Una Wang, Isla Munro Hochmayr - Living in the age of crypto tribalism : learnings from Zuzalu

Transcript

start okay um hey everybody thank you for being here um you and I came today to talk about the learnings from zuu and living in the age of Crypt tribalism um yeah very quickly on zuu it was an experiment in co- living and popup Villages run by vitalic last year in Montenegro we'll talk a bit more about it as we get into things um but yeah una and I just quick on us do you want to yeah I'm currently a PhD at eth Suk and um um with uh together with Isa we're in dalos and D Swiss so quite into the Dow narrative being blockchain Sphere for more than three four years

now yeah and uh on my side yeah also Dow Swiss uh we've been building daos together I'm a bit of a solar Punk idealist um very interested in the future of work and both of us attended the zalo events last year so we really wanted to come and share with a Swiss Community what what it was about and um yeah what we see for the future of this movement and what's happening yeah yep yeah thank you so I will start with uh some Global Trends so who here are digital Nomads zero or half three four four hands yeah so anyways what I'm saying here is that digital nads are trending

up so from the population wise and the interest on Google that you can see and they are predicting a different economy together with blockchain and we're enabling uh a different economy than before and second the trends in web 3 so we are in web 3 how many of you have feeling like we are gradually becoming event industry like there are so many events to participate including obviously the one we're doing here and if you go to a nomad's club like the crypto nads Club you can see this not ending list this just invents for April and it's not even ending actually I I couldn't do a screenshot that's long enough and you can still see here so we have a lot of lot of physical events so

that means actually web 3 Industry is gradually becoming more physical compared to three four years ago that I started and then there's more and more interest in real world asset and the demography actually Me and Al was joking that we're Millennials who are ogs or more ogs in cryptosphere are aging uh physically and who who can who know knows who said like who knows this blog belongs to um who wrote this blog with the title yeah yes yes not a long ago so he public said a very actually emotional and uh and beautiful um blog uh stating the end of his childhood which he also think

that zalu is his next leap into the physical world and experimenting with the actual Society um so with this trend we see that the narratives from of web 3 has gone from cyber world into physical world a lot and we're thinking about how do we reform Society how do we do experiment for society and for better Society tomorrow and there emerg the concept of network state which one of the most prominent experiments out there right now and uh if you can take out your phone and I would like to question you like what do you think about Network State into this with this questionnaire do you got it now or one

minute all right count down five four 3 two one okay I'm going to switch to the multimers okay oh yeah so results are coming in so what do you associate Network state with Anarchy oh oxy moral wow scary all right who said the what the I hope um the next two slid will explain you a bit more what about what is Network state liberty interaction oh more coming in you can submit multiple words so if you

have multiple complicated emotions associated with network State please put in our investment without legal W ownership experimental Universal basic income yay big corn Maxis yeah I think weird liian fantas pretty um I like freedom in the middle so let's pause right there um and so we have quite a mixed feeling right about what um really is um Network State I would

say and here today I don't get into because we're more going to talk about zalu our experience with zalu so we don't go into too much what nwork state is about if you're interested in going to biology's uh book everything's for free he has one paragraph one image definition of network State just a quick um just a quick give you for the ones who doesn't know maybe what network state is the quick definition is a nwork state is a highly aligned online community with a capacity for Collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually against diploma uh diplomatic uh recognition from pre-existing States so I want to stress that this is a evolving concept this I literally copy paste from bology book

and he's the defin he defined Network state so it cannot be per se wrong from his own definition but this is I want to say this is a evolving concept this is really more I see it more like a movement than a a fixed definition and we want to say that blockchain technology plays a plays a big part it's a enabling technology enabling economy a different economy into the nwork states and also many communities partially align with it so for example zalu it is though recognized as Network States but actually what the words that vitalic always use is pop-up City so a will go into More Concept later and also just a bit clear the confusion also about Network States and how we're doing also

