Section 227 of the Foreign Relations Authorization Act (1992) established a scholarship for exceptional students from the former Soviet Union to pursue graduate degrees in the US. A year later, it was renamed the Edmund S. Muskie Fellowship.

That was the name on the program application that my mother filled out.

I didn’t know any of this growing up. I just knew my mom had been in America for 2 years studying when I was young, and that afterward, our world expanded. In 1999, we moved from an industrial town in the depths of Russian Siberia to London. I was six.

It was a before-and-after moment in my life. I came from a small town where very few people leave. At the time, I didn’t want to be one of them. While my grandma went to the embassy to get our visas, I remember sitting in my aunt’s kitchen praying that our application would get rejected. I was scared to leave the only world I knew. But I was also pragmatic, so I made a deal with God: if we did get our visas, at least let me learn English quickly when we moved.

This chain of events began years earlier with Senator Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island. As chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the late 80s/early 90s, Pell was interested in human capital. He saw that while the Soviet command economy had produced brilliant scientists and engineers, it had suppressed the functions required for a free society: public administration, market economics, and the rule of law. He understood the importance of training the next generation of leaders.

He and his team did the work to set up this fellowship, bringing promising young professionals to American graduate schools. The program was born of an optimistic, confident time in US foreign policy. They felt the US had something worth sharing, and that bringing international students into its institutions would be mutually beneficial. They would immerse students in Western culture and values, trusting that those ideas would spread.

They named it after Senator Pell’s old colleague Edmund Muskie, the son of a Polish immigrant tailor who had risen to become Secretary of State. The symbolism was deliberate, and the program worked. On the macro scale, it produced leaders like Mikheil Saakashvili, who led the peaceful Rose Revolution in Georgia.

My mother was twenty-three when she came across the Muskie fellowship. We were living in the far east of Russia, closer to Japan than to Moscow, and somehow the application found her. She was brilliant, and she saw the application for what it was: an opportunity. Accepted into the highly competitive program, she flew to New York to earn her degree. I stayed with my grandparents, too young to understand what an MBA was or why she needed to go so far away to get one.

In New York, she met an older American couple named Bart and Pat, who took a shine to her. They were curious about this intelligent young woman from a country they had been told to fear their entire lives. They took her in, showed her how to make it in the big city, became something like family. When the program finished, they worked hard to introduce her to potential job connections. Through them, she met a woman named Sally, who helped her secure an interview in London. She got the job, and a couple of months later, I was in my living room praying for a visa outcome.

We got the visas. And although my first prayer went unanswered, the second was granted: while I was still in Russia, Bart and Pat sent me a new Nintendo Game Boy with Pokémon Red. I remember sitting on our kitchen floor, spending hours entranced by the game and inadvertently learning English (I mostly picked it up from a mix of Pokémon and Friends).

A few months later, I moved to London. I grew up there, learned the language, went to school, and built an expansive life in a world that would have been unimaginable from that kitchen floor. Eventually, I too went to New York, studying and building my career there for over a decade. When I got the opportunity, I became a US citizen. Full circle for the son of a Muskie Fellow.

It is hard to see something personal in a piece of legislation. Policy is inherently abstract, drafted in terms of statecraft and budget lines. But downstream from those decisions, individual lives are meaningfully and permanently changed.

I’ve been grateful to my mother my whole life for being brilliant and driven enough to get us out. Recently, I’ve started feeling gratitude to the people upstream: the senator from Rhode Island who believed education could change a country, the staffers who drafted Section 227, the administrators who processed one more application from the far east of Russia. They couldn’t have foreseen the individual impact of the chain of events they set in motion. A bill becomes law. My mother gets accepted. Bart and Pat take her in. Sally makes a call. A young boy moves West. And here I am, twenty-five years later, tracing the story back to the source.

I think about that six-year-old on the kitchen floor a lot. He was so scared and had no idea what was coming. I wish I could tell him, don’t worry, you’re about to have the most wonderful adventure.

With love,

Timour

As Edge City approaches its second birthday, we find ourselves in the middle of an exciting transition.

The early days of Edge were about proving we could create something new: month-long popup villages where scientists, technologists, artists, and builders live and work side by side. Environments designed for health and serendipity, where new ideas for society can take root. Multi-generational communities where kids run around while their parents prototype the future.

We proved we could build that. Over the past two years, we’ve hosted gatherings for thousands of participants across four continents, welcoming builders and families from 100+ countries.

We’re now shifting our attention to what actually gets built inside these environments; the incubator side of society incubator. The experiments are working, the community is deepening, and increasingly, real things are emerging.

This letter shares what we’ve learned this year and where we’re headed.

What We Built in 2025

In February, we published the Edge City Roadmap: a six-stage vision for how popup villages can evolve into a global network of innovation hubs. Then we got to work building it.

Our 2025 gatherings:

• Edge City Austin (March 2–7): A six-day gathering of 300+ builders the week before SXSW, setting the stage for our year.

• Edge Expedition: South Africa (April 3–12): A ten-day intensive exploring Cape Town’s tech ecosystem. We visited township internet projects, AI-enabled schools, biotech labs, and university innovation hubs. We evaluated the region as a potential site for a future full popup village.

• Edge Esmeralda (May 24–June 21): Our second year in Healdsburg, California. 850 residents from 66 countries. 80+ kids. Four weeks of building and experimenting, with dozens of projects and startups coming out of it.

• Edge Expedition: Bhutan (September 14–21): We hiked to Tiger’s Nest Monastery, spent a night at Dodedra Monastery, and visited Gelephu Mindfulness City, a pioneering urban project building spiritual infrastructure before commercial infrastructure. We held an Ideas Exchange with government officials and began conversations about youth mentorship and a potential Consciousness x AI Lab, exploring how contemplative traditions might inform the development of artificial intelligence.

• Edge City Patagonia (October 18–November 15): Our first full popup village in South America. 600+ participants from 72 countries gathered in San Martín de los Andes, a lakeside town in the Argentine Andes. Eleven thematic residencies anchored the village, from Protocol Labs running d/acc experiments to the Ethereum Foundation building their Open Intents Framework program.

From Container to Catalyst

Thus far, Edge City has primarily been a container; a well-designed environment where good things emerge. Going forward, we are leaning more into being a catalyst: actively shaping, funding, and accelerating what emerges.

We see five general categories of projects that we’re helping to build.

Startups

Edge City has begun to serve as a launchpad for new ventures. Constellation offers a prime example: at Edge Esmeralda, this neurotech experiment evolved into a venture-backed startup, collecting neural data on-site while closing their lead investor and building their founding team.

Shawn Fanning (founder of Napster) and Andrew Frame (founder of Citizen) soft-launched their stealth startup Ami, using the village as a live testbed. Several Long Journey Residency participants left with funding commitments or pivotal introductions that shaped their trajectories.

We’re excited to continue to support the next generation of startups, and have recently made a hire that will accelerate these efforts (more info below).

Applied Research

We’re bridging academic theory and real-world application. Vasocomputation started as a living room talk at Esmeralda and sparked a multi-day consciousness track, leading to multiple grants and a six-month engineering trial, and recruiting several Edge participants.

Keoni Gandall built a DIY biotech lab from scratch and ran live DNA experiments on-site, culminating in CRISPR-edited bread. Ben James constructed a solar-powered GPU datacenter to support compute-intensive research. These experiments are running in live community environments, with real feedback loops and real stakes.‍

Field Building

We see nascent movements starting to build their early support bases at Edge. One example is the d/acc movement; we partnered with Vitalik Buterin and Nodes to launch SHIFT Grants and deployed $400k to builders working on privacy, information resilience, and decentralized infrastructure. We also hosted the d/acc Residency in Patagonia in partnership with Protocol Labs. Other examples of early fields represented well at Edge include: Plurality & Digital Democracy, Network Socities, Consciousness & NeuroTech, Regenerative Living.

These are early signs of Edge City’s role as a coordination engine for the ‘pre-institutional’ phase of new movements. By providing a physical base for these nascent ideologies, we help turn abstract philosophies into legible, funded, and collaborative roadmaps before the rest of the world know they exist.‍

New Towns and Cities

Edge Esmeralda is co-organized with Devon Zuegel and the Esmeralda Institute, a new permanent town project north of San Francisco. Our popup village serves as a living prototype, testing ways of living and working together before they get built in concrete.

In Bhutan, we began conversations about longer-term collaboration with Gelephu Mindfulness City. We see Edge City as the place where the “software” gets developed for the “hardware” of new cities: the culture, norms, and governance systems that make a place actually work.

Directly Supporting Young Builders

The Edge City Fellowship supports emerging builders (ages 18–25) with a full-ride to attend Edge City and spend a month surrounded by leading builders and thinkers.

This year’s cohort explored neuroscience, AI governance, and decentralized systems. Highlights include Brian using AI to solve an ”unsolvable” math problem and Maxwell hacking the system to enable locals to remotely calibrate their hearing aids - all while closing a multimillion-dollar grant from NVIDIA.

Inflection Grants provided $2,000 micro-grants to early-stage builders, from a high schooler designing drug-delivery microrobots to a founder building mobile birthing clinics in rural India. We believe in funding people unusually early, when a small push can change a trajectory.

‍

“What makes Edge special is its capacity for experimentation. You are free to try unusual things, think in new ways, and find your tribe.”

“Edge was a great opportunity to get deep, focused work done — but also a chance to try new things, meet interesting people, and more deeply understand myself.”

Brian Kelleher, Founder Microdoc, applied AI & Systems Builder

Edge City Fellow, Patagonia 2025 Cohort

What We Learned in 2025

If 2024 proved that popup villages were possible, 2025 taught us that they are a powerful new form of social infrastructure for accelerating progress and the velocity of ideas.

1. The village compresses the build loop (Ideation -> Creation -> Iteration).

In a typical environment, the cycle from ideation to creation to feedback takes weeks. You schedule a call, send a deck, wait for responses. In the village, that loop collapses to days. Because we share meals, saunas, and living spaces, the barrier to passing ideas back and forth drops to zero.

The “preamble” disappears, and serendipity ensues. You sketch something at breakfast, build an MVP by the next day, and demo it at the Sunday Demo Days. The village is an engine for velocity.

2. Community becomes the first validator.

Usually, new ideas wait for permission (a grant, a VC check, university approval) before they are considered real. In the village, the community acts as the validator.

Projects such as Constellation and the DIY bio-lab didn’t wait for external approval. They launched because the immediate community provided the support, funding, testing ground, and moral encouragement to start. A high-agency community can replace the early-stage validation role that institutions used to play.

3. Residencies: Decentralizing the “Scenius.”

By empowering residency leads to anchor their own thematic tracks, we moved from being a hosted event to a true platform for co-creation. These leads brought specialized knowledge and creative energy that the core team never could have envisioned on our own. This shift turned participants into stakeholders with real skin in the game, creating a deeper sense of communal ownership.

We are incredibly grateful to the leads who took on this challenge; their leadership is what made the village feel like a living ecosystem rather than a programmed conference.

4. Small towns near nature make great hosts.

We keep finding that towns with natural beauty and seasonal rhythms are ideal for popup villages. San Martín worked because it had hospitality infrastructure, but it was in its quieter season. The venues were eager, the town was receptive, and there was capacity without overcrowding.

The pattern holds: places built for visitors, surrounded by mountains or water or forest, tend to welcome what we’re doing.‍

5. The intensity is the point.

Edge City is not a vacation. It’s an environment designed to stretch you.

The density of ideas, people, and possibilities can feel like a lot, and we’re realizing that that’s an important part of the experience. You choose how deeply you engage: some people come for a week, focus on their work, and meet a few people in the evenings. Others spend every waking hour in sessions, conversations, and late-night whiteboard sessions. Both are valid.

But the underlying premise is that challenge produces better work than comfort. The places that generate genuinely new thinking—certain labs, institutes, companies—do so because they demand something of the people who choose to be there. We’re learning to lean into that.

6. Large institutions are noticing

Governments and large-scale institutions are starting to pay attention. We’ve had serious conversations with city planners, economic development offices, and national governments, from Latin America to South Asia.

What started as a fringe experiment is beginning to look like a model worth studying. The question we’re now being asked isn’t “what is this?” but “how do we do something like this here?”

7. Serendipity keeps being off-the-charts, and we don’t fully understand why.

One of the most consistent patterns at Edge is people meeting exactly the person they needed. A founder searching for a specific technical co-founder runs into them at breakfast. A project that’s been stalled for months suddenly accelerates because of a conversation that happened by chance in the sauna. This keeps happening at a rate that feels statistically improbable.

We have some theories: the shared calendar, the AI-connection tools, the curation, the duration, the shared living spaces, and the fact that people are in exploratory mode rather than transactional mode. But we don’t fully understand it yet. It’s something we’re paying close attention to.

2026 and Beyond

Edge Esmeralda 2026 is confirmed for May 30 – June 27 in Healdsburg, CA. Applications are open now, and early-bird pricing ends January 15th, 2026.

Beyond California, our global roadmap is taking shape. We are currently scouting for Edge City India in Q4, and we are actively planning to return to Bhutan to deepen the collaborations we started this year.

