Zuzalu and Pop-Up Cities

Transcript

hello everyone uh glad to be at a network State event for the first time in person because uh after all you know bringing online communities driven by values and bringing them offline where we can build public goods together is what this movement is all about um so I thought I would start with just going back and resumming the uh thesis that I made when I summarized what what interested me about bology is Network State book back when I wrote that big long review of it in 2022 which was the first 8,000 word blog post that I ever wrote that that has since been suppressed by an 11,000 word one on Teal optimism um but I think to me the core

idea right is uh this idea of exit as a peaceful alternative to smashing the other tribe right basically there's a a lot of there's a lot of different people in the world there's a lot of people in pretty much every existing country lots of people have very different preferences including on some really important topics and if you have two people that are two groups of people that are stuck uh together in the same city and the same poity then it's very easy to have zero sum conflicts and it's very easy to have situations where people just start using more and more underhanded tactics in order to smash each other right and this has two problems one is that

smashing is bad by itself and two is that it creates like a bad selection function because instead of the group that wins that game being the group that actually creates the most admirable Society the group that wins is the group that ends up being better at smashing exit instead exit is step one and then demonstrate is step two and then once you demonstrate then like you're actually presenting a real live working alternative and this is like theoretically much better for everyone now going into um you know the details of this right I think you can break down Network States into the cultural side and into the regulatory side so bology had this keto kosher idea so you know a society where everything is set up all

of the rules all the infrastructure to really enable people to live much more healthily and then the other side is the regulatory side right so you can have regulation to serve non-mainstream priorities um so you for example you know you could have a state legalizes psychedelics but ban smoking and you know there's arguments why that might be better than the status quo you could have experimental regulation that's better at serving even mainstream priorities and you could just push against regulatory conservatism generally right there's a big discussion about how in the west there's this problem of you know vitrac doing anything interesting requires 15 different groups to approve until you

flip that around and say well let's coordinate and actually try to do this somewhere else uh this idea that the world is split into the three tribes um and network States can be this kind of decentralized Center and I also talked about like the Synergy between blockchains and network States so at the end of 2022 I basically had this Insight that it felt to me like we we had just had so much talking about building new societies building new cities building crypto cities building blockchain communi whatever you want to call it so let's like actually Advance a discussion and do something in person let's run an experiment bring 200 people into monegro from three different communities ethereum Community

especially people on the technical nzk side longevity and biotech and people interested in new governance uh topics in general bring these people together for 60 days try to like actually be a city and then see what happens so Z did not experiment on the regulatory Innovation side right regulatory Innovation is hard to get you need to have existing relationships with a government you have to do convincing there's a lot of work and cultural Innovation often doesn't really need the regulatory side right and so if you are interested in the cultural aspects you can basically hit the ground running without starting that at first on the cultural side a couple of interesting things so you know we had free breakfast

and it was actually good healthy breakfast so you know not like that Continental trash that you sometimes get um then uh and the free breakfast did a really good job of like it's like basically a soft subsidy for people to like actually come in and like and actually socialize and get to know each other organized exercise activities cold plunges um there's one at uh 8 am every day then educational presentations on all kinds of topics so basically I summarized it as you know keto kosher plus University light and then the light goes outside the brackets because I know light kind of multiplies on to keto kosher and University you of like you both of those things on the technology side you know we incubated some

techologies so we did zup pass through knowledge identity system and I did some tried to do like biomarker testing and like that kind of radical longevity side that ended up working a little bit less well that time but doesn't it could work in the future so learnings from zusu people just really enjoyed the experience as an experience the human element is crucial right so a lot of people I think have been thinking about Network States primarily from the like economics and incentives and Regulation and Technology lens let's like figure out you know optimal law and you know let's figure out like the optimal economic system and uh like that stuff by itself is not what's going to make a

successful Community right you really need the like the human element you need a community that people can really enjoy being part of so as an experience it was successful it was less clear what immediate Next Step Z implied um also governance is not solved right and I think in order to have governance one really major prerequisite is you need what I call a concept of membership right so concept of memberships include shareholding status as an employee citizenship residence digital Nomad Visa like basically I me know like what is that slider that defines is someone not a member of your community are they part are they kind of a member are they really a member um so all of these things were not solved so one of the

ways that I think about this is uh before we basically had this like very hazy road map where you have an idea then you have an online community and then you do something and then you have a new Society yay so after zizu we basically have you know you have an idea then you have an online community and then you try to instantiate it with a popup City and then you do something and then you have a new Society so it's a step forward but it's not the enti solution popup cities themselves are good this is one of those I think valuable learnings right so 2022 thesis was that crypto could support network States one thing that I really

underappreciated is that um networ pop-up cities can also support crypto and zup pass was a good example we basically incubated a new technology from scratch over the course of eight weeks and we quickly accelerated it and we actually got it to the point where it actually ended up being a pretty decent product right and uh having like an actual Community where the developers and you have a community of people who are ideologically like interested in beta testing and you have that super tight feedback loop where you actually have this like real life setting it's actually very powerful for incubating a technology right so we've had accelerator companies we can also have accelerator communities also there's this concept of