Dows like because Dows are getting more and more physical you probably heard the experiment of City Dow or cabin da yes or no like these are all physical experiment they bought Dows bought real estate and forming communities locally which is getting really close to the definition of network States and so in network States literally um biology provided a checklist on the right which are his list of definition you kind of have to check take take most of the boxes so be recognize that n state but then on the right for the Dows you can see like some Dows check most of could check most of the list but not all and some are just not inessential for most of the DS at all so there are confusions but today we are going to focus on our

experience in zalu and how vitalic and um now the current experiment is and I will hand the hand it to ISA now great thank you una I've got a yeah so first up what is zalu um it was an experiment started by vitalic and a few people that he was hanging out with uh there was no formal governments whatsoever it was very informal group of people that b it together um vitalik's idea around it was really to experiment in the space of creating a pop-up Village that's longer than a hecka house and also has more people um he said you know he hecka houses are can

be longer term but don't have many people usually only 2030 conferences have a lot of people the E ethereum Community comes together um but it's only a very short space of time um and he wanted to experiment in the space of living together in physical spaces popup Villages for a longer period of time so zalu came together last year in uh March April I believe uh in Montenegro it was a mix of around 200 people uh in the ethereum longevity uh governance public goods and network State um Community uh most people that were there lived together for two months and uh every week had a different

theme um and then that was followed up by two weeks of co-working in Istanbul later in the year um and now um let's talk a bit like what is a popup City actually um so in vitalik's mind it's something longer than a hecka house shorter than a university or a city he had this slide where he kind of talked about um something very shortterm and coming together like is like Tinder so you come together for a date uh very longterm are like real cities and countries and he wanted to experiment in the middle between shorter than universities longer than uh conferences or hacker houses um the one of the latest experiments that followed zalu

was Vitalia so a specifically longevity focused city um that came to together in ratan ratan is a free private City in Honduras um so that's actually a permanent Community focused on sort of like freedom and maybe some of these more libertarian ideas that some of you were alluding to uh and they had a thre month Village there called Vitalia focused specifically on longevity and how to actually bring to bring about longevity improvements faster um so that was kind of the idea space that we were playing in with like Community governance urbanism Logistics that's that's what this event was really about um the

highlights I'm like the obvious stuff that the media kind of picked up on was uh 200 weirdos living with vitalic full-time um Grimes turned up for House parties and djed um there were like a bunch of celebrities that nobody actually realized with there but just were like kind of lowkey there and nobody knew who they were um and just very easy access to people people like David Hoffman um vitalic obviously Scott Moore um but actually the real highlights were the personal experiences and I can say from my experience I was actually only there for about 3 weeks um it was really like on a personal level it created a new sense of identity um I had never had that sense of belonging the same way

that I did with that group of people for that amount of time um my parents had always said to me when I was young like oh when you go to university you'll like you'll meet your tribe you'll meet your people and I was honestly quite disappointed when I went to University that nobody seemed to be quite as nerdy and this was suddenly a group of people who came together and really wanted to discuss on an intellectual level but also were very open to like the human connection and it wasn't like at a conference this transactional thing of like what do you do what can you do for me um how can we exchange value there was much more of an interest in other humans because there was the safe knowledge that everyone you speak to is going to have some interesting thing or interesting nerdiness that they want to

talk about um and it was just incredible um it's very hard to describe but it was definitely a realization that we can have better Villages and cities where we live together and when where people can have a different or better sense of belonging than maybe they do in traditional cities learnings um this is a personal opinion so other people might have different learnings um but I know that uner and I agreed on two weeks being too short for zalu culture to truly unfold so when we did it in Istanbul we were only two weeks and we noticed that it was amazing people so very similar people but it was a lot harder to get the sense of community and being able to

because it was only two weeks there was a sense that like you had to make the most out of it so people were more transactional and they were trying to make amazing Connections in a short amount of time so I think definitely the magic of this zalo experience was being together in a physical space for a longer period of time and I would say that starts maybe at about the 3 we Mark um centralization was an interesting learning so it was common knowledge to everyone that basically like vitalic and a few people were behind it um but they possibly weren't transparent enough in the sense that uh a few months after the main event kind of happened nobody was clear on who's actually running this and governing this and how