We’re refining the residency model, investing in ecosystem support, and exploring new locations. If you’re building something that might benefit from a month in a popup village, we want to hear from you.

We’re also excited to announce a team update: to support this shift toward being an active player in how we accelerate builders, we’ve brought on Katherine Jones to focus on ecosystem building: tracking what emerges from our gatherings, connecting projects to resources, and helping innovations find their way into the world.

More announcements in the new year!

Why This Matters

Big things start small. When we look back at the movements that defined eras, they started quietly, in small rooms, with high-agency people who realized that the current way of doing things was no longer working.

We believe we are living through a similar transition. The institutions and norms we inherited were designed for a prior world. We need new environments to incubate the culture and systems of the future.

Two years in, Edge City is still small. But we’re starting to see the outlines of something larger. We’ve seen people receive funding because of who they met at dinner. We’ve seen companies start in residency living rooms. We’ve seen researchers find collaborators, artists find audiences, and builders find courage.

As one participant put it: “Edge is where you go to meet people who might change your life forever.”

That’s what we’re building. Thank you for being part of it.

P.S. This year, our reach expanded beyond just the gatherings themselves; we crossed 10k followers on our X, entirely organically. We also started posting more on our Newsletter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Farcaster. Follow us to stay updated and share with friends!

The flight into Bhutan sets the stage for the unique experience that lies ahead. The plane flies past Everest and through Himalayan peaks before weaving into the small Paro valley, mountains so close you think the wings could brush them. It’s exhilarating; the kind of arrival that makes you pay attention. Bhutan insists you arrive with awareness.

This was my third trip to the country, and this time I brought 30 members of the Edge City community: founders, researchers, artists, and investors, from organizations like Ethereum, SpaceX, IDEO, Paypal, Optimism, and top VCs. We came to explore a national experiment in reimagining development: The Gelephu Mindfulness City (GMC), a project set into motion by the King, which aims to build a new city that combines frontier technology and growth with a bedrock of Buddhist principles.

By the end of the week, we had shared blessings with monks, hiked sacred trails, danced in the capital’s clubs, and hosted a 120-person innovation day with leading government officials and local founders. We left convinced: Bhutan is undertaking one of the world’s boldest and most interesting experiments in designing for a flourishing future.

A History of Alternate Paths

For those unfamiliar with Bhutan, it’s helpful to start with some context about the aspects that make it such a unique place.

In 1972, the fourth king declared that Gross National Happiness (GNH) is more important than GDP, and turned the GNH metric into a framework for policy. Instead of optimizing for growth alone, Bhutan measures the wellbeing of its citizens across nine domains, from education and health to cultural preservation and ecology. The measure is used to inform policy decisions at the highest levels of government.

Bhutan is also one of the few countries that have never been colonized, and it maintains a strict cap on the number of tourists allowed to enter, which has enabled it to preserve a unique cultural and aesthetic identity. When you’re there, you can feel it; all buildings, from farmhouses to new government offices, follow a distinctive architectural style, creating a beautiful visual unity throughout the country.

This commitment extends to its relationship with the natural world. Bhutan’s constitution mandates that at least 60% of the country remain forested forever. Today, it is one of only three carbon-negative countries on Earth.

Visitors are also often surprised to learn that Bhutan is the fourth-largest sovereign holder of Bitcoin in the world, amassing its collection through mining since 2019, using the country’s surplus hydropower. The country was also one of the first to implement a decentralized self-sovereign identity system built onchain, called BhutanNDI.

And perhaps most remarkably, Bhutan is the only country in modern history where a king voluntarily initiated democracy and abdicated, against the wishes of his people. Bhutan had been an absolute monarchy since 1907, and the country held its first elections in 2008.

These facts reveal a pattern: Bhutan has long pursued its own unique vision, interweaving a grounded wisdom and deep care for its people, alongside technological change.

That approach is now shaping an entirely new city.

Grounding in Wisdom

The early part of our week in Bhutan began with a deep dive into the country's spiritual wisdom.

On our first morning, we drove to a centuries-old temple where we received blessings from the monks, who chanted for our wellbeing. The blessings were organized by our local leader, Dorji Wangchuk, PhD (Dorji’s personal blog is great), who was once the Press Secretary to the king. He explained that these rituals are an essential part of any journey’s beginning. When they’re not chanting for us, he said, they pray for all sentient beings.

The next day, we hiked to Tiger’s Nest Monastery, which sits perched on a cliff, 3,000m above sea level. The sheer drop falls away beneath the monastery walls, and the thin mountain air turns the climb into a silent meditation. There, the head Lama welcomed us for a long-life ceremony in the holiest room. We learned about the Bhutanese concept of moelam: aspirational prayers or intentions voiced to shape reality. Unlike karma, which looks backward, moelam is forward-facing. Every moment is a chance to set a new trajectory.

Moelam is also a way to acknowledge the incredible coincidence of meeting anyone in this world; the trillions of things that had to go right for you to share an experience with any other being. Dorji says that he treats the people he sits next to on the plane with reverence, given how unlikely it is to meet them at all.

Later in the week, we stayed overnight at Dodedra Monastery, which sits a 2-hour hike above Thimphu, the capital of Bhutan. Near the end of our walk up the mountain, we met a group of monks setting up a volleyball net. They played with us until the rain started falling too hard to ignore, and we ran to a covering to share butter tea and biscuits.

Later that evening, we received blessings in the temples and stayed overnight in the monks’ quarters, getting a small taste of what it’s like to live a life dedicated to Dhamma. We learned that Buddhism has a long history of debate and active discourse, with monks and even local farmers engaging in discussion about the nature of reality and wisdom.

These experiences made it clear that Bhutan’s wisdom is a living, practical reality. It offers a foundation for the country’s future ambitions and sets up the central tension we saw all week: the challenge, and the promise, of combining centuries-old traditions with future-minded growth.

The Future Takes Shape: Gelephu

After grounding ourselves in the country’s spiritual heart, we took a day-trip to the site of the new Gelephu Mindfulness City, which will be situated in the south of the country. A 30-minute flight from Paro brings you to the edge of the Himalayas, where the mountains meet the flat tropical plains and the border of northern India.

Local officials met us and led us to a dozen official cars. We convoyed to the site of the new international airport, where bulldozers had broken ground earlier that year. When we arrived, planners unrolled maps for a 2,500 km² region of the entire Special Administrative Region, which will eventually host millions of people. As I understand it, we were among the first foreigners to have the opportunity to see the construction.

GMC was announced in 2023 by King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck as a response to a generational challenge. Many young Bhutanese leave to find work abroad due to a lack of job opportunities. The majority go to Australia, but there are diaspora communities around Asia, Europe, and the US. The ultimate goal of GMC is to create opportunities close to home by attracting global talent and investment, but on Bhutan’s terms. The special zone is deliberate: a reflection of the king’s desire not to alter the tradition and culture of Bhutan itself, but to still create an environment that attracts economic growth where foreigners can come to live and domicile their businesses, and hire local Bhutanese. GMC will operate as a Special Administrative Region with its own governance and legal systems, designed to be nimble and attractive to foreign investment.

The blueprint is unlike that of any other city. The first layer of infrastructure, aside from the airport, is ten sacred temples, so the city grows from a spiritual foundation. This will also serve as the first industry of the city, bringing tourists who want to learn and grow through spiritual teachings.

Every stage of development will be informed Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness framework. It is an attempt to build an economic engine rooted in wellbeing, not just output. The plans showed IT parks running on clean energy and world-class education hubs to reverse the brain drain. The founders in our group wondered if talent and capital would come fast enough. The consciousness researchers were fascinated by a model that puts spiritual infrastructure first. Everyone agreed it was a gamble that no other country is taking.

The renders and maps are beautiful and paint an exciting vision, but a nation’s future is ultimately written by its people. The part of our trip I was most excited about was spending time in conversation with the Bhutanese who will build, and live in, this future.

Ideas Exchange

On our last full day, we co-hosted an “Ideas Exchange” programming day in the capital, Thimphu. We created the event with the help of the GovTech Secretary’s office, who oversee all tech-related things for the government in Bhutan. The room held 120 people: our thirty, alongside ninety of Bhutan’s leaders and builders; entrepreneurs who had returned from abroad, government officials shaping new policies, investors, and students eager to build.

The afternoon was structured as a rapid exchange of ideas, starting with a series of short lightning talks. These included talks from locals, including Pema Wangchug from DHI InnoTech, who explained the way the country views innovation. DHI, or Druk Holding and Investments, is the nation’s sovereign investment arm, the commercial engine tasked with stewarding Bhutan’s economic future.

Our group also gave talks, sharing their learnings from building successful ventures around the world. They covered a broad spectrum. James Tunningley, a former diplomat, spoke on the principles of structuring innovation ecosystems; Devansh Mehta from the Ethereum Foundation discussed funding mechanisms; YC Sun from IDEO and Stanford explored design systems.

After an hour, we broke into roundtables. We held ten tables, each facilitated by a guide who would lead the discussions, and participants could self-select which table to join based on their interests.

I was hoping this would be where abstract ideas would meet with specific implementation needs. At the innovation ecosystems table, the conversation quickly flipped from “how can we emulate Singapore?” to “what could be developed in Bhutan that could only exist here?” Someone raised the possibility of a center for the study of where consciousness, Buddhism, and AI intersect. This could have legs, the group agreed; there are many people in the West thinking about these questions, but few have spent meaningful time in a Buddhist country. The questions shifted from “can Bhutan modernize?” to “what can Bhutan pioneer that nowhere else can?”

Later that night, we ended up at Grey Area, a club in Thimphu that my local friend had told me was going to have a great house DJ that night. The music was great, the crowd was energetic, and it was a perfect chance to meet the young adults of Bhutan and get to know their hopes and dreams for the future. Over drinks, a young woman told me she was organizing Bhutan Fashion Week and invited us all to attend. Her friend described studying in Canada and deciding to return, even though she had the option to stay. “It’s still home,” she said, “and I can work remotely. GMC is exciting; I want to live there one day.”

These conversations, both formal and informal, showed us that Bhutan is a place actively negotiating its future. As one young Bhutanese entrepreneur told me during the Exchange: “We trust our King, and we’re excited. We need the jobs. For us, there’s no other option; GMC has to work.”

The Middle Way

But for GMC to work, it will have to balance between preserving a centuries-old tradition and embracing the economic growth needed to build a brighter future. Like walking a thin path on a steep Himalayan ridge, this tension came up throughout the week: how do you solve a problem that seems to pull in two opposite directions?

The planners are hopeful that their approach will succeed. During our trip to Gelephu, one of them told us, “We’re not just building a smart city. We’re building a wise city.”

A smart city uses sensors to manage traffic and algorithms to optimize services, a model designed for efficiency. A wise city optimizes not just for efficiency, but for human flourishing. It asks not just what is most efficient, but what is most meaningful. It doesn’t just import solutions; it grows them from its own cultural soil.

You can see the experiment as an application of the Buddhist concept of the Middle Way: a path of wisdom that avoids extremes. One extreme would be to treat tradition as a fragile relic that must be protected from the modern world, effectively turning a country into a museum. The other extreme is to pursue growth at all costs, erasing culture for the sake of efficiency. The Middle Way seeks a synthesis. It asks if tradition can be the very foundation upon which sustainable growth is built.

For Edge City, seeing this philosophy in practice is inspiring. Our popup villages are temporary laboratories where we experiment with new systems for how we might live and build flourishing communities. Bhutan is doing this at a national, multigenerational scale. Learning about GMC, I found myself thinking, what is our equivalent of leading with wisdom?

Opportunities for Collaboration

I wanted to end the week with clear commitments of how Edge City can continue to collaborate in Bhutan. Out of the Ideas Exchange and our time on the ground, a few clear opportunities emerged:

• Physical presence in Gelephu. We’re exploring a workspace where Edge City members and Bhutanese entrepreneurs can collaborate year-round. Not just another coworking space, but a hub for building together.

• Youth mentorship. This Autumn, a large group of youth will head down to Gelephu, and we have started to sign up Edge City members to serve as mentors.

• Consciousness x AI Lab. Several participants want to prototype AI tools aligned with Buddhist values, from Dzongkha language models to meditation apps backed by neuroscience.

• Builder exchange. Regular programs to bring Bhutanese founders into Edge City villages, and to send our residents to Bhutan to contribute on the ground.

These are still early sketches, but they are the beginning of a relationship, and a reminder that experiments in human flourishing work best when they are shared.

Thanks so much for reading,

Timour

We’re continuing our collaboration with Bhutan as GMC develops. If you’re interested in contributing to our initiatives, joining our mentorship program, or exploring how consciousness and technology can evolve together, please follow along on our newsletter, X, or Instagram.

Next Edge City Gathering: Patagonia, October 18 - November 15, 2025

Special thanks to our partners at Abroad.io, the GovTech team, the GMC team, and especially the people of Bhutan who shared their country and vision with such generosity.

