it.</p>

"Born from the spirit of Zuzalu, ZuZone exists to make sure that what we are building across the world stays aligned, supported, transparent, and human."</p> </blockquote>
The primary technical output so far is the zuletter</strong>: a community newsletter built as a GitHub-native, fully auditable system with no proprietary servers or databases — data lives in GitHub Issues and Markdown files, the UI is a Next.js app on Vercel.</p>
Projects</h1>
Zuletter</h2>
A community newsletter POC for the Zuzalu ecosystem. Key properties:</p>

Data</strong>: GitHub Issues and Markdown files — fully public and auditable</li>
UI</strong>: Next.js on Vercel (static/ISR)</li>
Writes</strong>: Redirect to GitHub's native flows — no custom auth</li>
February 2026 issue published with scrapbook collage layout</li> </ul> Links</h1>

zuzone.org</a></li>
zuletter.vercel.app</a></li>
GitHub: vrnvrn/zu</a></li>
Contact: hi@zuzone.org</li> </ul>
See Also</h1>

ZuVillage</a></li>
Zuzalu.city</a></li>
Pop-Ups</a></li> </ul>

Devcon

2026-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

Devcon is the annual Ethereum developer conference organized by the Ethereum Foundation</a>. It is the primary recurring gathering of the Ethereum ecosystem — researchers, protocol developers, application builders, and adjacent communities including much of the pop-up village world.</p>
Devcon 7 SEA — Bangkok, 2024</h1>
Devcon 7, held in Bangkok, Thailand in November 2024, was notable for coinciding with an unusually dense cluster of pop-up villages in the region. The Chiang Mai Archipelago</a> — over a dozen simultaneous pop-up communities in Chiang Mai — was timed deliberately between Token 2049 in Singapore and Devcon in Bangkok, creating an extended season of in-person coordination across Thailand. Edge City Lanna</a> ran October–November in Chiang Mai and fed directly into Devcon week.</p>
The result was one of the largest concentrations of ZuVillage-lineage participants in one region at one time. A Popup City talk at Devcon 7</a> documented the history and lineage of pop-up communities.</p>
Significance to this ecosystem</h1>
Devcon functions as a gravity well for the ZuVillage ecosystem. Pop-up events frequently cluster around it geographically and temporally — participants extend their travel to absorb both the conference and surrounding villages. Many of the projects documented in this wiki were demoed, announced, or coordinated at Devcon.</p>
Links</h1>

devcon.org</a></li> </ul>
See also</h1>

Ethereum</a></li>
Chiang Mai Archipelago 2024</a></li>
Edge City</a></li>
Zuzalu</a></li> </ul>

ZuConnect

2026-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

ZuConnect was the second major Zuzalu</a>-organized popup, held in Istanbul from October 29 to November 11, 2023 — timed immediately before DevConnect, a major Ethereum developer event. Approximately 300 full-time residents participated, with 100+ joining for part of the duration.</p>
See Also</h1>

Zuzalu</a></li>
Devcon</a></li>
ZuVillage</a></li> </ul>

E. Glen Weyl

2026-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

E. Glen Weyl is an economist and co-author of two works directly relevant to this wiki's themes. He co-authored the 2018 paper Liberal Radicalism</em> with Vitalik Buterin</a> and Zoë Hitzig, which introduced Quadratic Funding</a>. He also co-authored Plurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy</em> with Audrey Tang, the basis of the Pluralism</a> page.</p>
He founded RadicalxChange</a>, a foundation exploring new mechanisms for democratic coordination and market design.</p>
See Also</h1>

Quadratic Funding</a></li>
Pluralism</a></li> </ul>

Janine Leger

2026-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

Janine Leger co-organized the original Zuzalu</a> (Montenegro, 2023) and subsequently co-founded Edge City</a> with Timour Kosters</a>, which became the primary continuing series of pop-up villages in the Zuzalu lineage.</p>
See Also</h1>

Edge City</a></li>
Zuzalu</a></li>
Timour Kosters</a></li> </ul>

Vitalik Buterin

2026-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

Vitalik Buterin is the founder of Ethereum</a> and the initiator of Zuzalu</a> (Montenegro, 2023). His writing is the primary intellectual thread connecting this wiki's major topics: network states, pop-up cities, d/acc, programmable cryptography, and decentralized governance.</p>
Writings relevant to this wiki</h1>

Crypto Cities</a></strong> (2021) — explores blockchain integration into local governance; precursor to Zuzalu thinking</li>
Network States review</a></strong> (2022) — response to Balaji Srinivasan's book</li>
Why I Built Zuzalu</a></strong> (2023) — first-hand account of Zuzalu's design and lessons</li>
d/acc</a></strong> (2023) — Defensive Accelerationism essay</li>
Futures of Ethereum</a></strong> (2024) — includes overview of "God Protocols" and programmable cryptography</li> </ul>
His blog is at vitalik.eth.limo</a>.</p>
See also</h1>

Zuzalu</a></li>
d/acc</a></li>
Ethereum</a></li>
Programmable Cryptography</a></li> </ul>

DeSci

2026-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

DeSci (Decentralized Science) applies Web3 tools — DAOs, tokens, on-chain IP, and quadratic funding</a> — to the problems of scientific research: funding, publication, data access, and peer review. The argument is that traditional funding bodies and journals create bottlenecks that slow research, introduce bias, and lock knowledge behind paywalls.</p>
Connection to Zuzalu</h1>
Longevity and biotech research was one of the three founding tracks at Zuzalu</a> in 2023, alongside Ethereum developers and rationalists. This made DeSci a recurring presence across the ZuVillage lineage — the overlap between people building decentralized infrastructure and people trying to accelerate longevity research proved natural, sharing the same instinct toward permissionless, open systems.</p>
Key Mechanisms</h1>

IP-NFTs</strong> — tokenized intellectual property allowing research IP to be owned, licensed, and traded on-chain. Developed by Molecule</a>.</li>
Research DAOs</strong> — decentralized organizations pooling funds and governance to direct research spending. VitaDAO (longevity) is the most prominent example in this ecosystem.</li>
Open data</strong> — publishing datasets to decentralized storage (IPFS, Filecoin) to make them permanently accessible and citable.</li> </ul> Notable Projects</h1>

VitaDAO</a></strong> — DAO funding early-stage longevity research. One of the earliest and most active research DAOs; closely connected to the Zuzalu longevity community.</li>
Molecule</a></strong> — platform for IP-NFTs and research funding infrastructure.</li> </ul>
See Also</h1>

d/acc</a></li>
Quadratic Funding</a></li>
Zuzalu</a></li> </ul>

Phyles

2026-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

Phyles is a concept developed by Spanish economist David de Ugarte describing transnational groups that share cultural and economic ties, coordinate both online and offline, and function as a kind of voluntary non-territorial nation. The term and concept predate the crypto era.</p>
Vitalik Buterin</a> cited Phyles directly in Why I Built Zuzalu</em></a> as one of the intellectual precursors to Zuzalu, alongside Michel Maffesoli's The Time of the Tribes</em> and Balaji Srinivasan's The Network State</em>. He also listed it in his December 2025 essay Let a thousand societies bloom</em></a> as part of the broader "thousand nations bloom" intellectual tradition.</p>
Primary Sources</h1>
P2P Foundation: Phyles</a></li>
David de Ugarte</a></li> </ul>
See Also</h1>

Network Societies</a></li>
Pluralism</a></li> </ul>

ECF Pensieve

2026-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

ECF Pensieve is the Ethereum Community Fund</a>'s platform for community-driven project discovery, tracking, and grant allocation. It functions as a public ledger of project contribution histories, with Transparency and Accountability scores determining grant eligibility — no gatekeepers, permissionless participation.</p>

"Public goods deserve sunlight. Too often, early projects — the ones without tokens, hype, or venture backing — are left unfunded and unseen." — ECF</p> </blockquote>
Perennial Grant Experiment</h1>
A 10-week rolling grant program distributing weekly payments to projects based on their Pensieve scores. All payouts are streamed on-chain via Sablier</a>, making disbursements fully public and auditable. Anyone can contribute to, propose, review, or challenge projects without permission.</p>
The ZuVillage Special Grant</strong> was a two-week sub-round within the Perennial Grant Experiment, directed specifically at pop-up village projects. Winners of the first round (announced at the Zuzalu Software Townhall, Devcon 7</a>):</p>

ETHChiangmai</strong> — Ethereum community gathering in Chiang Mai around Devcon 7</li>
ZuKas</strong> — Pop-up in Kaş, Turkey; announced ZuKas II and the ZuGov protocol alpha</li> </ul> Features</h1>

Pensieve Ads</strong> — ad slots priced via Harberger tax: holders self-assess value and pay a continuous tax on that assessment; anyone can buy the slot at the self-assessed price at any time. Mechanism aligns pricing with genuine willingness to pay.</li>
MySieve</strong> — curation and sorting layer for grant and project discovery within the platform.</li> </ul> Connection to Zuzalu.city</a></h1>
ECF and Zuzalu Software (Zuzalu.city) are distinct organizations but closely coordinated. ECF Pensieve has been used to fund ZuVillage projects and was featured at the Zuzalu Software Townhall at Devcon 7 in Bangkok.</p>
Links</h1>

pensieve.ecf.network</a></li>
ecf.network</a></li> </ul>
See Also</h1>

Quadratic Funding</a></li>
Zuzalu.city</a></li>
Devcon</a></li>
Grants</a></li> </ul>

Gitcoin

2026-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

Gitcoin is the primary implementation of Quadratic Funding</a> in the Ethereum ecosystem. It runs grant rounds that distribute matching funds to open source software, community infrastructure, and public goods projects — allocating matching based on breadth of community support rather than donation size.</p>
Many projects in the ZuVillage and network-state ecosystem have been funded through Gitcoin Grants rounds, making it a significant piece of the financial infrastructure underlying this community.</p>
Links</h1>

