So today we're discussing one of the most interesting and fascinating, ambitious experiment in community building that emerged from the crypto and blockchain space, which is Zuzalu. So in 2023, Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, gathered 200 people in Montenegro to live for two months together, to work together and to experiment together. The goal was to explore what happens when you bring people together for long enough to actually build culture, not just exchange ideas. Now three years after this experiment, we've seen an explosion of similar projects, from Edge City to Vitalia to Shanghai, the Network School and many more. Those are pop-up villages, intentional communities, or experimental zones, each testing different modes of living to explore how people can live, govern themselves, and potentially organize into specific actions outside of traditional state structures. But we've also noticed that many of these experiments are getting shorter, smaller, or perhaps more generic over time, essentially drifting back to being just a long and large conference. So what distinguishes projects that actually create community and culture from those that don't, and what will it take to produce something enduring that actually generates real political communities capable of collective action? To discuss these ideas, we are joined today by Vitalik Buterin, who has spent the past three years and many more thinking about and actively participating in this space, visiting projects from Prospera in Honduras to the GMC in Bhutan, and who has been writing a lot on this topic. Together we want to explore what's working and what's not, what we can learn from successful or failed experiments, so that we can gather new insights on how to build network nations that are not just temporary communities or gatherings of people, but that can become lasting political actors.
Okay. So Vitalik, we're really happy to have you with us. The main reason we're really happy is because you were at the inception of Zuzalu, which I also had the privilege to attend for a few weeks. Zuzalu was actually the breeding ground in which the work around what we now call network nations was born. So we have a very good anchor point. To start, we'd like to discuss with you if you can tell us a little bit about the motivation that brought you to instantiate Zuzalu, whether it was something you had in mind for a long time, whether it was inspired by Balaji's Network State book, or what were you trying to achieve and what were the underlying motivations behind that?
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.
One thing that I think was very specific and novel about Zuzalu was the membership approach to it, which is that people need to obtain a visa. That means it's not just 'I buy a ticket,' it means I need to apply and then be accepted. So I'm curious about that particular selection process. What were you discriminating for or against? Were you trying to identify people that are part of a particular common culture? Were you trying to ensure diversity or alignment? What were you trying to achieve through this selection process?
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.
I think one of the interesting elements, I mean I wasn't able to join Zuzalu at the time unfortunately, but I've heard many stories about it. What strikes me is that it was a kind of shelling point for a lot of people who were already part of network communities, and it brought to the surface the potential of what network community building could be in the 21st century. But in many ways, it's still kind of an emerging vision. There were a lot of offsprings inspired by it, like Edge City and others, which tried to incubate a similar setup to Zuzalu, but a lot of them are still in the process of trying to understand what it is they're actually trying to construct. So I'm just wondering, where do you see this currently going directionally?
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.
I think this relates to the distinction you make in your recent post, which is the distinction between a city and the tribe or what we call the nation. An ephemeral city will never be as advanced or sophisticated as a permanent city. But the interesting question is when we talk about the tribes or the nation, are they bound to the same constraints? Can we actually create a nation or a tribe that has that 'nationness' feature in a digitally permanent way, with some instantiation at the physical level? Or is it also something that requires constant and permanent physicality? I think the Zuzalu experiment was quite interesting at the cultural level because it started by gathering communities that through the internet had identified themselves as having similar values and approximate culture. But by bringing them physically together, even for just two months, that initial cultural affinity was increasingly built. A new culture emerged, the Zuzalu culture if you want to call it that, which crystallized this affinity to the point that it actually pivoted to the degree of kinship that perhaps wasn't there when it was just a culturally aligned digital affinity. So in my view, what's powerful about Zuzalu and these pop-up cities is not necessarily the pop-up city aspect, but the possibility for digitally aligned, culturally aligned communities to build culture through geographical proximity for things they cannot do digitally - you cannot do the cold plunge digitally, but that's also part of a culture. So do you feel like what you just said about these convenings needing to be permanent also applies to the tribe or nationness aspect of things?
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 think there is a trade-off. It's annoying that people have to travel all over the world to instantiate themselves and build culture geographically. At the same time, if we are only location-based, we're missing out on all the people in the world that could be part of the same cultural entity or nation because they are not in the same place. So we also want to ensure there is capacity for discovering and connecting with people from the other side of the world who happen to be culturally aligned and could be associated into the same community.
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.
Just to pick on that with the nomadism, I think there is some sort of bias in these communities that it attracts mainly digital nomads with tech-adjacent backgrounds, which is a specific kind of community that tends not to have many instantiations in specific places because people travel. So there's a need for gathering spaces around the world. But then there's another way to think about network societies in a bottom-up way, which tries to build a network infrastructure for place-based communities that are value-aligned. For instance, the bioregional movement has place-based instantiations around the world of people coordinating around the same goals of integrating natural and human systems. They're building culture around this, but they're scattered around the world and so far lack the scaffolding to really coordinate at a global scale. So I wonder, is there a way to think about these questions...?
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.
I want to take the opportunity of you using this example to address the question of what you use the word 'vibes' and what we use the word 'keen.' Even within the Bitcoin community, interest in Bitcoin is often a representation of a particular cultural mindset, which creates kinship. But even in the Bitcoin community, people are interested for very different reasons. There are crypto-libertarian vibes, crypto-anarchist vibes, which are very different. And even more so in many other communities, whether blockchain or non-blockchain. So I think there is a fundamental question. For some reason, possibly because of the Network State book, when we talk about communities of kinship, we always use the example of the 'keto kosher' nation, which is interesting in its absurdity. Just because I'm keto doesn't mean I'll be culturally aligned with someone else who is keto just because of my food preferences. There's no guarantee of kinship. We kind of tackled it with Zuzalu, but there seems to be people thinking that an aligned community means people interested in the same topics who can speak the same language, versus an aligned community meaning people who have a cultural affinity, a common sense of identity, and are much more likely to develop direct or indirect kinship. You gave the example of saying that people at Zuzalu might not feel at ease at the Network School and vice versa. That's a good example of people obviously aligned on many layers in what they care about, but the vibes are not the same. So the tribe, which I think is more about the vibe than interest alignment, how do we actually build tribes? It's easy to say 'everyone interested in Bitcoin come to the embassy,' but hard to say 'everyone with this particular vibe come and meet.' How do we discover, if we cannot build them, how do we discover people who actually share those vibes so we can understand the extent to which they are part of the same tribe?
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.
Exactly. Within the network nation space, we have this important distinction we're trying to bring forward, which is the purpose of these communities that could become network nations. We distinguish between the internal purpose, which is literally we want to build community with people we feel aligned with at the kinship level, and that's the goal - ensuring this community is prospering, creating better trust, rituals, and so on. Then there is the external purpose, which is that the community also potentially has a political agenda that serves back the interest of ensuring the nation's prosperity. There's a distinction between internal and external purpose, which in some way go hand in hand. So when we define different flavors of how to identify the boundaries of a community, there is the mission-driven one, gathering around a particular telos, a particular mission or goal. Then we have the other definition, communities gathering because they have kinship, a sense of belonging, building a common identity. The telos is very easy to articulate, so it's easy to gather around. The kinship is almost impossible to articulate, so you just need to discover it. But they are interwoven, feeding into each other. In your perspective and experience with Zuzalu and many other communities, to what extent does the kinship element play a role more so, less so, or just as much as the telos? And perhaps an important question: because the telos is something that can be more easily articulated, does that have the consequence that the telos is always brought forward at the expense of kinship?
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.
Which is really not optimized for kinship.
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.