Appendix:

Participants’ Quotes

“Edge has a way of pulling together the exact kind of people the world needs right now: equal parts hearts and smarts. No posturing, no status” - Serj Hunt

“I want to thank every one of you guys for an incredible experience this past week. Seeing Bhutan was extremely special, but even more special to me was getting to know all of you exceptional people.” - Nick White, Celestia

“My brain is spinning from all the mental models and ideas I’ve downloaded in the week. Both from the other participants and also the programming” - Devansh, Ethereum Foundation

“I learned that edge is where you go to meet people who might change your life forever, in the best possible way. [...] Bhutan and its people are now cemented into my heart forever. i still need some time to process everything i learned and experienced. from meeting with locals and exchanging ideas, to visiting the future site of gelephu mindfulness city, to long discussions about vajrayana buddhism, karma, dharma and the bhutanese concept of moelam, there remains so much to explore that i’m certain i will be back… This trip and the people in it impacted me so much that I’m thinking of rearranging my plans to join Edge in Patagonia, too.” - Tinyrainboot

“Edge Bhutan took me by surprise, I went in with the expectation of eco-retreat meets tech-egotism and was instead greeted by heart-orientated people, deep conversations about human flourishing and spirituality balanced by responsiblity, and a shared sense of pragmatic dreaming towards the future of bhutan, it’s people, and environment. This trip was a highlight of my year!” YC Sun, IDEO, Stanford

Our Itinerary

• Day 1: Arrival in Paro, Rinpung Dzong visit, welcome dinner.

• Day 2: Temple blessings; fireside on Gross National Happiness with Dasho Karma Tshiteem.

• Day 3: Hike to Tiger’s Nest Monastery, long-life ceremony, introduction to moelam.

• Day 4: Flight to Gelephu, site tour of GMC, late-night group debates.

• Day 5: Hike to Dodedra Monastery, volleyball with monks, shared evening meal.

• Day 6: Dawn longevity ceremony, silent descent from monastery, reflections with Dr. Dorji Wangchuk.

• Day 7: Ideas Exchange with 120 Bhutanese and international participants; closing night at Grey Area club.

I’m flying home from the Network State Conference in Singapore, and I want to share my reflections while they’re still fresh. If you want to watch my talk, you can do so here.

TLDR

The network state movement is moving beyond a niche and feels increasingly real. Projects are doing substantial work in the world with genuine citizenship bases and momentum, and there is a growing set of investors and sovereigns paying attention.

The event drew 3,500 people, and the auditorium remained full for the entire 10-hour program, a rarity at conferences these days. The programming was multidisciplinary and of high quality, and the event itself was very well-organized. Huge props to Balaji, Jackson, and the rest of the NS team, and I’m looking forward to next year.

Quick context on network states (/ network societies / network cities)

Put simply, a network state is an online community that materializes in the physical world with the goal of achieving meaningful collective action. The idea is that groups of like-minded people distributed globally can organize themselves into something resembling a nation—providing services, governance, and infrastructure for their members across multiple physical locations.

My organization, Edge City, is building something that could resemble a network state in the future, although I often use ‘network city’ or ‘network society’ as interchangeable terms to describe what we’re building because we’re less focused on the more state-like functions.

Why does this matter now? If this works, it offers an alternative to the growing dysfunction in many traditional nation-states and a way for people to opt into communities that align with their values. At Edge, we view this as an opportunity to experiment with new society-level infrastructure, such as governance mechanisms, new education and economic systems, and ways of living meaningful lives in flourishing communities.

It’s clear that we need new institutions and cultures to face the challenges and opportunities of our time. I don’t think they will come from traditional thinktanks or accelerators; instead they’ll be incubated by groups of high-agency people who take time away from the mainstream to experiment, and then merge their learnings back into society. That’s a large part of our motivation for starting Edge City.

The Event Itself

The conference was remarkably well-attended and sustained that attendance throughout the day. The massive hall at Marina Bay Sands stayed packed from 8:30am until 5pm. This stands in stark contrast to many recent crypto conferences where sponsors get speaking slots and address empty rooms.

I think this reflects a growing curiosity about the topic. The event had the frontier energy of Ethereum conferences a few years back, when people were locked in and excited to learn what others were building.

I gave the second talk of the day, which I was grateful for, as it allowed me to spend the rest of the time in conversations with speakers and attendees. In my conversations with people at the event, it seems that they consider network states as the next big thing. Many are curious how to join a project; others want to know if they can invest; others are just curious about what it all means. The audience skewed crypto-adjacent but came from diverse places and sectors. For many, this was their first network state-related gathering.

The Speakers

The speaker lineup was both diverse and high-caliber, representing the full stack of what you’d need to enact network society ideas:

• Builders of early network society projects included Infinita, Zuitzerland, Ipe City, Oz City, Arc, and Edge City. These are the people materializing cloud communities into physical form.

• Adjacent thought leaders like Noah Smith, Bruno Macaes, Michel Bauwens, and Tomas Pueyo brought intellectual depth and cross-pollination from other domains.

• Major crypto projects and companies were well-represented: Vitalik, BitMEX, Dan Romero from Farcaster, Sreeram Kannan from EigenLayer, along with representatives from Circle and Zcash. This showed the natural affinity between crypto networks, which are already experimenting with decentralized governance and digital citizenship, and the network state concept.

• Major VCs participated, though many talks were remote or pre-recorded (with the exception of Olaf from Polychain, which I enjoyed a lot). This makes sense given travel logistics, but I hope for more in-person presence next year.

• Sovereigns from Singapore, El Salvador, and UAE sent representatives. I anticipate this category growing as more countries engage with international networks. I wouldn’t be surprised to see representatives from countries like Kazakhstan, Bhutan, or Argentina by next year.

It was particularly cool to see people like Amjad from Replit on stage. I’m a big fan of Replit (both as a user and a partner; they supported our work in Edge Esmeralda), and having top-tier founders there signaled that this movement extends well beyond crypto circles.

The Content & Conversations

The conference used mostly 5-minute lightning talks, running consecutively with brief breaks. This created dynamism and energy. When I rushed to cut my slides in half a few nights before (I’d thought I had more time), it forced me to focus on the most interesting and important aspects of Edge City. I noticed the same discipline in other speakers.

In the speaker lounge and dinners, conversations centered on practical applications and the broader theory. People were trading notes on what actually works, what doesn’t, and what they’re trying next.

Around midday, I noticed economist and blogger Noah Smith walk into the speaker’s lounge. I had just read his piece “Network State, or Network of States,” where he proposes updating the network state thesis into a modern Hanseatic League: a network of semi-autonomous cities that sit alongside existing countries, providing mutual benefits to their hosts while maintaining deep cooperation with each other. His vision addresses some of the core tensions in Balaji’s original concept, particularly around national defense and public goods. I told him I’m a fan of his thinking and that I see a future where Edge City could help spawn something like this. We’ll see what comes of that potential collaboration.

In general, it was energizing to meet people in person whose work I’ve been reading and following for some time (Noah Smith, Tomas Pueyo, Bruno Macaes). These are authors and internet intellectuals who bring historical and geopolitical perspectives to what could otherwise be purely technical or ideological conversations. Their presence elevated the discourse beyond just “how do we build this?” to “what are we actually building toward, and what can history teach us?”

I should say that there are other folks on the lineup with whom I would disagree in many matters of political and social worldviews, but we still had meaningful connections and interesting discussions. I enjoy containers like that because they’re rare in my day-to-day life, and I think the continued plurality of perspectives in the space is a good thing.

Permanent vs. Transient

One theme that emerged in conversations with organizers: there’s a clear emphasis on permanent nodes rather than temporary gatherings. The focus is shifting toward where projects will be set up permanently.

I’ve always thought of popups as a necessary intermediate step that will bootstrap the kinship and affinity that network societies need, and it’s encouraging that many projects are now starting by gathering people to build energy around their locations. That said, many projects are already in talks with their forever-locations, or at least the first permanent nodes in their networks.

At Edge City, we’re actively working with partners to identify permanent locations that we can create long-term partnerships with, and the popup model lets us test, iterate, and build community before committing to a place.

Movement Dynamics

These gatherings matter because they create a sense of collective momentum and act as attention beacons for what’s happening in the space.

Several people asked whether there are competitive dynamics between projects, e.g., between Edge City and other popup communities, or Balaji’s Network School in Malaysia. My honest answer is that while there’s some light competition, I think that’s healthy and pushes us to create better experiences. There are significant differences in our approaches, and I encouraged everyone to try multiple communities to find the vibe they prefer.

Events like this conference help everyone by increasing top-of-funnel attention. I appreciate Balaji and the Network School team for being thoughtful about inviting other projects; they clearly care about pushing this movement forward across the board.

Final Thoughts

This is early, but it’s real, and it’s moving from theory to execution. The question has shifted from “is this possible?” to “how do we do this well?”

I’m curious to see how the next year unfolds, and what next year’s conference will look like as more projects mature and more unexpected actors enter the space.

In the meantime, if you want to see what it’s all about, come to Edge City Patagonia (Oct 18-Nov 15) 🇦🇷 ☀️

Thank you for reading,

Timour

When Audrey was young, doctors found a hole between the lower chambers of her heart. They gave her a 50% chance of surviving each night until a future surgery. Every evening, she recalls, she felt like she was flipping a coin to determine if she’d wake up. To soothe the existential stress, she began recording her thoughts each day; first on tape recorders and floppy disks, then bulletin boards and the early internet. She called this habit “publish, then perish,” a play on “publish or perish”. If she didn’t wake up, at least her ideas would survive.

This origin is key to Audrey’s philosophy. Today, she's known as Taiwan’s former Digital Minister and a leading advocate of digital democracy, but she remains an open-source civic hacker at (beating) heart. Her early experiences shaped her belief that ideas should be freely shared and continuously improved. Transparency, openness, and radical collaboration ensured her thoughts survived; now, she argues, they’re necessary to help democracy survive.

Last month, I spoke with Audrey at Edge Esmeralda 2025, a popup village in Northern California. We discussed digital democracy, her path from hacker to government minister, and the popup city movement. You can hear the full conversation here, or read the summary below.

Hacking the government: GovZero and the Sunflower Movement

In open-source software, if you want to improve a program, you can 'fork' it: copy the code and build a better version. In 2012, a group of programmers in Taiwan asked a simple question: What if we could do the same for government? At the time, official websites were opaque; budgets were buried in unreadable files, and processes were unclear. So they started g0v (pronounced 'Gov Zero'), a movement to build citizen-run, transparent alternatives for government information.

Their central idea was simple and playful. You could take the URL of any official government website, replace the 'o' in .gov with a zero, and land on a citizen-built, open-source alternative. It was powerful, transforming passive frustration into active civic engagement.

This approach became critically important during Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement in 2014. When the government attempted to push through a controversial trade agreement with China behind closed doors, half a million Taiwanese citizens protested, with students occupying parliament for over three weeks. The movement was peaceful but unprecedented in scale.

Audrey and the g0v collective set up tools to livestream the occupation and transcribe every discussion in real time. Every evening, Audrey helped participants synthesize the day's conversations, distilling diverse voices into clear, actionable proposals. She explained:

“Every day, we did sense-making and read to the plenary exactly what was agreed and what remained to be discussed. After three weeks of peaceful occupation, we produced probably the only very coherent proposal from an Occupy movement, which the speaker of parliament then said, ‘This is a better set of ideas. Let's just adopt it.’”

This radical openness transformed a chaotic protest into coherent policy proposals that the Taiwanese government officially adopted. Audrey's work was so impactful that the administration, recognizing the power of civic participation, invited her to join the government. She accepted, eventually becoming Taiwan's first Digital Minister and effectively bridging civic hacker culture with official government policy.

The philosophy of Plurality

Joining the government presented a new challenge. Hacking for transparency is one thing, addressing political polarization is another. Audrey needed a framework for turning the constant, messy disagreements of a democracy into something productive. That work led to a philosophy called Plurality.

As Vitalik Buterin summarizes:

“Plurality is a social philosophy that recognizes and fosters the flourishing of and cooperation between a diversity of sociocultural groups and systems.”

The core insight is that societal conflicts can be harnessed productively. Differences in opinion are not inherently bad, they are just exagerrated by platforms that prioritize ‘engagement through enragement’. Audrey likens polarization to untapped energy:

“Plurality is the idea that societal conflicts and social differences are like fire on the ground. Before combustion engines, we could only put fire out. But if you have a good combustion engine, you drill down and harness the energy from conflict.”

Plurality transforms differences into cooperative strength using digital tools like Pol.is, a tool allowing participants to express opinions without descending into hostility. Pol.is clusters citizens' opinions visually, surfacing consensus beneath superficial disagreements.

Audrey described how Pol.is reshaped Taiwan’s COVID-19 vaccine rollout:

“We visualized vaccine preferences openly. People saw clearly what each region and age bracket preferred. It turned competitive, polarizing energy into co-creation. It was like my soccer team versus your soccer team, but we all love the same sport.”

To embody Plurality, Audrey herself publicly took four different vaccines, a playful, concrete act demonstrating unity through diversity.

Why Plurality matters right now

This philosophy matters now because technology and democracy are at odds. As Audrey and Glen Weyl write in their book, Plurality, we're walking a tightrope between AI-enabled authoritarianism on one side and algorithmically-driven polarization and enragement on the other.