gitcoin.co</a></li> </ul>
See Also</h1>

Quadratic Funding</a></li>
ECF Pensieve</a></li>
Grants</a></li> </ul>

Quadratic Funding

2026-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

Quadratic Funding (QF) is a mechanism for allocating matching funds to public goods projects. It was introduced in the 2018 paper Liberal Radicalism: A Flexible Design For Philanthropic Matching Funds</em> by Vitalik Buterin</a>, Zoë Hitzig, and E. Glen Weyl.</p>
The core insight: matching funds should be proportional to the number of contributors</strong>, not the total amount raised. A project with 100 people each donating $1 signals broader legitimacy than one person donating $100 — QF rewards the former more heavily.</p>
The Mechanism</h1>
Each project's match is proportional to the square of the sum of the square roots of individual contributions:</p>
`match ∝ ( √c₁ + √c₂ + ... + √cₙ )² </code></pre> This means small contributions from many people are amplified more than large contributions from few. It operationalizes the idea that community support — not wealth — should determine what gets funded.</p>`Gitcoin</h1> Gitcoin</a> is the primary implementation of QF for the Ethereum ecosystem. Its Gitcoin Grants program has run multiple rounds funding open source software, community infrastructure, and public goods projects — many of them directly adjacent to the ZuVillage and network-state ecosystem.</p> Significance</h1> QF is one of the cleaner examples of a governance mechanism that emerged from the crypto/Ethereum intellectual tradition and has been applied in practice at scale. It sits at the intersection of pluralism</a> (weighting breadth of support across diverse contributors) and the d/acc principle of building infrastructure that resists capture by large actors.</p> Glen Weyl, one of the paper's co-authors, is also co-author of the Plurality</a> book.</p> Primary Sources</h1> Liberal Radicalism paper</a> — Buterin, Hitzig, Weyl (2018)</li> Gitcoin.co</a></li> </ul> See Also</h1> Pluralism</a></li> Grants</a></li> Ethereum</a></li> </ul>
Zupass 2026-02-27T00:00:00+00:00 Zupass is a zero-knowledge proof-based identity and credential system developed by 0xPARC</a> for Zuzalu</a> in 2023. It lets users prove membership in a group or possession of a credential without revealing which specific person they are. It began as a way to prove "you are a Zuzalu resident" for access control, polling, and event sign-in, and has since become the primary identity layer across the ZuVillage</a> ecosystem.</p> Vitalik Buterin described it in Why I Built Zuzalu</a>: "The 0xPARC team created Zupass, an identity system based on zero-knowledge proofs that you could use to prove that you were a resident of Zuzalu without revealing which one."</em></p> How It Works</h1> Zupass stores credentials ("PCDs" — Proof-Carrying Data) in a client-side wallet. A credential might be: "ticket to Edge City Lanna," "Ethereum core dev," or "voted in this poll." Using ZK proofs, holders can prove predicates about their credentials — "I hold a valid ticket" or "I voted once" — without revealing the underlying data.</p> The core primitive is the PCD (Proof-Carrying Data)</strong> framework, an abstraction for any object that carries a verifiable claim. Different PCD types wrap different proof systems (RSA ticket signatures, Semaphore group membership, EdDSA signatures, etc.). Applications request specific PCD types; Zupass generates the proof client-side.</p> Key properties:</p> Client-side</strong>: private keys and credentials never leave the user's device</li> ZK proofs</strong>: selective disclosure — prove what's needed, nothing more</li> Composable</strong>: any app can request any PCD type; Zupass is a general wallet, not app-specific</li> Pseudonymous by default</strong>: proving group membership does not reveal identity</li> </ul> Usage Across the Ecosystem</h1> Zupass has been deployed at every major ZuVillage since 2023:</p> Zuzalu 2023</strong> — resident identification, anonymous polling via Zupoll</a></li> Edge City Esmeralda, Crecimiento, Lanna</strong> — event ticketing and access</li> ETHChiangmai, Devcon side events</strong> — ticket gating, vote proofs</li> Zuzalu.city</a></strong> — integrated as the primary identity/credential layer</li> </ul> The Zupass.org</a> app is the user-facing wallet. Zupoll</a> and ZuCast are built on top of it.</p> Significance</h1> Zupass is one of the few pieces of social technology that emerged from the original Zuzalu experiment, was battle-tested in real use, iterated on user feedback, and propagated across subsequent events. Vitalik cited it as evidence that the "incubating novel technologies within a dedicated community" model actually works.</p> It is also a proof-of-concept for the broader d/acc thesis: that privacy-preserving identity tools are buildable and usable today, not theoretical. The shift from "you must identify yourself to access this space" to "you must prove a predicate about yourself" is the practical application of programmable cryptography</a> to everyday community coordination.</p> Technical Resources</h1> Zupass GitHub</a> — open source</li> PCD framework documentation</a></li> 0xPARC on programmable cryptography</a></li> Zupoll</a> — anonymous polling built on Zupass</li> </ul> See Also</h1> Programmable Cryptography</a></li> Privacy Software</a></li> Zuzalu.city</a></li> Zuzalu</a></li> </ul> Personal Todo List 2025-01-23T00:00:00+00:00 Wiki</h2> Forum</h2> LaGrange</h2> Make RSS feed of https://lu.ma/zuzalutownhall/ and make a zuzalu acct?</li> </ul> Writing</h1> Edit first paragraph of A Lunarpunk Manifesto</a></li> </ul> Meta</h1> VMs</h2> Make a new wallet VM with whonix</li> Make Alpine VM</li> New rage and rsign2 public keys https://keys.pub/</li> </ul> </li> </ul> Wallets</h2> Set up SAFE wallet * https://app.safe.global/new-safe/create?chain=oeth</li> Set up Railgun https://www.railway.xyz/</li> https://tokenshielder.com/</li> </ul> </li> Set up Umbra, labrynth, privacy wallet. https://app.umbra.cash/setup</li> </ul> </li> </ul> DAOs</h2> HAI</h3> Bridge OP https://superbridge.app/optimism</li> https://www.brid.gg/op-mainnet?amount=&originChainId=1&token=ETH</li> https://www.optimism.io/apps</li> </ul> </li> Buy HAI and KITE https://app.uniswap.org/swap</li> https://www.letsgethai.com/auctions</li> </ul> </li> Get rEth</li> Stake rETH on HIA</li> Join Let's Get Hai governance https://common.xyz/lets-get-hai/discussions</li> https://www.tally.xyz/gov/hai/</li> </ul> </li> </ul> ethereum 2025-01-23T00:00:00+00:00 Ethereum is big and how much is necessary to cover in a network-societies wiki is debateable. Still, Ethereum provides super important infrastructure for decentralized software.</p> Stable coins</h1> Algorithmic</h2> Unpegged</h3> RAI</a> https://xcancel.com/reflexerfinance</li> </ul> </li> HAI</a></li> https://mixbytes.io/blog/security-of-algorithmic-stablecoins</li> </ul> Token Bridges</h1> SmolRefuel (Gassless Bridging)</a></li></p> Squid Router V2</a></li> Portal (Wormhole)</a></li> AllBridge</a></li> Satellite (Axelar)</a></li> O3</a></li> Transporter (Chainlink CCIP)</a></li> </ul> Cross-Chain Messaging</a></h2> Chainlink CCIP</a></li> Hyperlane</a></li> Wormhole</a></li> Layer Zero</a></li> Axelar Network</a></li> Privacy Software 2025-01-23T00:00:00+00:00 Privacy does not mean you have something to hide, it means you have the freedom to disclose your personal information at will. Imagine if ones personal thoughts were not private, how little risk, innovation, or creativity there would be. Computers are "bicycles for the mind," extensions of our own intellectual capabilities, and so demand a similar amount of privacy.</p> Univeral Declaration of Human Rightts</h1> Article 12</h2> No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.</p> Applications</h1> https://aztec.network/, ZK L2 in development</li> Massive resource of privacy-related apps in almost every use category: https://github.com/web3privacy/web3privacy</li> https://scribe.privacyredirect.com/@simbro/privacy-in-ethereum-stealth-addresses-f05016109010</li> </ul> LaGrange Punks 2025-01-21T00:00:00+00:00 Grange.la is a federated microblog server (like xitter, but more like mastodon/pleroma) running Mitra</a> software, written in Rust, with Ethereum wallet (optional Sign-In-With-Ethereum) and public key integration. It is lunarpunk</a> -- d/acc</a> themed and maintained as a Soverents Community Commons.</p> The name LaGrange Punkts is a reference to Lagrange points, places between two rotating bodies (such as the moon and the earth) where centrifugal forces and gravity cancel out and minimal/no energy is required to stay parked. It is the hypothesized ideal point for space colonies, and there are already man made objects taking advantage of this phenomenon.</p> Alternative Frontend (No JS)</h1> Once you've made an account on grange.la, you can login, post, and interact via https://bloat.grange.la, which is an alternative frontend that does not require javascript.</p> Future Living DAO 2025-01-21T00:00:00+00:00 The Future Living DAO is architecting a framework for the design and development of hubs (aka 'Lighthouses') and their interoperation.</p> Our vision is to create a decentralized network of "intelligent Lighthouses" – that serve as living laboratories for advancing civilization and human flourishing. The Ultramodern movement aims to revolutionize buildings and villages.</p> </blockquote> Lighthouses will integrate cutting-edge technology, sustainable practices, and be owned by the community to create environments that foster human flourishing and technological advancement.</p> </blockquote> Ultramodern</h1> The Future Living DAO has coined the phrase 'Ultramodern' to reflect a new kind of community with specific values and construction.</p> Mission Oriented Communities</h2> Open-source ethos (OG opensource vibes)</li> Decentralized organization principles - radically strong coordination work</li> Cutting-edge innovation (Xerox parc)</li> Visionary governance (Network states)</li> </ul> Community Values</h2> Intrinsically Motivated Innovators: Like the pioneers of open-source software, our members are self-driven to invent out of pure desire to evolve technology and society.</li> Decentralized Coordination Experts Leveraging the power of DAOs, we excel at remote collaboration, development, and shared incentives within our global community.</li> Tech-Optimists Inspired by Xerox PARC and Bell Labs, we're a group of technologists committed to building the future 30 years ahead of its time, coordinated through blockchain technology.</li> Network State Pioneers Evolving from co-living tribes to a global, decentralized community united under a shared vision of advancing civilization.</li> </ul> Technical Standards</h2> Token-based incentive systems</li> Interoperability and open standards</li> </ul> Members</h1> </li> </ul> Links</h1> Telegram:</li> Manifesto</a> Unofficial Mirror</a> [21/01/2025]</li> </ul> </li> Unofficial Forum</a></li> </ul> Cognitive Sovereignity 2025-01-20T00:00:00+00:00 Cognitive sovereignty is freedom of thought — not just from external manipulation, but from one's own cognitive weaknesses and biases. It is the mental counterpart to the political and financial self-sovereignty pursued by the broader network-society movement: the idea that a person cannot meaningfully be self-governing if their beliefs and attention are not their own.</p> It connects naturally to cypherpunk</a> values (privacy as a prerequisite for free thought) and to the rationalist community that was a founding track at Zuzalu</a>.</p> Concepts</h2> Cognitive Security (CogSec)</strong> — protecting one's epistemic environment from manipulation, misinformation, and adversarial persuasion. Analogous to OpSec for information.</li> Rationality</strong> — developing reliable mental tools for forming accurate beliefs and making good decisions.</li> Meditation / introspection</strong> — practices for observing and moderating one's own mental processes.</li> Epistemic autonomy</strong> — forming beliefs through one's own reasoning rather than deference to authority or social pressure.</li> </ul> See Also</h1> Cypherpunk</a></li> d/acc</a></li> Pluralism</a></li> </ul> Lunarpunk and the Dark Side of the Cycle 2025-01-20T00:00:00+00:00 Core Concepts</h2> Sci-fi expands possibilities; crypto is actionable sci-fi Solarpunk: optimistic, transparent, DAO-focused Lunarpunk: privacy-focused, skeptical, preparing for conflict</p> Key Contrasts</h2> Solarpunk</h3> Transparent infrastructure Public collaboration Institutional acceptance Potentially fragile</p> Lunarpunk</h3> Privacy-enhanced tools Underground resistance Anticipates conflict Antifragile design</p> Antifragility</h2> Lunarpunk thrives under pressure Privacy protects users during crackdowns Regulatory pressure strengthens system</p> Outcome</h2> Lunarpunk offers resilience solarpunk lacks Privacy essential for long-term survival Solarpunk must embrace privacy ("go dark") to succeed</p> More</h1> Interview with the author: https://diffractionscollective.org/zero-knowledge-during-the-dark-lunar-cycle-w-rachel-rose-oleary/</p> Mirror</h1> via https://dark.fi/insights/dark-side-of-the-cycle.html as of January 2025</p> Science fiction is a speculative exercise. By speculating on possible futures, sci-fi expands the space of possibilities. Crypto is an extreme kind of sci-fi because as well as offering a vision of the future it also provides the tools to make that future possible.</p> Crypto is currently energized by a sci-fi called solarpunk. Evolved from cyberpunk, solarpunk is a utopian vision of the future characterized by its optimism. For solarpunks, the future is bright. Solarpunk casts away the dystopian shadows of cyberpunk and illuminates a world beyond the chaotic horizon.</p> In Ethereum, solarpunk hackers are creating transparent infrastructures for funding public goods. The imaginary here is simple: decentralization and transparency will lead to a fairer and more just world. Web 3 is creating a new path for humanity, which old institutions will inevitably follow.</p> Solarpunk is crypto's conscious mind. It is bright, self-confident, and future-oriented. Yet the counterpart to solarpunk faith is lunarpunk skepticism. Lunarpunks are the solar shadow-self. They are the unconscious of this cycle. While "solarpunks join DAOs" (Dylan-Ennis), lunarpunks are preparing for war, and building privacy-enhanced tooling to protect their communities.</p> Lunarpunk first came into being as a subset of solarpunk. It has always preferred encryption over the plaintext paradigm offered by Ethereum. Overtime, the tensions created by solarpunk tendencies have only multiplied. Lunarpunk is forced to break away from the solarpunk legacy and assert its own.</p> In the lunarpunk imaginary, a conflict between crypto and existing power structures is essentially preprogrammed. Regulation forces crypto underground. Anonymity proliferates. In the interstellar darkness, freshly radicalized crypto factions create a new kind of democratic society.</p> This conflict is repressed in solarpunk psychology. The lunar cycle is rejected as a bearish nightmare. Its foundational conflict: nation-state's banning crypto – is called FUD because it produces fear, the kind of fear that compels people to grab their money and run.</p> As the supercycle segments, solarpunk repression is mounting. The optimism of solarpunk has become synonymous with bull market cycles, while pessimism is associated with the bear. Lunarpunk offers something beyond this simple oscillation. It is a moment of insight between market cycles, a glitch in the hologram where the source code shines through. Solarpunk fragility</p> Fragile is something that breaks when shaken. Antifragile is something that absorbs shocks and becomes stronger.</p> The fate of antifragility follows a convex curve, while fragility is concave.</p> The antifragility of crypto has been repeatedly emphasized. Yet crypto today exists on a fragility spectrum. The extent of its resilience will only be demonstrated when under sufficient external pressure. If crypto's defenses hold, convexity is its fate. Otherwise we will see a race to the bottom, concave-style.</p> Consider the following. Crypto's core innovation is a diptych – it empowers users while diffusing its attack surface (in equal proportion). User empowerment is negatively correlated with fragility; the more empowered a user base, the more antifragile a network becomes.</p> User-empowerment and system-antifragility are in positive feedback with each other. But this cycle also runs in reverse. In a transparent system, users are exposed. If the external environment turns hostile, this information can be weaponized against them. Faced with persecution, users will opt-out, triggering a descent into fragility.</p> The solarpunk mindset is essentially optimistic. Transparency in solarpunk systems is the spirit of optimism projected outward. By building transparent systems, the solarpunk says: I have faith that the law won't turn against me. Its insistence on optimism prevents it from preparing for the worst case scenario. This is the core of solarpunk fragility. Dark optionality</p> Taleb's thesis on antifragility hinges on unknowability. According to Taleb, the future is dark: it cannot be predicted with meaningful certainty. He describes optionality as the "weapon of antifragility" due to its ability to leverage this darkness to its advantage. Optionality assumes your prophecies are wrong most of the time. Being wrong is cheap, while being right is disproportionately rewarding.</p> Lunarpunk integrates optionality because it thrives in the worst-case scenario. If the lunarpunk thesis is wrong, the supercycle continues. If it's right, crypto enters its next phase armed with the appropriate defenses. Being well-defended means going dark: using cryptography to protect the identity and activity of users. This is the cornerstone of lunarpunk convexity.</p> In the solarpunk future, users flee when faced with persecution. But lunarpunks offer user protection. Participants in dark networks have plausible deniability. Changes in regulation do not affect them. The only reason why a regulatory crackdown would cause users to leave a network is if they do so voluntarily.</p> Crypto's antifragility is only demonstrated when anonymity is coupled with persecution. Still, to be truly antifragile crypto must do more than survive a regulatory onslaught. It must flourish under attack. Lunarpunks believe that through anonymity, escalating conflict simply empowers crypto; an empowerment which is exponential with the aggressor's decline. Convexity: a Prophesy</p> Anonymity is first compelled into being as an adaptation to mass surveillance. But its existence also further justifies surveillance efforts. This is a positive feedback loop that implies anonymity and surveillance are fated to escalate.</p> In a paradigm defined by its surveillance, the anonymity of crypto makes it alien. Left running long enough, the loop triggers the next phase in lunarpunk convexity– what I call the regulation trap. In this phase, attackers use the increase in anonymity as a scapegoat to leverage the full extent of their power against crypto.</p> Yet by cracking down on crypto, hostile powers simply further justify it. Crypto's usefulness is correlated with the extent of the crackdown: it expands disproportionately with each received blow. Antifragility.</p> The regulation trap forces crypto underground. This comes with a number of consequences:</p> Rising political consciousness</li> </ol> Anonymity is a catalyst for crypto's political consciousness. Post-regulatory crackdown, the crypto and fiat worlds are more clearly distinguished from each other. Only by establishing this separation can crypto build a new world that reflects its values. 2. Center is eliminated</p> A crypto at war is a hardened crypto. Those factions who are more willing to compromise with hostile powers will blend into the power apparatus or be eliminated. This is a kind of extinction event of ethically compromised projects. In time, it will empower crypto by vindicating its most ideological elements. 3. Better yield</p> Crypto is littered with the corpses of bad incentive design. Nowhere is this more densely concentrated than among legacy privacy coins. They are a master class in poor coin distribution and inflationary policies. The offset of this is that the true value of privacy projects is potentially much higher.</p> The new wave of privacy programmers are at ease with financial engineering. Thus the final stage in lunarpunk convexity is economic. Lunar settlements are only accessible by those who voluntarily reject the fiat paradigm. Anonymous offworlds offer a kind of revolutionary yield for those ideological enough to traverse the no man's land.</p> The Lunar Cycle</p> The sun is both a symbol of nature and of tyranny. Through its insistence of transparency and identity, solarpunk inherits the dual characteristics of its central symbol. Solarpunk systems are desert landscapes in which users are endangered and exposed.</p> Lunarpunk is more like a forest. A dense cover of encryption protects tribes and offers sanctuary for the persecuted. Wooded groves provide a crucial line of defense. Lunar landscapes are dark. They are also teeming with life.</p> Lunar tech is owned and operated by the people themselves in service of their freedom. Lunar settlements are a sanctuary where difference is nurtured and protected. The lunar cycle upholds democratic techniques against authoritarian technology, freedom against surveillance, and diversity against monoculture.</p> Lunarpunk’s believe freedom can only be found outside the logic of domination. This means lunar society must completely decouple itself from the current paradigm. As such the lunarpunk future is born from a conflict that solarpunks seek to avoid.</p> This solarpunk repression is its weakest point. Solarpunk cannot build the vision it projects if it has already integrated the oppression that it hopes to break away from. By favoring transparency in its systems, solarpunk is tragically engineering its fate. Surveillance – the mechanism of authoritarianism – is bound to the solarpunk destiny.</p> For solarpunk to succeed it must integrate the lunarpunk unconscious. The only hope for solarpunk is to go dark.</p> Thanks to Paul, Amir and Matti for feedback, and to Armor for his diagrams and artwork.</p> </blockquote> This article was originally published on the 22nd February 2022 in egirl capital. At the time of publication the original link is no longer accessible.</p> LunarDAO Manifesto 2025-01-20T00:00:00+00:00 Core Principles</h2> Information asymmetry: transparency for power, privacy for people Resistance against surveillance state and financial control Defense of cryptographic privacy tools and DeFi</p> State Hypocrisy</h2> Claims crypto enables crime while enabling larger-scale crimes Maintains control through financial surveillance Uses economic warfare against dissent Persecutes privacy advocates (Assange, Ulbricht)</p> LunarDAO's Vision</h2> Creates infrastructure for autonomous societies Invests in privacy projects and anonymity tools Builds self-sustaining ecosystem outside state control Promotes education and knowledge sharing</p> Lunarpunk Philosophy</h2> Forms communities rather than focusing on individual liberty Uses zero-knowledge cryptography for collective protection Builds parallel confederated societies Emphasizes self-defense and autonomy</p> Historical Context</h2> Continues legacy of cypherpunk movement Draws from historical resistance movements Fights against state monopoly on technology Creates sanctuary in "moonlit forests of encryption"</p> Mirror</h1> LunarDAO Manifesto</a> as of Jan 2025</p> The Leviathan</p> Information is power. Privacy and transparency are two antithetical dimensions of information. Transparency must apply to those in power, to lay open their machinations and hold them accountable. This includes any government, supranational entity, corporations and conglomerates. Privacy is for the people, to prevent the agents of power from intruding in the innermost parts of our individual and social existence.</p> The mouthpieces of the surveillance state claim that our sanctuaries and agoras are enabling criminals to sell drugs, weapons and human beings, and laundering money through cryptocurrencies. They use this as an excuse to block our access to DeFi and privacy tools and limit our autonomy. All the while the crimes we stand accused of are carried out day by day on a massive scale by well-connected and legally protected people, aided by national governments, their courts and law enforcement bodies. While attacking tools that empower people, they commandeer the black market and launder money through esteemed international banks.</p> So-called democratic nation-states openly make profit by entertaining economic relations with regimes they pretend to reject. Especially when it comes to war industry, these profitable relations are carried out against international conventions these states promoted themselves. Armaments are sold to regimes and used against civilians and liberation movements in the name of profit.</p> Hegemonic nation-states and their financial institutions have control over our lives. As long as we depend on their money we have no choice but to live under the dominion of empires. Banks track and control the money flow and can freeze assets at any time. They tempt us with the illusion of wealth, making us believe that we are part of the big game, when really we are expropriated. We are the yield. Sunset</p> Decades ago, cypherpunks foresaw the rise of censorship and surveillance. They understood that cryptography and economic sovereignity were necessary to ensure freedom. Bitcoin created an economy outside of financial hegemony and made it possible for people to regain agency.</p> Today that is no longer enough.</p> Crypto’s resistance to capture makes it a target. And so the surveillance state is on the attack. It has already started to make our software illegal. We are forced to self-regulate to survive. Anyone who falls into this trap has already lost.</p> Over the years, the voices upholding the cypherpunk mission have become fewer and quieter, drowned out by a flood of easy money. The advocates of crypto's liberatory mission lack unity as well as strategy.</p> LunarDAO provides such a strategy. Midnight</p> There are no institutions in this world that safeguard freedom. Those that try to are being denounced as criminal and terrorist, co-opted, marginalized and violently crushed. The existing establishment only maintains and intensifies our enslavement. We, the people, must create new worlds to live a free life. Many others before us have attempted to do so, and important contributions have been given by freedom fighters. We walk on this path remembering and celebrating this heritage and forging alliances with others struggling for liberation. We recognize the contribution done by the team of Wikileaks, which has stripped the American government of its historical immunity and shed light on the dark affairs of world powers. The United States, eager to deny the right to privacy of their citizens, are now persecuting Julian Assange for unmasking their own crimes.</p> While trying to regulate their internal markets and imposing strict surveillance over the economic activities of their own citizens, countries like France have developed unregulated markets in former colonies that are crippling local economy. An exemplary case is the French sabotage in Guinea; after the former colony declared its independence, France, led by De Gaulle, counterfeited the new Guinean Franc in order to trigger an economic crisis and cast down the elected leader Touré, as testified by former French secret services agent Maurice Robert. The colonizers didn’t succeed with getting rid of Touré, but managed to damage the Guinean economy enough to ensure dependency on France. Guinean case is particularly symbolic for French policies in the former colonies of West Africa, where economics has been weaponized against local people to keep them enslaved.</p> This and others crimes are daily committed with impunity by authorities that persecute, torture and imprison people building concrete alternatives of free life.</p> This is the case of Ross Ulbricht, among others. Creator of Silk Road, an anonymous e-commerce website, Ulbricht has been sentenced to an unjustifiable two life sentences and more, without parole, because some users used the marketplace to sell and buy illegal goods, mostly cannabis. The fact that one of the drug sellers has been condemned to five years makes if crystal clear that Ulbricht has been turned into the scapegoat of the United States’ war against privacy, to spread terror and deter the online community from searching for alternatives to surveillance.</p> Economy is being weaponized in Iran against women struggling for their freedom, as Iranian government is threatening to freeze the bank accounts of those who refuse to adhere to the law imposing hijab. As economic warfare is a common practice of the nation-states to impose their domain, building tools and platforms to guarantee economic freedom is a crucial struggle.</p> Organization is the key to self-defense, and self-defense is necessary to live. So believed J-Stark, 3D printing pioneer, who lived by the slogan ‘live free or fucking die’. He did die for freedom – he was murdered by German police, guilty of giving people a 3D technology that deprived the state of its monopoly on weapon production. We celebrate his legacy, and recognize a society’s right to self-defense against exploitation and occupation.</p> Since the dawn of the oppression of the state, free societies have armed themselves and resisted. Countless have died to protect the free life of humanity, and great victories have been achieved. But we slowly lost ground. State civilization has imposed its own narrative, casting the memory of democratic resistance in the shadows of the past - but our legacy has never disappeared. Although at constant risk of being erased and forgotten, it still continues in the resistance against occupation, fascism, patriarchy and ecocide. It has flourished over the millennia in the uprisings of peasants against landlords, in the knowledge of the witches, in the nomadic tribes refusing the institutions of power. The spirit of freedom that inflamed Tiananmen Square and the people of Falluja is a source of hope in Jenin and Kobane. The great battles of the past are the urban guerrilla of today. Everywhere, David is striking back at Goliath.</p> Ruling elites have robbed society of its knowledge, its memories and its dimensions. They have monopolized economy, depriving it of its original meaning, rewritten history and deviated the noble purpose of science. The greed of the oppressors is pushing technology, one of the spearheads of humanity’s knowledge, into degeneration. As they weaponize technology to enforce oppression, we are committed to using our skills to promote liberation.</p> This is why lunarpunks gather in the periphery rather than the center. We make our home in moonlit forests of encryption outside the reach of the state. We refuse to leave our protection in the hands of governments and Big Tech. We consider self-defense to be everyone's responsibility.</p> Rulers maintain authority by keeping people isolated. When we are alone, we cannot build the strength to change our realities. That is why lunarpunks are not content with the modern mirages of individual liberty. We form squads, clans and communities and fight for collective liberation. Moonrise</p> Freedom can only be found outside the logic of domination. Self-defense requires a philosophy rooted in liberation and adequate tools. We must bypass the all-pervasive mindset of submission and obedience. Lunarpunk forest is a sanctuary where society can redefine itself, self-administrate and regain its economic, political and moral agency. As our community grows, we witness how society can truly flourish only when free from state. But in order to protect ourselves and our communities from oppression, we need to practice self-defense.</p> Decentralized, private and anonymous networks are fundamental for communities to defend themselves. Self-defense requires control over information, infrastructure and material resources. Lunarpunks use zero-knowledge cryptography to create a shield of privacy and anonymity that enables communities to operate without persecution by the state.</p> The aims of LunarDAO are:</p> Enable parallel confederated societies that are diverse and autonomous but mutually protect each other against central authority. Learn, educate, share knowledge. Education is fundamental in our struggle for free life, autonomy, and community. Develop infrastructure for economy and politics beyond the state, that is uncensorable, sovereign and anonymous. Expand the dark forest. </code></pre> LunarDAO invests in privacy projects and anonymity-oriented tooling for the lunarpunk society. By prioritizing technical excellence, practicality and an uncompromising philosophy of freedom it creates value building towards a self-sustaining antifragile ecosystem. We believe that lunarpunk is not something distant. It is available to anyone who is ready to make a choice: to let nation-states control our lives or to join the fight for freedom.</p> Anyone can join LunarDAO and start a new investment project or take part in an existing one. Learn how to use free software and privacy tools, extend the reach of infrastructure, exit Big Tech and the surveillance state, learn programming, study economics and build the counter-economy.</p> Sunset has arrived. The moonlit night is coming. Moonlight, or the lunarpunk future</p> In the darkness of the night, the forest of encryption is alive. Many tribes have found a sanctuary under the thick branches of its trees. Societies are regaining their strength, and free life is being built under the gentle light of the moon. Outside of the forest, war is raging. Nation states are in conflict with one another, ecocide is being perpetrated against nature, and repression strikes those who struggle for freedom. The more the agents of the state attack, the more individuals and groups escape the scorching sun of surveillance and seek refuge in the moonlight of anonymity. Societies, finally aware of themselves, defend their forest through cyber-guerrilla and regain territory. A new moon shines on earth.</p> A Lunarpunk Manifesto 2025-01-20T00:00:00+00:00 Say cheese, you just got added to the list of people practicing applied utopia/experimental utopics, decentralization, self-sufficiency, all strictly anti status quo activities. The future is bright but the night is dark and dawn is far. The status quo are alighed on power, money, violence, mindless consumption, a race to the bottom, a marathon toward death/competition for most eccentric death. Like the moon polarizing the light of a new day, lunarpunks must reflect and align. [on about core tenets, then:] but there are traitors among us, bdouble agents who represent the very repression we rseek to obsolesce. They were planted well before this movement was born, generations of instigators, placed by oppressive and invisible social norms, by subtle and explicit advertisements/images, jingles and slogans against our will. But more importantly our own minds sell us out. Ignorant peasants they were never trained to compete in such an agressive competition for mind-share, they let every assumption and corruption in, an easy mark, a total sucker. we must build, but it is coming uncomfortably clear that we don't know what we're building. AI aligntment has only placed a dark mirror in front of us and shown we have no recognizeable [solidity/structure/values/alignment] among one another, and, even more glaringly, even within our selves. we are chatoic messes, stardust organized only physically, temporarily. we must know ourselves or we will be building a future for people we don'9 know at all. INWARD. </code></pre> ** Speaking past one another, imagining ourselves as a series of forgotten traumas whose entire architecture will change as soon as another hang up forces itself into our crachked foundations. blinded by all of our differently tinted lenses which when all combined show nothign but black. by design of the powers that be and by sad accident, ignorance, weakness. We seek a toy moon [unless we discover what exactly we are looking for].</p> CHEESE! Just at the height of propgress, a tipping point, etc etc you and your collaboratores locked away on creatives charges of alleged crimes, peace andd prosperity for so many postponed another generation, maybe indefitnietly. Luckily the tools you designed, from wells to windmills, cash to comunication channels were built open-source, permissionless, robust, decentralized, uncorruptible(?sp). The futer is bright, but the night is dark and long, you personally may not arrive at the but maybe your tools, your ethos, your love, your compassion, your imagination will.