NN Ep:11 Let a Thousand Societies Bloom with Vitalik Buterin

Yeah. So at the time, I had been thinking about a lot of similar kinds of topics. I did read Balaji's book and wrote that long review of it back in 2022. But before that, in 2021, I wrote that post on crypto cities and had been thinking about how crypto could potentially improve urban economics. I've been following the charter cities people even before crypto, following some of these different movements that were trying to figure out what it means to create new communities or new societies or new tribes. It felt like at the end of 2022, there were a lot of people who wrote a lot of things and there was really interesting discussion, but it seemed like the right time to move from just talking about things to much more action. My thinking was, let's just do a real-life experiment and push in directions that haven't really been done before. The idea was to bring 200 people together from a few different communities, including the Ethereum community, the longevity community, some rationalists, people thinking about AI, people thinking about governance, and bring them together in one place for two months, basically try to create a temporary city and see what happens. My thinking was that there have already been things that were much smaller than that, like hacker houses have existed forever, conferences have existed forever, even very large-scale things like Burning Man existed for a long time. Combining that kind of diversity, having those few different communities together, with both the longer duration and larger scale, was something I really wanted to make sure we actually do and not compromise on. Part of my thinking was that the goal is to get as close as possible to what one of these new cities or societies would look like if you tried to actually do it, but in a way that's still feasible. If you do anything smaller, there would be too many dynamics that you would miss. In the 200-person group, we saw people forming their own different subtribes. There were people doing Ethereum-related workshops, people doing exercise, cold plunges, running, saunas, hot pots, karaoke, all kinds of different things. With the two-month duration, it really got people past the point where they were thinking of the experience as a break from their life and got to the point where they were thinking, for these two months, this actually is my life. So I was basically trying to figure out what is that step that's much more ambitious than what's already been done many times, so that we would actually learn interesting new things, and at the same time something we could still just do and pull off within half a year. So I decided to try to do Zuzalu.

Yeah. So the way the process really worked is we found about 10 to 20 people and then we gave each of them the opportunity to suggest people to invite, whom we would in most cases just accept. The goal definitely was that we saw a lot of those inviters as being people who had a good sense of what kind of people would make sense for Zuzalu within their own community. Some of them came from the Ethereum community and different corners of it. Some came from the longevity space. Some came from the Vienna rationalist community, some from a few other places. The goal was to find and bring people who were part of a few particular cultures and communities and spaces, but also at the same time more than just one. People who were interesting, who would provide value to Zuzalu while it was happening. Also, we wanted to avoid the kinds of people who would pop in opportunistically, like people who want to come in because they're trying to shoulder projects or trying to identify things to invest in. We were very worried at the beginning that this sort of thing would end up being pretty high-profile, and as happens on the internet, you have your geeks, and then you have your mops and your sociopaths. So we were trying to be selective.

Part of the goal then was to try to give all of us more information about what is the next direction that actually makes sense. Even at the time, it was obvious that there were a lot of these different visions where the first or second step might align, because the first and second step is just building the community and going from an online thing to something in person. But if you look at the fifth or tenth step of what Zuzalu wants to do versus what Balaji wants to do versus what Mark from the Charter Cities Institute wants to do versus even what the longevity people want to do, there are very different longer-term goals. Part of my interest was trying to create more knowledge and discover what next steps actually make sense. I think that was one of those things that the Zuzalu event ended up not doing too much of. It still left 'what is the next step' as a big open question. Then at the end of 2023, half a year after, I made the decision to decentralize, in the sense that we would not try to make one central community, but would encourage people to do their own thing. We saw Edge City come out of that, we saw Shanghai come out of that, we saw Forces come out of that, we saw Vitalia, which then became Infinita and all those projects. The goal was to see how some of these projects diverge and try to cooperate where we can. We cooperated on some digital public goods, some digital infrastructure quite a bit, and also on just getting everyone together to do their pop-ups beside each other in Chiang Mai a year and a half later. I saw those next couple of years as that sort of process of discovery. My recent change of mindset since then, the biggest part has been that I do believe in permanent locations more. To me, the whole point of doing these things instead of just people chilling is that you're able to instantiate a lot of things, whether it's cultures or governance mechanisms, with a lot more depth. If you want that depth, then you need permanence. This was pretty obvious to me when I saw how Shanghai was doing it. I'm very impressed by their commitment to the cultural aspects of what they do, but when you visit, it's obvious that the decorations, for example, are just paper. Paper is the only thing you can possibly do when you have something that lasts for 40 days. So we need to create things that last much longer than 40 days, and that's starting to happen now.