Technology, which once promised greater freedom and connection, increasingly fuels division, misinformation, and centralized control, while democracy is struggling to adapt. Audrey argues that we urgently need to upgrade our democracy—like open-source software—through continuous experimentation, feedback, and collaboration.

She often frames this challenge in software terms, urging us to think about how we can "fork" our democratic systems or submit "pull requests" to upgrade their core functions.

Plurality caught me and many others because it is the most coherent set of ideas that I’ve seen to address problems caused by technology, such as increased polarization, while acknowledging that tech has a role to play in the solution. Beyond just ideas, it is also a set of practices and tools for turning polarization and conflict into productive, collaborative energy.

But is this just a hopeful idea from a relatively homogenous island nation, or can it actually scale? The 2024 gubernatorial race in Tokyo offers a compelling example for the latter.

AI Anno and broad listening

Last year, a 33-year-old AI engineer named Takahiro Anno entered the Tokyo gubernatorial race just one month before voting began, directly inspired by Audrey and Glen’s book. Lacking party support or name recognition, Anno launched a unique campaign focused on ‘broadlistening’ instead of ‘broadcasting’, and leveraging radical transparency through AI-powered public engagement.

Anno used “Talk to the City,” an AI-driven tool capturing citizens’ perspectives. He opened his entire policy platform via GitHub and created an AI-driven “VTuber” avatar named “AI Anno,” livestreaming 24/7 and answering thousands of citizen questions.

Audrey emphasized the impact of Anno’s approach:

“He was probably the only candidate running explicitly on ‘broad listening.’ He crowdsourced his entire platform. His policies were ranked independently as the best, even better than the winner's.”

Anno received 154,000 votes (2.3%), the highest ever for a candidate under 40 with no political backing. After the election, Governor Yuriko Koike invited Anno to advise Tokyo’s GovTech initiatives, embedding his approach into official city governance. Digital democracy rapidly reshaped Tokyo’s political culture.

These ideas are gaining traction globally, with other experiments underway in Bowling Green, Kentuck, and California. Edge City, I hope, can also be fertile ground for these types of experiments.

Plurality at Edge City

During our conversation at Edge Esmeralda, Audrey emphasized that popup villages and network societies are uniquely positioned to experiment with democratic innovation. Unlike established institutions constrained by legacy processes, temporary communities at society’s edges can quickly test, iterate, and refine new ideas.

Audrey described it directly:

“You are the research lab for this. Each Edge community is one potential fork of society. If you fork with the intention to merge, it can merge back into mainstream governance, potentially upgrading democracy everywhere.”

This is a large part of why I’m excited about building Edge City, and I want the community to be a path for Plurality ideas to be tested and spread. As one example, we’ve been using a collective intelligence tool called Harmonica to do our own version of broadlistening, and get insight into varied community opinions on topics like shared values and guidelines, or how we should approach incorporating kids more closely into the community building that we’re doing. I’ll share more details on our learnings as we continue to run experiments.

More broadly, I hope that our villages can serve as working demonstrations that it’s possible to create new types of gatherings with people who share a wide variety of perspectives.

The counter-narrative

During the 2020 pandemic, authoritarian states argued that their top-down model was superior for managing a crisis. They pointed to the messiness of democratic debate as a fatal weakness. Yet Taiwan, a vibrant democracy of 24 million people, recorded just seven COVID-19 deaths that year.

This wasn't achieved with draconian lockdowns, but with the tools discussed in this essay: rapid, open collaboration between citizens and government. Instead of censorship, Taiwan used humor, or "meme engineering", to combat misinformation. Instead of centralized control, g0v volunteers built public maps showing mask availability in real-time. The country’s defense against the virus was decentralized, fast, and driven by mutual trust.

This success is Audrey’s origin story written on a national scale. A society facing an existential threat survived not by closing down, but by opening up. The philosophy of "publish, then perish"—sharing information freely so that ideas outlive threats—became a national immune response.

At a time when democracy’s effectiveness is constantly challenged, Taiwan's story offers the clearest possible counter-narrative: collaboration is more resilient than control.

With love,

Timour

Thank you, Venkatesh Rao, Vitalik Buterin, Toby Shorin, Justin Mares, and Ryan Pripstein for giving their thoughts on earlier versions of this essay.

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Tech is moving fast; society isn’t. The systems that shape our time—institutions, norms, governance structures—were made for a prior world. They are not able to meet the opportunities and challenges of the current moment. There are profound technological breakthroughs on the horizon, and their implications need to be worked out.

What if we saw this moment as an opportunity to build something better, leveraging new advancements to prototype new ways of living and connecting in global communities?‍

This is the challenge we’re embracing at Edge City. Over the past year, we’ve hosted monthlong popup villages where thousands of people—builders, thinkers, creatives, and more—lived together to test new ways of organizing communities and collaborating on emerging ideas. Across frontier tech, health & longevity, education systems, governance, and even consciousness research, it is a place to learn about and create what comes next.

We've never had more leverage and agency to shape our world, but this comes with responsibility; new systems need to be tried and tested. That's our aim in building what we think of as a society incubator. By embedding innovation in a living, evolving community—where a variety of perspectives and disciplines interact—we unlock breakthroughs that wouldn’t emerge in traditional accelerators or think tanks. And we can better guide them to enable human flourishing.

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Below is our roadmap to build a global ‘network city’: a collection of temporary and permanent ‘villages’ designed as laboratories for social, economic, and technological innovation. The result will be an interconnected global network of communities that demonstrate a better way to live and flourish.

As we go, we'll iterate and open source everything we learn. Our goal isn't just to build one community—it's to spark a movement of thousands of experiments on how humans can live and thrive together, creating blueprints for more resilient and flourishing societies worldwide.

Our roadmap

1. Build fun ‘popup villages’ where people thrive

We start by making monthlong communities designed for collaboration and well-being. Start your day with mountain treks and cold plunges. Move into deep work and learning alongside accomplished builders. End with farm-fresh dinners and sessions that push ideas forward. We gather awesome people by creating environments where you can live your best life and do your best work.

Four key principles shape our approach: default healthy, multidisciplinary, build & co-creation focused, and multigenerational. We believe the best ideas emerge when people feel great physically, when people from different fields live alongside one another, when everyone is focused on building vs. passive learning, and when family life is fully integrated. The result is an experience that isn't just productive but deeply fulfilling. (Read more about our approach and what we learned in our first year.)

The temporary nature of these events creates freedom to experiment outside of the box, mixed with a shared sense of urgency and ambition to build and ship before the end of the month. Imagine what will be incubated in a space where people flourish, in an environment where nurturing your mind and body is the default state.

The connections created in these villages don’t fade when the month ends. They grow into a global network ->

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2. Build a global network of people shaping the future

The heart of Edge City is its people. We bring together curious, kind, high-agency individuals who want to build a brighter future. You share meaningful experiences—living together and collaborating on big ideas—which build trust and create lasting bonds. You’ll leave with friends and collaborators who will push your thinking and expand your work.

Strong connections create the conditions for progress, and the network spreads that progress across the world. The Edge City ecosystem has already incubated and spread a variety of projects in our first year, from privacy-preserving identity systems (Cursive and ZuPass) to community currencies (∈dges) to new tech movements in Argentina (Crecimiento).

As the ecosystem grows, we’ll learn more about what works. Then, we’ll turn those lessons into playbooks and infrastructure that make it easy for others to launch their own popup city experiments ->

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3. Build the stack for tomorrow’s communities and cities

Edge City is pioneering a new approach to building tech-enabled communities. As we solve challenges, we’ll create open-source tools and playbooks that help people organize in more fluid, high-trust ways. We’ll share the norms, practices, and technologies that we develop, which will emerge not from theory but from the real needs of a thriving community.

We believe technology should enhance in-person connection, not replace it. From governance frameworks to coordination tools, we are developing systems that amplify trust, increase serendipity, and enable more intentional ways of living. These tools are incubated in our temporary environments but will also be used by communities in existing towns and cities who are looking to evolve.

Why open-source everything we learn? There are two key benefits. First, it makes it easier for others to do the same, which grows the movement, and we’ll learn from experiments and breakthroughs we could never have predicted. We’ve drawn inspiration from our time building Zuzalu and know that the best ideas emerge from the bottom up. Second, the further these tools spread, the more we accelerate the transition toward better ways of living beyond just our villages.

By making this stack available to everyone, we are ensuring that Edge City-style communities can grow and evolve without starting from scratch. Some will stay temporary, but others will become permanent over time. ->

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4. Build permanent anchors, including new towns

While popup villages provide the freedom and urgency to experiment, Edge City will also create opportunities to ground those learnings in more permanent settings. These may look like hubs in existing cities or like entirely new towns. The hubs are not replacements for temporary villages, but spaces where the ideas and practices tested in popups can be refined and implemented over time.

One example is Esmeralda, a new walkable town project located 90 minutes north of San Francisco. Founder Devon Zuegel is building Esmeralda to blend the intimacy of a pedestrian-friendly community with the Bay Area’s culture of creativity and invention. This summer, we are once again hosting Edge Esmeralda—a month-long popup village designed to showcase what living in this innovative town will be like. This gathering provides an opportunity for Esmeralda to demonstrate its vision while allowing Edge City to further explore how the tools and culture that we incubate can be applied in a more permanent context.‍

A single village can test new ideas. A permanent hub can refine them. But when these communities are linked into a broader network, their impact multiplies—transforming isolated experiments into a global movement. ->

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5. Link the nodes of the network city to build a global innovation engine

Ideas evolve best when they encounter new environments and constraints. Each Edge City village serves as a testing ground, but real breakthroughs emerge when projects travel and adapt, taking on new forms across the different locations.

A governance model first explored in Esmeralda may take on a new form in Bhutan, and then be refined in Argentina. A decentralized identity system piloted at Edge City Lanna could expand its applications in a permanent hub. A coordination system designed in Thailand may only reach its full potential when tested in a permanent hub.

How will we create the links within the network city? People who visit multiple create natural bridges between locations. A shared archive of experiments could track what’s been tested, what needs refinement, and what could be built next. Having 24/7 portals set up between nodes will allow for serendipitous connections. Most projects begin in one village and continue in the next, strengthening through iteration.

As these villages connect and evolve, they begin to model a future where better ways of living are possible ->

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6. Demonstrate a better way of living. (Yes, seriously.)

Eventually, existing cities will adopt the best ideas from our network. Local governments will integrate our community technologies and governance models. Public and private institutions will adopt our methods. New kinds of globally connected communities will emerge, not bound to a single place but existing across physical and digital spaces, linked by shared ideas and practices.

There will be a shift in culture, one that recognizes people’s agency to shape their communities into spaces where they flourish. Cities, towns, and even online spaces don’t have to be dictated by outdated systems; they can evolve through the choices and actions of the people who live in them. Our goal isn’t to design a single utopia but to empower individuals and groups with the tools to create the kinds of places they want to live in.‍

If we do this right, Edge City-style living won’t be an eccentric subculture; it’ll shape how mainstream society evolves. That’s our endgame: a future where the best aspects of these experiments become normal, and the next generation of humans grows up in healthier, freer, and more imaginative communities by default.

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Get Involved

• ‍Join a popup: Come live with us for a month. Bring your ideas, friends, and family.

• Build with us: Incubate a project, contribute to one, or simply give feedback to accelerate progress.

• Partner or Donate: We’re a 501(c)(3). If you believe in advancing technology, science, and society through experimentation, we could use your support.

With love,
The Edge City team ☀️

Paradigm shifts often start at the edges. Throughout history, people have carved out space outside the mainstream to exchange ideas, explore new ways of thinking, and reimagine what’s possible. From Enlightenment salons to Auroville, these hubs of exploration have shaped the world in ways that lasted far beyond them.

Today, popup cities continue that lineage. For a month at a time, 1,000 people come together to prototype new ways of organizing society, exploring everything from governance experiments to decentralized technologies to alternative ways of building community. They aren’t just spaces to talk about new ideas; they’re places to live them.

(If you’re thinking, what on earth is a popup city, I wrote about my experience at Zuzalu and why I’m so excited about this format here: Zone of Scenius.)

The excitement around this is growing. Last November at DevCon, I cohosted a session on this movement with Janine (my cofounder at Edge City), Nicole, and DC. The room was packed, and a dozen folks stayed afterward to discuss starting their own popups. It’s exciting to see the momentum.

I opened the session with a 10-minute talk situating popup cities in a broader context—a lineage of human creativity in rethinking how society works—by sharing six of my favorite historical examples. The tldr is that humans have always had amazing creativity and agency in imagining better worlds, and we need to continue that tradition.

Right now feels like a particularly important time for this kind of experimentation. Tech is moving fast; society isn’t. The coming wave of change will force us to rethink core questions, like:

• Should there be a new social contract in a world with strong AI? What should it look like?

• How do we ensure new technologies enhance human flourishing rather than undermine it?

• How do we design governance systems agile enough to keep up with exponential change?

There are many others. Where will answers come from? Some will come from the usual places: universities, think tanks, the public sector, and corporations. But those institutions work within existing structures. They refine ideas, but they don’t create new worlds. Popup cities let us do that.