</li> </ul> Solarpunk 2025-01-20T00:00:00+00:00 Like other "-punk" philosophies, solarpunk is a rebellion/protest movement. Specifically it is a protest against future where humans increasingly damage the environment, corporations have more and more control over society, technology is primarily for surveillance/profit, social/inequality worsens, and economics defines progress. Solarpunk is an optimistic vision of the future that combines sustainable technology, environmental harmony, and social justice. Some common solarpunk themes are:</p> Sustainability and High Technological Development</strong> Clean energy (especially solar) and green technology widely integrated into society</li> Nature and urban spaces coexist through green architecture and design</li> Technology serves human and ecological needs rather than corporate profits</li> </ul> </li> Collectivism and Individuality</strong> Communities are resilient, collaborative, equitable and more personal</li> Collective action and individual responsibility are fundamental to paving this route to the future. Despite the importance of dependence on others and the importance of collaboration, individual sovereignity and liberty is increased rather than diminished.</li> </ul> </li> Focus on relationships and building instead of isolated comsumption, dynamic, diverse, flourishing human culture.</li> The means of production are decentralized, communities are bottom-up instead of top-down and infrastructure is much more local and human-centric.</li> </ul> </li> </ul> Because solarpunk believes that responsibly implementd technological progress is the path forward, it is essentially accelerationist</a></p> Aesthetic</h2> Solarpunk has a strong visual aesthetic, often showing walkable cities, small, diverse communities, and comfortable/human centric implementation of technologies. Often solarpunk cities are shown as very green with few cars. Unlike cyberpunk's dystopian, technologically driven corporate future, solarpunk envisions humanity solving climate change and social issues through sustainable innovation. In essence it is high tech futurism set in lush, naturally integrated environments.</p> </iframe> A video called Dear Alice that went viral for its depiction of a solar punk lifestyle. Notice the abundance of technology, community, and integration with the natural environment. Note: this was originally a yogurt ad, but this version</a> has been decommodified</em>.</p> Lunarpunk</h1> Solarpunk x Cypherpunk = [Lunarpunk]</a>. For a thorough comparison to solarpunk see Lunarpunk and the Dark Side of the Cycle</a>.</p> Zuzalu Community Newsletter: 2024 Retrospective 2025-01-15T00:00:00+00:00 Zuzalu Community Newsletter | 2024 Retrospective Happy New Year's Eve, everyone! It's been a whirlwind of a year in the Zu-niverse, and I wouldn't have it any other way.</p> In this edition of the newsletter, you'll find some highlights – a portion of the energy and momentum our movement saw in 2024 – as well as upcoming events because no, we're not slowing down. ✊</p> I also think it's time to revamp the Zuzalu newsletter in the coming year. I've enjoyed keeping this mailing list alive with your submissions, and appreciate the surprising number of silent readers:</p> Subscribers and submissions have been gated to those that attended Zuzalu and ZuConnect, and I think it's time for both to change to reflect how our movement continues to grow and diversify. Next year, I'd like to make the newsletter more open: for people to subscribe and submit content to share. I've also chatted with some folks about incorporating more diverse forms of media. If you're interested in joining forces to revamp the Zuzalu Community Newsletter in 2025, please reach out! 🤗</p> Without further ado, your 2024 Retrospective:</p> What would you like to share about your 2024?</p> "I've been a nomad for 7 years and had a couple good friends that I meet in different countries. I'm blown away by how fast the Zuzalu community has become integrated, and integral, to my life and soul."</p> "LottoPGF v1 just launched! To start using it you can check the docs (docs.lottopgf.org) or use this decentralised launcher and player frontend: ottoslottos.eth.limo.</p> If you just want to try your luck and support an upcoming popup city you can play ETHiopia’s lottery on: https://eth-iopia.xyz/lotto</p> Happy New Year from Otto 🐸"</p> "2024 will be remembered as a growth year in my books. I'm particularly proud of myself for becoming a PhD candidate in ZK <3 Thank you 2024, looking forward to 2025 🙏"</p> "A ZK community just ran their own $500 prize on viaPrize without any assistance from our team! We are thrilled to see the platform reach a point of autonomous use. In our journey making viaPrize easier to use, we learned to let customers pay with credit card and forward those payments to the business as crypto. We now offer this as a service at normie.tech! On to the next adventure :)"</p> "Castalia, a DeSci-focused pop-up city, took over Mexico this Nov/Dec. The event focused on onboarding normie scientists, connecting with local web3 communities, and hacking on DeSci projects. Highlights included Plague Hunt (Pokémon Go but for diseased trees🤔), a Christmas Posada and of course the tacos! There will be a bigger event in Mexico in Q3—join the TG to stay updated: https://t.me/CastaliaCity"</p> "In 2024, Zuitzerland has blossomed from an idea into a bold experiment for a permanent network state and society sandbox, inspired by Switzerland's 700-year history of decentralization. In September, we gathered 35+ governance pioneers for 10 days in Interlaken to co-design Zuitzerland’s next steps, shaping a vision for a frontier governance sandbox in Switzerland. Just before Christmas, we secured (🤞) our permanent village location, setting the stage for our first full-scale event in 2025.</p> Zuitzerland 2025 will be focused on seeding long-term communities and bringing Zuitzerland’s longer-term vision to life with our residents. Curious about what’s next? Join our X Space this Friday at 6 PM UTC, where we’ll share what Zuitzerland 2025 holds and how you can be part of this journey!"</p> "ZuTech day was a special moment spanning the many pop up experiments in Chiang Mai this fall. Builders across the archipelago came together to discuss open source and decentralization software values, and opinions and ideas proliferated on both the abstract and technical levels. As many of us collaborate on projects remotely, this no-gadget IRL day was a unique opportunity to connect face to face with friends and colleagues we've gotten to know over the past years in the Zuzalu technology ecosystem."</p> "I like where this is going."</p> Reflections What is a recent technological or scientific advancement that excited you and why?</p> Binius, finally completed my blog post on it! https://0xmilica.com/post/binius/ I recently learned that baths in Japan have a "reheat" function so you can stay nice and cozy while u soak for hours without needing to add hot water and overflow. Revolutionary </code></pre> What are your hopes for Zuzalu in 2025?</p> I would like to see all of us in Montenegro again, where it all started :) More 6+ week events. More property purchases. More love </code></pre> Anything else?</p> Sending love to my Zuzalu people <3 We are in the process of closing on 2 more houses in the network bringing the total to 4 by end of 2024. If you're interested in buying a house and joining our village then contact the Pirate King. </code></pre> 📣 Previous Townhalls 📣</p> December Zuzalu Community Townhall: Video Recording & AI Notes</p> December Zuzalu Software Townhall: Blog & Audio Recording</p> 🔧 Join the conversation and build with us on the Zuzalu Software Matrix server.</p> Ecosystem TG Channel Roll Call</p> Zuzalu Catalog by 4Seas Popup City Updates by Chance </code></pre> Note: The "Zuzalu Official Announcements" channel from Montenegro (at least on my end) has no link for newcomers to subscribe to. Also worth considering a more open forum for sharing announcements in the new year.</p> Upcoming Events</p> Luma calendar - Subscribe for Townhalls and add your own events Vitalia Forever 2025 (January 6 - March 3, 2025) Zu-Grama (January 5 - February 16, 2025) ZK Village (February 16 - March 2, 2025) Crecimiento (March 2025) ARC Austin (March 2025) Ipê Village (April 22, 2025 - May 22, 2025) Zuitzerland (May 1, 2025 - June 16, 2025) ZuCity Detroit (May 2025) ZuAfrique (May 2025) Edge Esmeralda 2 (May 24, 2025 - June 21, 2025) ZuCity Japan (September 2025) </code></pre> Also check out netso villages, a "Nomad's list for Popups" created by Chance at ZuThailand!</p> Have a wonderful end to 2024, and see you in Zu next year! 🎉🍀💕 Veronica</p> About 2025-01-14T00:00:00+00:00 Sove.re is community commons infrastructure to fill a communication/information gap in the network-societies movement.</p> "Soverent" is a neologism and portmanteau combining the word "sovereign" (as in autonomous) and constituent (as in a part of a whole) to emphasize the dual aspecs of agency and community inherent in network-societies. Other terms describing people interested in this movement, such as self-sovereign, fail to encompass the collaborative and social aspect that is integral to the philosophy. Feel free to use the word in other contexts if it is useful to you, nobody owns it</a>.</p> </blockquote> {.is-info}</p> List of tools</h1> Forum.sove.re Instant messaging like Telegram can be ephemeral and disorganized, while many topics of discussion require long-term consideration and discussion. Instant messaging is important, but hopefully forum.sove.re can provide points of reference and "roll-ups" in a consolidated location.</li> </ul> </li> Wiki.sove.re Similarly, forum discussions can further be "rolled up" into an even more organized and long-term-useful database. Eventually it could be useful to have an easy to navigate information resource covering the entire landscape of the network society ecosystem.</li> </ul> </li> Docs.sove.re This is a CryptPad instance which provides a collaboration suite similar to Google Docs, except that it is entirely encrypted in browser so that not even the server can read any content. It is always painful to receive a google hosted document from a project furthering sovereignity. Hopefully by providing this service it will be easier for people to move away from centralized tools.</li> </ul> </li> </ul> Who is Sove.re for?</h1> Built a public commons, the platform is for everyone interested in furthering human flourishing and soveregnity. This means individuals as well as open source projects that would benefit from the infrastructure provided by Sove.re. Projects/teams can eventually have their own subforums with independent moderation. To this end some of these subforums may even be private and for internal coordination of team members.</p> Sove.re is also for individuals who want to contribute to the network society present/future, or even just as a way to keep track of developments in the ecosystem. The entire point of Sove.re is to make it easier to stay up to date on the community at large, with all of its disparate projects, aims, and participants.</p> Who is behind Sove.re?</h1> Sove.re was initialized by Riso Nonx</a> while attending Edge City Lanna</a>.</p> As soon as possible others will be invited to moderate and administrate the forum and wiki via DAO governance, and eventually the hosting infrastructure itself can be decentralized.</p> Privacy Policy</h1> No user information (such as email address or other identification) will ever be shared or sold. The entire server including all contents and databases will remain consolidated in one place. All user information can be fully erased on request at any time. Please allow some time for requests to be processed.</p> contribute 2025-01-14T00:00:00+00:00 Join the Soverents guild</a> and request the Wiki Editor role. After you have achieved this, add a link to your guild account profile to your forum.sove.re profile and indicate your interest on this thread</a>. Note: this requires some reputation on the forum so as to screen bad-faith editors.</p> Method Two</h1> This method does not require manual changes to your account and instead follows standard git practices. It requires a github account, some familiarity with git, and ability to format your additions to match the repo/page formatting. While this will allow you to submit pull requests, it is still useful to join the guild account above and connect your github.</p> Every pag has an "Edit on Github" button.</p> Git repo: https://github.com/ha1ix/wiki.sove.re</p> Formatting Guidelines</h1> Links are case sensitive, please title all new pages in lower case.</strong></p> For example "/network-societies/pop-ups/zugarden" NOT</strong> "network-societies/pop-ups/ZuGarden"</li> </ul> Edge City 2025-01-14T00:00:00+00:00 Edge City is a continuing series of "pop-up villages" founded by Janine Leger</a> and Timour Kosters</a> in 2024. Their locations vary and the number of full time attendees is around the dunbar number</a> of 200-300, while in total over a thousand may visit. The description on their site as of 2024 is: "Edge City convenes people working at the frontiers of tech, science, and society in popup villages across the globe. We aspire to be a ‘society and culture incubator’— an IRL lab of experimentation for new ideas, tech, culture, and organizations, all dedicated to accelerating human flourishing." They have three "impact areas:"</p> Encourage, educate and inspire attendees "to do the most impactful work of their lives."</li> Incubate projects</li> Advance governance and community models</li> </ul> Edge City is part of the ZuVillage</a> lineage of pop-ups, with co-founder Janine Leger also organizing the original Zuzalu</a>.</p> In his December 2025 essay Let a thousand societies bloom</em></a>, Vitalik Buterin wrote: "One of the Zu spinoffs, Edge City, has perfected a pipeline of organizing them, and I have heard that they are at this point a cash-flow-positive business."</em></p> Past Pop-Ups</h1> 2024</h2> Edge Denver</h2> Week-long gathering during ETHDenver [Feb 26th - March 3rd].</li> via edgecity.live</a></li> </ul> Esmerelda</h3> A one-month village in Northern California in June [June 2nd - June 29th].</li> https://edgeesmeralda.com/2024</li> Now the site of a permanent Hub</a>.</li> </ul> Crecimento</h3> A one-month village in Argentina in August. [Aug 6th - Sep 6th]</li> https://aleph.crecimiento.build/</li> </ul> Lanna</h3> A village in Thailand [Oct 10th - Nov 10th].</li> https://www.edgecity.live/lanna</li> </ul> 2025 Timeline</h1> Sove.re discussion.</a></p> </p> Future Locations</h1> There was an interesting discussion at Edge Lanna 2024 about scouting future locations (slides here</a>). Most of the locations were not on the slides, but are reproduced below along with the criteria to consider for a future location.</p> Strategy</h2> </summary> Goal: grow a high quality, interesting diverse network with steady momentum</p> 300-1000 person villages (300 full time, 1000 visitors)</li> </ul> </li> Nature</p> </li> Local people</p> </li> Culture</p> Food</li> </ul> </li> Walkable</p> </li> Climate</p> </li> Visa difficulty</p> </li> Flight connectivity</p> </li> Safe</p> </li> Cost</p> </li> Infrastructure</p> </li> Facilities</p> </li> Accommodation</p> </li> City size</p> </li> Crypto friendliness</p> </li> </ul> </details> Possibilities</h2> </summary> These were tossed out by attendees of the meeting.</p> Ponto do Sol, Madeira, Portugal</li> Zermatt & Vispertermine, Switzerland</li> Cape Town</li> Coppenahagen</li> Kreuzberg, Berlin</li> Slovenia</li> Menchuka</li> KL / Penang</li> La Fortuna, Costa Rica</li> IFRANE, Morroco</li> Chiang Mai</li> Bali Indonesia</li> Nozawa, Japan</li> New Zealand</li> Porto, Portugal</li> Declining liberal arts colleges on U.S. east coast.</li> </ul> </details> Links</h1> https://www.edgecity.live/</li> Twitter https://xcancel.com/joinedgecity</li> RSS: https://xcancel.com/joinedgecity/rss</li> </ul> </li> </ul> What is a Zuvillage? 2025-01-14T00:00:00+00:00 What is a pop up village? What is a ZuVillage? What is Edge City?</p> The recent concept of "pop up villages" was coined in 2023 with a two-month long experiment in Montenegro called Zuzalu. It was a diverse mix of digital nomads, ethereum contributors, longevity enthusiasts, and other participants in cutting edge technologies, all of them interested in participating in a social experiment to test new ways of spending time day-to-day in a physical community. Explicitly, attendees were interested in testing new technologies that benefit from in person gathering over an extended period, such as applied programmable cryptography and novel governance models, and they had the high level of technical understanding and patience to enjoy the experience. To this end Zuzalau was a success, some interesting new applications were battle tested and have now been iterated, such as the zero-knowledge community stack by Zuzalu.city. Novel technology incubator is not a bad way to describe nascent pop-up villages. Based on my recent month-long experience at Edge City Lanna, organized by much of the same team as Zuzalu, another definition of a pop up village is a place where people come together for a period of time and ask eachother and themselves, "what is a pop up village?" Like the paradoxical image of lifting ones-self into the air by pulling on the straps of one's boots, pop up villages are a strange loop where pop up villages are invented. Many of the type of people that I met during my month in Chiang Mai I think would agree that this is a very satisfying definition, in a Hoefstadderian sense. The constant stream of new pop-ups emerging since Zuzalu is evidence that pop-up villages are pop-up village factories.</p> BUT WHY SO RECURSIVE? THERE MUST BE PASSION AND DESIRE/DEMAND FOR SOMETHING.</p> Groups of like-minded people are the building blocks of human civilization. Vitalik Buterin, creator of the decentralized "world computer," Ethereum, lead the creation of Zuzalu. Some of his friends and colleagues at Zuzalu have gone on to organize other ZuVillages. Their like-mindedness stems at laest in part from the philosophical, political and humanitarian foundations of Ethereum. Decentralization, premissionlessness, transparency, self-severeignity are some of the core features of the Ethereum credo. That the attendees of Zuzalu personally held many of these philosophies as important helps us better visualize the ambiance of the event. These are people who generally are acutely aware of the failings of modernity and are thinking about a future society that has parallel, and fairer, financial and governance infrastructure than the status quo today. They are technologically savvy enough to build on cutting edge protocols, and they are both curious enough and caring enough about human liberty to learn about all of the periferal political and historical context preceding their work. Despite a wide range of highly specialized knowledge between the participants, there is also an uncommon sense of generalist polymathic intellect. This allows us to fill in the blanks on our image of Zuzalu, with breakout lectures and discussions, hackathons and coworking, and exercise and meal regiments that promote human thriving. All organized, often spontaneously, by people who care about improving human civilization. So another definition of ZuVillage, this one as important as any other, is that it is a community of enthusiastic and capable people who care deeply about something.</strong></p> SPIRITUALLY/PHILOSOPHICALLY/PERSONALLY</p> At the outset, I thought my experience would put me in touch with new ideas and technologies, maybe guiding me to work on some new front or at least find out about some new and useful applications. While both of these things ocurred, my experience at a month long pop up has shown that these were just sideshows of the main event. The value came in the form of vivid inspiration from my interactions with the people there. On the Edge City website one of the core goals are to "fill our villages with curious, kind, ambitious people who give each other the courage, education, and inspiration to apply their talents to do the most impactful work of their lives.‍" I don't remember reading this when I applied to attend, I may have cynically brushed it off as hopeful prose aimed to soften the reality of a gathering of nerds. I realize now that their two other core goals, to incubate new technologies and experiment in governannce coordination, are absolutely subordinate to the first. The obvious success in these two other areas are offshoots of the immense inspirational aura of the caliber of people coming together in one place. but surely what a pop up city is can be defined more specifically than that. Almost the only common theme I can pick out is that every person here had some above average inherent curiosity which had led to some experience in self-inquiry which had resulted in some level of maturity, and the agency that follows this. Everybody was very smart, whether they were applying their intellect to lunar breathwork or cryptography it is clear they had the mental capacity to wrap their heads around their fascination of choice, and further could re-contextualize and integrate their mental models with various novel and uncorrelated models shared with them by others. There was a strong sense of orientation with all of these people; though their specific orientation may have been remarkably novel, or focused or esoteric, you could confidently enter into a conversation with them knowing they had considered many angles and that their contextualization was reasonably likely to be accessible to you or another person with similiar expectations of a desire and search for orientation in the universe. This resulted in what I imagine many others would agree was one of the greatest outcomes of the pop up: extreme broadening of personal context and understanding as you inevitably talked to people with wildly differing backgrounds and interestsbut who all had strong objective arguments for their fascinations and were good at asharing them. If each of us come with a small quadrant of map we have charted, Edge City was a map-sharing endeavor.</p> Stil rather vague. Well imagine these people who in general, based on my interaction with a few dozen of them, are highly curious and also motivated, self discipilined to "satisfy" their curiostiy. These people have willpower and a reson to live, they have high self respect and some level of expecation that other people are not unlike themselves, which seemingly results in respect for others as well. These are the people for which freedom was built. They do not need anyone to tell them what to do, nor will they waste anyones time, least of all their own. There were people doing fictional world building, physical art, economic experiments, culinary experiments, and the only thread connecting them was a sense of sincerity and an complete lack of frivolity. It was wonderful and utopian.</p> And from this description naturally flows the rest of the motives and explanations. These people,one could argue, are doing great justice to the long strugle of mankind. They are not taking it for granted, selling it short, or misappropriating it. They are laughing, and loving, using their bodies and minds at such a pace that there is no time to so much as mutter the phrase 'cape diem' [SCREENSHOT OF A SAMLE DAILY SCHEDULE]. Naturally the most core theme, focus, goal and topic of the event then is self-sovereignity. It is adorable and authentic and respectable. All of these people are doing their best and just want to be allowed to do it. They don ot want to be hindered by hate, or technology, or beuarocracy or arbitrary regulations. They are doing great and the only thing that could be better is if the rest of the gritty world would just get out of their way. It is extremely fair, and unlike your tired adolescent online libertarian anarchist, this group has their money where their mouth is. They already know what they want to do, they have no intention of inhibiting your quest for what you want to do, and what they want to do is actually well thought out and very cool and high minded and respectable. Sure some of us likely also want to be allowed to be gay drug users, but this is not the end of the road.</p> So self-sovereignity is the theme, it naturally follows from all of the other characteristics, and informs the goings on of the entire event. The technology, the high intensity workouts, the group therapy: how can I be the most fully individuated person that I have the pontential to be. And the corollary follows: and how can I functionally be allowed to pursue this goal and minimize the ability of anyone else to take this responsiblity/ability from me. What is so beautiful and really shows what a high level of intelligence the group in general has, both intellectually and emotionally, is that the group is not hung up on guns and private fortresses of solitude. Everyon here has either leapfrogged the lonely/selfish branches of thought or computed them out to their sad and unworkable conclusions and realized we all not only must and should work together, working together is the best part. It's a bit like atlas shrugged except there's no shrugging, just embracing the world and a desire to mke it better.</p> And so people who are passionate and calm and enjoying themselves don't want to lose this opportunity to someone less passionate and calm and enjoying, and so the rest of the event naturally follows from this. People working ,exercising, enjoying themselves, or discussing and working on protocols and frameworks for maintining the passion and calmness and enjoyment.</p> A pop up village is a social technology, a return to physical interaction while maintingi the plurality of interests and people of the internet, but with the necesarry component of colocation. not only is it a social technology, its purpose is an incubation space for successive social technologies. plurality and openmindeness are core components, but also the sense of play, pop up villages are playgrounds for new social technologies. they have something of the ethos of a hackathon but the prize is the play, the prize is in the testing, as the pepole involved are self motivated to begin with to do this work, so dont necessarily require money or titles, they just want to show other people what they built, test it, etc. this is tomething of a core component, that there is no hierarchy or set goal, if there was a specific goal it would exclude some people, you want the yogi and the adolescent there because social technologies of this sort require an organic society in which to incubate their ideas.</p> what exactly is the cohesion of this group? it is a bit mysterious. many people were web3, but not everyone, and yet there was a good chance that even the non web3 people were interested in similiar types of experiments and possible outcomes. i guess in some way the thesis is that the secret is that the commononality between every participant was an extremely high degree of sovereignity to begin with, [go into cognitive sovereiginity etc] and so long as all of the experiments supported or furthered or explored sovereignity in general, it didnt matter a persons specific interests, in the end the experiments would still apply to everyone regardless because of their shared interest in self-sovereignity.</p> At the veny least gceat excuse to travel and know interesting people wil be there better than traveling alone. I would like to know how they chose applicants and how many people applied.</p> No selling excited buliders</p> SOVER.NET?</p> My background Why I a came -What was it supposed to be? -High agency people, who also are relatively nomadic -What it was -Basically a bunch of people in one place a with an eclectic mix of interests, but a shared curiosity and sense of agency that made cross-pollination very successfull. A large precentage of people I met were working in web3, had done a 10 day vipassana retreat, and were on a sabbattical. -Some of the general themes: decentralization, resiliency and responsibility, especially identity, governance, social innovation. Wellness: yoga, mindfulness, fitness. Creativity: art, worldbuildgin, -Workshops, discussions, and lectures large and small in all of these topics, from big ideas like the history of civilization and opportunity zones, to the hyper-specific like particular implementations of particular types fof zkproofs for particualar ends. My experience/learnings -It is a marathon. It is like being at a university where you choose your schedule a week before, or the day of, and have to design your own major. -But I learned something I already knew, that time is valuable, that you have to be able to say no to things, that you have to know yourself, otherwise there are too many things to do and you won't ever finish a project of your own or go deeg into anything. -Awesome way to survey a group of simliarly curious, high agency peoplee and see what you are missing, to see if your project fits, get feedback -In my case I am currently writing a science fiction book during a sabattical, which felt a bit vain, and I not only expected to feel like I had less to contribute than others at the pop up village, I actually felt at times that I should be working on something more palpable and practical. HOWEVER, I also eflt hugely inspired in my work in a way I did not expect, because the largest take away from this event for me was the idea that pop up villages, and edge city in particular, are cultural incubators, and that the cultural/communal/social compenent is the secret sauce, and that a large component of this is acitevly and creatively designing narratives and portents (memes if you will) that help guide and ground all of the wildly different ideas and enthusiasms into a cohesive path, but also to make a space for untested/unexamined ideas, or to paitn a picture that as much contextualizes the goings on as it shows the blank spaces in the map of the future we are all designing.</p> Introduction: The Birth of Pop-up Villages</li> </ol> Zuzalu 2023 as the genesis</li> Brief overview of what happened in Montenegro</li> The recursive nature of defining pop-up villages</li> Hint at the deeper meaning beyond surface descriptions</li> </ul> Setting the Scene: Edge City Lanna</p> Physical context in Chiang Mai</li> Basic structure and daily life</li> Physical description and logistics</li> Basic structure (200-300 people, 2-month duration)</li> Common misconceptions (not just crypto bros/longevity seekers)</li> Sample schedule showcase</li> </ul> </li> Surface-level Definitions</p> Common descriptions and misconceptions</li> Various interpretations of what constitutes a pop-up village</li> The apparent Web3/crypto connection</li> </ul> </li> Peeling Back the Layers</p> Traditional definition (temporary intentional community)</li> Technical definition (playground for innovation)</li> Meta definition (self-referential community creation)</li> Beyond professional backgrounds</li> Shared philosophical underpinnings</li> The sovereignty connection</li> </ul> </li> The Core Revelation: The People</p> High agency and curiosity as common threads</p> </li> Intellectual capacity and orientation</p> </li> Authentic pursuit of self-improvement</p> </li> Respect and sincerity as foundational values</p> </li> Key characteristics:</p> </li> High agency and curiosity</p> </li> Self-discipline and willpower</p> </li> Intellectual capacity with practical application</p> </li> Respect for self and others</p> </li> Sincere pursuit of meaningful goals</p> </li> Cross-pollination of ideas</p> </li> Natural emergence of self-governance</p> </li> Organic development of culture</p> </li> Balance of individual sovereignty and community</p> </li> </ul> </li> Why It Works</p> Self-selection of participants</li> Balance of individual sovereignty and community</li> Cross-pollination of ideas</li> Organic social technology development</li> </ul> </li> Implications: The Future of Pop-up Villages</p> Cultural incubation potential</li> Model for future communities</li> Cultural incubation potential</li> Bridge between online and physical worlds</li> Scaling considerations</li> The ongoing evolution</li> </ul> </li> Conclusion: The Secret Sauce</p> </li> </ol> Return to thesis about quality of people</li> Future potential of the movement</li> Call to action/reflection</li> </ul> changelog 2024-12-10T00:00:00+00:00 https://github.com/ha1ix/wiki.sove.re/commits/main/</p> Dec 9, 2024</h2> I have not been keeping a good changelog.</li> </ul> Nov 28, 2024</h2> Created Home</a></li> Added License</a></li> </ul> To read</h1> https://flame-spice-8c2.notion.site/Regen-Library-c3ca587347594684b3b744bcb0c9f2f0</p> https://flame-spice-8c2.notion.site/541db3612e014be09a66dcf6e1b320ad?v=dade666a5b734a0ea22e44ed17847568</p> https://flame-spice-8c2.notion.site/Reading-Notes-e14a52afc4934ec0ab0f4a89a7ab3bb4</p> https://www.nsforum.net/posts/welcome-to-the-network-society-forum</p> https://fileverse.io/features</p> via eric</p> eric 12-10-24 links</h3> </p>Network States_Master List - Fogli Google</a> </dt> Network_states_database__19_12_2023 - Fogli Google</a> </dt> Network States | Full list with links & statistics</a> </dt> Network States_Master List - Fogli Google</a> </dt> Competitive Governance Project/Society/Org List - Fogli Google</a> </dt> Network States_Master List - Fogli Google</a> </dt> Network States_Master List - Fogli Google</a> </dt> NetX State | Argentina ReGen Node Network</a> </dt> Virtual communities Tech-stack analysis (public) - Fogli Google</a> </dt> Institute of Free Technology</a> </dt> Free Citadels</a> </dt> Country Founders</a> </dt> Auspicious Notes | Substack</a> </dt> the network of "intentional community" concepts</a> </dt> FUTURE STATE CONGRESS</a> </dt> Kernel Community</a> </dt> Kernel | Application</a> </dt></dl> </p></dt> Grants 2024-12-10T00:00:00+00:00 Quadratic Funding</a> — the dominant matching mechanism in the Ethereum ecosystem. Used by Gitcoin Grants.</li> Gitcoin</a> — primary QF implementation for Ethereum public goods.</li> ECF Pensieve</a> — Ethereum Community Fund's permissionless grant platform. Scores projects on transparency and accountability; includes a ZuVillage-specific grant round.</li> </ul> Some Grants compiled by Agartha</a></h1> Mask Protocol</strong></li> Komorebi</strong> - https://twitter.com/KomorebiFund - women in web3</li> Artizen</strong> - https://www.artizen.fund/ - Application</li> Celo Grant</strong> - https://celo.org/experience/grants#introduction</li> Massive List</strong> - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ah5eyRh6smIirbhUKHEa8aMJ3nR-wi7B/view</li> SeeDAO</strong></li> Sovereign Nature Collective</strong> - https://sovereignnature.com/join https://linktr.ee/sni_linktree - Nature + Tech + Art</li> Seedclub</strong></li> Women Build Web3</strong> - https://www.womenbuildweb3.com/accelerator</li> Web3 Women</strong> - https://www.web3women.community/</li> 1xx</strong> - https://twitter.com/1kxNetwork</li> Metacartel Ventures</strong> - https://twitter.com/VENTURE_DAO</li> Ethereum Foundation</strong> - https://esp.ethereum.foundation/applicants/small-grants/apply - Community and Education</li> </ul> Chiang Mai Archipelago 2024 2024-12-10T00:00:00+00:00 The Chiang Mai Archipelago was a significant gathering of decentralized "pop-up cities" that took place in Chiang Mai, Thailand from September 20 to November 10, 2024. It represented one of the largest coordinated experiments in temporary autonomous communities at the time.</p> Overview</h2> The event consisted of 11 independent pop-up communities or "islands" operating simultaneously in Chiang Mai, each with their own focus areas and organizational structures. The timing was strategically chosen between Token 2049 in Singapore and Devcon in Bangkok.</p> Core Values</h2> The gathering was united by four shared values:</p> Authentic Kindness</li> Mutual Respect</li> Personal Growth</li> Freedom</li> </ul> Mission</h2> The stated mission was "to foster a global network of communities to advance humanity by creating playgrounds at the intersection of free and open technology, health, science and social innovation."</p> Pop-Ups Present</h2> Some of the major pop-up communities included:</p> MegaZu - Focused on shipping code</li> Edge City</a> Lanna - AI, crypto, and longevity tech</li> MuChiangMai - ZK crypto and cross-community coordination</li> ShanhaiWoo - AI and blockchain art</li> Lovepunks - Cultural innovation and creator economy</li> H.E.R. DAO - Women in Web3</li> Web3Village</li> SeaPunks</li> Invisible Garden</li> Funding the Commons</li> NEAR house</li> Filecoin house</li> </ul> Challenges & Learnings</h2> The experiment surfaced several key challenges in building decentralized communities:</p> Identity Definition</strong>: Difficulty in establishing clear principles for what constituted a "Zuzalian" community</li> Economic Accessibility</strong>: High costs limited participation primarily to wealthy tech nomads</li> Geographic Barriers</strong>: Passport and visa restrictions prevented participation from many global regions</li> Measurement</strong>: Lack of standardized metrics to evaluate community success and impact</li> Family Integration</strong>: Limited infrastructure for including families and older generations</li> </ul> Location Choice</h2> Chiang Mai was selected for several strategic reasons:</p> High-quality internet infrastructure (Thailand ranked 7th globally)</li> Cost-effective living expenses</li> Established digital nomad ecosystem</li> Walkable old city layout with 1-mile square design</li> Local community support and cultural richness</li> Strategic location between major tech events</li> </ul> Impact & Outcomes</h2> The experiment influenced thinking around:</p> Scalable community building models</li> Decentralized governance structures</li> Cross-community coordination mechanisms</li> The practical implementation of Network State concepts</li> </ul> The gathering demonstrated both the potential and limitations of decentralized community experiments, providing valuable insights for future attempts at building opt-in societies.