What is a pop up village? What is a ZuVillage? What is Edge City?
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.
BUT WHY SO RECURSIVE? THERE MUST BE PASSION AND DESIRE/DEMAND FOR SOMETHING.
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.
SPIRITUALLY/PHILOSOPHICALLY/PERSONALLY
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No selling excited buliders
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.
Setting the Scene: Edge City Lanna
Surface-level Definitions
Peeling Back the Layers
The Core Revelation: The People
High agency and curiosity as common threads
Intellectual capacity and orientation
Authentic pursuit of self-improvement
Respect and sincerity as foundational values
Key characteristics:
High agency and curiosity
Self-discipline and willpower
Intellectual capacity with practical application
Respect for self and others
Sincere pursuit of meaningful goals
Cross-pollination of ideas
Natural emergence of self-governance
Organic development of culture
Balance of individual sovereignty and community
Why It Works
Implications: The Future of Pop-up Villages
Conclusion: The Secret Sauce