History serves as inspiration. You can watch the talk (10 mins), or for those of us who still prefer to read, below is a summary of the examples I shared.

Historical Examples

Enlightenment Salons (17th–18th Century, France)

• Founded: 17th–18th century, primarily in Paris.

• Notable Participants: Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot; hosted by influential women like Madame Geoffrin and Madame de Staël.

• Description: Social gatherings where intellectuals discussed philosophy, politics, and science in informal but structured environments.

• Ideas/Technology: Sparked the development of revolutionary ideas like liberalism, democratic governance, and the concept of universal human rights.

Imagine a firelit room in 18th-century Paris, the home of Madame Geoffrin. The city’s brightest minds, a mix of philosophers, writers, and statesmen, are gathered in heated discussion. They drink wine, argue about Rousseau’s latest essay, and debate whether monarchy can survive the century.

These salons weren’t universities or formal institutions, yet they shaped history. They provided a rare space for intellectuals to push the boundaries of accepted thought at a time when questioning authority could be dangerous. It was in these small gatherings that ideas like democracy and human rights were incubated and refined. It’s easy to forget how radical these concepts once were because they’ve been woven so deeply into modern life. But none of them were inevitable; they started as conversations.

To me, this is a reminder that big shifts often start in small rooms. Today, instead of books and pamphlets, new ideas spread through blogs and group chats. But the principle remains the same: we need spaces to debate and refine the core ideas that will shape the future.

The Chautauqua Movement (1874–Present, U.S.)

• Founded: 1874, Chautauqua, New York, by Lewis Miller and John Heyl Vincent.

• Notable Participants: Speakers included Mark Twain, Susan B. Anthony, and William Jennings Bryan.

• Description: Initially a lakeside retreat, it evolved into a national movement blending education, arts, and recreation. Local communities hosted traveling Chautauqua events that brought lectures, music, and discussions to rural areas.

• Ideas/Technology: Pioneered participatory education and broadened access to cultural and intellectual resources.

In 1874, a small group gathered on the shores of Chautauqua Lake for what was supposed to be a one-time summer retreat. Soon, “Chautauquas” spread across the country, creating traveling circuits that brought education, music, and debate to towns across the US. These events were temporary public learning festivals, giving people across the country access to intellectual and cultural opportunities they couldn’t find elsewhere. Notable figures like Mark Twain and Susan B. Anthony spoke at these gatherings.

What’s interesting about Chautauqua is how it scaled; what began as a single event in upstate New York turned into a decentralized network of gatherings that persisted for decades. This is a clear parallel to what is happening with popup cities, which started as temporary gatherings and are now going global. Our collaborator on Edge Esmeralda, Devon Zuegel, has written beautifully about her experience of Chautauqua as ‘an idea embedded in a place.’

Black Mountain College (1933–1957, U.S.)

• Founded: By John Andrew Rice in North Carolina as a radical alternative to traditional education.

• Notable Participants: Buckminster Fuller, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Willem de Kooning.

• Description: A progressive school that blurred the lines between living, learning, and creating.

• Ideas/Technology: Produced groundbreaking work in architecture, art, and music. Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome, for instance, became an icon of sustainable design, while Cage’s experimental compositions redefined music.

Before Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome became an icon of sustainable design, it was an experiment at Black Mountain College. Before John Cage redefined music, he was testing his ideas in its studios. This small, unconventional school in North Carolina became a breeding ground for ideas that would shape art, architecture, and beyond.

Black Mountain College rejected the hierarchy of traditional universities. There were no deans, no rigid departments—just a belief that learning happened best when people worked side by side. Its multidisciplinary approach fostered an environment where ideas collided and evolved into something entirely new. It was an attempt to dissolve boundaries between disciplines, and between education and life. This aspect is definitely something we’re inspired by at Edge City.

Although Black Mountain College was a permanent institution, for many people, their experience was temporary (similar for Auroville and SFI below); they could come for a summer or a semester to go deep on a particular idea. It is inspiring to us to think about how, over time, edge cities can become permanent hubs as well.

Auroville (1968–Present, India)

• Founded: 1968 by Mirra Alfassa ("The Mother") with inspiration from Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy.

• Description: An international township in southern India designed as a living experiment in human unity, sustainable living, and decentralized governance.

• Ideas/Technology: Pioneered eco-village concepts, renewable energy systems, and new governance frameworks for global communities.

In 1968, thousands of people gathered in a barren stretch of land in southern India for an unusual ceremony. They came from all over the world, carrying handfuls of soil from their home countries, which they placed into a marble urn at the center of a newly founded settlement: Auroville. It was meant to be a place beyond borders, beyond money, beyond religion; a living experiment in human unity.

What makes Auroville remarkable is that it still exists more than 50 years later. Utopian projects tend to collapse under their own weight, but Auroville continues to evolve, testing new models for living that inspire many other experiments around the world. They have thousands of residents from dozens of countries who work on regenerative agriculture, renewable energy, and alternative governance systems. It’s one of the most ambitious attempts to create a self-sustaining, borderless community.

I think Auroville is a great reminder of how radical experiments, while challenging traditional norms, can inspire lasting change, both locally and globally. We had folks from Auroville come to Edge Esmeralda, and it was exciting to see how enthusiastic they were about the concept of popup cities. From our conversations, it seems like their experience with Auroville made them particularly keen on the idea of creating spaces for real-world experimentation with new ways of living.

Santa Fe Institute (1984–Present, U.S.)

• Founded: 1984 by scientists, many of whom had worked on the Manhattan Project.

• Description: A research institute dedicated to understanding complex systems through interdisciplinary collaboration.

• Ideas/Technology: Advanced complexity science with applications in economics, biology, climate science, and social systems.

Why do some civilizations collapse while others endure? Why do financial markets behave like ecosystems? Why do weather patterns resemble the spread of disease? These questions are fascinating, yet academia isn’t designed to tackle them directly. The most interesting problems don’t fit neatly into physics, biology, or economics; they live in the gaps between them. So in 1984, George Cowan gathered a group of scientists in Santa Fe to create something new: a research institute dedicated to multidisciplinary study. Something they would eventually call complexity science.

This radical approach worked. Over the next few decades, Santa Fe researchers pioneered new ways of thinking about networks, chaos theory, and adaptation. Their work reshaped everything from financial modeling to epidemiology, proving that the biggest insights come from seeing the world as an interconnected system.

What inspires me most about the Santa Fe Institute isn’t just that they were multidisciplinary; it’s the intentionality with which they approached it. They didn’t just hope for breakthroughs; they thought incredibly hard about how to maximize the likelihood that they would happen. Through structured workshops and deliberate cross-disciplinary collaboration, they made interdisciplinarity real. We’re taking that same principle at Edge City but expanding it beyond intellectual fields into technology, science, and culture. If SFI is about interdisciplinary thinking, we want to cultivate interdisciplinary doing. It’s a tall order, and I have humility in that. We have a lot to learn, but we’re excited about the challenge.

For people curious to learn more about SFI, I highly recommend the book Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos, which was recently suggested to me by Ryan Pripstein, who thoughtfully intuited that there are a lot of lessons for us in the story of the institute.

Burning Man (1986–Present, U.S.)

• Founded: 1986 by Larry Harvey and Jerry James; now held annually in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert.

• Description: A temporary city built on principles of radical self-expression, self-reliance, and participation, combining art, community, and experimental living.

• Ideas/Technology: Fostered participatory culture, large-scale art installations, and experimental living systems.

If you take the term popup city literally, Burning Man is probably the first thing that comes to mind. For most of the year, Black Rock City is nothing but desert. Then, for a brief moment, it transforms into a self-organized city of art, radical self-expression, and community. What started in 1986 as a small gathering on a San Francisco beach—just a few friends burning an effigy—grew into an annual festival, then into a global movement.

I’ve had many meaningful experiences at Burning Man, and I’m often struck by how a short event can leave such a lasting imprint on culture. I recommend it to anyone who can swing it and feels called to go—I’m always in awe at people’s creativity when I’m there. “I can’t believe someone thought to do that and then went for it” is a common refrain.

That said, there’s an important distinction between what happens at Burning Man and what we’re trying to build with Edge City. The festival excels at fostering creativity and self-expression, but it’s designed to be a full escape from the default world. We’re interested in something different: how the energy, experimentation, and community of a temporary gathering can prototype and actually incubate real-world institutions, technology, and culture. Burning Man proves that short-lived environments can be transformative. The question we’re asking is: how do we carry that energy forward into the way we live, work, and build long-term?

Other Examples

Many other experiments would work as examples, some of which I may explore in future essays. Below are a few quick honorable mentions.

The Esalen Institute in California became a nerve center for the countercultural movements of the 1960s and 70s, pioneering breakthroughs in psychology, human potential, and alternative ways of living. The Bauhaus School redefined art and design by embedding experimentation into daily life, merging craftsmanship with modern technology in ways that still shape architecture and design today.

Looking further back, Michel Bauwens shared an example with me that I find fascinating: after the fall of the Roman Empire, medieval monasteries became places where monks preserved knowledge and ideas about how society could function, laying the intellectual foundations for Europe’s revival.

Nowadays, many others are experimenting in this space, each with their own approach. Feytopia, Cabin, Network School, and the various Zuzalu-inspired villages are part of a broader wave of decentralized, experimental communities. Some focus on governance and technology, others on creativity and culture, but all share a common impulse: to explore new models of living and working together. It feels like we are entering a golden age of societal experiments—one where people are no longer waiting for change to come from existing institutions but are building new structures themselves.

Why does this matter?

“The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” - David Graeber

I love this quote from Graeber because it’s so obvious and so easy to forget. We inherit institutions and norms, but we’re not stuck with them. Every generation has its challenges, but it also has its opportunities—moments where we get to ask new questions about how to live well and then create the systems around us to reflect those answers. And when things feel uncertain, that’s usually a sign that something new is emerging.

That’s what excites me about popup cities. They aren’t about forcing a vision of the future; they’re about creating environments where people flourish and then seeing what emerges from that. Think about what can be incubated in communities where people are energized, flourishing, and engaged in experimentation together.

We have a long long way to go. A lot of the experimentation focus I mentioned above is aspirational; it takes time to figure out how to organize and grow any novel idea. I don’t know what will emerge out of all this, but that’s what makes it fun. If you want to be part of it, come hang out at Edge City ☀️

Follow me here and Edge City here.

My first “cold” plunge happened in the Adriatic Sea the morning I arrived at Zuzalu. The clear blue water was more lukewarm than cold, to be fair, since it was already well into April, but joining the morning ritual was a refreshing welcome, relaxing some of the apprehension that had followed me to Montenegro. 

As I floated with a group of strangers (including one well-known podcast host who was leading the session), I was surprised at how quickly my sense of unfamiliarity began to thaw. We joked around and discussed our plans for the day. Would I be checking out the zero-knowledge workshop that afternoon? Maybe, although I had to find time to plan the AI weekend that I was helping to organize. Ah, cool, they said; they were really looking forward to that one. 

A small group of us ended up spending the morning together, flowing effortlessly from the ocean to breakfast (broccoli and lentils inspired by Bryan Johnson), to an impromptu talk on the pier (about the aging process of cells), to a fun encounter with a group excitedly building AI that could track thousands of data inputs from the local river (one of the last wild rivers in Europe). I was struck by how open and interesting everyone I met was. It was somewhat intimidating but mostly exciting. 

This mini-adventure was a microcosm of the variety of experiences that a well-designed popup village allows for. The first few days verged on overwhelming, but once I got into the flow of the experience, I began to decorate my time by exploring my interests and letting serendipity guide me.

Popup villages 

How did we get there? 

Around this time last year, 200 people decided to move in together for two months in a small seaside resort in Montenegro. During that time, another 800 visitors joined them, many of whom intended to come for just a week but prolonged their stays. The crowd was eclectic—a mix of technologists, scientists, academics, engineers, cultural figures, and entrepreneurs.  

This gathering, Zuzalu, was the slightly chaotic yet much-beloved beginning to what is now shaping up to be a new movement. ‘Popup villages’ are attracting large groups of people to live together in co-created communities for multiple months at a time and are serving as a way to bootstrap global networked communities. 

The Zuzalu event expanded the adjacent possible, demonstrating that this type of gathering was viable and directly spawning a large number of spinoffs, each organized by someone who was at the first event and each with their own areas of focus: Edge City (what I’m building with Janine), Vitalia (focused on longevity), Mu (focused on hackers), and many others, all pushing the format in various ways. If you wanted to, you could now spend the rest of 2024 solely living in a popup village, going from one to the other.  

There is plenty of historical precedent for similar things, from the Chautauqua Movement in the late 1800s to various attempts at utopian communities during the cultural renaissance of the 1960s. Now, these ideas have new life, initially reignited by nomad-adjacent folks who are seeking community, although it is quickly growing beyond that initial demographic.

Why are people drawn to these popup villages, and why do they talk about the experiences as transformational? I want to explore these questions through my own experience to see what this new format means for communities and technologies going forward. 

What actually is a popup village? 

It’s worth briefly defining the concept. These events, with their longer durations, multidisciplinary focus, and emergent programming, are distinct from typical gatherings.