</p> Significance</h2> The Archipelago model represented an attempt to solve the scaling problem of community building - allowing growth while maintaining tight-knit social connections through a confederation of Dunbar-sized groups. It served as an early experiment in Network State concepts and decentralized community coordination.</p> Legacy</h2> The event helped establish patterns for future decentralized community gatherings and demonstrated both the possibilities and challenges of coordinating multiple autonomous groups with aligned values but independent governance.</p> Ecovillages 2024-12-10T00:00:00+00:00 Ecovillages predate the Zuzalu movement and have a long history. They focus more on sustainability and ecological integration than governance.</p> Resources^1^</h1> Education</h2> Earth Activist Training</a></li> Deep Green Permaculture</a></li> Gaia's Garden</a></li> Permaculture: A Designer's Manual</a></li> </ul> Communities & Networks</h2> Gaianet</a> - Meta community fostering eco communities</li> Traditional Dream Factory</a> - Web3 eco villages</li> Next Gen Village</a> - Sustainable city in Switzerland</li> Futurethinkers</a> - Game B theory and smart villages</li> Marmalade Lane</a> - UK co-op community</li> Oasa</a> - Portuguese co-housing network</li> Auravana</a> - System design for future communities</li> Lamina Pop</a> - Affordable housing in South America</li> Culdesac</a> - Carless city project in US</li> Catalist Networks</a></li> </ul> Established Eco Villages</h2> East Wind Community</a> (US)</li> Thrive Ithica</a> (US)</li> Liminal Village</a> (Italy)</li> Local Lab</a> (Philippines)</li> Tamera</a> (Portugal)</li> Ubuntu Village</a> (Africa)</li> Rancho Mastatal</a> (Costa Rica)</li> Zunya</a> (Costa Rica)</li> Pachamama</a> (Costa Rica)</li> Chateau Chapiteau</a></li> Vidalia</a></li> Zukunftsorte</a> (Germany)</li> TERA</a> (France)</li> O.U.R EcoVillage</strong> | Website</a> | Vancouver Island, BC, Canada | Coliving,Education,Regeneration 🌱 | English | Regenerative</li> Tamera</strong> | | Portugal | | Portuguese | Regenerative</li> Proto Village</strong> | Website</a> | Andhra Pradesh, India | Coliving,Regeneration 🌱 | English,Hindi | Communal</li> Pachamama</strong> | Website</a> | Costa Rica | Coliving,Education,Personal Growth,Regeneration 🌱 | English | Regenerative</li> Rancho Mastatal</strong> | Website</a> | Costa Rica | Coliving,Education,Regeneration 🌱 | English | Regenerative</li> Ithaca Eco Village</strong> | Website</a> | Ithaca, NY, USA | Coliving,Education,Regeneration 🌱 | English | Communal</li> Unity Coliving</strong> | Website</a> | Costa Rica | Coliving,Coworking,Regeneration 🌱 | English | Regenerative</li> La La Garddens</strong> | Website</a> | Colorado | Coop,Regeneration 🌱 | English | Regenerative</li> </ul> Future City Projects</h2> Telosa</a></li> Oceanix City</a></li> Arcosanti</a></li> </ul> Other Resources</h2> Open Source Ecology</a></li> All Things New: American Communes & Utopian Movements</a></li> </ul> Sources</h1> Agartha</a></li> </ol> Intentional Communities 2024-12-10T00:00:00+00:00 Ecovillages</a></h2> 🔗 Web3/Crypto Communities</h2> CabinDAO</strong> | Website</a> | Hill Country, TX, USA; Puerto Rico | Coliving,Coworking,DAO,Web3 | English | Communal</li> TraditionalDreamFactory</strong> | Website</a> | Abella, Portugal | Coliving,Coworking,Regeneration 🌱,Web3 | English,Portuguese | Regenerative</li> EmpireDAO</strong> | Website</a> | Manhattan, NY, USA | Coworking,DAO,Web3 | English | Techsavvy</li> Crypto Commons</strong> | Website</a> | Austria | Collective,Education,High-tech,Web3 | English | Techsavvy</li> </ul> 🛠️ Hackerspaces/Maker Spaces</h2> Technologia Incognita</strong> | Website</a> | Amsterdam, Netherlands | Collective,High-tech | Dutch,English | Techsavvy</li> Noisebridge</strong> | Website</a> | San Francisco, USA | Collective,High-tech | English | Techsavvy</li> Babycastles</strong> | Website</a> | Manhattan, NY, USA | Collective,High-tech | English | Artistic</li> </ul> 🕉️ Spiritual/Mindfulness Centers</h2> Plum Village</strong> | Website</a> | France, US, Thailand | Coliving,Monastery🕉,Regeneration 🌱 | English,French | Spiritual</li> Llama Foundation</strong> | Website</a> | Taos, NM, US | Coliving,Regeneration 🌱 | English | Spiritual</li> </ul> 🏠 General Coliving/Mixed</h2> 706青年空间</strong> | Website</a> | All Cities | Coliving,Coworking | Chinese,English | Communal</li> Place Community</strong> | Website</a> | Oakland, Bay Area, CA, USA | Collective,Regeneration 🌱 | English | Communal</li> Liminal Village</strong> | Website</a> | Italy | Coliving,High-tech,Regeneration 🌱 | English,Italian | Communal</li> Chateau Chateau</strong> | Website</a> | Tbilisi, Georgia | Coliving,Coworking,High-tech,Regeneration 🌱 | English,Russian | Communal</li> Raddish Community</strong> | Website</a> | Oakland, Bay Area, USA | Coliving,High-tech | English | Communal</li> Piratas Do Amor</strong> | Website</a> | The Ocean & Netherlands | Coliving,Sailing | Dutch,English,Spanish | Communal</li> Uyuni Pretschen</strong> | Website</a> | Berlin, Germany | Coliving | English,German | Communal</li> </ul> More^1^</h2> A Quinta da Large</h2> Location:</strong> Portugal (37.66908754911384, -8.674301842327376)</li> Website:</strong> https://www.aquinta.org/</li> Tags:</strong> Art, Coliving, Coworking, Farming</li> Description:</strong> An intentional community exploring art, ecology, and technology intersection. Focused on sustainability, creativity, personal growth and permaculture principles.</li> </ul> Anthillhacks</h2> Location:</strong> India (13.375117324213697, 77.21267042031764)</li> Website:</strong> https://anthillhacks.in/</li> Tags:</strong> Event Space, Maker Space, Technology</li> Description:</strong> Annual gathering since 2015, evolving from 9-day to 2-week events focused on community engagement and technology.</li> </ul> Aardehuis</h2> Location:</strong> Netherlands (52.32999352004901, 6.11257358434057)</li> Website:</strong> https://www.aardehuis.nl/index.php/en/</li> Tags:</strong> Coliving, Eco Village</li> Description:</strong> Pioneering community merging art, ecology, and technology with sustainable housing solutions and natural building materials.</li> </ul> Gray Area</h2> Location:</strong> USA (37.7549350892146, -122.41833103863169)</li> Website:</strong> https://grayarea.org/</li> Tags:</strong> Art, Coworking, Education, Event Space</li> Description:</strong> San Francisco-based nonprofit cultural incubator integrating art, technology, science, and humanities for social impact.</li> </ul> Ängsbacka</h2> Location:</strong> Sweden (59.60160478264089, 13.700197092607924)</li> Website:</strong> https://www.angsbacka.com/</li> Tags:</strong> Eco Village, Education, Event Space, Farming</li> Description:</strong> Volunteer-driven community offering courses, festivals and programs in a welcoming environment.</li> </ul> Arcosanti</h2> Location:</strong> USA (34.342549549718704, -112.10110404565829)</li> Website:</strong> https://www.arcosanti.org/</li> Tags:</strong> Art, Coliving, Coworking, Education, Event Space</li> Description:</strong> Innovative desert community founded by Paolo Soleri, exploring urban design principles and sustainable living practices.</li> </ul> Austin Farm Sanctuary</h2> Location:</strong> USA (30.14186878956333, -97.13796221164884)</li> Website:</strong> https://www.austinfarmsanctuary.org/</li> Tags:</strong> Eco Village, Education, Farming</li> Description:</strong> 501(c)(3) Animal Rescue Farm providing rescue, rehabilitation and forever homes to farmed animals.</li> </ul> Bay Area Makerfarm</h2> Location:</strong> USA (37.78708965763778, -122.29247988661311)</li> Website:</strong> https://bayareamaker.farm/</li> Tags:</strong> Education, Event Space, Farming</li> Description:</strong> Community venue for makers, fixers and artists supporting community sustainability.</li> </ul> Brave Earth</h2> Location:</strong> Costa Rica (10.387039654490446, -84.59900518946831)</li> Website:</strong> https://www.braveearth.com/</li> Tags:</strong> Eco Village, Resort</li> Description:</strong> Living laboratory exploring cultural evolution, decolonization, and environmental stewardship.</li> </ul> c-base</h2> Location:</strong> Germany (52.513070499702465, 13.420083965039705)</li> Website:</strong> https://c-base.org/</li> Tags:</strong> Education, Maker Space</li> Description:</strong> Creative space in Berlin themed as a crashed space station, fostering technology development and community.</li> </ul> CabinDAO Neighborhood 0</h2> Location:</strong> USA (30.27713139344963, -98.41376692095363)</li> Website:</strong> https://www.cabin.city/</li> Tags:</strong> Coliving, Coworking, Web3</li> Description:</strong> Global network of nature-based properties connected through shared culture, community, economy, and governance.</li> </ul> Chateau Chapiteau</h2> Location:</strong> Georgia (41.84726719562444, 46.10665053903223)</li> Website:</strong> https://chateauchapiteau.com/</li> Tags:</strong> Art, Coliving, Coworking, Eco Village, Maker Space</li> Description:</strong> Community focused on art, performance, and technology convergence.</li> </ul> Coliving Provence</h2> Location:</strong> France (44.020010224400984, 5.853541631463572)</li> Website:</strong> http://colivingprovence.io/</li> Tags:</strong> Coliving, Coworking</li> Description:</strong> Retreat space for digital nomads and location-independent entrepreneurs seeking focus and relaxation.</li> </ul> Compact Coliving Bruc</h2> Location:</strong> Spain (41.39708281356137, 2.165990183832755)</li> Website:</strong> https://coimpactbcn.com/</li> Tags:</strong> Coliving, Coworking</li> Description:</strong> Modern living and working space in Barcelona's center with hospitality focus.</li> </ul> Counter Culture Lab</h2> Location:</strong> USA (37.835503950627356, -122.2641732)</li> Website:</strong> https://www.counterculturelabs.org/</li> Tags:</strong> Event Space, Maker Space</li> Description:</strong> Open community biology lab supporting scientific exploration and knowledge sharing.</li> </ul> Crypto Commons</h2> Location:</strong> Austria (48.13597989032159, 16.3673570067866)</li> Website:</strong> https://crypto-commons.org/</li> Tags:</strong> Education, Event Space, Web3</li> Description:</strong> Decentralized virtual community promoting blockchain and web3 technologies.</li> </ul> Divine Desert Homestead</h2> Location:</strong> USA (34.17931973268905, -115.92210454017513)</li> Website:</strong> https://hype.co/@divinedeserthomestead</li> Tags:</strong> Art, Coliving, Event Space</li> Description:</strong> 4-acre sanctuary supporting artists and natural world reconnection.</li> </ul> Emboo Camp</h2> Location:</strong> Kenya (1.5286350987597888, 35.17113159207326)</li> Website:</strong> https://www.emboo.camp/</li> Tags:</strong> Resort</li> Description:</strong> Sustainable lodge in Maasai Mara offering wildlife experiences and eco-friendly accommodation.</li> </ul> Essencia</h2> Location:</strong> Portugal (37.27642253867098, -8.769674865634286)</li> Website:</strong> https://www.essencia.life/</li> Tags:</strong> Resort</li> Description:</strong> Off-grid community focused on personal growth, organic farming, and natural lifestyle.</li> </ul> Life Itself</h2> Location:</strong> France (45.119145896041765, 0.5457095233996833)</li> Website:</strong> https://lifeitself.org/</li> Tags:</strong> Art, Coliving, Education, Event Space</li> Description:</strong> Pragmatic utopian community creating coliving hubs and pioneering wiser culture.</li> </ul> Liminal Village</h2> Location:</strong> USA (42.5273002663103, 13.078969460849983)</li> Website:</strong> https://liminalvillage.com/</li> Tags:</strong> Coliving, Eco Village, Education, Farming</li> Description:</strong> Community dedicated to alternative lifestyles and sustainable living practices.</li> </ul> Lios Labs</h2> Location:</strong> Poland (52.2297, 21.0122)</li> Website:</strong> https://lios.io/</li> Tags:</strong> Art, Coliving, Education, Maker Space</li> Description:</strong> Community and collaborative workspace for technological innovation in Warsaw.</li> </ul> Living Energy Farm</h2> Location:</strong> USA (38.0394371954553, -77.98918200796017)</li> Website:</strong> https://livingenergyfarm.org/</li> Tags:</strong> Coliving, Eco Village, Farming</li> Description:</strong> Off-grid intentional community and organic farm demonstrating fossil-fuel-free living.</li> </ul> Lost Valley</h2> Location:</strong> USA (43.89161177911071, -122.82563390185132)</li> Website:</strong> https://www.lostvalley.org/</li> Tags:</strong> Eco Village, Education, Farming</li> Description:</strong> Non-profit educational center focusing on sustainability and community development since 1989.</li> </ul> Mars College</h2> Location:</strong> USA (33.35746500317858, -115.7311437807498)</li> Website:</strong> https://mars.college/</li> Tags:</strong> Education, Web3</li> Description:</strong> Virtual learning community focused on space exploration and technology.</li> </ul> MolinoLab</h2> Location:</strong> Spain (40.71325038083019, -6.403978877246)</li> Website:</strong> https://molinolab.org/</li> Tags:</strong> Art, Coliving, Eco Village, Education, Farming</li> Description:</strong> Rural experimentation space focused on self-sufficiency in food, art, culture, energy, and technology.</li> </ul> Montaia</h2> Location:</strong> USA (37.65015912865587, -118.97232558425021)</li> Website:</strong> https://www.montaia.com/</li> Tags:</strong> Coliving, Coworking, Web3</li> Description:</strong> CABIN Neighborhood in Eastern Sierra Mountains promoting connection to nature amid technological growth.</li> </ul> Moonwater Farm</h2> Location:</strong> USA (33.88758116050102, -118.23313736931527)</li> Website:</strong> https://www.moonwaterfarm.net/</li> Tags:</strong> Art, Education, Event Space, Farming</li> Description:</strong> Land-based learning hub focusing on health regeneration and community wealth.</li> </ul> MOOS</h2> Location:</strong> Germany (52.48814882856454, 13.46054530048266)</li> Website:</strong> https://moos.space</li> Tags:</strong> Art, Coliving, Coworking, Eco Village, Education, Event Space, Maker Space, Web3</li> Description:</strong> Former bathtub factory turned creative space for work, living, and project development.</li> </ul> No School Nevers</h2> Location:</strong> France (50.63647197437758, 3.06002605092305)</li> Website:</strong> http://noschoolnevers.com/index.html</li> Tags:</strong> Art, Education, Maker Space</li> Description:</strong> International summer school exploring social and environmental impacts of technology.</li> </ul> NYC Resistor</h2> Location:</strong> USA (40.68472245049477, -73.98228965647658)</li> Website:</strong> https://www.nycresistor.com/</li> Tags:</strong> Art, Event Space, Maker Space</li> Description:</strong> Hacker collective in Brooklyn focused on knowledge sharing and community building.</li> </ul> O U R Eco Village</h2> Location:</strong> Canada (48.4284, -123.3656)</li> Website:</strong> https://ourecovillage.org/</li> Tags:</strong> Eco Village, Education</li> Description:</strong> Canadian sustainable living educational center and demonstration site.</li> </ul> Omni Commons</h2> Location:</strong> USA (37.835800497600246, -122.26365613126029)</li> Website:</strong> https://omnicommons.org/</li> Tags:</strong> Art, Education, Event Space, Maker Space</li> Description:</strong> Community-run venue space in Bay Area focused on social justice and radical generosity.</li> </ul> Original Mind Residency</h2> Location:</strong> USA (37.0902, -95.7129)</li> Website:</strong> https://www.original-mind-residency.com/</li> Tags:</strong> Art, Coliving, Coworking, Web3</li> Description:</strong> Space for solitude and co-creation in service to meaningful work.</li> </ul> Pacha Mama</h2> Location:</strong> Costa Rica (9.7489, -83.7534)</li> Website:</strong> https://www.pachamama.com/</li> Tags:</strong> Coliving, Eco Village, Event Space</li> Description:</strong> Eco-community focused on holistic healing, personal growth, and sustainability.</li> </ul> Place Community</h2> Location:</strong> USA (37.84636957026451, -122.2856150336906)</li> Website:</strong> https://www.place.community/</li> Tags:</strong> Art, Education, Event Space, Farming</li> Description:</strong> Community center combining makerspace and permaculture in Oakland.</li> </ul> Project Kamp</h2> Location:</strong> Portugal (40.20338154513466, -8.410325396260207)</li> Website:</strong> https://projectkamp.com/</li> Tags:</strong> Eco Village, Education, Maker Space</li> Description:</strong> Research center exploring community living with open-source documentation.</li> </ul> Protopian Convergence</h2> Location:</strong> Costa Rica (10.594002500676316, -84.84091173238136)</li> Website:</strong> https://ratpark.org/</li> Tags:</strong> Coliving, Coworking, Resort, Web3</li> Description:</strong> Urban co-living and co-working space promoting creative collaboration.</li> </ul> ProtoVillage</h2> Location:</strong> India (13.845364366204873, 77.6746772340407)</li> Website:</strong> https://protovillage.org/</li> Tags:</strong> Eco Village, Education, Farming</li> Description:</strong> Decentralized cooperative focused on sustainable lifestyle and growth alternatives.</li> </ul> Punta Mona</h2> Location:</strong> Costa Rica (9.635337910344603, -82.62932355952353)</li> Website:</strong> https://www.gandoca.org/</li> Tags:</strong> Eco Village, Education, Farming</li> Description:</strong> Regenerative lifestyle center (temporarily closed for regulatory compliance).</li> </ul> Azhen Sanctuary</h2> Location:</strong> Not specified</li> Website:</strong> https://www.azhensanctuary.com/</li> Tags:</strong> Retreat Space</li> Description:</strong> [No description provided in original data]</li> </ul> Himalayan Institute Retreat Center</h2> Location:</strong> Not specified</li> Website:</strong> https://himalayaninstitute.org/retreat-center/</li> Tags:</strong> Education, Retreat Space</li> Description:</strong> [No description provided in original data]</li> </ul> Artist Retreat</h2> Location:</strong> Not specified</li> Website:</strong> https://artistretreat.info/</li> Tags:</strong> Art, Music</li> Description:</strong> Music-based artist retreat space</li> </ul> Saba Collective</h2> Website:</strong> https://sabacooperative.com/link-tree/</li> Description:</strong> Network of cooperative spaces and initiatives</li> </ul> Together Network</h2> Location:</strong> Rome</li> Website:</strong> http://www.togethernetwork.org/</li> Description:</strong> Community network based in Rome</li> </ul> Sun and Co</h2> Website:</strong> https://sun-and-co.com/pricing/</li> Description:</strong> Coliving and coworking network</li> </ul> Embassy Network</h2> Website:</strong> https://embassynetwork.com/</li> Description:</strong> Network of collaborative living and working spaces</li> </ul> Regen Nomads</h2> Website:</strong> https://rudimedved.notion.site/rudimedved/Regen-Nomads-be86b02420ca4325b1359c6a3325df71</li> Description:</strong> Network focused on regenerative nomadic living</li> </ul> Sources</h1> Agartha Map</a></li> </ol> ZuVillage Movement 2024-12-10T00:00:00+00:00 A ZuVillage is a specific style of pop-up villages in the bluprint of Zuzalu</a> to promote open source technology and seek avenues of "human flourishing" as opposed to profit or centralized power. Core characteristics are diversity, curiosity, kindness, health, decentralization. They are incubators for new technologies, from cryptography to social structure experiments.</p> The Zuzalu Nonprofit Organization</h1> While the role of the nonprofit is not yet concrete, some ideas below come from Zuzalu.city</a></p> 2024: Open Frontier</h2> At the end of 2023, the Zuzalu frontier was opened:</p> We take the 2024 “spring of spinoffs” concept as inspiration, and make that be the only thing we do in 2024. We extend it to cover the whole year.</p> </li> We intentionally do NOT DO any of the following:</p> Have an explicit primary headline long-duration event</li> Have an explicit concept of “Zuzalu citizens” or “Zuzalu residents”</li> Attach the name “Zuzalu” to a specific physical event in general</li> </ul> </li> We do:</p> Actively encourage people, both inside the existing community and on the edges of it, to run their own Zu-villages. It’s totally okay and even encouraged for some of these Zu-villages to be simultaneous with and beside each other!</li> Strongly consider providing funding to some of these groups</li> Continue to stay together as a group, both virtually and through in-person chats at various Zu-villages, to (i) coordinate on supporting digital public goods that would be common across these Zu-villages and (ii) engage in cross-pollination and intellectual discussion</li> Continue to be open to multiple paths in 2025, eg: moving toward becoming “United Networks”, coming back into doing some kind of larger event, etc. 2024 will be Zuzalu 2.0, 2025 will be Zuzalu 3.0; the future going that far out is unknown.</li> </ul> </li> </ul> In 2024, Zuzalu has grown into a decentralised movement with many initiatives.</p> ⚠️ There is no official Zuzalu account, so watch out for anything that claims to be a single source of truth for "Zuzalu" as a whole.</p> Discussion</h1> Zuzalu.city subforum</a></li> Zuzalu Charter/Constitution discussion</a></li> </ul> Defensive Accelerationism 2024-12-10T00:00:00+00:00 In response to an essay by venture capitalist Marc Andreessen titled "The Techno-Optimist Manifesto"</a> and as a corollary to e/acc effective accelerationism</a> (which specifically promotes the accelerated development of general artificial intelligence and in turn was partly a criticism of the conservatism of Effective Altruism</a>), Vitalik Buterin published an essay titled my techno optimism</a> coining the term d/acc, or defensive accelerationism.</p> We need to build, and accelerate. But there is a very real question that needs to be asked: what is the thing that we are accelerating towards? The 21st century may well be the pivotal century for humanity, the century in which our fate for millennia to come gets decided. Do we fall into one of a number of traps from which we cannot escape, or do we find a way toward a future where we retain our freedom and agency? -- Vitalik Buterin, Nov 27, 2023</p> </blockquote> Accelerationism</h2> The "acc" in d</strong>efensive acc</strong>elerationism is a form of "techno optimism" in that it believes that technology can improve human civilization and we should pursue this outcome as quickly as possible (as opposed to decelerationists, such as AI "doomers", who think technology is more likely to damage humanity than improve it in the long run, or luddites, who would prefer we undo some of our technologies and return to relatively more primitive states).</p> Defensive</h2> The "d" stands for defensive and has dual meaning. One meaning is we should actively build technologies that protect human agency and are resistant to corruption, the other meaning applies to how we should carefully consider which technologies we choose to build because certain branches of technological development are likely to be dangerous. d/acc then explains that we should pursue the development of technology to improve human civilization as quickly as is safely possible</em> while simultaneously developing technologies that improve the odds of our fluourishing</em>.</p> Notes</h1> The entire essay was published in a small printed booklet for Devcon7 attendees. {width=200 height=400}</p> See also</h1> Lunarpunk</a></li> </ul> Effective Altruism 2024-12-10T00:00:00+00:00 Effective Altruism</strong> is a philosophical and social movement focused on using evidence and reason to determine the most effective ways to benefit others.</p> Core Principles</h2> Cause prioritization</li> Impartial beneficence</li> Quantitative reasoning</li> Long-term focus</li> Evidence-based giving</li> </ul> Key Areas</h2> Global poverty</li> Animal welfare</li> Existential risk reduction</li> AI safety</li> Global health</li> </ul> Notable Organizations</h2> GiveWell</li> 80,000 Hours</li> Open Philanthropy</li> Future of Humanity Institute</li> Centre for Effective Altruism</li> </ul> Key Figures</h2> Peter Singer</li> William MacAskill</li> Toby Ord</li> </ul> Criticism</h2> Criticized for:</p> Over-emphasis on quantification</li> Focus on long-term/speculative risks</li> Tech industry influence</li> Resource allocation decisions</li> </ul> See also: [Longtermism], [Global Priorities Research]</em></p> Effective Accelerationism 2024-12-10T00:00:00+00:00 Effective Accelerationism</strong> (e/acc) is a techno-optimist movement advocating rapid technological progress through minimal regulation and market-driven solutions.</p> Core Principles</h2> Accelerate technological advancement</li> Embrace AI/automation</li> Oppose regulatory barriers</li> Reject techno-pessimism</li> </ul> Criticism</h2> Movement criticized for oversimplifying complex technological/social issues and downplaying potential risks.</p> Learn More</h2> @BasedBeffJezos</a> - Prominent e/acc voice on X/Twitter</li> e/acc Manifesto</a> - Written by Beff Jezos</li> Effective Accelerationism Discord</a> - Main community hub</li> Manifold Markets</a> - e/acc prediction markets</li> </ul> Key figures:</p> Marc Andreessen - Published "Techno-Optimist Manifesto"</li> Garry Tan - Prominent VC supporter</li> vgr (Venkatesh Rao) - Theoretical contributions</li> </ul> Note: Movement is rapidly evolving; figures/resources change frequently.</p> Docs 2024-12-09T00:00:00+00:00 Sign up to a document editing suite where not even the server administrator can see your work. https://docs.sove.re</p> Forum 2024-12-09T00:00:00+00:00 The Soverents forum is for discussing anything related to network-societies, pop up villages, etc. Teams can create their own private or public subforums and moderate it themselves. If you would like to moderate your own subforum or an entire category, please join the Soverents Guild.</a></p> Links</h1> https://wiki.sove.re</p> Dunbar Number 2024-12-09T00:00:00+00:00 via Wikipedia</a></p> Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships—relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person.</p> This number was first proposed in the 1990s by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who found a correlation between primate brain size and average social group size. By using the average human brain size and extrapolating from the results of primates, he proposed that humans can comfortably maintain 150 stable relationships. There is some evidence that brain structure predicts the number of friends one has, though causality remains to be seen.</p> Dunbar explained the principle informally as "the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar."Dunbar theorised that "this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, and that this, in turn, limits group size ... the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained". On the periphery, the number also includes past colleagues, such as high school friends, with whom a person would want to reacquaint themselves if they met again. Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restrictive rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group. It has been proposed to lie between 100 and 250, with a commonly used value of 150.</p> </blockquote> Application to Network-Societies</h1> From the very beginning pop-up cities have been designed with the dunbar number in mind. One of the often discussed limitations of regular cities/states is their sprawl/impersonality, and so maybe the very first "social technology", and arguably the most important, undergoing experimentation in any pop-up city is the "human sized" community and the kinds of social interactions it fosters. Knowing the people in your community is the first step toward learning to interact with them in novel and positive ways.</p> See also</h1> Loneliness epidemic</li> </ul> Digital Nomading 2024-12-09T00:00:00+00:00 Digital Nomad Communities (replicated from Agartha</a> 2/12/24). These projects have not been researched independently.</p> WifiTribe</li> Nomadlist</li> Outsite — https://www.outsite.co/</li> RemoteYear</li> NomadCruise</li> CommunityFinder — https://communityfinders.com/</li> Coworking Cafes in France — https://cartographie.francetierslieux.fr/</li> Hacker’s Paradise — https://www.hackerparadise.org/</li> Unsettled — https://beunsettled.co/</li> Innate Global — https://www.innate.global/</li> Conscious Coliving — https://www.consciouscoliving.com/</li> California Cohousing — https://www.calcoho.org/</li> CabinDAO</li> Embassy Network</li> The Listing Project</li> Fairbnb</li> Live Kindred</li> Colive Value — https://colivevalues.com/</li> Startup Madeira (Portugal based) — https://digitalnomads.startupmadeira.eu/</li> </ul> Regen Library 2024-12-09T00:00:00+00:00 Communities</h4></div></div>Massive List (that has another massive list in it)</span></a></div></div></div></div></div>https://www.eastwindblog.co/</span></a></div></div></div></div></div>UK massive (legit) list</span></a></div></div></div></div></div>https://landartgenerator.org/competition2020.html</span></a> (permanent burning man)</div></div></div></div></div>https://www.zukunftbahnhof.ch/en</span></a> (Switzerland)</div></div></div></div></div>Fairground</span></a> (Texas Harberger Taxes Experiment) White paper</span></a></div></div></div></div></div>First Earthship Village in the Netherlands</span></a> Aardehuis</span></a></div></div></div></div></div>https://solarliving.org/</span></a> (Northen CA)</div></div></div></div></div>http://www.regen.org</span></a> (Pomona Co-op)</div></div></div></div></div>Kibbutz</span></a></div></div></div></div></div>The Farm</span></a> (Tennessee)</div></div></div></div></div>https://www.flockfingerlakes.com/about</span></a></div></div></div></div></div>Headwaters</span></a> (Vermont) Ethos</span></a></div></div></div></div></div>https://www.newearthdevelopment.org/</span></a></div></div></div></div></div>Ubuntu</span></a> (Africa)</div></div></div></div></div>Taos Mesa</span></a></div></div></div></div></div>https://www.vidalia.coop/home/</span></a></div></div></div></div></div>https://zukunftsorte.land/</span></a> (Germany)</div></div></div></div></div>https://www.tera.coop/</span></a> (France)</div></div></div></div></div>Bio Veda Philosophy</div></span></div></div></div></div></a></div></div>Bioveda x Earthship</div></div></div></div></div>https://www.ecovillagenj.org/</span></a> (NJ)</div></div></div></div></div>https://www.twinoaks.org/</span></a> (US)</div></div></div></div></div>https://lemoulinagedechirols.org/</span></a> (France)</div></div></div></div></div>https://fermelegere.greli.net/</span></a> (France)</div></div></div></div></div>https://desobeissancefertile.com/</span></a> (France)</div></div></div></div></div>https://ecovillagedepourgues.coop/</span></a> (France)</div></div></div></div></div>Brave Earth, Re:source, Kasaba, Desa, Hedone, Per Anhalter, Gandum</div></div></div></div></div>https://highatlasfoundation.org/</span></a> (Morocco)</div></div></div></div></div>https://community.ecodesignhive.com/local</span></a> (virtual permaculture community)</div></div></div></div></div>https://psd-zukunftspreis.de/</span></a> Tech ? (Berlin)</div></div></div></div></div>https://cartographie.francetierslieux.fr/</span></a> (Network of CoWorking Cafes)</div></div></div></div></div>https://coglab.fr/</span></a> (Neuro Meetup in Paris)</div></div></div></div></div>https://www.emmaus-lescar-pau.net</span></a> (France)</div></div></div></div></div>https://www.recurse.com/</span></a> (New York)</div></div></div></div></div>https://datapaulette.org/</span></a> Paris</div></div></div></div></div>https://fuz.re/</span></a> Paris</div></div></div></div></div>https://lapaillasse.org/</span></a> Paris</div></div></div></div></div>https://known.hackens.org/profile/hackens</span></a> Paris</div></div></div></div></div>https://www.reset.bar/</span></a> Gaming Bar Paris</div></div></div></div></div>https://www.electrolab.fr/</span></a> Fablab Paris</div></div></div></div></div>https://www.tetalab.org/fr/blog</span></a> Toulouse </div></div></div></div></div>https://www.nuanu.com/</span></a></div></div></div></div></div>Ancient</h4></div></div>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakers</span></a></div></div></div></div></div>Icaria</span></a> - French Socialist community in 1830s</div></div></div></div></div>All Things New</span></a>, American Communes from after Civil War to before WW1</div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>Coliving</h4></div></div>Tera Coop</span></a> (France)</div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>Designs</h4></div></div>https://geophilia.org/page22.html</span></a></div></div></div></div></div>Burner City — https://flyranch.burningman.org/</span></a></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>Hotels/Resorts</h4></div></div>https://country.figment.live/</span></a></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>Individuals or households with rights to withdraw resource units from the common-pool resource, and the boundaries of the common-pool resource itself, are clearly defined.</div></div></div></div></div></div></span></div>Congruence A. The distribution of benefits from appropriation rules is roughly proportionate to the costs imposed by provision rules. B. Appropriation rules restricting time, place, technology, and quantity of resource units are related to local conditions.</div></div></div></div></div></div></span></div>Collective-Choice Arrangements Most individuals affected by operational rules can participate in modifying operational rules.</div></div></div></div></div></div></span></div>Monitoring Monitors, who actively audit common-pool resource conditions and appropriator behavior, are accountable to the appropriators or are the appropriators themselves.</div></div></div></div></div></div></span></div>Graduated Sanctions Appropriators who violate operational rules are likely to receive graduated sanctions (depending on the seriousness and context of the offense) from other appropriators, from officials accountable to these appropriators, or from both.</div></div></div></div></div></div></span></div>Conflict-Resolution Mechanisms Appropriators and their officials have rapid access to low-cost, local arenas to resolve conflict among appropriators or between appropriators and officials.</div></div></div></div></div></div></span></div>Minimal Recognition of Rights to Organize The rights of appropriators to devise their own institutions are not challenged by external governmental authorities.</div></div></div></div></div></div>For common-pool resources that are parts of larger systems: 8. Nested Enterprises Appropriation, provision, monitoring, enforcement, conflict resolution, and governance activities are organized in multiple layers of nested enterprises. Source: Adapted from Ostrom (1990, 90).