Yeah, it's a good question. How much permanence do you need? The one thing I am confident in is that we don't want everyone in this space to be jumping between locations every 40 days. There's always a spectrum. I think that level is a bit too much. Generally, when you jump between locations, there's a cost. Some people are able to come, others are not, and you have to pay the economic costs of figuring out the new venue. One thing about physical venues that I think we've only come to appreciate over time is that there are generic physical venues, and then you can think of a physical venue that's totally designed around a particular tribe. There's also an interesting point in the middle: physical venues that are designed more for tribes without being specific to one. A lot of things need to be different. The really big one is just having spaces where you can do collective events, a room with 100 to 200 chairs and a big screen, which is effectively a movie theater or a conference room. That's surprisingly hard to find in a lot of places, and we often work hard to make it happen. In the original Zuzalu, we built an entire dome from scratch, and lots of people used it. It was a super important cultural and strong point. Both the Ethereum-specific stuff and the music, dance, and activities happened there. One thing we've also seen is that you have 4C, which is a permanent node in Chiang Mai, and we actually see pop-ups happening inside it. So essentially, you have something which is sort of a tribe and at the same time a sort of city, and you also have other tribes that it connects to. I think this makes total sense.

I agree. I think this is one of the big differences between all of these projects and traditional nations. With traditional nations, membership is either zero or one, you're a foreigner or full-time. That's not the model that works for any of these things. What you actually see is there's always some small core that wants to stay full-time, people who come in more frequently, people who come in less frequently. That's a healthy thing, and different versions work for different people. There's a lot of value in going around and interacting with different communities. On the other hand, there are people who, because of their passports, find it difficult to go to literally every single one. If they can figure out how to get into even one country, it's a blessing. So you don't want to over-index on the nomad side either. The right path is being able to support both groups.

Yeah. I feel like this was something the Bitcoin community was trying to inch towards five or ten years ago. In the Bitcoin community, it's a very global internet-based community, and there was this movement to create Bitcoin embassies. There was one in Toronto, one in Vienna, and others everywhere. There was a community of people excited about this concept, and when they traveled around the world as tourists, one thing they would do is go to the local Bitcoin embassy. The idea is you see something still recognizably your culture. If you're a Bitcoiner, they're going to know who Hal Finney is, they'll be able to talk about the 93 billion Bitcoin bug from 2010, they can tell you unfavorable facts about the Federal Reserve. But at the same time, in every region, there's a different kind of Bitcoin community, and that's part of what makes it interesting and part of the point of traveling around instead of just being in one place. I'm assuming a lot of different spaces have that kind of dynamic.

Yeah, so I think there are two things here. In a long-term community, the thing that binds people together is not shared interests but people's interest in each other as people, which comes as a result of shared experiences. That's the thing that Zuzalu created, and it's something that definitely happens in crypto because everyone can bond over what happens to a price chart or various situations on crypto Twitter. These collective experiences are very emotionally meaningful for long. The other part is when people don't yet know each other and haven't been part of a community, what brings them together initially. One take I have about things like keto culture is that it claims to be about one thing but is always in practice about other things. The way people work is that the simplest model of a person has very strong attachments to a very small number of ideas, developing everything from there. But humans tend to have weaker attachments to a much larger set of ideas. If people come together under the banner of keto kosher, they probably align more than average on a hundred other smaller things, possibly things they were not even consciously aware of. It's similar to how, on the other side, if you go to hipster restaurants that sell avocado toast, the kinds of beach towns where people eat that kind of food, do yoga, and water sports, you can probably predict things about those people's political opinions, approach to life, how much they value money versus enjoyment, their connection to family, their religion. These things are always more correlated than you think, in ways you can't always express in words easily. That's why it's often easier to identify these kinds of clusters when they already exist than to create them. If you try to create keto kosher without any understanding of the existing keto community, you might end up with people who want to eat the same food but on every other axis are in a totally different universe. I've had to deal with this a few times because there were internet communities that I really vibed with, and then when I met them in person, I realized there were 10 other axes on which they were totally different people. A lot of these communities have some in-person component, but growing up in Canada and not really doing in-person things, I was always more disconnected from that side. So basically yeah, if keto kosher works, I think it would work for reasons that were not written down on paper anywhere.