Unlike industry conferences, which can gather similar numbers of people but last only a few days, popup villages last at least a month, allowing deeper connections and more meaningful collaborations. They cover many topics, provide ample time and space for in-depth projects and experiments, and foster a holistic experience that integrates many parts of life.

Unlike hacker houses or residencies, which can last similar amounts of time but involve much smaller groups, popup villages accommodate several hundred people. This creates a full community experience where participants live, cook, and embark on adventures together, allowing them to express many facets of their personalities.

Popup villages seem to hit a sweet spot in size and length. Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Zuzalu, put it well: “A two-day conference is a break from your life, but a two-month-long event is your life.” If you’re living somewhere for over a month, you’ll put in the effort needed to get comfortable and integrate into the experience. 

Express yourself

An important aspect of popup villages is that the immersive environment and variety of experiences allow you to express multiple sides of your personality and bring your whole self to the container. At Zuzalu, I was able to learn from experts in many fields, have in-depth discussions, DJ with Grimes, be playful with friends, cook group meals, do intense workouts, practice handstands, meditate in the morning, and enjoy quiet time reading in my room.

This ability to fully express myself and be surrounded by others doing the same created a continuous stream of meaningful experiences and a quick sense of affinity with those around me. Definitely not a typical conference. 

If we make up a metric for how authentic and holistic we are in an environment (i.e., how many parts of ourselves can be expressed), like a ‘Holistic Expression Index,’ then I think it would have a very tight correlation with the Depth of Connection that we feel with other humans in those environments. 

My personal corresponding chart might look something like this, and I would put well-designed popup villages directly in the top right. 

Accelerators of kinship

So what happens when several hundred people live together in an environment that fosters exploration, learning, self-expression, and meaningful connections? The result is deep community ties and a lot of new ideas. 

Popup villages act as accelerators of kinship and affinity. Strong communities are built on shared experiences, which create a sense of a shared past and a vision for a shared future. These bonds are further reinforced through active collaboration. You might meet someone at a talk, discuss ideas during a walk the next day, and then team up for a hackathon the following week.

This is important because communities are crucial for human flourishing. In a great essay, Brink Lindsey argues that strong personal relationships and community ties are essential not just for individual well-being but for societal sustainability and equity. He emphasizes that building and maintaining strong relationships requires shared activities and responsibilities. 

"To build and maintain strong relationships, people need to do things together — even if the thing in question is just hanging out. People need to share responsibilities and engage in joint projects. They need to depend on each other."

These communities will go beyond just the time and place where they are instantiated. Popup villages are incubators for future networked communities, which have the capacity to become significant entities like network cities or network societies (more on that below). 

Toby Shorin, the creator of Other Internet, had a great line in a chat we had a few weeks ago:

“Pop-up cities are an angle on the big question of our time: what are social forms that can overcome the technological disintermediation of our social lives that we’ve been living with and create new robust, lasting social ties?” 

I think that’s a great take. And, importantly, the connections transcend just the time and place where the popups happen. Now, just a year into this movement, there is a global network of people who have a shared experience that bonded them and have gone back to their respective homes to spread what they’ve learned and incubated. Unlike the 'back to the land' movements of the 1960s, where people decided to remove themselves from society completely, we are all digitally connected, so we don't need to separate ourselves from the world. 

Novel ideas and technology incubated in popup villages can spread digitally and physically, expanding their impact.

From zone of genius to zone of scenius — incubating new technologies

Beyond accelerating kinship, popup villages offer a unique environment for incubating new ideas and technologies.

When a large number of smart, high-agency people gather, each bringing their area of expertise, the environment can foster the merging of their individual zones of genius into a collective form—something like a ‘zone of scenius.’ This concept, inspired by Brian Eno’s term 'scenius,' refers to the collective genius that emerges from a community, combining their unique collective abilities and areas of interest. Zones of scenius thrive in environments with a rapid collision of ideas and strong community network effects between participants.

It’s no surprise that people who work in frontier fields like AI, BioTech, and Crypto are initially the ones most drawn to these experiments and form the early majority of attendees. Folks in these industries are building at the edges of possibility and they need a community to collaborate with. Early ideas—especially the unconventional or seemingly bad ones—require a supportive space to develop.

Zac Williamson, the co-founder and CEO of Aztec, put it well in a chat we had: 

“All great ideas start out as terrible ideas, and you need people who are willing to engage with you and help you iterate and refine your ideas to figure out if it is actually just bad or decent…. I see what Zuzalu and Edge City are doing as creating scenes that can act as a crucible for innovation in emergent industries.” 

Popup villages provide that supportive space, allowing participants to explore unusual side projects and find collaborators. The multidisciplinary nature of these gatherings also facilitates cross-field learning and innovation. These scenius environments can enable the critical ‘zero to one’ moments for groundbreaking ideas, and the strong ties formed in these environments can sustain builders through the inevitable ‘winters’ that come to all innovative industries. 

Another advantage is that villages often take place around the world outside of traditional urban hubs. This setting allows builders to step outside their usual bubbles, exposing them to diverse influences and novel experiences. It’s an environment that fosters new ideas and enables participants to meet people they wouldn’t encounter in their usual routines.

What is being built? 

Each village has a different focus and comparative advantage, although I think the current batch all lend themselves well to projects related to community, identity, and real-world applications of frontier tech. To help paint the picture, I’ll share a couple of examples from the countless projects that were built. 

ZuPass is an identity system based on zero-knowledge proofs that was built during Zuzalu and has been used at many events since, including the large conference DevConnect and our event Edge City Denver. It was built by the 0xPARC team, who wanted to showcase real-world use-cases of the cryptographic primitive Proof Carrying Data. It allows people to check in to events and participate in governance votes by proving cryptographically that they are members of the community without revealing anything about their identity. The implications for digital democracy, privacy, and social interactions are endless. We are huge fans of these ideas at Edge City and will continue to create spaces for the growing ZuPass ecosystem to be developed further. 

Daimo was built as a direct response to a problem that DC and Nalin noticed at Zuzalu — no one was using crypto to split bills between each other. They quickly built a prototype of an app that allows you to do everything that Venmo or PayPal can do, but onchain using the stablecoin USDC, with free transactions. They developed it in the months between Zuzualu Montenegro in May and ZuConnect (the second major event we did in Istanbul) in October. The product experience feels like magic to anyone who is used to dealing with crypto transactions directly. 

In just twelve months since Zuzalu started, hundreds of other companies/hackathon projects/funds/network cities have been conceptualized/built/scaled at these events. The regular nature of the villages, with several months in between, also offers multiple opportunities to iterate on concepts, showcasing progress between gatherings.  

Popup villages tend to be designed for emergence, so it’s hard to say what will be built beforehand, but that’s what makes them so exciting. People have an idea, see an opportunity or identify a potential issue, and build something to address it. 

But technologists are not the only ones who are building at the edges. 

Social Technology 

For me, the important aspect of these gatherings is not just the software or hardware technology that gets incubated. Rather, these villages are perfect places to incubate new ‘social technology’—the norms, practices, and rituals of being in community with others. They are the perfect testing ground for new ideas about how people can live together and interact with one another. 

Popup villages open a new design space for what it takes to create and govern meaningfully sized communities, that is, communities sized Dunbar’s Number or greater. The long length means stakes are high, and it’s necessary to figure out how to get along, but they are not forever, so new ideas can be tried without the red tape of current cities or the inertia caused by the fear of permanence. It’s ambitious but manageable. 

It’s exciting that we will have dozens more experiments soon. As I’ve written before, it is important that we run many concurrent bottoms-up experiments in governance, community-building, and economic models. Humanity’s history is full of creativity in these areas that modernity seems to have forgotten. 

Matt Prewitt, the president of RadicalxChange, wrote about the importance of this in an excellent essay: 

“The drivers of social coherence, such as culture, governance, morality, law, shared stories, and shared values, might as well be considered “technologies.” … Without progress in our techniques of deepening and expanding community, all other technical progress will evolve without reason or direction, eventually snagging on internal and external contradictions.”

I agree with Matt. As technology accelerates, it is perhaps just as important to innovate on how we interact together as humans. Popup villages provide a unique opportunity to test and refine these ideas in real-world settings, paving the way for more cohesive, resilient, and adaptive communities in the face of rapid technological change. To do this well, the number and scope of villages need to grow to include many that aren’t just filled with mostly scientists and tech folks but feature intersectional communities that bring together people from all aspects of life (that is an aspiration of ours at Edge City, although it will take time). 

These ideas become even more interesting when we consider the formation of new types of networks that transcend national boundaries. 

Example: New networks

I happened to be at Zuzalu during the ‘Coordi-nations’ week, which was a great example of the potential of these types of gatherings in cultivating new social technology. 

It was organized by Primavera de Filippi and Jessy Kate Shingler, both Harvard academics. They brought together a small group of leading researchers and builders from diverse backgrounds to incubate the idea of “Coordi-nations,” a new type of organizational structure that aims to foster cooperation at both local and global scales through shared values and participatory decision-making.

Many similar ideas to network states were discussed at length in Zuzalu and served as part of the initial inspiration for the event. I resonated particularly with the Coordi-nations emphases on mutualism and solidarity. Whatever form these networks take, the potential for global communities that transcend national boundaries is huge. These networks could eventually help tackle global issues that current institutions are currently struggling to manage due to coordination problems.

But they are extremely difficult to grow, so they need to start with a strong foundation of connection between the people building them, to allow them to weather the challenges ahead. They need to start with a group of people who actually care about each other, not just the broader vision.

This is why popup villages will serve as a critical IRL touchpoint to bootstrapping these novel types of networks by providing a context for the communities to bond. Over time, through meaningful shared experiences, people may feel a stronger kinship with these networks than with their traditional sources of identity, like their country of birth or residence. 

As Primavera and Jessy Kate wrote in their write-up of the workshop: 

“Coordi-nations are an emergent form of networked sovereignty. They rely on networked communities as an animating force for cooperation, collaboration, mutualism, and solidarity in a context of growing global interdependencies. The growth of networked communities may have significant implications for global governance, global trade and mobility.” 

Was a popup village necessary to further this idea? I think so. The format of Zuzalu offered several boons to the idea of coordi-nations and network societies more broadly: 

• Container: It gave space to the group of thinkers to incubate the ideas; 

• Feedback loop: It allowed them to present their concepts to the wider community, getting immediate thoughts and feedback; 

• Demonstration: Most importantly, Zuzalu was itself a proto-example of the very type of social technology innovation that is being discussed. Hence, it fed into the ideation and provided evidence and a potential path for how these ideas can actually be instantiated. 

This is a very intriguing area of research, and we are excited to host Primavera and her crew at our upcoming Edge City event, Edge Esmeralda, to further their investigation and build a framework to make it tangible. This is one example of many powerful ideas that benefit from environments like this which will get incubated in the future. I hope to write about others soon. 

Challenges and learnings

It’s important to be open about the challenges that these types of events bring and the lessons we’ve already learned. Different approaches will yield different lessons, and they’ll allow us all to iterate faster. 

We are fortunate to work in a space where everyone is building in public (we created an open-source ops playbook from Zuzalu for anyone curious!). I can already feel some light competition between the various spinoffs, but everyone is mostly friendly and excited to share what they’ve learned. 

Some of the challenges we’ve noticed: 

• Organizer burnout: it is hard to bring this many people together for this long. It takes an insane amount of work to do it well. 

• Short-term attendance: we’ve noticed that attendees are often tempted to just come for a weekend or a week, but then they do not get as much out of the experience. In fact, they can often have a bad time because they don’t fit into the natural flow of things. 

• Infra challenges: current infrastructure isn’t set up for this type of event yet. Finding the right spaces is difficult, and it’s difficult for people to carve out long chunks of their year to do something like this. 

• Community management: any gathering that brings together lots of people in one place can be difficult to manage. Conflicts are inevitable, and you have to be thoughtful to make it a safe and fun space for people.  

• Inclusivity vs. capacity and curation: there is a tension between inclusivity and respecting the space's boundaries. On the one hand, you want to be open and encourage everyone to come. On the other hand, events are, by definition, exclusive due to physical capacity constraints. 

  • It is also important to curate attendees thoughtfully to ensure a good environment for everyone. This isn’t an easy thing to solve, and it is an ongoing area of thought for everyone organizing these types of events. 

  • Our current thinking for solving this is to open-source all of our learnings and encourage others to do the same. If folks might not be a good fit for one event, they could be great for another. 

• Local Integration: These gatherings take place in various international locations. When bringing people from around the world to a new place, it's important to be very thoughtful about how to integrate with the local communities and to ensure that attendees are thoughtful as well. We’ve spent a lot of time forging deep relationships with local partners to try our best to do this. 

As we continue to refine and improve these gatherings, we’ll keep sharing what we learn. With each event, we get noticeably better and gain invaluable insights that help us create more cohesive communities. 

Looking forward

That initial plunge in the Adriatic led to a habit—I have likely done over fifty cold plunges since then, and most of them have been actually extremely bloody cold (it’s always pain; I'm not sure why I keep doing it 🙃). But what I remember most from that morning are the connections I made, which have remained warm. These lasting relationships are a testament to the bonds that can be formed in such immersive environments.