um and there started to be like discussions within the community of like we know like vitalic is running it so just like say that um and I think that that was a big learning for the the group that was mainly organizing in terms of just like getting from that centralized beginning which was actually totally okay but just being transparent about it to a state where the community is governing more and that's where we're getting now uh Bellic took the step of decentralizing um the events for 2024 uh but also we have like Zagora which is a forum you can do Anonymous posts and the discussion is happening mainly there um so it's a lot easier now to kind of truly have that sense of a decentralized community governing this kind of vision

and idea um another big learning was like the media assumes anything it isn't invited to write about is elitist uh all of the Articles pretty much that were written about zalu were quite negative and they were like yeah crypto bro is coming together and like yeah um it's it was it was not good media and that was a conscious choice I think on the organizers that they just didn't want to invite media they wanted this to be a safe space for people to just do their thing and not have it like a big event that everyone's like hyping about um so just because you're not invited as the media doesn't mean an event is elitist um and there's a big butt to that definitely the way they did diversity inclusion was actually a lot better than

I think people expected they just put a lot of money into scholarships and a lot of people were there that would not otherwise have financially been able to be there so it wasn't just like a bunch of Rich Bros um and there were it wasn't 50% wom but I would say at least 30% it was very diverse um but it can definitely be done better uh and that's a big topic personally that I think is really exciting to work on and a lot of people in that Community are working on uh also if you're interested uh I recommend the article why I built zalu which I've put a link to there um it's an article personally from vitalic where he talks about his background for the event what we're doing now um vitalic put this post up in the community Forum

uh that he wants to make 2024 the year of spin-offs uh so instead of just doing one big headline event for zuzelo again uh he re recognized it was kind of the central group of people that had all the power and that they didn't want actually there to be kind of a picking of favorites and like a an informal But ultimately centralized group of people deciding who can do events and which events as zalu events and instead he said let's decentralize this let's open the frontier and make 2024 explicitly about opening and having an experimentation of new events by new organizers um so none of the events happening in 2024 will have the name

zalu uh but all of them will have at least one team member organizing that was at zalu um and that was for continuity of culture so zalo was a very special experience I would say and I think it's definitely not necessary to Define it in terms of you have to be a zelu person to be able to organize it but I think his meaning there was really if you haven't been there it's hard to kind of get the sense of what was important or what wasn't so he set up this funding round to decentralize the events coming up in 2024 he put 300 e every quarter up from him like his private funds um the first

round happened in q1 um most of the money is going towards events so people organizing events like zalu uh or with a zalu kind of a approach EG longer than three weeks um and he also put up 0 e for the technology round so zalo is kind of becoming this Vision towards how do we live together in the physical space ethereum is this great Community we come together for conferences a lot but how do we come together more often and actually spend time together longer periods of time how can we make this physical space more permanent and maybe more conducive to us grown-ups who might have children and might need uh a slightly more permanent kind of place to

live with people than just like digital nomading around the world and so in order for these pop-up villages to keep happening you also need the technology uh and that's where the technology round is important so it's quite hard for example financing so there's like this crowdfunding tool that's coming about where people can help sort of pre- crowdfund the events they want to see um and then Q2 is going to be a similar kind of approach but with the integration of learnings from q1 um cool um very very quickly now we're going to tell you about what unaa and I and a bunch of other people in Switzerland have been working on we're trying to do a zuel related event in Switzerland with a bit bit of a focus

on the power of decentral decentralization and the Swiss culture um and how we can bring the leadership skills that are required to kind of bring about this new era of decentralization um so we're calling it Zoo lead at the moment uh the idea is to have three weeks in Switzerland uh this year uh the EOS that we're working around is accelerating and shaping web leadership promoting public awareness around web 3's Collective power for good um but really it's kind of about cross-pollinating ideas both between like the traditional space of decentralization so for example impact

