Vitalik Buterin on Zuzalu: The Future of Pop-Up Cities & Community Innovation | #InnoMinds

I think the way that I would describe the idea of Zuzalu in general is that for a long time there's been a lot of excitement around this idea of either creating new cities or creating new societies, or taking online communities and bringing them offline, and really being intentional about offline community and the physical environment, and the kinds of physical network effects that we're creating and participating in. This is something that a lot of people have written about, often very idealistically for decades. There's a lot of writing in the 80s and 90s talking about this idea that we live in physical communities, but at the same time, our values and the things that we use and benefit from are going off on this totally separate digital axis, and are there ways to bring the first more in line with the second? Balaji Srinivasan recently wrote his book on the network state. There's also a book by someone called David de Ugarte on what he calls 'files' that takes a very different political angle on something that's ultimately not too different as a concept. One of the goals of Zuzalu was to take some of that discussion and bring things from a phase of just discussion a step closer into a live experiment, so we can see something run and how people respond to it and what the consequences are. So the concept is basically to bring together about 200 people from a combination of a few different communities. The biotech community was one; there were actually at least three biotech subcommunities: a lot of longevity people, but also some synthetic biology people, and some COVID researchers also came by for some time. Also Ethereum people, including Ethereum core developers, and also people focused on zero-knowledge proofs, just people who are enthusiastic about the topic of building new cities or new societies in general, people from the Vienna rationality community. Just all kinds of these different spaces. And just bring them together for two months, basically just be a city for two months in this kind of far-off, somewhat secluded place in Montenegro, which is in Southeastern Europe. And the experiment was interesting. It was a combination of just bringing people together and living in a city, but also trying to really do some of the infrastructure around some of the different goals that people had. So there was an app that we built just for Zuzalu called Zuzalu Pass, which is basically a zero-knowledge identity system. You have a mobile app that shows a QR code, and that QR code is a zero-knowledge proof which proves that you're a member of the group but without revealing which member of the group you are. You can use this to sign into places in person and also online. There's another app called Zuzalu Poll, which is doing voting, and you could use your Zuzalu Pass to vote in a Zuzalu Poll. The polls were sometimes on very basic topics and sometimes went into deep political stuff, just all kinds of things. People were able to vote anonymously but at the same time prove that they're actually supposed to be one of the voters and that they're not voting twice. A lot of the time we think of anonymity as you're proving nothing about yourself and you're maximum untrustworthy, but this shows how with zero-knowledge proofs there are a lot more possibilities than just that. On the health side, there was a combination of different things: an exercise gym that was set up, a culture of doing cold plunges every morning that about 10% of the population participated in, people who were taking biomarkers and measurements of various stats of their body, and also just sub-events or just basically an ongoing intellectual salon. It was fascinating in a bunch of different ways, both from those communities individually but also in the way that those different groups came together. The outcome, I think, is just that it proves the concept kind of works, and it is a new category of thing. Hacker houses last for years but only have 10 or 20 people; conferences have thousands of people but only last a week. So let's make something that has 200 people and lasts a few months, and it actually happened and it worked. But I think we're still a long way away from really answering some of the deeper questions of what something like this should turn into. We have these really powerful tools to coordinate in a bunch of ways, and at some point it makes sense for that coordination to start to be in person. But what form that actually takes, and can we avoid having a world that gets dominated by five cities with big super mega network effects by instead empowering these smaller-scale network effects in very specific communities of 100 or a thousand people, but they just happen to be 100 or a thousand of the right people and that's all you need? There are just these interesting questions, and I look forward to people continuing to try and answer more of them.