</div></div></div></div></div>Prosocial: Using Evolutionary Science to Build Productive, Equitable, and Collaborative Groups</div></div></div></div></div>www.newharbinger.com</div>https://www.newharbinger.com/9781684030248/prosocial/</div></div></div></a></div></div></div></div>https://encode.org/</span></a></div></div></div></div></div>https://metagov.org/</span></a></div></div></div></div></div>https://www.yakcollective.org/projects/yak-online-governance-primer/</span></a></div></div></div></div></div>Nature of Human Assembly</span></a></div></div></div></div></div>Quadratic Funding x EA</span></a></div></div></div></div></div>Add a web bookmark</div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>Downloadable Books</span></a></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>Farming</h4></div></div>https://www.startafoodforest.com/</span></a></div></div></div></div></div>https://lakesidecommunitygarden.org/home-2/</span></a></div></div></div></div></div>https://earth-regenerators.mn.co/</span></a></div></div></div></div></div>https://katari.farm</span></a></div></div></div></div></div>https://www.complexearth.com/</span></a></div></div></div></div></div>https://earth-regenerators.mn.co/posts/please-join-barichara-updates</span></a></div></div></div></div></div>Growing stuff for busy people</span></a></div></div></div></div></div>Loses Plateau 黄土高原绿化</span></a></div></div></div></div></div>calcium & magnesium portion</div></div></div></div></div>https://www.permaculturenews.org/</span></a></div></div></div></div></div>https://www.gaiacreationsecoland.com/</span></a></div></div></div></div></div>https://workspace.oregonstate.edu/student-portfolio-examples-permaculture-design-certificate-online</span></a></div></div></div></div></div>From @KainX on Discord:</div></div></div></div></div></div></div>https://imgur.com/gallery/zZHD1</span></a></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>https://docs.google.com/document/d/10y7nZgBgCLaokpywYyILcSSXoJJ33WAufiAbXx3HhDI/edit</span></a></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yP_eqoUZgFSH_mvEpN4ZXXsO8xDyQhRxpt5wgjMlYkI/edit</span></a></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>No access</span></div></span></div></div></div></div></a></div></div>https://famous-bulb-a04.notion.site/Permaculture-and-21st-Century-Farming-Video-Resources-c7770a6842a143a1bc1faf7c0eaafcb1</span></a></div></div></div></div></div>https://www.farmla.org/?fbclid=PAAaY5ePVofXu2DJIICtdpAMpAL3kCBp2pMIXloveGcQ-dBAbIqKpW8eUX1_g</span></a></div></div></div></div></div>https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eden_Project</span></a> World Largest Greenhouse</div></div></div></div></div>https://growingcommunities.org/about-us</span></a> (Organic Farm Community in UK)</div></div></div></div></div>Organic Farming: https://rodaleinstitute.org/</span></a></div></div></div></div></div>Farmlink Local food oasis Food hub FARMER’S MARKET</div> Crypto Cities 2024-12-09T00:00:00+00:00 Overview</h2> "Crypto Cities" is a 2021 article by Vitalik Buterin</a> exploring the intersection of cryptocurrency technology and local governance. The article examines how blockchain technology could be integrated into city administration and governance.</p> Complete Reproduction of Post</summary> Special thanks to Mr Silly and Tina Zhen for early feedback on the post, and to a big long list of people for discussion of the ideas. One interesting trend of the last year has been the growth of interest in local government, and in the idea of local governments that have wider variance and do more experimentation. Over the past year, Miami mayor Francis Suarez has pursued a Twitter-heavy tech-startup-like strategy of attracting interest in the city, frequently engaging with the mainstream tech industry and crypto community on Twitter. Wyoming now has a DAO-friendly legal structure, Colorado is experimenting with quadratic voting, and we're seeing more and more experiments making more pedestrian-friendly street environments for the offline world. We're even seeing projects with varying degrees of radicalness - Cul de sac, Telosa, CityDAO, Nkwashi, Prospera and many more - trying to create entire neighborhoods and cities from scratch.</p> Another interesting trend of the last year has been the rapid mainstreaming of crypto ideas such as coins, non-fungible tokens and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). So what would happen if we combine the two trends together? Does it make sense to have a city with a coin, an NFT, a DAO, some record-keeping on-chain for anti-corruption, or even all four? As it turns out, there are already people trying to do just that:</p> CityCoins.co, a project that sets up coins intended to become local media of exchange, where a portion of the issuance of the coin goes to the city government. MiamiCoin already exists, and "San Francisco Coin" appears to be coming soon. Other experiments with coin issuance (eg. see this project in Seoul) Experiments with NFTs, often as a way of funding local artists. Busan is hosting a government-backed conference exploring what they could do with NFTs. Reno mayor Hillary Schieve's expansive vision for blockchainifying the city, including NFT sales to support local art, a RenoDAO with RenoCoins issued to local residents that could get revenue from the government renting out properties, blockchain-secured lotteries, blockchain voting and more. Much more ambitious projects creating crypto-oriented cities from scratch: see CityDAO, which describes itself as, well, "building a city on the Ethereum blockchain" - DAOified governance and all. </code></pre> But are these projects, in their current form, good ideas? Are there any changes that could make them into better ideas? Let us find out... Why should we care about cities?</p> Many national governments around the world are showing themselves to be inefficient and slow-moving in response to long-running problems and rapid changes in people's underlying needs. In short, many national governments are missing live players. Even worse, many of the outside-the-box political ideas that are being considered or implemented for national governance today are honestly quite terrifying. Do you want the USA to be taken over by a clone of WW2-era Portuguese dictator Antonio Salazar, or perhaps an "American Caesar", to beat down the evil scourge of American leftism? For every idea that can be reasonably described as freedom-expanding or democratic, there are ten that are just different forms of centralized control and walls and universal surveillance.</p> Now consider local governments. Cities and states, as we've seen from the examples at the start of this post, are at least in theory capable of genuine dynamism. There are large and very real differences of culture between cities, so it's easier to find a single city where there is public interest in adopting any particular radical idea than it is to convince an entire country to accept it. There are very real challenges and opportunities in local public goods, urban planning, transportation and many other sectors in the governance of cities that could be addressed. Cities have tightly cohesive internal economies where things like widespread cryptocurrency adoption could realistically independently happen. Furthermore, it's less likely that experiments within cities will lead to terrible outcomes both because cities are regulated by higher-level governments and because cities have an easier escape valve: people who are unhappy with what's going on can more easily exit.</p> So all in all, it seems like the local level of government is a very undervalued one. And given that criticism of existing smart city initiatives often heavily focuses on concerns around centralized governance, lack of transparency and data privacy, blockchain and cryptographic technologies seem like a promising key ingredient for a more open and participatory way forward. What are city projects up to today?</p> Quite a lot actually! Each of these experiments is still small scale and largely still trying to find its way around, but they are all at least seeds that could turn into interesting things. Many of the most advanced projects are in the United States, but there is interest across the world; over in Korea the government of Busan is running an NFT conference. Here are a few examples of what is being done today. Blockchain experiments in Reno</p> Reno, Nevada mayor Hillary Schieve is a blockchain fan, focusing primarily on the Tezos ecosystem, and she has recently been exploring blockchain-related ideas (see her podcast here) in the governance of her city:</p> Selling NFTs to fund local art, starting with an NFT of the "Space Whale" sculpture in the middle of the city Creating a Reno DAO, governed by Reno coins that Reno residents would be eligible to receive via an airdrop. The Reno DAO could start to get sources of revenue; one proposed idea was the city renting out properties that it owns and the revenue going into a DAO Using blockchains to secure all kinds of processes: blockchain-secured random number generators for casinos, blockchain-secured voting, etc. </code></pre> Reno space whale. Source here. CityCoins.co</p> CityCoins.co is a project built on Stacks, a blockchain run by an unusual "proof of transfer" (for some reason abbreviated PoX and not PoT) block production algorithm that is built around the Bitcoin blockchain and ecosystem. 70% of the coin's supply is generated by an ongoing sale mechanism: anyone with STX (the Stacks native token) can send their STX to the city coin contract to generate city coins; the STX revenues are distributed to existing city coin holders who stake their coins. The remaining 30% is made available to the city government.</p> CityCoins has made the interesting decision of trying to make an economic model that does not depend on any government support. The local government does not need to be involved in creating a CityCoins.co coin; a community group can launch a coin by themselves. An FAQ-provided answer to "What can I do with CityCoins?" includes examples like "CityCoins communities will create apps that use tokens for rewards" and "local businesses can provide discounts or benefits to people who ... stack their CityCoins". In practice, however, the MiamiCoin community is not going at it alone; the Miami government has already de-facto publicly endorsed it.</p> MiamiCoin hackathon winner: a site that allows coworking spaces to give preferential offers to MiamiCoin holders. CityDAO</p> CityDAO is the most radical of the experiments: Unlike Miami and Reno, which are existing cities with existing infrastructure to be upgraded and people to be convinced, CityDAO a DAO with legal status under the Wyoming DAO law (see their docs here) trying to create entirely new cities from scratch.</p> So far, the project is still in its early stages. The team is currently finalizing a purchase of their first plot of land in a far-off corner of Wyoming. The plan is to start with this plot of land, and then add other plots of land in the future, to build cities, governed by a DAO and making heavy use of radical economic ideas like Harberger taxes to allocate the land, make collective decisions and manage resources. Their DAO is one of the progressive few that is avoiding coin voting governance; instead, the governance is a voting scheme based on "citizen" NFTs, and ideas have been floated to further limit votes to one-per-person by using proof-of-humanity verification. The NFTs are currently being sold to crowdfund the project; you can buy them on OpenSea.</p> What do I think cities could be up to?</p> Obviously there are a lot of things that cities could do in principle. They could add more bike lanes, they could use CO2 meters and far-UVC light to more effectively reduce COVID spread without inconveniencing people, and they could even fund life extension research. But my primary specialty is blockchains and this post is about blockchains, so... let's focus on blockchains.</p> I would argue that there are two distinct categories of blockchain ideas that make sense:</p> Using blockchains to create more trusted, transparent and verifiable versions of existing processes. Using blockchains to implement new and experimental forms of ownership for land and other scarce assets, as well as new and experimental forms of democratic governance. </code></pre> There's a natural fit between blockchains and both of these categories. Anything happening on a blockchain is very easy to publicly verify, with lots of ready-made freely available tools to help people do that. Any application built on a blockchain can immediately plug in to and interface with other applications in the entire global blockchain ecosystem. Blockchain-based systems are efficient in a way that paper is not, and publicly verifiable in a way that centralized computing systems are not - a necessary combination if you want to, say, make a new form of voting that allows citizens to give high-volume real-time feedback on hundreds or thousands of different issues.</p> So let's get into the specifics. What are some existing processes that blockchains could make more trusted and transparent?</p> One simple idea that plenty of people, including government officials around the world, have brought up to me on many occasions is the idea of governments creating a whitelisted internal-use-only stablecoin for tracking internal government payments. Every tax payment from an individual or organization could be tied to a publicly visible on-chain record minting that number of coins (if we want individual tax payment quantities to be private, there are zero-knowledge ways to make only the total public but still convince everyone that it was computed correctly). Transfers between departments could be done "in the clear", and the coins would be redeemed only by individual contractors or employees claiming their payments and salaries.</p> This system could easily be extended. For example, procurement processes for choosing which bidder wins a government contract could largely be done on-chain.</p> Many more processes could be made more trustworthy with blockchains:</p> Fair random number generators (eg. for lotteries) - VDFs, such as the one Ethereum is expected to include, could serve as a fair random number generator that could be used to make government-run lotteries more trustworthy. Fair randomness could also be used for many other use cases, such as sortition as a form of government. Certificates, for example cryptographic proofs that some particular individual is a resident of the city, could be done on-chain for added verifiability and security (eg. if such certificates are issued on-chain, it would become obvious if a large number of false certificates are issued). This can be used by all kinds of local-government-issued certificates. Asset registries, for land and other assets, as well as more complicated forms of property ownership such as development rights. Due to the need for courts to be able to make assignments in exceptional situations, these registries will likely never be fully decentralized bearer instruments in the same way that cryptocurrencies are, but putting records on-chain can still make it easier to see what happened in what order in a dispute. </code></pre> Eventually, even voting could be done on-chain. Here, many complexities and dragons loom and it's really important to be careful; a sophisticated solution combining blockchains, zero knowledge proofs and other cryptography is needed to achieve all the desired privacy and security properties. However, if humanity is ever going to move to electronic voting at all, local government seems like the perfect place to start. What are some radical economic and governance experiments that could be interesting?</p> But in addition to these kinds of blockchain overlays onto things that governments already do, we can also look at blockchains as an opportunity for governments to make completely new and radical experiments in economics and governance. These are not necessarily final ideas on what I think should be done; they are more initial explorations and suggestions for possible directions. Once an experiment starts, real-world feedback is often by far the most useful variable to determine how the experiment should be adjusted in the future. Experiment #1: a more comprehensive vision of city tokens</p> CityCoins.co is one vision for how city tokens could work. But it is far from the only vision. Indeed, the CityCoins.so approach has significant risks, particularly in how economic model is heavily tilted toward early adopters. 70% of the STX revenue from minting new coins is given to existing stakers of the city coin. More coins will be issued in the next five years than in the fifty years that follow. It's a good deal for the government in 2021, but what about 2051? Once a government endorses a particular city coin, it becomes difficult for it to change directions in the future. Hence, it's important for city governments to think carefully about these issues, and choose a path that makes sense for the long term.</p> Here is a different possible sketch of a narrative of how city tokens might work. It's far from the only possible alternative to the CityCoins.co vision; see Steve Waldman's excellent article arguing for a city-localized medium of exchange for yet another possible direction. In any case, city tokens are a wide design space, and there are many different options worth considering. Anyway, here goes...</p> The concept of home ownership in its current form is a notable double-edged sword, and the specific ways in which it's actively encouraged and legally structured is considered by many to be one of the biggest economic policy mistakes that we are making today. There is an inevitable political tension between a home as a place to live and a home as an investment asset, and the pressure to satisfy communities who care about the latter often ends up severely harming the affordability of the former. A resident in a city either owns a home, making them massively over-exposed to land prices and introducing perverse incentives to fight against construction of new homes, or they rent a home, making them negatively exposed to the real estate market and thus putting them economically at odds with the goal of making a city a nice place to live.</p> But even despite all of these problems, many still find home ownership to be not just a good personal choice, but something worthy of actively subsidizing or socially encouraging. One big reason is that it nudges people to save money and build up their net worth. Another big reason is that despite its flaws, it creates economic alignment between residents and the communities they live in. But what if we could give people a way to save and create that economic alignment without the flaws? What if we could create a divisible and fungible city token, that residents could hold as many units of as they can afford or feel comfortable with, and whose value goes up as the city prospers?</p> First, let's start with some possible objectives. Not all are necessary; a token that accomplishes only three of the five is already a big step forward. But we'll try to hit as many of them as possible:</p> Get sustainable sources of revenue for the government. The city token economic model should avoid redirecting existing tax revenue; instead, it should find new sources of revenue. Create economic alignment between residents and the city. This means first of all that the coin itself should clearly become more valuable as the city becomes more attractive. But it also means that the economics should actively encourage residents to hold the coin more than faraway hedge funds. Promote saving and wealth-building. Home ownership does this: as home owners make mortgage payments, they build up their net worth by default. City tokens could do this too, making it attractive to accumulate coins over time, and even gamifying the experience. Encourage more pro-social activity, such as positive actions that help the city and more sustainable use of resources. Be egalitarian. Don't unduly favor wealthy people over poor people (as badly designed economic mechanisms often do accidentally). A token's divisibility, avoiding a sharp binary divide between haves and have-nots, does a lot already, but we can go further, eg. by allocating a large portion of new issuance to residents as a UBI. </code></pre> One pattern that seems to easily meet the first three objectives is providing benefits to holders: if you hold at least X coins (where X can go up over time), you get some set of services for free. MiamiCoin is trying to encourage businesses to do this, but we could go further and make government services work this way too. One simple example would be making existing public parking spaces only available for free to those who hold at least some number of coins in a locked-up form. This would serve a few goals at the same time:</p> Create an incentive to hold the coin, sustaining its value. Create an incentive specifically for residents to hold the coin, as opposed to otherwise-unaligned faraway investors. Furthermore, the incentive's usefulness is capped per-person, so it encourages widely distributed holdings. Creates economic alignment (city becomes more attractive -> more people want to park -> coins have more value). Unlike home ownership, this creates alignment with an entire town, and not merely a very specific location in a town. Encourage sustainable use of resources: it would reduce usage of parking spots (though people without coins who really need them could still pay), supporting many local governments' desires to open up more space on the roads to be more pedestrian-friendly. Alternatively, restaurants could also be allowed to lock up coins through the same mechanism and claim parking spaces to use for outdoor seating. </code></pre> But to avoid perverse incentives, it's extremely important to avoid overly depending on one specific idea and instead to have a diverse array of possible revenue sources. One excellent gold mine of places to give city tokens value, and at the same time experiment with novel governance ideas, is zoning. If you hold at least Y coins, then you can quadratically vote on the fee that nearby landowners have to pay to bypass zoning restrictions. This hybrid market + direct democracy based approach would be much more efficient than current overly cumbersome permitting processes, and the fee itself would be another source of government revenue. More generally, any of the ideas in the next section could be combined with city tokens to give city token holders more places to use them. Experiment #2: more radical and participatory forms of governance</p> This is where Radical Markets ideas such as Harberger taxes, quadratic voting and quadratic funding come in. I already brought up some of these ideas in the section above, but you don't have to have a dedicated city token to do them. Some limited government use of quadratic voting and funding has already happened: see the Colorado Democratic party and the Taiwanese presidential hackathon, as well as not-yet-government-backed experiments like Gitcoin's Boulder Downtown Stimulus. But we could do more!</p> One obvious place where these ideas can have long-term value is giving developers incentives to improve the aesthetics of buildings that they are building (see here, here, here and here for some recent examples of professional blabbers debating the aesthetics of modern architecture). Harberger taxes and other mechanisms could be used to radically reform zoning rules, and blockchains could be used to administer such mechanisms in a more trustworthy and efficient way. Another idea that is more viable in the short term is subsidizing local businesses, similar to the Downtown Stimulus but on a larger and more permanent scale. Businesses produce various kinds of positive externalities in their local communities all the time, and those externalities could be more effectively rewarded. Local news could be quadratically funded, revitalizing a long-struggling industry. Pricing for advertisements could be set based on real-time votes of how much people enjoy looking at each particular ad, encouraging more originality and creativity.</p> More democratic feedback (and possibly even retroactive democratic feedback!) could plausibly create better incentives in all of these areas. And 21st-century digital democracy through real-time online quadratic voting and funding could plausibly do a much better job than 20th-century democracy, which seems in practice to have been largely characterized by rigid building codes and obstruction at planning and permitting hearings. And of course, if you're going to use blockchains to secure voting, starting off by doing it with fancy new kinds of votes seems far more safe and politically feasible than re-fitting existing voting systems.</p> Mandatory solarpunk picture intended to evoke a positive image of what might happen to our cities if real-time quadratic votes could set subsidies and prices for everything. Conclusions</p> There are a lot of worthwhile ideas for cities to experiment with that could be attempted by existing cities or by new cities. New cities of course have the advantage of not having existing residents with existing expectations of how things should be done; but the concept of creating a new city itself is, in modern times, relatively untested. Perhaps the multi-billion-dollar capital pools in the hands of people and projects enthusiastic to try new things could get us over the hump. But even then, existing cities will likely continue to be the place where most people live for the foreseeable future, and existing cities can use these ideas too.</p> Blockchains can be very useful in both the more incremental and more radical ideas that were proposed here, even despite the inherently "trusted" nature of a city government. Running any new or existing mechanism on-chain gives the public an easy ability to verify that everything is following the rules. Public chains are better: the benefits from existing infrastructure for users to independently verify what is going on far outweigh the losses from transaction fees, which are expected to quickly decrease very soon from rollups and sharding. If strong privacy is required, blockchains can be combined zero knowledge cryptography to give privacy and security at the same time.</p> The main trap that governments should avoid is too quickly sacrificing optionality. An existing city could fall into this trap by launching a bad city token instead of taking things more slowly and launching a good one. A new city could fall into this trap by selling off too much land, sacrificing the entire upside to a small group of early adopters. Starting with self-contained experiments, and taking things slowly on moves that are truly irreversible, is ideal. But at the same time, it's also important to seize the opportunity in the first place. There's a lot that can and should be improved with cities, and a lot of opportunities; despite the challenges, crypto cities broadly are an idea whose time has come.</p> </details> Key Concepts</h2> City Tokens</h3> Alternative to traditional home ownership</li> Creates economic alignment between residents and cities</li> Potential for sustainable government revenue</li> Encourages local participation and savings</li> </ul> Blockchain Applications</h3> Transparent government payments</li> Verifiable random number generation</li> Digital certificates</li> Asset registries</li> Voting systems</li> </ul> Governance Experiments</h3> Harberger taxes</li> Quadratic voting</li> Quadratic funding</li> Participatory urban planning</li> </ul> Notable Examples</h2> MiamiCoin</strong>: City-specific cryptocurrency</li> CityDAO</strong>: Wyoming-based experiment in blockchain city governance</li> Reno</strong>: Blockchain initiatives including NFTs and DAO exploration</li> </ul> Challenges</h2> Risk of early adopter concentration</li> Need for careful implementation</li> Balance between innovation and stability</li> Privacy concerns</li> </ul> Traditional Dream Factory 2024-12-09T00:00:00+00:00 "...5 hectare regenerative playground in Abela, [Portugal] where we have a reforestation, food forest, glamping accomodations, industrial kitchen, cafe, sauna and more:</p> Coworking </code></pre> </li> OPEN Coworking & STARLINK WIFI </code></pre> </li> Van </code></pre> </li> 6 Van parking areas </code></pre> </li> Glamping </code></pre> </li> 10 Glamping Accommodations </code></pre> </li> Syntropic food forest </code></pre> </li> Food Forest + REFORESTATION </code></pre> </li> (w/ 2000+ trees) </code></pre> </li> Veggetable production </code></pre> </li> Market garden (producing vegetables for 30+ people) </code></pre> </li> TDF Cafe </code></pre> </li> Mushroom farm Coming soon </code></pre> </li> Events </code></pre> </li> Pop-up event space </code></pre> </li> Events </code></pre> </li> Sauna </code></pre> </li> Wellness candle </code></pre> </li> Natural pool Coming soon </code></pre> </li> Restaurant plate </code></pre> </li> Pizza oven </code></pre> </li> TDF Cafe </code></pre> </li> Coffee shop </code></pre> </li> Makerspace </code></pre> </li> Makerspace & workshop </code></pre> </li> </ul> Documents</h1> Pink Paper</a></p> Links</h1> https://www.traditionaldreamfactory.com/</p> Network States 2024-12-09T00:00:00+00:00 source: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2022/07/13/networkstates.html</p> Reproduction (Poorly Formatted)</h1> vitalik.eth.limo What do I think about network states? 44–56 minutes</p> 2022 Jul 13 See all posts</p> On July 4, Balaji Srinivasan released the first version of his long-awaited new book describing his vision for "network states": communities organized around a particular vision of how to run their own society that start off as online clubs, but then build up more and more of a presence over time and eventually become large enough to seek political autonomy or even diplomatic recognition.</p> Network states can be viewed as an attempt at an ideological successor to libertarianism: Balaji repeatedly praises The Sovereign Individual (see my mini-review here) as important reading and inspiration, but also departs from its thinking in key ways, centering in his new work many non-individualistic and non-monetary aspects of social relations like morals and community. Network states can also be viewed as an attempt to sketch out a possible broader political narrative for the crypto space. Rather than staying in their own corner of the internet disconnected from the wider world, blockchains could serve as a centerpiece for a new way of organizing large chunks of human society.</p> These are high promises. Can network states live up to them? Do network states actually provide enough benefits to be worth getting excited about? Regardless of the merits of network states, does it actually make sense to tie the idea together with blockchains and cryptocurrency? And on the other hand, is there anything crucially important that this vision of the world misses? This post represents my attempt to try to understand these questions. Table of contents</p> What is a network state? So what kinds of network states could we build? What is Balaji's megapolitical case for network states? Do you have to like Balaji's megapolitics to like network states? What does cryptocurrency have to do with network states? What aspects of Balaji's vision do I like? What aspects of Balaji's vision do I take issue with? Non-Balajian network states Is there a middle way? </code></pre> What is a network state?</p> Balaji helpfully gives multiple short definitions of what a network state is. First, his definition in one sentence:</p> A network state is a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states. </code></pre> This so far seems uncontroversial. Create a new internet community online, once it grows big enough materialize it offline, and eventually try to negotiate for some kind of status. Someone of almost any political ideology could find some form of network state under this definition that they could get behind. But now, we get to his definition in a longer sentence:</p> A network state is a social network with a moral innovation, a sense of national consciousness, a recognized founder, a capacity for collective action, an in-person level of civility, an integrated cryptocurrency, a consensual government limited by a social smart contract, an archipelago of crowdfunded physical territories, a virtual capital, and an on-chain census that proves a large enough population, income, and real-estate footprint to attain a measure of diplomatic recognition. </code></pre> Here, the concept starts to get opinionated: we're not just talking about the general concept of online communities that have collective agency and eventually try to materialize on land, we're talking about a specific Balajian vision of what network states should look like. It's completely possible to support network states in general, but have disagreements with the Balajian view of what properties network states should have. If you're not already a "crypto convert", it's hard to see why an "integrated cryptocurrency" is such a fundamental part of the network state concept, for example - though Balaji does later on in the book defend his choices.</p> Finally, Balaji expands on this conception of a Balajian network state in longer-form, first in "a thousand words" (apparently, Balajian network states use base 8, as the actual word count is exactly (512 = 8^3)) and then an essay, and at the very end of the book a whole chapter.</p> And, of course, an image.</p> One key point that Balaji stresses across many chapters and pages is the unavoidable moral ingredient required for any successful new community. As Balaji writes:</p> The quick answer comes from Paul Johnson at the 11:00 mark of this talk, where he notes that early America's religious colonies succeeded at a higher rate than its for-profit colonies, because the former had a purpose. The slightly longer answer is that in a startup society, you're not asking people to buy a product (which is an economic, individualistic pitch) but to join a community (which is a cultural, collective pitch). </code></pre> The commitment paradox of religious communes is key here: counterintuitively, it's the religious communes that demand the most of their members that are the most long-lasting.</p> This is where Balajism explicitly diverges from the more traditional neoliberal-capitalist ideal of the defanged, apolitical and passion-free consumerist "last man". Unlike the strawman libertarian, Balaji does not believe that everything can "merely be a consumer product". Rather, he stresses greatly the importance of social norms for cohesion, and a literally religious attachment to the values that make a particular network state distinct from the world outside. As Balaji says in this podcast at 18:20, most current libertarian attempts at micronations are like "Zionism without Judaism", and this is a key part of why they fail.</p> This recognition is not a new one. Indeed, it's at the core of Antonio Garcia Martinez's criticism of Balaji's earlier sovereign-individual ideas (see this podcast at ~27:00), praising the tenacity of Cuban exiles in Miami who "perhaps irrationally, said this is our new homeland, this is our last stand". And in Fukuyama's The End of History:</p> This city, like any city, has foreign enemies and needs to be defended from outside attack. It therefore needs a class of guardians who are courageous and public-spirited, who are willing to sacrifice their material desires and wants for the sake of the common good. Socrates does not believe that courage and public-spiritedness can arise out of a calculation of enlightened self-interest. Rather, they must be rooted in thymos, in the just pride of the guardian class in themselves and in their own city, and their potentially irrational anger against those who threaten it. </code></pre> Balaji's argument in The Network State, as I am interpreting it, is as follows. While we do need political collectives bound not just by economic interest but also by moral force, we don't need to stick with the specific political collectives we have today, which are highly flawed and increasingly unrepresentative of people's values. Rather, we can, and should, create new and better collectives - and his seven-step program tells us how. So what kinds of network states could we build?</p> Balaji outlines a few ideas for network states, which I will condense into two key directions: lifestyle immersion and pro-tech regulatory innovation.</p> Balaji's go-to example for lifestyle immersion is a network state organized around health:</p> Next, let's do an example which requires a network archipelago (with a physical footprint) but not a full network state (with diplomatic recognition). This is Keto Kosher, the sugar-free society. Start with a history of the horrible USDA Food Pyramid, the grain-heavy monstrosity that gave cover to the corporate sugarification of the globe and the obesity epidemic. ... Organize a community online that crowdfunds properties around the world, like apartment buildings and gyms, and perhaps eventually even culdesacs and small towns. You might take an extreme sugar teeotaler approach, literally banning processed foods and sugar at the border, thereby implementing a kind of "Keto Kosher". You can imagine variants of this startup society that are like "Carnivory Communities" or "Paleo People". These would be competing startup societies in the same broad area, iterations on a theme. If successful, such a society might not stop at sugar. It could get into setting cultural defaults for fitness and exercise. Or perhaps it could bulk purchase continuous glucose meters for all members, or orders of metformin. </code></pre> This, strictly speaking, does not require any diplomatic recognition or even political autonomy - though perhaps, in the longer-term future, such enclaves could negotiate for lower health insurance fees and medicare taxes for their members. What does require autonomy? Well, how about a free zone for medical innovation?