Hub is doing decentralization for years and they have maybe some successes and learnings from that process that the web 3 Community has not yet actually integrated and at the same time the web 3 Community has a lot of learning so how can we bring more traditional leaders together with web 3 leaders and really talk about these learnings and really create a sense of like this is actually how to do leadership in web 3 and there's never going to be like one one definition but like I think we can get to the point now of like a mini MBA for how to do leadership and co-create that together um and that's the idea um a short res residency one to 200 people uh local participation we want to have 25

curators so 25 people from various ious leadership spaces who help us Define both who should participate and who should actually Define the content and who can bring valuable content so uh we'll say that as well later but if anyone thinks that they could be one of those people feel free to reach out to us um and diversity equity and inclusion very important to me personally and to us as a group uh we think that that's one of the key important aspects that were actually a great success in zalu and made the event so rich and we want to bring that also to too late uh and I will hand over to una to talk a bit more about the event and yeah the concrete stuff uh we're running a bit short out of time so um instead of talking too

much about basically what we're trying to say in this slid say we really want to bring local community of Switzerland the Swiss um why we're doing in Switzerland not other places so the Democracy practices C pollination from Real World because we do believe in uh certain Swiss democratic practices and it can br bring special learnings to web 3 leaders and these are our some our Visions um we don't want to go into too much detail um but one one thing that we want to say at the end to highlight one of our location partner that uh who Ralph is right here uh we going to partner with next JY Village we're um at the Interlaken mystery Park I don't know if anyone has been to Interlaken mystery

Park it's a really fun place where there's literally a spaceship and pyramids so um there there we want to to really um create a new vision for uh next generation of society do leaving Laboratories over there and there's we have great capacity over there and still under um brainstorming and how can we can bring about this Lively community of zalu there and bring web 3 Community there to let's do the first kind of social experiment leing lab experiment in Switzerland and this is basically our vision and welcome you to co-create or support us in any way um since we're running out of time so a quick overview of like how how crazy the space is is really amazing uh I imagine already G

party over there um and like if you're interested please let's take the conversation after this thank you thank yes thank you we do have we have time for maybe one or two questions if anyone right here in the back uh let's get the we'll get the microphone over to you so we can all hear you hey uh thank you for the presentation um Zu Berlin is coming up and it's scheduled for two weeks and you have mentioned that you think it's at least three weeks to get the full experience um I still plan on going uh

to give it a shot um yeah what's your thought on this that it's just scheduled for two weeks yeah um I mean that's my personal learning I I would definitely try and do a zoo related event longer but it was also very short notice for some of these Zoo related events so not everybody is going to have the full capacity to do a three-week or more event this year I think that's totally fine definitely go to Zubin I think it's going to be amazing event anyway um yeah but I think for the full experience it does really help to have a longer period of time thank you for the question any other does anyone else have any questions right

here you got the mic so I mean Hello thank you for your presentation um I was just wondering uh this is a genuine question like aren't you afraid like this experiences can kind of become a cult over time and sort of religious kind of things where it becomes more isolating than useful because I really like the concept at the same time you know maybe I've seen too many movies about these kind of like communities in isolation that then end up drifting away from the so I was just curious about your take on the subject oh okay um yeah so I am scared of that actually um I think that's healthy to be scared of it I watch a lot of documentaries on Netflix about cults

and I have to say the similarities between Cults and Dows and network states are very scary and it's a very fine line I think that's totally something that we need to be conscious of um and I think that can be one of the reasons that is good to learn from previous from history and from what we've already learned in history about governance and how to prevent Cults um but yeah being scared of something I'm not sure if it's the reason not to do it it's just um an educated I think yeah like in in my uh I did a presentation for example about n wor state so the problem is that when you have a prominent leader you have self power right I think for a forming of a code that's something the most probably most scary because you actually we actually have all the infrastructure the

governance like and S like and also software actually technically we have voting powers given to people so technically actually they're they we don't we have porism in for example Network State that's what we're aiming for and but like I think this is already a leap from original per say whatever tribalism or like people gathering together because you will have a transparent onchain record of people voting and what people want so this consensus is different but still like the worry for me is that there's still soft power for leader so you know there's still we we still have Pro for example vitalic as a prominent leader for zalu and he still have immens self-power but this is something more uh psychological it's really hard to solve

it depends really very much on the Community Vision and in zalu I have to say I feel very safe and I feel like this is not going to happen and this is you know this is this is very much because is soft power you you you cannot quantify it and also in nwork state they always stress also a prominent leader right so that would happen in any community that would have some sort of leader title but you always have to feel it maybe in the future we will have a I don't know more better assessment framework for for this but at the moment I I felt like it was always very safe and it's not going there great thank you give it up one more time for Isa and Uma