uh synergies between popups and new regulatory zones right so it turns out that there's people who are very good at community building but who know nothing about how to actually do like do regulatory reform then there's people who have been working for years at regulatory reform but they know nothing about community building and maybe you can put the two together right and sometimes like sometimes there's people who actually know some of both right but there's value in like basically like creating synergies between these two units and I think we saw Vitalia and prosper starting to have that kind of a relationship also Zano and fumba town which is a new city project in Zanzibar basically zanu being like a a temporary popup that would attract more people

there to come and like understand more about fumba town and like potentially grow into contributing more and participating more over time so this is also one use case for them so one of my one of the thesis for all of this that I uh only recognized after this right is is uh so capitalism typically thinks one step ahead right you build products that make sense in the Contex of everything else that people are already doing politics also often thinks one step ahead if that much right sometimes politics thinks five steps backwards uh sci-fi can think 10 steps ahead um and museums of the future can think 10 steps ahead right so I wrote that recent uh article reviewing know the museum in

Dubai Museum in Tokyo I think you know there's a lot of value in creating that immersive environment where you just get to show people your entire vision and I view popup cities as being like a new medium through which you can basically do SciFi right you can basically actually think 10 steps ahead build out figure out what are the different technology and culture pieces that you want to do all together and like try to create an immersive environment where it it can actually all work together and succeed uh so who here recognizes which city this is a subway map for um no no Singapore Subway is actually good Francis correct San Francisco okay so like it gets used as a metaphor for a lot of things right but

one of the way that I think about this is uh so if you think about the stages that I had right stage one is an idea stage two is an online community stage three is a popup and a lot of different for a lot of different things for those three stages you're basically on the same Journey but then if you want to go further right then actually there is this still this Divergence that's based on what is the thing that you ultimately wants to do the needs of a digital Nomad Hub the needs of a digital University the needs of a biotech startup and the needs of going to Mars are actually quite different right it's like from counterclockwise to clockwise basically how much do you even need um government support um or even a friendliness for example right for a digital Nomad Hub

the main thing that you need is a friendly Visa policy otherwise you just go do stuff yourself for University you might need a little bit more and then to go to Mars like you know you really want your government to uh to be on board because there's just so much capital investment that goes into the physical infrastructure so relationships between Network States and each other and network states in the world right so thinking about like cooperativeness versus um you know just leave each other alone versus uh versus fighting between different kinds of communities right so to me like I can in general I think of outcomes as being in you know basically you have four different categories right so bad is when people with different

philosophies fight on Twitter right it's just you know debate is good but debate in this the formats that we have now is ends up often being just a very Zero Sum and unproductive then the worst is people with different philosophies fight in the real world and they try to use increasingly underhanded tactics to just impose their Vision on the whole structure in before the other side can impose its own Vision right good is if you actually have people with different philosophies implementing things and either we get to see which ones are better and which ones are worse or we get to see people self- selecting and different things actually end up working for different people that's good right but there is one level higher than good

which is the best and the best is like REM merging to main right it's like you know you have a branch in like a GitHub repository you a downloaded you'll change a bunch of stuff and then it works for you you upload a pull request and the pull request actually gets merged right so like actually doing that remerging I think is one of those things that's really valuable for movements like this actually have scale right and you can REM merge from a network state to the to the world you can also remerge between uh Network States and each other and uh so One Way by which we us as a movement can evaluate how good we are at this is we can ask well we already have cryptocurrencies how good are we at doing this with our cryptocurrencies I

think we're very good at having like very little fighting IRL like there is relatively little lobbying the governments to ban each other there's very little 51% attacking each other which I think is great there's lots of fighting on Twitter um so I think you know there's definitely room to improve now if we compared to cryptocurrencies I think Network states are less financialized and they're less high stakes in a certain sense right and uh I mean maybe this creates less room for competition and uh also potentially more cooperation right another thing is that I think one one thing that makes Network States potentially like even more Cooperative is like all cryptocurrencies by default want anyone who has dollars

right now you could make a choice and you could say well actually if a certain group of people are like very culturally harmful then like you don't want them even if they bring dollars right but like a default cryptocurrency would not say that but with a network State well the default is that you only want people who are compatible with your culture now we want a United networks right big topic among everyone you know there's uh there's real public goods across all of these Network State projects like digital software figuring out concepts of membership is hard the UN was formed when states were already very mature the concept of sovereignty sovereignty was ambiguous for a long time and so governance too ear doing governance too early risks creating Zero Sum objects to fight over money legitimacy so my

conclusion right now is that like a United networks is probably not a good idea today but thinking harder about cooperation and building special purpose vehicles to cooperate more is really good right so conclusions I think popups as popups have product Market fit we have to solve governance and membership more and then to go further from here the path depends on the goal and the path depends on the goal whether you want to go to Mars whether you want an OB app something in between and finally we should be all cooperating much more even if we have different goals but we should think carefully about how thank you