Yeah, it's a good question. There's always a trade-off between the two. The other thing is if you think about the type of telos-oriented community that is most prominent and advanced in the world right now, the answer is just a corporation. Corporations are a type of community optimized for hundreds of years around the telos.

Exactly. It's optimized around the telos, and a lot of the explicit wisdom in corporate land says things like 'we're a sports team, not a family.' That was one of the Netflix people's slogans. That can sometimes deliver outcomes but totally does not satisfy all of these other human needs. If you're trying to build something that's not a corporation, there's always some balance between these two things. Basically, if you don't have a telos at all, if you set that slider all the way to zero, then I actually think that's unhealthy in its own way.

What makes this also some of the network communities that exist at the moment are facing as a problem. They're realizing, when we speak to teams or people, that vibes in and of themselves are not enough to sustain a long-lasting community. Vibes are more of a substrate because the internal purpose needs to generate value, and value is based in the end on real material needs and idealistic needs of self-expression and so on. So just vibing in the long term is probably not the best recipe for building an impactful community.

Yeah. And the telos has a shelling point. That's the other thing. Just talking about some goals attracts people who share those goals, and because they've come to hear about those goals from the same internet source, chances are people are similar in other ways. So I would say the thing we want is definitely some mixture of both of those things. If you don't have that mixture, then I do expect that you'll lose people.

I think it's starting to grow aspects of the culture. For a long time it was definitely exclusively focusing on setting up the legal environment and basic infrastructure. You basically had people basing things inside of Prosper but not really interacting with each other much. There even are some biotech businesses registered in Prosper but they're based on a different part of Roatan Island, about 5 or 10 kilometers away. It feels like it's newer that they're trying to be an actual community. I talked to Nicholas, Aninger, Lewis, and Loness, and they mentioned that Zuzalu helped inspire them about the importance of that side. So they've started bringing people in by hosting events and having more of a population. Those things are hard when you don't have infrastructure. They have an apartment building and a golf course style venue that can hold 100 to 200 people, but only one restaurant. Food options are limited, and people won't come for long if that's the level of infrastructure. Actually, I think you guys would be better at bringing people to Prosper than the Prosper people, ironically. There's a subset of people who are good at bringing in those willing to participate in something exciting and new even if infrastructure is not great, and just collectively work together. If there are no restaurants, they understand you have to self-organize and collectively cook dinner with 30 people. That doesn't exist there. That's the kind of thing someone like Auer would be able to figure out, those more collectivist cooperatives. The mood in Prosper is more on the side of people coming in and having the same kinds of lives they would have otherwise, not adjusting too much. But compared to what it was before, it's definitely shifted quite a bit.

Yes.