When people connect within a specific context like Zuzalu, it creates strong connections, not just between the people but also with the overall idea of Zuzalu. Now, when I meet people who were also there, we bond over our mutual affinity for that community, even if we didn’t meet there at the time. The web of connection grows, and I feel simultaneously closer to them and to the community that we’re both a part of.

These communities will intertwine with each other through people who belong to multiple of them. Zuzalu, Edge City, Vitalia, Mu, ZuGeorgia etc. are all interconnected through the people they share. They are starting to weave a growing decentralized tapestry of connections.

This interconnectedness will foster a growing zone of scenius, where the collective genius of the communities combines to drive creativity and progress.

If that’s interesting to you, feel free to reach out on Twitter and follow along with what we’re building at Edge City 🌞

Thank you, Chance, Arthaud, and Dan Hunt, for taking a read, Janine for a lot of ideas, Olga Kuri for most of the amazing art here, and to everyone involved in Zuzalu and the growing ecosystem for inspiring this movement.

We’ve made a lot of progress across the space, but I understand the skepticism. At a high level, though, there are two main things I try to communicate: 

1. When people say crypto lacks a use case, they usually mean that it appears to lack a use case for the typical Western consumer with disposable income. For those of us born elsewhere (I lived my early years in post-Soviet Siberia), we know inherently why it is so revolutionary and so necessary. Blockchains enable a system of governance and finance that is separate from centralized state structures, acting as a bulwark against potential misuse of power. Crypto’s existence is its main use case. 

2. Crypto is exciting because it offers a perfect testing ground and toolkit for experimenting with entirely new systems of economics and governance. In doing so, it opens up these fields to the powerful forces of evolutionary innovation, which will lead to much better systems in those fields. The sudden emergence of this real-world laboratory has also shifted old narratives, shaking up the confined snowglobe of our political and economic thinking and turning previously frozen topics into fresh areas of discussion. These fields are now practical instead of theoretical, allowing us to experiment and think outside of the sphere.  

We now have a brief window in time where new ideas and actual change seem feasible. And it’s good timing because we certainly need alternatives. 

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The water we swim in

Our collective political and socioeconomic thinking is stuck. There are plenty of interesting ideas, but they are relegated to endless debate in academia, never tested in the daylight of real incentives and irrational actors. This makes sense; novel ideas of these kinds are very expensive to test in the real world. The current system also perpetuates itself by creating an information environment where alternatives are not taken seriously. We are taught that history ended in the early 90s, and all important problems have been solved. It is clearer now than ever, amid a carnival of simultaneous crises, that this is not the case. 

Solutions to these crises will be multidisciplinary, and they will certainly require new systems of governance, coordination, and economics. We’re used to seeing attempts to change these things through mass protests and top-down revolutions, but these rarely achieve their goals, often replacing one form of inequity with another. 

Instead, we should focus on a decentralized ground-up approach: running countless concurrent experiments in governance, community-building, and economic models. These experiments could range from pilot programs within existing communities to entirely decentralized autonomous organizations. By adopting an iterative approach, we can learn from each trial, making real-time adjustments as needed. This methodology respects the complexities of societal change and offers a safer, more sustainable path toward improvement.

There are many sources of inspiration. New anthropological and archaeological research in books like The Dawn of Everything shows that the history of our species is full of diverse political and social structures and that humans 10,000 years ago were likely more engaged in the politics that ruled their lives compared to today’s average person. They outline clever and interesting frameworks, like indigenous North American societies that lived under centralized rule in winter months and reverted back to decentralized communities in other seasons. These may or may not be relevant to our coordination systems today, but they are important reminders that it is possible to be more creative. We have to continuously question the political water we swim in. 

It’s time to experiment

Crypto enables us to explore these ideas, and many others, by creating a versatile toolkit for societal experimentation. We can trial different systems of property rights, currency, power, and identity, designing systems with real incentives to see how people act and react. 

This is important because it suddenly allows us to tap into the strongest force of innovation: evolution. In Matt Ridley's books 'Genome' and 'How Innovation Works,' he explores two very different fields (nature and technology) but comes to the same conclusion: the most effective solutions arise from a process of continuous evolutionary trial and error. This is how complex life has evolved and how the best technological innovations are created. 

Crypto's new primitives—smart contracts, programmable money, NFTs, and others—bring this iterative, evolutionary mechanism to the realms of governance and economics. And because crypto is by default open-source and composable, every trial and error is transparent for everyone to see, allowing for an even faster collective learning process that supercharges the pace of innovation.

To summarize the key idea: crypto subjects the fields of governance and economics to the powerful forces of evolution. We can now experiment with social structures in the same way as we create new technology: ideate, launch MVPs, test, and iterate.

The result of this will be “something 100x better than any government or company in history”.  

You no longer need to run a country to form a new currency or create a new system of voting. Do it digitally in a DAO, or start a network state, or start your own decentralized social network governed by its users. This experimentation is happening across the entire space, from infrastructure to DeFi to consumer tech to DAOs. I’m excited about all of it, but I’m following these areas most closely: 

• Consumer crypto leverages the tools of the space to create compelling product experiences for users.

• Games and autonomous worlds allow us to create entirely new experimental worlds and economies.

• DAOs and online communities show us how large groups of strangers can coordinate and share resources.

• Cooperatives, localized currency experiments, and digiphysical goods are bringing blockchain into the IRL.

• Decentralized venture DAOs are perfect experimentation environments because they have relatively simple decisions with high stakes, allowing many different structures to be tried. 

These examples might seem relatively trivial compared to the grand rhetoric of societal change. But real sustainable change will have to come from the ground up. We will prove and test new ideas in increasingly higher-stakes environments, earning the right to challenge long-standing institutions and paradigms. 

Interestingly, and perhaps just as importantly, the novelty of the technology and the way that it influences these fields has led to a powerful shift in our perception of political ideas, both new and old. 

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Narrative shifts 

‘Web3’ has shifted discourse significantly. It is now common to hear tech bros talking about ideas like ‘shared ownership’ and ‘polycentric governance.’ Huge VC funds have been raised on the thesis that the people who create value in platforms should own those platforms and have part of the upside. This is called socialism the Ownership Economy, and it is a good idea. 

A couple of short generations ago, discussing this in the US would have you ostracized or put in jail. The Overton window has shifted; these topics are now common not only because web3 technology makes them more possible, but also because the arrival of new technology shakes everything up, giving old ideas new names and making them sexy. One of the most impactful things web3 has done is to make smart tech people interested in politics again. 

Nathan Schneider describes this ‘innovation amnesia’ and why it is healthy in an excellent post: 

The class of technology variously referred to as Web3 or crypto has been heralded as a democratizing force for economics and governance. To the extent such hype is justified, it is only partly due to the affordances of the technology itself. Perhaps more important is the amnesia it has induced, as an innovative paradigm whose novelty inclines people to neglect once-stable norms.

Big epochal shifts in technology create opportunities to question and redefine the systems that we live in. They unlock new capabilities, allowing us to question our prior-held assumptions. The last major technological shift, the introduction of the internet, led to interesting attempts to establish new norms like the Declaration of Independence (of Cyberspace). But structurally, little changed, and the existing system captured the web. Large shifts enable change but don’t guarantee it. 

Will this time be different? Maybe. Some reasons why it might:

1. We are much more aware of the crises we face. Climate, mental health, inequality, and many others are an ever-present part of mainstream discourse. When even Ray Dalio says that the system needs to change, you know there has been a major shift in public thinking. 

2. We’re living through multiple major technological accelerations, driven in part by AI, and the stakes are higher than ever. The magiclike power of the technology and the accompanying sense of awe and fear has created a mainstream understanding that we really need to get this transition right. Important questions like “how will we govern the AI models that run our societies?” are starting to be discussed.

3. Crypto is a subversive ground-up technology and industry, making it harder to capture. It has been explicitly political from the start, requiring earnest participants to understand the values of decentralization before coming on board. This was not the case with the web, where the politics were implicit, and people were not aware it could be coopted until it was too late. In crypto, big tech can’t centralize the data and monetize it as easily as the internet, yet. This provides a window to engineer new systems grounded in the values of the space.

However, as Schneider describes in his post, the possibility of positive change does not mean that it will happen. In fact, it seems that thus far, the space has not lived up to the promises described above at all. The scams, frauds, and unethical practices have painted it in a bad light. The only way to show that there is value here is by proving it; these are issues that our community needs to confront head-on. 

The only way to be sure of a better future is to create it.

Seize the juncture, shape the future

We stand at a unique juncture, a window of opportunity opened by technological acceleration and pressing global issues. Crypto has given us a fresh canvas for social and economic experimentation, but this window won't stay open indefinitely. 

As we've seen in history, complacency and inaction can quickly close the door to change. Just because crypto enables evolution, it doesn’t mean it’s inevitable. It's not just about adopting new technology but about mobilizing a broad swath of society to actively engage in the governance of our shared future. We have the tools; now, we need the collective will. Let's not squander this chance to reimagine and reshape our world.

Thank you, Ori Shimony and Arthaud for thoughts and feedback. For more, subscribe here or follow me on Twitter.

But it is important that we combine this vigor with a firm understanding of the current reality in our society. Technology is an incredible tool for solving problems, but it’s often developed in a vacuum that does not consider broader political and socioeconomic implications. To be effective, we need to know what the real problems are.

The binary views of ‘all tech is good vs. all tech is bad’ or ‘tech vs government’ are unproductive. We have to introduce much-needed subtlety to the conversation. Solutions will come through collaboration, and both sides need to realize that the other has something to offer.

In this piece, I’ll focus on the tech side of the debate (where I spend my time). Marc’s influence on our space is significant. His ideas permeate the ecosystem, setting the ideological tone and shaping the perspectives of the next generation of investors and founders. This is why it is critical to look at the nuances that are left out of this manifesto and of mainstream tech discourse in general.

Note: I realize that manifestos rarely deal in nuance; that’s not their aim. This is not a critique of the piece, but more of a personal exploration of why I was simultaneously fired up and slightly uncomfortable when reading it. I am always learning and updating my ideas, so please take them lightly and feel free to debate, as long as you do so thoughtfully.

On Markets

Markets are excellent at resource allocation. The efficiency with which they orchestrate billions of people working in tandem is beautiful. But markets are a mechanism, and no mechanism is perfect. They do not accurately measure the externality costs of production and consumption (costs to the environment, etc.), and they favor short-term reward consumerism over complex long-term human flourishing. Hayek and the Austrian School’s responses to this critique (that these issues can be solved through stronger private property systems) fall apart when considering the issues on a global scale, but that’s a post for another time.

We don’t need to dive deep into economics to see that there is a clear dichotomy:

• Markets have enabled the invention of modern wonders: computer chip fabrication machines, self-driving cars, and reusable space rockets (seriously, how?!).

• Markets have also contributed to the inventions of brain-deadening addictive media (avg. 3 hours of TV per day), body-destroying addictive food, and a race to turn as much fossil fuel into shareholder value as possible before it runs out or we all die.

My simple point (which should not be controversial, but it is) is that markets are good for many things, but there is potential for negative side effects. This topic deserves nuance but rarely gets it. When discussed in my tech circles, it’s always framed in the same unimaginative binary of ‘free markets’ vs. ‘central planning’. Yes, we know, central planning is bad and doesn’t work. Obviously. But this is a straw man and a lazy technique; by arguing against the obvious faults of centralized economic planning, it makes the proposed alternative of free markets seem self-evidently good and unassailable.

Yes, markets, when combined with capital and technological innovation, have led to magic-like inventions. But if we are actually going to use technology to solve big problems, we need to understand that there are also side effects.

The problem is that we’ve been raised (myself included) to believe that markets are the only way of understanding what problems there are to solve. If someone pays for my product, then I can get rich by meeting that consumer demand, and the problem goes away. But markets aren’t always good at signaling complex problems that require long-term thinking and mass coordination. Those are the things that we should be inspiring our young founders to focus on.

Problems we face

What’s an example of a sticky, complex problem that we face? For one, we live in a dual economic reality. In the US, both things are true:

Statement 1: It is a time of extreme economic abundance.

GDP has risen significantly, and although it is an imperfect measure of progress, it has been concurrent with a huge rise in living standards measured in consumerist terms. Most people in the global north have had their basic needs met for decades. Their 'infinite' consumer needs are being met with abandon.

Statement 2: It is a time of extreme economic stagnation for the majority of US Americans.

Don’t take this from me. Here are some direct quotes from an essay by Ray Dalio (hedge fund billionaire) who has a top team of researchers looking deeply at this. TLDR: he's very worried about the US.

• Important fact 1: "There has been little or no real income growth for most people for decades."

• Important fact 2: "Most people in the bottom 60% are poor, and increasingly they are stuck poor. 40% of all Americans would struggle to raise $400 in the event of an emergency.” (that’s 130 million people, in the wealthiest country in the world).

• Important fact 3: "Economic mobility in the US is one of the lowest levels for a developed country." (basically if you are rich in the US, you'll stay rich or get richer; if you are poor, you will most likely stay poor)

• Important fact 4: "The income gap is as high as ever, and the wealth gap is the highest since the late 1930s."