</p> Now let's do a more difficult example, which will require a full network state with diplomatic recognition. This is the medical sovereignty zone, the FDA-free society. You begin your startup society with Henninger's history of FDA-caused drug lag and Tabarrok's history of FDA interference with so-called "off label" prescription. You point out how many millions were killed by its policies, hand out t-shirts like ACT-UP did, show Dallas Buyers Club to all prospective residents, and make clear to all new members why your cause of medical sovereignty is righteous ... For the case of doing it outside the US, your startup society would ride behind, say, the support of the Malta's FDA for a new biomedical regime. For the case of doing it within the US, you'd need a governor who'd declare a sanctuary state for biomedicine. That is, just like a sanctuary city declares that it won't enforce federal immigration law, a sanctuary state for biomedicine would not enforce FDA writ. </code></pre> One can think up of many more examples for both categories. One could have a zone where it's okay to walk around naked, both securing your legal right to do so and helping you feel comfortable by creating an environment where many other people are naked too. Alternatively, you could have a zone where everyone can only wear basic plain-colored clothing, to discourage what's perceived as a zero-sum status competition of expending huge effort to look better than everyone else. One could have an intentional community zone for cryptocurrency users, requiring every store to accept it and demanding an NFT to get in the zone at all. Or one could build an enclave that legalizes radical experiments in transit and drone delivery, accepting higher risks to personal safety in exchange for the privilege of participating in a technological frontier that will hopefully set examples for the world as a whole.</p> What is common about all of these examples is the value of having a physical region, at least of a few hectares, where the network state's unique rules are enforced. Sure, you could individually insist on only eating at healthy restaurants, and research each restaurant carefully before you go there. But it's just so much easier to have a defined plot of land where you have an assurance that anywhere you go within that plot of land will meet your standards. Of course, you could lobby your local government to tighten health and safety regulations. But if you do that, you risk friction with people who have radically different preferences on tradeoffs, and you risk shutting poor people out of the economy. A network state offers a moderate approach. What is Balaji's megapolitical case for network states?</p> One of the curious features of the book that a reader will notice almost immediately is that it sometimes feels like two books in one: sometimes, it's a book about the concept of network states, and at other times it's an exposition of Balaji's grand megapolitical theory.</p> Balaji's grand megapolitical theory is pretty out-there and fun in a bunch of ways. Near the beginning of the book, he entices readers with tidbits like... ok fine, I'll just quote:</p> Germany sent Vladimir Lenin into Russia, potentially as part of a strategy to destabilize their then-rival in war. Antony Sutton's books document how some Wall Street bankers apparently funded the Russian Revolution (and how other Wall Street bankers funded the Nazis years later). Leon Trotsky spent time in New York prior to the revolution, and propagandistic reporting from Americans like John Reed aided Lenin and Trotsky in their revolution. Indeed, Reed was so useful to the Soviets — and so misleading as to the nature of the revolution — that he was buried at the base of the Kremlin Wall. Surprise: the Russian Revolution wasn't done wholly by Russians, but had significant foreign involvement from Germans and Americans. The Ochs-Sulzberger family, which owns The New York Times Company, owned slaves but didn't report that fact in their 1619 coverage. New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for helping the Soviet Union starve Ukraine into submission, 90 years before the Times decided to instead "stand with Ukraine". </code></pre> You can find a bunch more juicy examples in the chapter titled, appropriately, "If the News is Fake, Imagine History". These examples seem haphazard, and indeed, to some extent they are so intentionally: the goal is first and foremost to shock the reader out of their existing world model so they can start downloading Balaji's own.</p> But pretty soon, Balaji's examples do start to point to some particular themes: a deep dislike of the "woke" US left, exemplified by the New York Times, a combination of strong discomfort with the Chinese Communist Party's authoritarianism with an understanding of why the CCP often justifiably fears the United States, and an appreciation of the love of freedom of the US right (exemplified by Bitcoin maximalists) combined with a dislike of their hostility toward cooperation and order.</p> Next, we get Balaji's overview of the political realignments in recent history, and finally we get to his core model of politics in the present day: NYT, CCP, BTC.</p> Team NYT basically runs the US, and its total lack of competence means that the US is collapsing. Team BTC (meaning, both actual Bitcoin maximalists and US rightists in general) has some positive values, but their outright hostility to collective action and order means that they are incapable of building anything. Team CCP can build, but they are building a dystopian surveillance state that much of the world would not want to live in. And all three teams are waaay too nationalist: they view things from the perspective of their own country, and ignore or exploit everyone else. Even when the teams are internationalist in theory, their specific ways of interpreting their values make them unpalatable outside of a small part of the world.</p> Network states, in Balaji's view, are a "de-centralized center" that could create a better alternative. They combine the love of freedom of team BTC with the moral energy of team NYT and the organization of team CCP, and give us the best benefits of all three (plus a level of international appeal greater than any of the three) and avoid the worst parts.</p> This is Balajian megapolitics in a nutshell. It is not trying to justify network states using some abstract theory (eg. some Dunbar's number or concentrated-incentive argument that the optimal size of a political body is actually in the low tens of thousands). Rather, it is an argument that situates network states as a response to the particular political situation of the world at its current place and time.</p> Balaji's helical theory of history: yes, there are cycles, but there is also ongoing progress. Right now, we're at the part of the cycle where we need to help the sclerotic old order die, but also seed a new and better one. Do you have to agree with Balaji's megapolitics to like network states?</p> Many aspects of Balajian megapolitics will not be convincing to many readers. If you believe that "wokeness" is an important movement that protects the vulnerable, you may not appreciate the almost off-handed dismissal that it is basically just a mask for a professional elite's will-to-power. If you are worried about the plight of smaller countries such as Ukraine who are threatened by aggressive neighbors and desperately need outside support, you will not be convinced by Balaji's plea that "it may instead be best for countries to rearm, and take on their own defense".</p> I do think that you can support network states while disagreeing with some of Balaji's reasoning for them (and vice versa). But first, I should explain why I think Balaji feels that his view of the problem and his view of the solution are connected. Balaji has been passionate about roughly the same problem for a long time; you can see a similar narrative outline of defeating US institutional sclerosis through a technological and exit-driven approach in his speech on "the ultimate exit" from 2013. Network states are the latest iteration of his proposed solution.</p> There are a few reasons why talking about the problem is important:</p> To show that network states are the only way to protect freedom and capitalism, one must show why the US cannot. If the US, or the "democratic liberal order", is just fine, then there is no need for alternatives; we should just double down on global coordination and rule of law. But if the US is in an irreversible decline, and its rivals are ascending, then things look quite different. Network states can "maintain liberal values in an illiberal world"; hegemony thinking that assumes "the good guys are in charge" cannot. Many of Balaji's intended readers are not in the US, and a world of network states would inherently be globally distributed - and that includes lots of people who are suspicious of America. Balaji himself is Indian, and has a large Indian fan base. Many people in India, and elsewhere, view the US not as a "guardian of the liberal world order", but as something much more hypocritical at best and sinister at worst. Balaji wants to make it clear that you do not have to be pro-American to be a liberal (or at least a Balaji-liberal). Many parts of US left-leaning media are increasingly hostile to both cryptocurrency and the tech sector. Balaji expects that the "authoritarian left" parts of "team NYT" will be hostile to network states, and he explains this by pointing out that the media are not angels and their attacks are often self-interested. </code></pre> But this is not the only way of looking at the broader picture. What if you do believe in the importance of role of social justice values, the New York Times, or America? What if you value governance innovation, but have more moderate views on politics? Then, there are two ways you could look at the issue:</p> Network states as a synergistic strategy, or at least as a backup. Anything that happens in US politics in terms of improving equality, for example, only benefits the ~4% of the world's population that lives in the United States. The First Amendment does not apply outside US borders. The governance of many wealthy countries is sclerotic, and we do need some way to try more governance innovation. Network states could fill in the gaps. Countries like the United States could host network states that attract people from all over the world. Successful network states could even serve as a policy model for countries to adopt. Alternatively, what if the Republicans win and secure a decades-long majority in 2024, or the United States breaks down? You want there to be an alternative. Exit to network states as a distraction, or even a threat. If everyone's first instinct when faced with a large problem within their country is to exit to an enclave elsewhere, there will be no one left to protect and maintain the countries themselves. Global infrastructure that ultimately network states depend on will suffer. </code></pre> Both perspectives are compatible with a lot of disagreement with Balajian megapolitics. Hence, to argue for or against Balajian network states, we will ultimately have to talk about network states. My own view is friendly to network states, though with a lot of caveats and different ideas about how network states could work. What does cryptocurrency have to do with network states?</p> There are two kinds of alignment here: there is the spiritual alignment, the idea that "Bitcoin becomes the flag of technology", and there is the practical alignment, the specific ways in which network states could use blockchains and cryptographic tokens. In general, I agree with both of these arguments - though I think Balaji's book could do much more to spell them out more explicitly. The spiritual alignment</p> Cryptocurrency in 2022 is a key standard-bearer for internationalist liberal values that are difficult to find in any other social force that still stands strong today. Blockchains and cryptocurrencies are inherently global. Most Ethereum developers are outside the US, living in far-flung places like Europe, Taiwan and Australia. NFTs have given unique opportunities to artists in Africa and elsewhere in the Global South. Argentinians punch above their weight in projects like Proof of Humanity, Kleros and Nomic Labs.</p> Blockchain communities continue to stand for openness, freedom, censorship resistance and credible neutrality, at a time where many geopolitical actors are increasingly only serving their own interests. This enhances their international appeal further: you don't have to love US hegemony to love blockchains and the values that they stand for. And this all makes blockchains an ideal spiritual companion for the network state vision that Balaji wants to see. The practical alignment</p> But spiritual alignment means little without practical use value for blockchains to go along with it. Balaji gives plenty of blockchain use cases. One of Balaji's favorite concepts is the idea of the blockchain as a "ledger of record": people can timestamp events on-chain, creating a global provable log of humanity's "microhistory". He continues with other examples:</p> Zero-knowledge technology like ZCash, Ironfish, and Tornado Cash allow on-chain attestation of exactly what people want to make public and nothing more. Naming systems like the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) and Solana Name Service (SNS) attach identity to on-chain transactions. Incorporation systems allow the on-chain representation of corporate abstractions above the level of a mere transaction, like financial statements or even full programmable company-equivalents like DAOs. Cryptocredentials, Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), Non-Transferable Fungibles (NTFs), and Soulbounds allow the representation of non-financial data on chain, like diplomas or endorsements. </code></pre> But how does this all relate to network states? I could go into specific examples in the vein of crypto cities: issuing tokens, issuing CityDAO-style citizen NFTs, combining blockchains with zero-knowledge cryptography to do secure privacy-preserving voting, and a lot more. Blockchains are the Lego of crypto-finance and crypto-governance: they are a very effective tool for implementing transparent in-protocol rules to govern common resources, assets and incentives.</p> But we also need to go a level deeper. Blockchains and network states have the shared property that they are both trying to "create a new root". A corporation is not a root: if there is a dispute inside a corporation, it ultimately gets resolved by a national court system. Blockchains and network states, on the other hand, are trying to be new roots. This does not mean some absolute "na na no one can catch me" ideal of sovereignty that is perhaps only truly accessible to the ~5 countries that have highly self-sufficient national economies and/or nuclear weapons. Individual blockchain participants are of course vulnerable to national regulation, and enclaves of network states even more so. But blockchains are the only infrastructure system that at least attempts to do ultimate dispute resolution at the non-state level (either through on-chain smart contract logic or through the freedom to fork). This makes them an ideal base infrastructure for network states. What aspects of Balaji's vision do I like?</p> Given that a purist "private property rights only" libertarianism inevitably runs into large problems like its inability to fund public goods, any successful pro-freedom program in the 21st century has to be a hybrid containing at least one Big Compromise Idea that solves at least 80% of the problems, so that independent individual initiative can take care of the rest. This could be some stringent measures against economic power and wealth concentration (maybe charge annual Harberger taxes on everything), it could be an 85% Georgist land tax, it could be a UBI, it could be mandating that sufficiently large companies become democratic internally, or one of any other proposals. Not all of these work, but you need something that drastic to have any shot at all.</p> Generally, I am used to the Big Compromise Idea being a leftist one: some form of equality and democracy. Balaji, on the other hand, has Big Compromise Ideas that feel more rightist: local communities with shared values, loyalty, religion, physical environments structured to encourage personal discipline ("keto kosher") and hard work. These values are implemented in a very libertarian and tech-forward way, organizing not around land, history, ethnicity and country, but around the cloud and personal choice, but they are rightist values nonetheless. This style of thinking is foreign to me, but I find it fascinating, and important. Stereotypical "wealthy white liberals" ignore this at their peril: these more "traditional" values are actually quite popular even among some ethnic minorities in the United States, and even more so in places like Africa and India, which is exactly where Balaji is trying to build up his base. But what about this particular baizuo that's currently writing this review? Do network states actually interest me?</p> The "Keto Kosher" health-focused lifestyle immersion network state is certainly one that I would want to live in. Sure, I could just spend time in cities with lots of healthy stuff that I can seek out intentionally, but a concentrated physical environment makes it so much easier. Even the motivational aspect of being around other people who share a similar goal sounds very appealing.</p> But the truly interesting stuff is the governance innovation: using network states to organize in ways that would actually not be possible under existing regulations. There are three ways that you can interpret the underlying goal here:</p> Creating new regulatory environments that let their residents have different priorities from the priorities preferred by the mainstream: for example, the "anyone can walk around naked" zone, or a zone that implements different tradeoffs between safety and convenience, or a zone that legalizes more psychoactive substances. Creating new regulatory institutions that might be more efficient at serving the same priorities as the status quo. For example, instead of improving environmental friendliness by regulating specific behaviors, you could just have a Pigovian tax. Instead of requiring licenses and regulatory pre-approval for many actions, you could require mandatory liability insurance. You could use quadratic voting for governance and quadratic funding to fund local public goods. Pushing against regulatory conservatism in general, by increasing the chance that there's some jurisdiction that will let you do any particular thing. Institutionalized bioethics, for example, is a notoriously conservative enterprise, where 20 people dead in a medical experiment gone wrong is a tragedy, but 200000 people dead from life-saving medicines and vaccines not being approved quickly enough is a statistic. Allowing people to opt into network states that accept higher levels of risk could be a successful strategy for pushing against this. </code></pre> In general, I see value in all three. A large-scale institutionalization of [1] could make the word simultaneously more free while making people comfortable with higher levels of restriction of certain things, because they know that if they want to do something disallowed there are other zones they could go to do it. More generally, I think there is an important idea hidden in [1]: while the "social technology" community has come up with many good ideas around better governance, and many good ideas around better public discussion, there is a missing emphasis on better social technology for sorting. We don't just want to take existing maps of social connections as given and find better ways to come to consensus within them. We also want to reform the webs of social connections themselves, and put people closer to other people that are more compatible with them to better allow different ways of life to maintain their own distinctiveness.</p> [2] is exciting because it fixes a major problem in politics: unlike startups, where the early stage of the process looks somewhat like a mini version of the later stage, in politics the early stage is a public discourse game that often selects for very different things than what actually work in practice. If governance ideas are regularly implemented in network states, then we would move from an extrovert-privileging "talker liberalism" to a more balanced "doer liberalism" where ideas rise and fall based on how well they actually do on a small scale. We could even combine [1] and [2]: have a zone for people who want to automatically participate in a new governance experiment every year as a lifestyle.</p> [3] is of course a more complicated moral question: whether you view paralysis and creep toward de-facto authoritarian global government as a bigger problem or someone inventing an evil technology that dooms us all as a bigger problem. I'm generally in the first camp; I am concerned about the prospect of both the West and China settling into a kind of low-growth conservatism, I love how imperfect coordination between nation states limits the enforceability of things like global copyright law, and I'm concerned about the possibility that, with future surveillance technology, the world as a whole will enter a highly self-enforcing but terrible political equilibrium that it cannot get out of. But there are specific areas (cough cough, unfriendly AI risk) where I am in the risk-averse camp ... but here we're already getting into the second part of my reaction. What aspects of Balaji's vision do I take issue with?</p> There are four aspects that I am worried about the most:</p> The "founder" thing - why do network states need a recognized founder to be so central? What if network states end up only serving the wealthy? "Exit" alone is not sufficient to stabilize global politics. So if exit is everyone's first choice, what happens? What about global negative externalities more generally? </code></pre> The "founder" thing</p> Throughout the book, Balaji is insistent on the importance of "founders" in a network state (or rather, a startup society: you found a startup society, and become a network state if you are successful enough to get diplomatic recognition). Balaji explicitly describes startup society founders as being "moral entrepreneurs":</p> These presentations are similar to startup pitch decks. But as the founder of a startup society, you aren't a technology entrepreneur telling investors why this new innovation is better, faster, and cheaper. You are a moral entrepreneur telling potential future citizens about a better way of life, about a single thing that the broader world has gotten wrong that your community is setting right. </code></pre> Founders crystallize moral intuitions and learnings from history into a concrete philosophy, and people whose moral intuitions are compatible with that philosophy coalesce around the project. This is all very reasonable at an early stage - though it is definitely not the only approach for how a startup society could emerge. But what happens at later stages? Mark Zuckerberg being the centralized founder of facebook the startup was perhaps necessary. But Mark Zuckerberg being in charge of a multibillion-dollar (in fact, multibillion-user) company is something quite different. Or, for that matter, what about Balaji's nemesis: the fifth-generation hereditary white Ochs-Sulzberger dynasty running the New York Times?</p> Small things being centralized is great, extremely large things being centralized is terrifying. And given the reality of network effects, the freedom to exit again is not sufficient. In my view, the problem of how to settle into something other than founder control is important, and Balaji spends too little effort on it. "Recognized founder" is baked into the definition of what a Balajian network state is, but a roadmap toward wider participation in governance is not. It should be. What about everyone who is not wealthy?</p> Over the last few years, we've seen many instances of governments around the world becoming explicitly more open to "tech talent". There are 42 countries offering digital nomad visas, there is a French tech visa, a similar program in Singapore, golden visas for Taiwan, a program for Dubai, and many others. This is all great for skilled professionals and rich people. Multimillionaires fleeing China's tech crackdowns and covid lockdowns (or, for that matter, moral disagreements with China's other policies) can often escape the world's systemic discrimination against Chinese and other low-income-country citizens by spending a few hundred thousand dollars on buying another passport. But what about regular people? What about the Rohingya minority facing extreme conditions in Myanmar, most of whom do not have a way to enter the US or Europe, much less buy another passport?</p> Here, we see a potential tragedy of the network state concept. On the one hand, I can really see how exit can be the most viable strategy for global human rights protection in the twenty first century. What do you do if another country is oppressing an ethnic minority? You could do nothing. You could sanction them (often ineffective and ruinous to the very people you're trying to help). You could try to invade (same criticism but even worse). Exit is a more humane option. People suffering human rights atrocities could just pack up and leave for friendlier pastures, and coordinating to do it in a group would mean that they could leave without sacrificing the communities they depend on for friendship and economic livelihood. And if you're wrong and the government you're criticizing is actually not that oppressive, then people won't leave and all is fine, no starvation or bombs required. This is all beautiful and good. Except... the whole thing breaks down because when the people try to exit, nobody is there to take them.</p> What is the answer? Honestly, I don't see one. One point in favor of network states is that they could be based in poor countries, and attract wealthy people from abroad who would then help the local economy. But this does nothing for people in poor countries who want to get out. Good old-fashioned political action within existing states to liberalize immigration laws seems like the only option. Nowhere to run</p> In the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine on Feb 24, Noah Smith wrote an important post on the moral clarity that the invasion should bring to our thought. A particularly striking section is titled "nowhere to run". Quoting:</p> But while exit works on a local level — if San Francisco is too dysfunctional, you can probably move to Austin or another tech town — it simply won't work at the level of nations. In fact, it never really did — rich crypto guys who moved to countries like Singapore or territories like Puerto Rico still depended crucially on the infrastructure and institutions of highly functional states. But Russia is making it even clearer that this strategy is doomed, because eventually there is nowhere to run. Unlike in previous eras, the arm of the great powers is long enough to reach anywhere in the world. If the U.S. collapses, you can't just move to Singapore, because in a few years you'll be bowing to your new Chinese masters. If the U.S. collapses, you can't just move to Estonia, because in a few years (months?) you'll be bowing to your new Russian masters. And those masters will have extremely little incentive to allow you to remain a free individual with your personal fortune intact ... Thus it is very very important to every libertarian that the U.S. not collapse. </code></pre> One possible counter-argument is: sure, if Ukraine was full of people whose first instinct was exit, Ukraine would have collapsed. But if Russia was also more exit-oriented, everyone in Russia would have pulled out of the country within a week of the invasion. Putin would be left standing alone in the fields of the Luhansk oblast facing Zelensky a hundred meters away, and when Putin shouts his demand for surrender, Zelensky would reply: "you and what army"? (Zelensky would of course win a fair one-on-one fight)</p> But things could go a different way. The risk is that exitocracy becomes recognized as the primary way you do the "freedom" thing, and societies that value freedom will become exitocratic, but centralized states will censor and suppress these impulses, adopt a militaristic attitude of national unconditional loyalty, and run roughshod over everyone else. So what about those negative externalities?</p> If we have a hundred much-less-regulated innovation labs everywhere around the world, this could lead to a world where harmful things are more difficult to prevent. This raises a question: does believing in Balajism require believing in a world where negative externalities are not too big a deal? Such a viewpoint would be the opposite of the Vulnerable World Hypothesis (VWH), which suggests that are technology progresses, it gets easier and easier for one or a few crazy people to kill millions, and global authoritarian surveillance might be required to prevent extreme suffering or even extinction.</p> One way out might be to focus on self-defense technology. Sure, in a network state world, we could not feasibly ban gain-of-function research, but we could use network states to help the world along a path to adopting really good HEPA air filtering, far-UVC light, early detection infrastructure and a very rapid vaccine development and deployment pipeline that could defeat not only covid, but far worse viruses too. This 80,000 hours episode outlines the bull case for bioweapons being a solvable problem. But this is not a universal solution for all technological risks: at the very least, there is no self-defense against a super-intelligent unfriendly AI that kills us all.</p> Self-defense technology is good, and is probably an undervalued funding focus area. But it's not realistic to rely on that alone. Transnational cooperation to, for example, ban slaughterbots, would be required. And so we do want a world where, even if network states have more sovereignty than intentional communities today, their sovereignty is not absolute. Non-Balajian network states</p> Reading The Network State reminded me of a different book that I read ten years ago: David de Ugarte's Phyles: Economic Democracy in the Twenty First Century. Phyles talks about similar ideas of transnational communities organized around values, but it has a much more left-leaning emphasis: it assumes that these communities will be democratic, inspired by a combination of 2000s-era online communities and nineteenth and twentieth-century ideas of cooperatives and workplace democracy.</p> We can see the differences most clearly by looking at de Ugarte's theory of formation. Since I've already spent a lot of time quoting Balaji, I'll give de Ugarte a fair hearing with a longer quote:</p> The very blogosphere is an ocean of identities and conversation in perpetual cross-breeding and change from among which the great social digestion periodically distils stable groups with their own contexts and specific knowledge. These conversational communities which crystallise, after a certain point in their development, play the main roles in what we call digital Zionism: they start to precipitate into reality, to generate mutual knowledge among their members, which makes them more identitarially important to them than the traditional imaginaries of the imagined communities to which they are supposed to belong (nation, class, congregation, etc.) as if it were a real community (group of friends, family, guild, etc.) Some of these conversational networks, identitarian and dense, start to generate their own economic metabolism, and with it a distinct demos – maybe several demoi – which takes the nurturing of the autonomy of the community itself as its own goal. These are what we call Neo-Venetianist networks. Born in the blogosphere, they are heirs to the hacker work ethic, and move in the conceptual world, which tends to the economic democracy which we spoke about in the first part of this book. Unlike traditional cooperativism, as they do not spring from real proximity-based communities, their local ties do not generate identity. In the Indianos' foundation, for instance, there are residents in two countries and three autonomous regions, who started out with two companies founded hundreds of kilometres away from each other. </code></pre> We see some very Balajian ideas: shared collective identities, but formed around values rather than geography, that start off as discussion communities in the cloud but then materialize into taking over large portions of economic life. De Ugarte even uses the exact same metaphor ("digital Zionism") that Balaji does!</p> But we also see a key difference: there is no single founder. Rather than a startup society being formed by an act of a single individual combining together intuitions and strands of thought into a coherent formally documented philosophy, a phyle starts off as a conversational network in the blogosphere, and then directly turns into a group that does more and more over time - all while keeping its democratic and horizontal nature. The whole process is much more organic, and not at all guided by a single person's intention.</p> Of course, the immediate challenge that I can see is the incentive issues inherent to such structures. One way to perhaps unfairly summarize both Phyles and The Network State is that The Network State seeks to use 2010s-era blockchains as a model for how to reorganize human society, and Phyles seeks to use 2000s-era open source software communities and blogs as a model for how to reorganize human society. Open source has the failure mode of not enough incentives, cryptocurrency has the failure mode of excessive and overly concentrated incentives. But what this does suggest is that some kind of middle way should be possible. Is there a middle way?</p> My judgement so far is that network states are great, but they are far from being a viable Big Compromise Idea that can actually plug all the holes needed to build the kind of world I and most of my readers would want to see in the 21st century. Ultimately, I do think that we need to bring in more democracy and large-scale-coordination oriented Big Compromise Ideas of some kind to make network states truly successful.</p> Here are some significant adjustments to Balajism that I would endorse:</p> Many founders want to eventually retire or start something new (see: basically half of every crypto project), and we need to prevent network states from collapsing or sliding into mediocrity when that happens. Part of this process is some kind of constitutional exit-to-community guarantee: as the network state enters higher tiers of maturity and scale, more input from community members is taken into account automatically.</p> Prospera attempted something like this. As Scott Alexander summarizes:</p> Once Próspera has 100,000 residents (so realistically a long time from now, if the experiment is very successful), they can hold a referendum where 51% majority can change anything about the charter, including kicking HPI out entirely and becoming a direct democracy, or rejoining the rest of Honduras, or anything </code></pre> But I would favor something even more participatory than the residents having an all-or-nothing nuclear option to kick the government out.</p> Another part of this process, and one that I've recognized in the process of Ethereum's growth, is explicitly encouraging broader participation in the moral and philosophical development of the community. Ethereum has its Vitalik, but it also has its Polynya: an internet anon who has recently entered the scene unsolicited and started providing high-quality thinking on rollups and scaling technology. How will your startup society recruit its first ten Polynyas? Network states should be run by something that's not coin-driven governance</p> Coin-driven governance is plutocratic and vulnerable to attacks; I have written about this many times, but it's worth repeating. Ideas like Optimism's soulbound and one-per-person citizen NFTs are key here. Balaji already acknowledges the need for non-fungibility (he supports coin lockups), but we should go further and more explicit in supporting governance that's not just shareholder-driven. This will also have the beneficial side effect that more democratic governance is more likely to be aligned with the outside world. Network states commit to making themselves friendly through outside representation in governance</p> One of the fascinating and under-discussed ideas from the rationalist and friendly-AI community is functional decision theory. This is a complicated concept, but the powerful core idea is that AIs could coordinate better than humans, solving prisoner's dilemmas where humans often fail, by making verifiable public commitments about their source code. An AI could rewrite itself to have a module that prevents it from cheating other AIs that have a similar module. Such AIs would all cooperate with each other in prisoner's dilemmas.