I think there have been two different or even three different strands of thinking about these new zones. There's the libertarian side, saying there are oppressive regulations we want to get away from and create a territory where people can be free to work on technology or have businesses otherwise not allowed, or even say things that would be censored. At the beginning, they went for full sovereignty, seasteading in international waters, Sealand, Liberland. Over time, many from that community have moderated and shifted toward a more cooperative, issue-specific approach, working with governments, like Mark and the Charter Cities Institute. Another group looks at it from the government perspective, inspired by Shenzhen. They established a separate zone in China with different rules and an internal border, attracting people and building a new city from a fishing village. Governments ask how to reform and modernize while minimizing risk and political constraints. The solution is to create separate sandbox zones with buffers so changes don't affect the whole country. Many countries have this, even if not aligned with crypto or libertarians. Examples include the Dubai International Financial Center and China's free trade zones. The Charter Cities Institute bridges the libertarian and developmentalist perspectives. In Bhutan, the Gelephu Mindfulness City (GMC) is in the middle, trying to create a Hong Kong for Bhutan with unique aspects. Generally, regulation is moving from large-scale uniformity to local, two-level or three-level structures with different zones and jurisdictions. The intersection with tribes happens through thematic alignments, but I'm bullish on the combination for a theoretical reason. If you're China, you can do a Hong Kong or Shenzhen. If you're Saudi Arabia, you can build massive towers with oil money. But if you're anyone else, you can't compete on generic network effects. So you should try to succeed at specific network effects within a niche. Real world examples of niche cities include ski towns and surf towns with 1,000 to 5,000 people, university towns with 30,000 to 150,000. If you care about a niche, you can survive with a few thousand people, but you have to be not generic. You need a community building strategy that is not just raw scale.

You see the archipelago as integrated? Why I see tribes and zones as separate instead of merging? I like the idea that the zone is the platform and different tribes can plug in and out. But I also see another vision where the zone and tribe are attached.

I see both being possible. The prototype example is Zuzalu, which has no autonomy but is a physical location hosting pop-ups. But it's not a generic space; it's attached to particular cultures and ideas. The high-level reason I was thinking about zones as platforms is because making a zone is really hard. You need capital, understanding of governance, constitutional law, what attracts business, international diplomacy, negotiation, and the ability to get companies to build your airport. None of us are good at that. When different parts of a stack require totally different specialties and personalities, separation and collaboration naturally makes sense. To the extent they would merge, one example might be GMC. They want to create an autonomous zone to attract international talent and Bhutanese people otherwise leaving for Australia to return. But they don't want to make GMC a generic Hong Kong or Dubai; they want cultural aspects. Their government is engaging with us and the Ethereum Foundation, so places like that could specialize in particular tribes. I could also see zones as homes of big tribes, but with embassies in other places. If GMC became a community of 50,000 with a culture, there would be a 'GMC in New York'.

Yeah. I think it's obvious to Prospera that to survive, they have to turn what they have into a win-win for enough people in the country. Even projects initiated externally will come to that realization. The idea that you just sign a contract for 50 years of autonomy and don't have to care at all is unrealistic because there are always things not specified in the contract and more opportunities for positive collaboration between the two sides. The most natural positive thing is to give local people an opportunity to stay in the country while participating in frontier science and technology. Can we make biotech, AI, and crypto something everyone is part of instead of requiring you to be in New York or San Francisco? If you achieve that, you win a lot of local friends. If not, and you're somewhere off in a corner 200 kilometers away, people might forget about you. That's kind of Liberland's strategy, being far away and doing their own thing.

Indeed, exactly. But there are locals 5 kilometers away. If you turn Liberland into something where locals come in, interact with people working on biotech, and learn things, then you get more friends. Stability is never as guaranteed as words written on paper. I think there's a limit to the strategy of being off in the corner and not touching you, so expect not to be touched. I expect all these things to be more stable if they engage more and provide positive value. In Prospera, there are Hondurans on the team and locals starting businesses. That exists more than before.

One of the things we discovered after Zuzalu is strong pressure for governance thinking to fall away, especially in pop-ups. At the beginning we thought we should figure out a proper DAO, but what works surprisingly well is forking. Every pop-up is organized by a small founding team, like a benevolent short-term dictator. If they don't do a good job, someone else can do their own and people migrate. We saw Vitalia split in half with two forks. I think forking as governance is underrated because there's an instinct to formalize, but formalizing has costs. Forking as governance is a traditional open-source approach that works unreasonably effectively in many situations. But eventually that runs into limits. If you build something permanent, you can't fork it. You can fork a tribe, but not a zone or permanent location. I hope we come back to figuring out governance more thoroughly. This is connected to the bigger issue in crypto where in 2025 there's a mood that DAOs are dead and let's go back to companies. You have to engage with that and understand why people are disillusioned with the first decade of DAOs, but then realize that corporations and financialized governance also have problems, and we need a better thing.