  

These come from Dalio's essay 'Why and How Capitalism Needs to Be Reformed' in the Harvard Law Review. I suggest you read it. When we have folks like Dalio writing pieces like this, we should at least consider that something isn't 100% right with the system.

If you don't read the full piece, at least consider his conclusion:

“Contrary to what populists of the left and populists of the right are saying, these unacceptable outcomes are not due to either a) evil rich people doing bad things to poor people or b) lazy poor people and bureaucratic inefficiencies, as much as they are due to how the capitalist system is now working.”

“While the pursuit of profit is usually an effective motivator and resource allocator for creating productivity and for providing those who are productive with buying power, it is now producing a self-reinforcing feedback loop that widens the income/wealth/opportunity gap to the point that capitalism and the American Dream are in jeopardy.”

I’ll repeat this because it is so important for both sides to understand:

These are unacceptable outcomes, and they are not because rich people are evil or poor people are lazy. They are structural elements of the system.

The counterargument to this, as the manifesto points out, is that at least there is equality of consumption as consumer goods get cheaper; it doesn’t matter how rich you are, everyone drinks the same Diet Coke, and everyone uses the same iPhone. That’s a genuinely interesting aspect of markets, actually. But I’d posit that there is much more to living a fulfilled flourishing life than using the same consumer items as Bezos.

Social mobility, the ability to access quality healthcare and education, the freedom to pursue passions without the looming shadow of financial ruin, the dignity that comes from meaningful work and community involvement, and the psychological well-being that arises from a sense of security and purpose — these are some of the building blocks of a fulfilled life that are increasingly out of reach for the economically disadvantaged.

To motivate this further: if you are not driven by the sheer inequity and unfairness of the information above, just think about how many more interesting things we’d have invented if people didn’t have to work two full-time jobs just to survive on a minimum wage that hasn’t risen since 2009, and could instead be doing creative fulfilling work.

To be clear, tech has an important role to play in the solution here. These big societal meta-problems are structural and pernicious. Contrary to what some people in government believe, public policy cannot solve these issues alone. New technology like AI and blockchain will help immensely (I will write about this in more detail in future). Solutions will have to be multidisciplinary, combining the talents of leading startup builders, policy-makers, and scientists. This is exciting and worth inspiring young founders to focus on. We need to stop incentivizing people to build incremental widgets and b2b SaaS tools, and start thinking about how to solve the above.

Economic issues aside, there is another important example that illustrates the problem with no-holds-barred progress-at-all-costs ideology.

Psychological Health

You’ve seen the statistics. Depression, anxiety, and suicide, all rising to never-before-seen levels. Unlike some critics, I do not think this is entirely due to social media, but we need to be honest with ourselves that technology has had a big role to play here.

This is a clear example of the problem with the maxim that defines the techno-optimist manifesto: “Technological progress is always good, and we need more”. Again, I mostly agree with this, but it is so obviously not 100% true, it discredits us when we say it.

There are clear cases of unintended consequences. Social media is a good example. By any measure, it is a tech success darling. Meta (fka Facebook) is roughly a trillion in market cap and has driven some sweet sweet value to shareholders. It is a generation-defining company. But it also has pretty clear causal links to a growing global mental health crisis.

Again, don’t take it from me. Sam Harris sums it up clearly:

"I think social media has been the technology that has deranged us ... We have effectively been enrolled in a psychological experiment to which no one gave consent ... It's just been terrible. I just think it's been bad for society in almost every respect."

Tristan Harris has also thought about this deeply (the Harrises have a monopoly on thoughtful critique in this field):

“This system (social media algorithms) is better at hijacking your instincts than you are at controlling them. You’d have to exert an enormous amount of energy to control whether these things are manipulating you all the time. And so we have to ask: How do we reform this attention economy and the mass hijacking of our mind?”

To fully break this down is beyond the scope of this essay. I personally have a complicated relationship with social media; it has brought me immeasurable joy through connections with friends, but it has definitely affected my mental health in subtle ways I find difficult to properly understand.

Why is this important? Because we are teaching the next generation of founders that all they have to worry about is building something that will get them rich, and that anything they do to make themselves money will have a positive impact on the world. This ideology fits neatly into the Silicon Valley narrative. It just has the one annoying characteristic of not being true.

The Bubble

Most of us who work in tech inhabit a bubble. It’s a very nice, comfortable bubble, where people are smart, driven, and passionate. We’re ‘changing the world’ and we’re stacking our paper. It’s pretty great.

Occasionally, we’ll peek outside of the bubble, and notice that people don’t like us very much. “Wtf?! We’re literally saving you ungrateful people, how could you dislike us?” we think. We are the engine of progress. They must just be jealous.

But whenever there is this kind of animosity, it's worth considering the reasons. One reason is that people perceive us to be detached from the real-world consequences of our technologies. When algorithms perpetuate systemic inequalities or when startups prioritize growth over ethical considerations, it leaves people skeptical of our intentions.

Another is the economic disparity: while we in the tech industry reap the rewards of high-paying jobs and transformative solutions, those outside this sphere may see their livelihoods disrupted or made obsolete by our innovations. Additionally, the communities directly impacted by our products—whether through mental health concerns or environmental effects—often feel that they don't have a say in the decisions we make.

By dismissing legitimate concerns, we're missing out on valuable perspectives that could actually make technology better and its impact more equitable.

Tech can (actually) save the world

But those who criticize tech also need to realize that this bubble is a crucible for human advancement. There is something very powerful and important about this industry. The ecosystem they decry has given rise to technologies that have saved lives, revolutionized industries, and broken down barriers to communication and knowledge.

I’m certain that tech is a large part of how we will solve big global issues like climate, global health, and global inequality.

I just hope that we can add nuance to the conversation and start to collaborate properly.

Final thoughts

Halfway through a recent trip to San Fransisco, I realized how much fun I was having. I love being around founders and investors who deeply understand technology. We share a context that allows us to instantly reach depth in discussion. It is fun and brings me joy.

But I was surprised by the points of view I heard when it came to questions of politics or societal change. All of the young entrepreneurs I spoke with talked about wanting to “change the world” or “have a positive impact”, but were largely unsure of what that meant. When discussions got more specific, their takes seemed to be mostly formed by an amalgamation of Joe Rogan podcasts and EA think pieces.

To repeat myself for the last time, it didn’t feel like a rounded, nuanced understanding of how the world works. I wouldn’t say I’m an expert, and I have plenty of reading to do, but it does feel like there’s something missing. Especially since these founders will likely be some of the most impactful people of our generation.

So to end, maybe I’ll offer my own reading list, just as Marc did. I’m not as well-read as him, and I love many of the authors he mentioned. Here are the ones I’d add, that I think folks in tech should read. Or just stay in touch with me, and I’ll summarize their thoughts in a nice, nuanced way in due time 🙂

Reading list:

Thomas Piketty

Kim Stanley Robinson

Noam Chomsky

David Graeber

Jaron Lanier

Yuval Noah Harari

Shoshana Zuboff

Tim O'Reilly

Niall Ferguson

Zeynep Tufekci

Note: this quick post was very US-centric; I will endeavor to explore these ideas in a more global context in the future.

This essay was originally published with Folklore, a community exploring the labyrinth of networked worlds.

If walls could talk

I have a vivid memory of a particular moment in 2019: it was a sunny spring day, and I had just picked up the keys to my new apartment in West Village, NYC. I ran up the stairs and stepped in. I remember feeling excited by the emptiness, about the memories that I’d create here. And then, as many people must do, I thought about the past.

While finalizing the lease, I had learned that the building was built in 1920. It was one year short of a century old. As I stood there, the potential of the empty rooms moved me with a sweet melancholy – I wondered about the people who had lived here in those years. What were they like? What beautiful and complex lives did they lead? I suddenly had a deep longing to have some way of accessing those stories.

Was there a public record that saved people’s histories based on where they lived? I entertained the inquiry and found a post that showed how to access the record of pictures for any New York building from 1940. I loved it, gladly looking at the five buildings I had lived in in the city and seeing how they had changed. But this look into the past just increased my desire to know what was happening to the humans there and then. What were their names, their routines, their favorite places in the neighborhood? I was yearning for the stories.

This kind of archive is a simple idea but hard to implement. It wouldn’t make sense for a centralized institution to track it, and besides, who would want to chat with the local archivist? It could be an open-source, public project, but how would you prove that someone lived where they said they did?

Back then, I had a nagging feeling that blockchain could offer a solution. It was already useful for onchain archiving of digital histories and cultures, but the practicality of using it for memories fixed in space didn’t quite make sense. How could we ensure that only others who were in the exact location at that moment could see what was written?

Some years later, here now, I think we may have a solution. It brings the physical world onchain in a real and strange way. And sometimes strange is good.

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Location-bound digital diary

Here’s the idea. We put a simple blockchain-enabled NFC chip on the wall in the inner hallway of our living spaces. They don’t record or do anything until you want to add a journal entry for whoever comes after you. When you’re feeling inspired, maybe on the day you’re moving out, you tap it with your phone and share your thoughts with future dwellers. Wish them well. Tell them about your cat. Share your stories about being locked down in this small apartment for so many months in 2020.

The messages are encrypted and uploaded to the blockchain, and they can only be unencrypted by someone who stands in that room and scans that same chip. Decades from now, someone whose parents are not even alive today might read your recollections. Make them good! We can’t rescue the stories from the past, but we can leave a meaningful memory for the future.

If apartments are too personal, we can start on the street. Put NFC-chipped stickers around the city for this purpose. What conversation would you want to have with every person who will one day be in the exact same location as you? What puzzles or riddles would you gift them? Each chip is a digital time capsule bound in space, an airdrop waiting in escrow.

There is a bigger idea here: these tiny chips can fit everywhere, so every physical object becomes a possible archive. As people pass on their objects, they can leave messages for posterity. You can read stories bound to the family heirloom passed down from your great-great-great-grandmother. Or hear about the countless nights of laughter spent on the sofa you bought on eBay. Or relive the tales from the front porch of the first house in your network city.

And then just imagine, every object we interact with suddenly brings a rich history. How much more interesting would that be compared to mass-produced things? I don’t want the cheap factory thing, I want the one with the anecdotes! Things capture memories that were once vivid reality for someone. They have always had tales to tell; the humans that nurture them are humble messengers and scribes.

Earlier this year, I visited New York and needed to swing by the village, so I reached out to the people who moved into that apartment after me. We had kept in touch, and they were glad to invite me over for coffee. The place was arranged differently, but the memories and emotions came flooding back. Over our chat, we reminisced about our experiences in that space, two different timelines converging in the same location.

Such encounters remind me of the profound connection we share with places and things. And we can now imbue objects with story, highlighting their significance in our lives. Share that they really mattered to someone, for a time.

Thank you to Austin and Yancey from Metalabel for inspiring me to write again. Thank you Alice Sholto-Douglas, Rafa, Jon Hillis, Cameron, and Yun for thoughts and feedback.

Epilogue

Entry: #00001

Date: October 10, 2023

Author: T

Hey, I don’t know who you are, but I hope that you are smiling as you read this. I just set this thing up in my apartment. Pretty weird, huh? Or maybe not to you.

I don’t know how many years, decades, or even centuries from now you’re alive, but I hope things aren’t too crazy then. I imagine they probably are. But oh well, at least you have a nice apartment!

A lot has happened for me here. I’ve made this place home with my partner N. We usually hang out on the rugs in the living room, around our circular table, laughing and discussing the world. We talk about how we don’t want to leave this place, but I imagine eventually we will. If you’re reading this, I guess we did.

Maybe as I get more used to this, I’ll share more stuff.

Ciao for now.

Entry: #00002

Date: July 20, 2025

Author: T

Hey, me again. We’re moving out next week, so I wanted to leave a note. It’s so wild to read my notes from two years ago. I can’t believe how time flies. It feels like it was yesterday, but also like it was a different lifetime.

We’re thinking about starting a family, and N’s job is moving us away from the city, but we’re definitely sad to leave this place. So many lovely memories. I hope you enjoy it.

Take care, all the best <3

Entry: #00003

Date: March 8, 2030

Author: R

Hey! R here. This apartment was my little sunlit haven. Nothing beat the warm morning rays streaming through those windows.

I stumbled upon the previous notes early on. They were like mini time capsules. I love the feeling of being part of this shared history, it added an unexpected layer of depth to my time here. I wish there were more from further back in the past.

Btw I love the coffee at Pinky’s. They’ve been around forever so I imagine they’ll continue. The neighborhood has definitely changed in the past five years, but everywhere does, I guess.

It's been real. Hope you create as many fond memories here as I did. Cheers!

Entry: #00004

Date: August 9, 2037

Author: S

Hey people from the future. This apartment is a dream. To be honest, my time recently hasn’t been so easy. I won’t get into it. But I found my peace here, and I’m grateful for that.

I agree with the person above that I wish there were more of these entries. They were lovely to read. I’ll try to write a few more before I leave

Wishing you joy, laughter, and countless cherished moments in this home.