</p> As I pointed out years ago, DAOs could potentially do the same thing. They could have governance mechanisms that are explicitly more charitable toward other DAOs that have a similar mechanism. Network states would be run by DAOs, and this would apply to network states too. They could even commit to governance mechanisms that promise to take wider public interests into account (eg. 20% of the votes could go to a randomly selected set of residents of the host city or country), without the burden of having to follow specific complicated regulations of how they should take those interests into account. A world where network states do such a thing, and where countries adopt policies that are explicitly more friendly to network states that do it, could be a better one. Conclusion</p> I want to see startup societies along these kinds of visions exist. I want to see immersive lifestyle experiments around healthy living. I want to see crazy governance experiments where public goods are funded by quadratic funding, and all zoning laws are replaced by a system where every building's property tax floats between zero and five percent per year based on what percentage of nearby residents express approval or disapproval in a real-time blockchain and ZKP-based voting system. And I want to see more technological experiments that accept higher levels of risk, if the people taking those risks consent to it. And I think blockchain-based tokens, identity and reputation systems and DAOs could be a great fit.</p> At the same time, I worry that the network state vision in its current form risks only satisfying these needs for those wealthy enough to move and desirable enough to attract, and many people lower down the socioeconomic ladder will be left in the dust. What can be said in network states' favor is their internationalism: we even have the Africa-focused Afropolitan. Inequalities between countries are responsible for two thirds of global inequality and inequalities within countries are only one third. But that still leaves a lot of people in all countries that this vision doesn't do much for. So we need something else too - for the global poor, for Ukrainians that want to keep their country and not just squeeze into Poland for a decade until Poland gets invaded too, and everyone else that's not in a position to move to a network state tomorrow or get accepted by one.</p> Network states, with some modifications that push for more democratic governance and positive relationships with the communities that surround them, plus some other way to help everyone else? That is a vision that I can get behind.</p> Why I Built Zuzalu 2024-12-09T00:00:00+00:00 Article by Vitalik Buterin explaining the purpose of Zuzalu as an experiment to see if online communities (particularly crypto) could successfully "materialize" into physical spaces and create intentional communities.</p> Read the original Palladium article</a>.</li> </ul> The entirety of the original article is reproduced below.</h3> Complete article </summary> Vitalik Buterin is the founder of Ethereum. You can follow him at @vitalik.eth. 13–17 minutes</em></p> We tend to think about physical places, as well as the activities and cultures that come with those places, as being immutable. As an individual, you may have a choice to move to a particular place: to San Francisco for its open and accepting culture or for its AI development scene, to Berlin for the open source hacker culture, or to Asia to be part of a new and rising world.</p> At the same time, we take all of those features as given, as an exogenous and fixed part of the human world—there are tradeoffs, and you have to choose. But what if this could be different? What if cultures or tribes that have formed online with their own goals and values could materialize offline, and new physical places could grow due to intention rather than random chance?</p> Ideas like this have floated around online philosophical circles for decades. In 1988, the French sociologist Michel Maffesoli wrote a book called The Time of the Tribes, arguing that the next era will see more agency exercised in groups defined by common interests, rather than common history or blood and soil. More recently, Balaji Srinivasan wrote The Network State, arguing that communities defined by common interests can start off as purely online discussion forums, but then “materialize” into in-person hubs over time. From the perspective of economic democracy, David de Ugarte’s Phyles advocated for cultural and economic collaboration between transnational groups that would coordinate both online and offline.</p> The virtual transnational community that this author calls home is the crypto space, and it is a unique place from which to view these issues. On the one hand, it is a “tech” industry. The whole space runs on advanced software and mathematics like blockchains and zero-knowledge proofs. Users interact with it through applications that they run on computers and phones that receive data served over the internet.</p> But it also has plenty of its own unique characteristics. Unlike other tech industries, which typically consolidate around San Francisco or sometimes New York City, crypto has strangely resisted the gravitational pull of geographical centralization. Ethereum is legally based in Switzerland, with a second major entity in Singapore. Many of its developers are in Berlin. Major development teams are based in places such as Romania and Australia. One layer-2 scaling protocol is based in India and another is in China.</p> In some sense, Ethereum already is one of these digital internet tribes. It already frequently “materializes” through regular conferences that happen in all parts of the world and attract many thousands of people each time. These give participants the opportunity for regular in-person interaction and serendipitous connections without the need to get a U.S. visa or pay sky-high rents. For weeks at a time, the Ethereum community is already shaping human geography to a significant extent, not just responding to it. The Beginning of Zuzalu</p> By 2022, I had been thinking about many of these topics for a while. I read and reviewed Balaji Srinivasan’s book on network states, wrote posts about what a crypto city might look like, and explored issues of governance in the context of blockchain-native digital constructs like DAOs. But the discussion seemed like it was remaining too theoretical for too long, and the time seemed ripe for a more practical experiment. And so came the idea for Zuzalu.</p> Zuzalu was an experiment in taking these ideas to the next level. We already have hacker houses, and hacker houses can last for months or even years, but they usually only fit around ten or twenty people. We already have conferences, and conferences fit thousands of people, but each conference only lasts a week. That is enough time to have serendipitous meetings, but not enough to have connections with true depth. So let’s take one step in both directions: create a pop-up mini-city that houses two hundred people, and lasts for two whole months.</p> This hits a sweet spot: it’s ambitious enough and different enough from what has already been repeated ad nauseam that we actually learn something, but still light enough that it’s logistically manageable. And it also intentionally does not center any specific vision about how something like this should be done, whether Balaji’s or otherwise.</p> The work started in January. A team that started with about four people scouted out locations and decided on a resort in Montenegro. The resort is ordinarily quite expensive, but the negotiating power of renting a hundred apartments at once, plus picking an off-season time when the resort is usually empty, pushed the costs much lower.</p> We invited about a dozen inviters, who in turn invited more people, along with sharing an application form in a few communities: the Ethereum community, with a focus on developers and researchers working on zero-knowledge proofs, the longevity and broader biotech industry, and European rationalists. We also engaged researchers and builders of “the meta:” internet tribes, network states, community building, and governance. By February, the team expanded to about eight people and worked quickly on logistics. It was a challenge but working with an existing resort made it surprisingly manageable.</p> On March 25th, the event began and the two hundred guests quickly began rolling in. The parts of Zuzalu that were “centrally planned” were available from the start. We cooperated with a local restaurant to make a breakfast buffet based loosely on longevity guru Bryan Johnson’s Blueprint menu. The meals fused Bryan’s ideals of identifying the healthiest possible diet and lifestyle with the needs of practicality, such as sticking to a budget of $15 per person per day.</p> On the crypto side, the 0xPARC team created Zupass, an identity system based on zero-knowledge proofs that you could use to prove that you were a resident of Zuzalu without revealing which one. This could be used both in-person and online, including to anonymously sign in to applications like Zupoll. Soon after, we turned the balcony of one of the apartments into a gym.</p> What happened from that point forward, however, was completely bottom-up. A tradition of taking daily morning cold plunges emerged on its own and grew over time. Groups started to independently cook their own food. After a month, we started to have karaoke sessions. In the beginning, the core team organized a meeting room with high-quality audio-visual equipment and created a webpage that any resident could use to permissionlessly book a time slot and make their own event. Soon, residents were creating sub-events and tracks started to emerge.</p> All in all, it felt like Zuzalu had achieved its core objectives: it brought together a new combination of cultures and it felt like a city. What Did We Learn?</p> The “form factor” of two hundred people coming to live in a place for an extended duration really did work. People were willing to come, and those people who came almost universally reported enjoying the experience. This reflected something I also experienced later at a four-day blockchain conference in the Pacific island nation of Palau: the event was deliberately light on sessions and heavy on informal spend-time-together activities, and many attendees reported being very appreciative of the unique form factor.</p> Over time, the longer duration of Zuzalu succeeded at creating a different mindset. A four-day conference is a break from your life, but a two-month stay is your life. And for at least some people, it turned out that the small but highly focused network effect of a few hundred people who care about the precise thing you care about really can substitute the massive but much more unfocused network effects of the global megacities.</p> The idea of building and beta-testing a technology inside of a community of dedicated enthusiasts also proved a success. Zupass started off as essentially a clunky piece of hackathon software, but through real-time use and feedback from users, usability quickly and noticeably improved to the point where it became more usable than many multi-year-old blockchain applications. A healthy lifestyle is also a technology—one which works best as a social technology—and this too improved quickly at Zuzalu.</p> We did not quite reach the goal of developing a less costly and time-consuming version of Bryan Johnson’s extreme longevity lifestyle but we did make significant progress. Technologies that have a heavy cultural component, where new software tools and new human habits are being developed at the same time, are likely a great fit for this approach.</p> That said, there remain plenty of experiments still left to do. Crypto payments, a long-time dream of the Bitcoin and Ethereum communities, were present but limited. No one even considered governing Zuzalu with a DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization running on a blockchain. A two-hundred-person community lasting for two months was either too short, too small, or both for such a thing to really make sense. But these two dreams are important enough that future experiments, whether run by the Zuzalu community or by independent spinoffs, will undoubtedly make a much more concerted effort to realize them.</p> Zuzalu also succeeded at being a highly international community: no single country was the source of more than one-third of the attendees; the top two were, unsurprisingly, the United States and China. This diversity was in large part deliberate, an intentional strategy to avoid getting captured by the internal struggles and excesses of any one single national culture. As far as subject areas went, Zuzalu was less diverse: while non-crypto communities were present and appreciated the experience, the Ethereum community was a clear forerunner.</p> But perhaps this is not a failure: diversity done well is not about equally representing all of society or humanity, it’s about strategically bringing together groups that would otherwise not care for each other and building bridges. What Questions Remain Unanswered?</p> What the experiment did less well at was showing a clear picture of where to go from here. Balaji’s The Network State did talk about the multi-century history of small-scale “communistic societies” in the U.S. and elsewhere, but also highlighted a grand geopolitical vision: the Decentralized Movement, a twenty-first-century non-aligned movement that can protect freedom in an unfree and high-conflict world. Perhaps such a movement can even provide a peaceful alternative to the unstable geopolitical bipole of China and the U.S. Zuzalu, however, did not yet feel like something that was actually achieving such a lofty goal.</p> Many cultural movements—digital nomadism, cryptoanarchy, and others come to mind—excitedly grow at first, but then settle down into becoming part of the global political and cultural landscape. They are stable and even significant, but ultimately not world-changing once they saturate their natural base of enthusiasts. Would “Zuzaluism” meet the same fate? And might it in fact be good to decrease ambitions somewhat and let that happen?</p> It is easy to argue the case that Zuzaluism in its current form is destined to be fairly niche. The community that is attracted to Zuzalu, while impressive, has clear biases: many of the attendees are young, there were few families with children and those who did come only stayed for a few days, and roughly a third of the attendees were already digital nomads. Thanks to subsidies, many people who were not rich in money were able to come, but they were still quite elite in terms of their social connections.</p> More broadly, many strands of evidence show that unless faced by a “push factor” as strong as a literal war of conquest taking over one’s land, it is very rare for a demographically significant portion of a previously static population to pick up and move somewhere else. Even in Russia, less than one percent of the population has left the country following the start of the current war. Certainly, many of those who left are Russia’s best and brightest, serving the function of weakening an aggressive power and setting an example to others who might do the same. But it’s also clear that large-scale emigration is still far from a grand solution to major geopolitical problems.</p> And so this leaves the question: where do we go from here? There are plenty of historical examples of intentionally created, medium-sized, and longer-term gatherings that don’t overturn the world, but still leave a worthy impact. Universities are one good precedent to think about—an ironic precedent, given how many of us a decade ago were enthusiasts of disrupting in-person universities with online MOOC services such as Udacity and Coursera, but an underappreciated precedent nonetheless.</p> Monasteries are another example; a few years ago, the philosopher Samo Burja asked why there are no monasteries dedicated to perfecting software, given that many software engineers have made enough money and now desire personal spiritual progress. Ultimately, the Zuzalu community does have ambitions that stretch somewhat higher than creating universities and monasteries, even if they are lower than fixing global politics. And in any case, the model that makes sense to apply somewhere new is rarely exactly a carbon copy of any specific thing that came before.</p> My own prediction is that Zuzalu will in part become a structure that has aspects of universities, monasteries, and digital nomad hubs. But it will also introduce entirely new activities like “incubating” novel technologies, including social technologies, by testing them out within a dedicated community. It will also find its niche in “the meta” by being a gathering spot for the future builders of new physical places and new societies of all kinds. That said, there is a long way to go. Many paths still unexplored or even unknown, and so the journey is just beginning.</p> </details> Timour Kosters 2024-12-09T00:00:00+00:00 Timour Kosters co-organized Zuzalu</a> (Montenegro, 2023), running the AI x Crypto Summit track, and subsequently co-founded Edge City</a> with Janine Leger</a>.</p> X: @timourxyz</a></li> </ul> Timour at Zuzalu, 2023. </p> See Also</h1> Edge City</a></li> Janine Leger</a></li> </ul> Cypherpunk 2024-12-09T00:00:00+00:00 Like other "-punk" philosophies, cypherpunk is a rebellion/protest movement that maintains that privacy, especially on the internet and in a technologically connected world, is a right. When the internet was new its vast possibilities inspired many. The internet in its infancy, however, was completely transparent, data was not encrypted in any meaningful way so individuals, governments, and corporations could surveil online activity easily. The cypherpunks believed the web would be hindered at best, and harmful at worst, if users were not able to communicate and transact privately. Today we have HTTPS and other invitible encryption standards which allow significant gains in privacy and security when computing between machines.</p> Many people continue to call themselves cypherpunks, protesting a world increasingly disrespectful of individual privacy, chilling government censorship and surveillance, and "sureillance capitalism." Their work continues to expand the access to and implementation of strong cryptography.</p> Cypherpunks are fundamentally libertarian, believing individuals have a right to communicate and transact with others in a way that cannot be interfered with by third parties.</p> See also</h1> Programmable Cryptography</a></li> </ul> Pluralism 2024-12-09T00:00:00+00:00 Pluralism</strong> is a social and political philosophy that recognizes and advocates for the flourishing of, and cooperation between, diverse sociocultural groups and systems. It emphasizes maintaining connections between different groups while preserving their distinct identities and autonomy.</p> Core concepts</h2> Fundamental principles</h3> Recognition of diversity</strong>: Acknowledging different social groups, belief systems, and ways of life as legitimate</li> Subsidiarity</strong>: Delegating decision-making to the most local appropriate level</li> Neutrality</strong>: Establishing frameworks that don't inherently favor any particular group</li> Cooperation across diversity</strong>: Giving greater weight to actions that receive support across different groups</li> </ul> Social model</h3> Pluralism views individuals as existing at unique intersections of multiple group memberships, rather than as purely autonomous agents or purely defined by collective identity. This perspective, developed by sociologist Georg Simmel, suggests that individual identity emerges from participation in multiple, overlapping social circles.</p> Contrast with other philosophies</h2> Pluralism differs from:</p> Libertarianism</strong> by emphasizing positive relationships between groups rather than just individual autonomy</li> Technocracy</strong> by rejecting centralized planning in favor of distributed decision-making and diverse forms of knowledge</li> </ul> Applications</h2> Technology and Governance</h3> Pluralistic approaches emphasize:</p> Decentralized and interoperable systems</li> Tools that strengthen connections across differences</li> Multiple overlapping jurisdictions</li> Decision-making processes that reward broad consensus</li> Protection for minority groups while maintaining overall cohesion</li> </ul> Criticism</h2> Common criticisms include:</p> Implementation complexity</li> Potential inefficiency compared to centralized systems</li> Risk of deadlock when groups cannot reach agreement</li> </ul> See More</h1> The book, Plurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy by E. Glen Weyl, Audrey Tang and the Plurality Community</em>, is open source:https://github.com/pluralitybook/plurality/tree/main</li> </ul> hardware 2024-12-09T00:00:00+00:00 Your content here</p> Social Technology 2024-12-09T00:00:00+00:00 Social technology is the least obvious of the technologies listed here because it is so subtle and prevalent. Missing the forest for the trees.</p> Foundational Software 2024-12-09T00:00:00+00:00 If projects build with these they are, at least for the time being, likely aligned with many network-society values.</p> Ethereum</a></h2> Zuzalu.city</a></h2> Zuzalu Software</li> </ul> Waku/Whisper</a></h2> An evolution of Whisper for decentralized private communication for blockchains.</li> </ul> Zupass</a></h2> ZK identity and credential wallet. The identity layer for ZuVillages.</li> </ul> Programmable Cryptography 2024-12-09T00:00:00+00:00 See the overview by 0xParc</a></p> "God Protocols"</h1> Vitalik's description</a> (quotes below) of extremely powerful types of cryptography that will revolutionize certain types of software.</p> Zero Knowledge Proofs</h1> Specifically ZK-Snarks</a> "allow a user to prove any arbitrary statement about data that they hold, in a way that the proof (i) is easy to verify, and (ii) does not leak any data other than the statement itself... But ZK-SNARKs have an important limitation: you need to know the data to make proofs about it. Each piece of state in a ZK-SNARK application must have a single "owner", who must be around to approve any reads or writes to it."</p> Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE)</a></h1> "FHE lets you do any computation on encrypted data without seeing the data. This lets you do computations on a user's data for the user's benefit while keeping the data and the algorithm private... But FHE too has its limits: any FHE-based technology still requires someone to hold the decryption key."</p> Indistinguishability Obfuscation</a></h1> "Indistinguishability obfuscation lets you create an "encrypted program" that performs an arbitrary computation, in such a way that all internal details of the program are hidden."</p> waku 2024-12-09T00:00:00+00:00 A decentralized, encrypted messaging protocol that evolved from Whisper as a foundational technology for ethereum.</p> More</h1> waku.org part of logos.co which is building an entire blockchain/storage/messaging stack. Not yet launched, while Waku has been implemented in multiple other projects already.</li> </ul> </li> </ul> Zuzalu.city 2024-12-09T00:00:00+00:00 "Zuzalu.city is a decentralised open-source operating system that connects users to interoperable Ethereum ecosystem applications for innovating their communities."</li> </ul> Technologies</h1> Zupass</a> has been used as a login/identity provider for multiple ZuVillages.</li> Zupoll</a> for polling.</li> </ul> Screenshots</summary></h2> </details> via Zupass.city</a></h1> Reproduced here verbatim for posterity and because they reflect a good deal of the network-societies ethos.</p> Principles</h2> Our mission for Zuzalu.city revolves around five key principles: privacy, ease-of-use, modularity, composability and interoperability.</p> Definitions of Principles</h3> Privacy</strong> - We ensure user data is private and in the control of users. We use ZKPs and encryption to maintain privacy and provide the option for users to store data on Ceramic for full control.</p> Ease-of-Use</strong> - Packaging our complex tech stack in a simple user interface, we allow communities to customize their spaces and run their own modules without needing deep technical knowledge.</p> Modularity</strong> - Our operating system is built with independent modules each with their own attributes and functionality. This creates more flexibility for spaces to be adapted to the needs of any given community.</p> Composability</strong> - We design with the ability to integrate a combination of various modules or primitives, creating a customizable system for all users.</p> Interoperability</strong> - Integrations and native features share data via Ceramic and processes via smart contracts, allowing applications to interact and exchange data seamlessly.</p> Alignment</h2> Open global participation: anyone in the world should be able to participate as a user, observer or developer, on a maximally equal footing. Participation should be permissionless.</p> </li> Decentralization: minimize the dependence of an application on any one single actor. In particular, an application should continue working even if its core developers disappear forever.</p> </li> Censorship resistance: centralized actors should not have the power to interfere with any given user's or application's ability to operate. Concerns around bad actors should be addressed at higher layers of the stack.</p> </li> Auditability: anyone should be able to validate an application's logic and its ongoing operation (eg. by running a full node) to make sure that it is operating according to the rules that its developers claim it is.</p> </li> Credible neutrality: base-layer infrastructure should be neutral, and in such a way that anyone can see that it is neutral even if they do not already trust the developers.</p> </li> Building tools, not empires. Empires try to capture and trap the user inside a walled garden; tools do their task but otherwise interoperate with a wider open ecosystem.</p> </li> Cooperative mindset: even while competing, projects within the ecosystem cooperate on shared software libraries, research, security, community building and other areas that are commonly valuable to them. Projects try to be positive-sum, both with each other and with the wider world.</p> </li> </ul> History</h2> Zuzalu.city was launched and tested as a permission-less shared calendar for all participants to self-organize programme in Montenegro in 2023 at Zuzalu, a 2-month experiment bringing together over 700 innovators including Ethereum researchers and developers, AI, longevity and biotech, European rationalists, and "tribes of the meta". In 2024, we entered the "Open Frontier" phase, focusing on creating a shared community-driven OS for technical project coordination and integration.</p> 2024 Objectives & Tracks</h3> We are building a decentralized operating system with open-source tools open for all communities to use for online and offline coordination, innovation, interoperability, and forking.</p> We are establishing a coordination system for builders of independent projects to collaborate and integrate modules into our operating system for widespread testing and adoption.</p> We are supporting emerging temporary and permanent crypto city movements and projects, recognizing the unique opportunity and need for these projects to communicate and coordinate using decentralized and privacy-first technology.</p> Development Base</h4> • Establish a base team to initiate the groundwork and basic community experience for Zuzalu.city.</p> • Create processes that enable the broader community of developers to contribute and co-build with.</p> • Adopt an iterative approach for Zuzalu.city, focusing on improving and adding necessary functionality.</p> 2024 Featured Features</h4> • ZK-NFT ticketing with client-side proofs ✅</p> • A social system with feeds, posts, and messaging 🚧</p> • A “catch-all” DID Layer ✅</p> • Native event modules for scheduling and ticketing ✅</p> • Customizable gating for digital and physical spaces ✅</p> • Badge attestations for community contributions ✅</p> • Credential-based on-chain voting ✅</p> • Harberger Tax Advertisements 🚧</p> • NFT Store functionality for communities and events 🚧</p> • On-Chain Lotteries for ticketing and special events funding ✅</p> Links</h1> Zuzalu.city</a></li> </ul> Bulgaria 2024-12-01T00:00:00+00:00 Compiled from community digests.</em></p> Bansko</h2> Established nomad hub with recurring community presence. One of the most frequently mentioned long-stay destinations in nomad circles, alongside Cape Town (South Africa).</p> South Africa 2024-12-01T00:00:00+00:00 Compiled from community digests.</em></p> Cape Town</h2> Recurring nomad hub. Mentioned alongside Bansko (Bulgaria) as a regular gathering point for the nomad community.</p> Thailand 2024-12-01T00:00:00+00:00 Compiled from community digests.</em></p> Koh Tao</h2> Diving</h3> Recommended dive operators (as of March 2026): Hydronaughts, Pimp My Dive, Divers Boat, Goodtime, New Haven (Chalok area). March is the start of dive season.</p> Koh Phangan also has dive spots but less detailed recommendations available.</p> Koh Phangan</h2> Healthcare</h3> Hospital exists on the island but quality reports are mixed. For anything serious, Ko Samui (short ferry) has better facilities. See Ko Samui healthcare section.</p> Neighborhoods</h3> Northwest side (Haad Yao, Chalok Lam) regarded as the chill side of the island — better for people wanting quiet beaches and gyms over party scene.</p> Notes</h3> Mixed reports on atmosphere. Some friction between locals and tourists reported (scooter near-misses, rudeness). Beaches and nature are the main draw; town areas less so. Best visited with low expectations for nightlife/social scene.</p> Chiang Mai</h2> Air Quality & Burning Season</h3> Burning season runs roughly February–April. As of mid-March 2026: AQI hits red levels in mornings, but conditions varied (some cloudy/rainy days keeping it manageable). Rain has been reported to significantly improve air quality during this period. Air purifiers available in some coworking spaces and hotels — worth confirming before booking. Nomad presence still active during this period despite the air quality.</p> As of early April 2026: air quality continuing to worsen through the season. Some nomads staying through regardless, waiting for Songkran.</p> Neighborhoods</h3> Nimman: popular but noted as noisy — not the quiet retreat some expect.</p> Songkran (Thai New Year, mid-April)</h3> Expect chaos. Practical tips: use Grab cars (not scooters), carry dry bags for electronics and documents.</p> Pattaya</h2> Seasonality</h3> Rainy season runs approximately April–November. Rain typically comes in short, intense episodes rather than all-day downpours. Noted as having child-friendly services and infrastructure for families.</p> Ko Samui</h2> Notes</h3> Underrated relative to its Nomad List ranking (as of March 2026). Good beaches, reasonable cost of living, active nightlife. Some power reliability issues reported. Hospital quality on the island is considered decent and significantly cheaper than US equivalents.</p> Healthcare</h3> Hospital options across the Gulf islands vary. Ko Samui has the most established facilities; Koh Phangan and Ko Lanta have hospitals but with mixed reports on quality. All considerably cheaper than US healthcare. Worth checking specific hospital reviews before relying on island-based care for anything serious.</p> Bangkok</h2> Overview</h3> Frequently recommended as the easiest affordable entry point for digital nomad beginners. Infrastructure, cost of living, and existing nomad community lower the barrier to entry. Some long-term nomads have settled in Bangkok specifically for routine and stability after years of moving. Pollution and sleaze noted as persistent downsides.</p> Neighborhoods</h3> Sukhumvit 11 reportedly shifting toward a "Little India" character (as of April 2026).</p> For quiet areas comparable to Chiang Mai's Nimman: BTS-adjacent neighborhoods recommended — Nana, Thong Lo, On Nut, Udom Suk. Talat Noi/Songwat (old town riverside area) and Ari also suggested as quieter alternatives with character.</p> Food</h3> Healthy eating: Tom Kha Gai and Tom Yum widely available as lower-oil Thai options. Low-oil delivery options exist on Grab but require searching. Finding no-plastic, genuinely low-oil delivery remains difficult.</p> Practical</h3> DMK (Don Mueang) airport: night markets located near airport-area hotels — useful for late arrivals or early departures.</p> Coworking and cafe scene active but no specific venues named in this digest cycle.</p> Transit</h3> Bangkok–Surat Thani train route: a practical 12-day itinerary with stops at Sam Roi Yot, Koh Tao, and Koh Phangan before reaching Surat Thani. A good way to see the Gulf coast without flying.</p> Chiang Mai / Pai</h2> Driving</h3> International Driving Permit (IDP) is essential for renting cars — without one, insurance is void and fines apply. For scooters/bikes, enforcement is more lenient and varies by area, though having an IDP is still advisable. Physical copy required (digital not accepted). IDP can be shipped from home country via postal service if not obtained before departure.</p> In tourist-heavy areas (Phuket especially), police checkpoints targeting foreigners on scooters are common — expect bribes if riding without proper documentation.</p> Phuket</h2> Sports & Recreation</h3> Tennis academies available for intermediate-level adult players. Kali academy mentioned. Long-stay hotel/villa options near academies. Bangkok also has options (Alpha academy noted for older players).</p> Visa & Tax</h2> Free 30-day visa extensions have been reported for travelers affected by Middle East war-related flight cancellations (as of early 2026). Confirm current policy with immigration before relying on this.</p> Visa Runs & Extensions (April 2026)</h3> Stricter enforcement at Bangkok airport against short (1–2 day) visa runs. Extensions now capped at 2 per year: 30 days on the first, 7 days on the second. Land border entries are ineligible for extensions. Annual stay day caps being applied and scrutiny increasing after repeated runs. Rejections reported at Nonthaburi immigration office.</p> DTV (Digital Traveler Visa)</h3> Generally smooth after 180 days. Occasional requests for onward tickets — airport-dependent; having one ready (or using TDAC) advisable. For remote workers: no Thai employer registration needed if employer is offshore, but tax residency risks apply if staying 180+ days in a calendar year.</p> Vietnam 2024-12-01T00:00:00+00:00 Compiled from community digests.</em></p> Da Nang</h2> Recommended as a beginner-friendly nomad destination, often suggested as an alternative to Bangkok with better vibe and climate. Paired with nearby Hoi An for variety.</p> Neighborhoods</h3> East of the airport / Han River area near the beach is the most recommended zone for nomads — walkable to cafes and coworking, close to the coast.</p> Cafes & Coworking</h3> Login Cafe noted as an active nomad morning spot.</p> Hoi An</h2> Frequently mentioned alongside Da Nang as part of the central Vietnam corridor. Regarded as having a better atmosphere than Bangkok for those who find the Thai capital overwhelming.</p> Cafes & Coworking</h3> Hub Hoi An coworking praised (as of April 2026).</p> Visa & Tax</h2> At immigration after visa runs, stick to "tourism" as purpose of visit — officers rarely probe further. Having an onward ticket ready is advisable (Onwardify is one tool for generating these). Be aware of tax residency implications of extended stays.</p> Land border crossings reported as problematic for Indian nationals specifically — airport entries are smoother.</p> Responsive same-day visa agencies exist (~$60) — ask in community channels for current recommendations.</p> Practical</h2> Money Transfers</h3> Glintz app recommended for transferring money into VND via Napas 247 (as of April 2026). Community comparison tools exist for evaluating transfer rates.</p> Nomadics 2024-12-01T00:00:00+00:00 Cross-country advice compiled from community digests.</em></p> Settling Down & Lifestyle Patterns</h2> Common pattern: cycling between settling (3–12 months in one place) and moving. Kids and community cited as the primary anchors that shift people toward longer stays. The "perpetual itch" — difficulty staying put even when settled — is widely reported. Bangkok is a common choice for those transitioning from full nomad to semi-settled, given its infrastructure and cost of living.</p> Worldschooling</h3> Families traveling with children while homeschooling/unschooling on the road. Cape Town and Bansko mentioned as recurring hubs with worldschooling community presence.</p> Connectivity & SIMs</h2> eSIM recommendations from the community (as of April 2026): Saily Ultra eSIM for data, paired with a Tello US number for maintaining a US phone number abroad (activatable outside the US using a VPN). Roamless Flex also well-regarded. Note: Tello activation requirements have changed — verify current process before relying on it.</p> Gear Insurance</h2> Community consensus leans toward self-insuring laptops and gear via savings and cloud backups rather than traditional insurance policies. Premiums, deductibles, and claims hassle generally outweigh the coverage for nomads.</p> Health Insurance</h2> Genki frequently recommended as nomad health insurance. SafetyWing also used — reimbursement process reported as positive by some users. Key caveats for any nomad insurance: expect upfront out-of-pocket payments (reimbursement model, not direct billing), watch for exclusions, and read full policy terms before relying on coverage. Fine print matters more than brand reputation.</p>

Soverents

Hub List

Europe</h2>

Asia</h2>

Additional Resources^1^</h2>

Example Spaces</h2>

Resources</h1> https://hub.eudaform.org/</li> https://hubs.city</li> </ol>

Let a Thousand Societies Bloom

Framework</h1>

ZuZone

Projects</h1> Zuletter</h2> A community newsletter POC for the Zuzalu ecosystem. Key properties:</p>

Zuletter</h2> A community newsletter POC for the Zuzalu ecosystem. Key properties:</p>

Links</h1> zuzone.org</a></li> zuletter.vercel.app</a></li> GitHub: vrnvrn/zu</a></li> Contact: hi@zuzone.org</li> </ul> See Also</h1> ZuVillage</a></li> Zuzalu.city</a></li> Pop-Ups</a></li> </ul>

Devcon

ZuConnect

E. Glen Weyl

Janine Leger

Vitalik Buterin

DeSci

Phyles

ECF Pensieve

Features</h1> Pensieve Ads</strong> — ad slots priced via Harberger tax: holders self-assess value and pay a continuous tax on that assessment; anyone can buy the slot at the self-assessed price at any time. Mechanism aligns pricing with genuine willingness to pay.</li>

Gitcoin

Quadratic Funding

Zupass

Usage Across the Ecosystem</h1> Zupass has been deployed at every major ZuVillage since 2023:</p>

Personal Todo List

Wiki</h2>

Forum</h2>

Meta</h1>

DAOs</h2>

ethereum

Stable coins</h1>

Algorithmic</h2>

Privacy Software

Univeral Declaration of Human Rightts</h1>

Article 12</h2> No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.</p>

Applications</h1> https://aztec.network/, ZK L2 in development</li> Massive resource of privacy-related apps in almost every use category: https://github.com/web3privacy/web3privacy</li> https://scribe.privacyredirect.com/@simbro/privacy-in-ethereum-stealth-addresses-f05016109010</li> </ul>

LaGrange Punks

Future Living DAO

Ultramodern</h1> The Future Living DAO has coined the phrase 'Ultramodern' to reflect a new kind of community with specific values and construction.</p>

Mission Oriented Communities</h2> Open-source ethos (OG opensource vibes)</li> Decentralized organization principles - radically strong coordination work</li> Cutting-edge innovation (Xerox parc)</li>

Technical Standards</h2> Token-based incentive systems</li> Interoperability and open standards</li> </ul> Members</h1> </li> </ul> Links</h1> Telegram:</li> Manifesto</a> Unofficial Mirror</a> [21/01/2025]</li> </ul> </li> Unofficial Forum</a></li> </ul>

Members</h1> </li> </ul> Links</h1> Telegram:</li> Manifesto</a> Unofficial Mirror</a> [21/01/2025]</li> </ul> </li> Unofficial Forum</a></li> </ul>

Links</h1> Telegram:</li> Manifesto</a> Unofficial Mirror</a> [21/01/2025]</li> </ul> </li> Unofficial Forum</a></li> </ul>

Cognitive Sovereignity

Lunarpunk and the Dark Side of the Cycle

Core Concepts</h2> Sci-fi expands possibilities; crypto is actionable sci-fi Solarpunk: optimistic, transparent, DAO-focused Lunarpunk: privacy-focused, skeptical, preparing for conflict</p>

Key Contrasts</h2>

Antifragility</h2> Lunarpunk thrives under pressure Privacy protects users during crackdowns Regulatory pressure strengthens system</p>

Outcome</h2> Lunarpunk offers resilience solarpunk lacks Privacy essential for long-term survival Solarpunk must embrace privacy ("go dark") to succeed</p>

More</h1> Interview with the author: https://diffractionscollective.org/zero-knowledge-during-the-dark-lunar-cycle-w-rachel-rose-oleary/</p>

LunarDAO Manifesto

Core Principles</h2> Information asymmetry: transparency for power, privacy for people Resistance against surveillance state and financial control Defense of cryptographic privacy tools and DeFi</p>

State Hypocrisy</h2> Claims crypto enables crime while enabling larger-scale crimes Maintains control through financial surveillance Uses economic warfare against dissent Persecutes privacy advocates (Assange, Ulbricht)</p>

LunarDAO's Vision</h2> Creates infrastructure for autonomous societies Invests in privacy projects and anonymity tools Builds self-sustaining ecosystem outside state control Promotes education and knowledge sharing</p>

Lunarpunk Philosophy</h2> Forms communities rather than focusing on individual liberty Uses zero-knowledge cryptography for collective protection Builds parallel confederated societies Emphasizes self-defense and autonomy</p>

Historical Context</h2> Continues legacy of cypherpunk movement Draws from historical resistance movements Fights against state monopoly on technology Creates sanctuary in "moonlit forests of encryption"</p>

A Lunarpunk Manifesto

Solarpunk

Zuzalu Community Newsletter: 2024 Retrospective

About

Who is behind Sove.re?</h1> Sove.re was initialized by Riso Nonx</a> while attending Edge City Lanna</a>.</p> As soon as possible others will be invited to moderate and administrate the forum and wiki via DAO governance, and eventually the hosting infrastructure itself can be decentralized.</p>

contribute

Formatting Guidelines</h1> Links are case sensitive, please title all new pages in lower case.</strong></p> For example "/network-societies/pop-ups/zugarden" NOT</strong> "network-societies/pop-ups/ZuGarden"</li> </ul>

Edge City

Past Pop-Ups</h1> 2024</h2> Edge Denver</h2> Week-long gathering during ETHDenver [Feb 26th - March 3rd].</li>

2024</h2>

Edge Denver</h2> Week-long gathering during ETHDenver [Feb 26th - March 3rd].</li>

2025 Timeline</h1> Sove.re discussion.</a></p> </p>

Resources</h1>

https://hub.eudaform.org/</li>
https://hubs.city</li> </ol>

Links</h1>

zuzone.org</a></li>
zuletter.vercel.app</a></li>
GitHub: vrnvrn/zu</a></li>
Contact: hi@zuzone.org</li> </ul>
See Also</h1>

ZuVillage</a></li>
Zuzalu.city</a></li>
Pop-Ups</a></li> </ul>

Article 12</h2>
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.</p>

Applications</h1>

https://aztec.network/, ZK L2 in development</li>
Massive resource of privacy-related apps in almost every use category: https://github.com/web3privacy/web3privacy</li>
https://scribe.privacyredirect.com/@simbro/privacy-in-ethereum-stealth-addresses-f05016109010</li> </ul>

Ultramodern</h1>
The Future Living DAO has coined the phrase 'Ultramodern' to reflect a new kind of community with specific values and construction.</p>

Technical Standards</h2>

Token-based incentive systems</li>
Interoperability and open standards</li> </ul>
Members</h1>

</li> </ul>
Links</h1>

Telegram:</li>
Manifesto</a>

Unofficial Mirror</a> [21/01/2025]</li> </ul> </li>
Unofficial Forum</a></li> </ul>

Members</h1>

</li> </ul>
Links</h1>

Telegram:</li>
Manifesto</a>

Unofficial Mirror</a> [21/01/2025]</li> </ul> </li>
Unofficial Forum</a></li> </ul>

Links</h1>

Telegram:</li>
Manifesto</a>

Unofficial Mirror</a> [21/01/2025]</li> </ul> </li>
Unofficial Forum</a></li> </ul>

Core Concepts</h2>
Sci-fi expands possibilities; crypto is actionable sci-fi Solarpunk: optimistic, transparent, DAO-focused Lunarpunk: privacy-focused, skeptical, preparing for conflict</p>

Antifragility</h2>
Lunarpunk thrives under pressure Privacy protects users during crackdowns Regulatory pressure strengthens system</p>

Outcome</h2>
Lunarpunk offers resilience solarpunk lacks Privacy essential for long-term survival Solarpunk must embrace privacy ("go dark") to succeed</p>

More</h1>
Interview with the author: https://diffractionscollective.org/zero-knowledge-during-the-dark-lunar-cycle-w-rachel-rose-oleary/</p>

Core Principles</h2>
Information asymmetry: transparency for power, privacy for people Resistance against surveillance state and financial control Defense of cryptographic privacy tools and DeFi</p>

State Hypocrisy</h2>
Claims crypto enables crime while enabling larger-scale crimes Maintains control through financial surveillance Uses economic warfare against dissent Persecutes privacy advocates (Assange, Ulbricht)</p>

LunarDAO's Vision</h2>
Creates infrastructure for autonomous societies Invests in privacy projects and anonymity tools Builds self-sustaining ecosystem outside state control Promotes education and knowledge sharing</p>

Lunarpunk Philosophy</h2>
Forms communities rather than focusing on individual liberty Uses zero-knowledge cryptography for collective protection Builds parallel confederated societies Emphasizes self-defense and autonomy</p>

Historical Context</h2>
Continues legacy of cypherpunk movement Draws from historical resistance movements Fights against state monopoly on technology Creates sanctuary in "moonlit forests of encryption"</p>

Who is behind Sove.re?</h1>
Sove.re was initialized by Riso Nonx</a> while attending Edge City Lanna</a>.</p>
As soon as possible others will be invited to moderate and administrate the forum and wiki via DAO governance, and eventually the hosting infrastructure itself can be decentralized.</p>

Formatting Guidelines</h1>
Links are case sensitive, please title all new pages in lower case.</strong></p>

For example "/network-societies/pop-ups/zugarden" NOT</strong> "network-societies/pop-ups/ZuGarden"</li> </ul>

2025 Timeline</h1>
Sove.re discussion.</a></p>
</p>