(2023-10-06) Buterin Why I Built Zuzalu

Vitalik Buterin: Why I Built Zuzalu. We tend to think about physical places, as well as the activities and cultures that come with those places, as being immutable.

What if cultures or tribes that have formed online with their own goals and values could materialize offline, and new physical places could grow due to intention rather than random chance?

In 1988, the French sociologist Michel Maffesoli wrote a book called The Time of the Tribes

More recently, Balaji Srinivasan wrote The Network State,

David de Ugarte's Phyles (Phyle) advocated for cultural and economic collaboration between transnational groups that would coordinate both online and offline.

The virtual transnational community that this author calls home is the crypto space, and it is a unique place from which to view these issues.

Unlike other tech industries, which typically consolidate around San Francisco or sometimes New York City, crypto has strangely resisted the gravitational pull of geographical centralization

By 2022, I had been thinking about many of these topics for a while.

Zuzalu was an experiment in taking these ideas to the next level.

let's take one step in both directions: create a pop-up mini-city that houses two hundred people, and lasts for two whole months.

And it also intentionally does not center any specific vision about how something like this should be done, whether Balaji’s or otherwise.

The work started in January. A team that started with four people scouted out locations and decided on a resort in Montenegro.

On March 25th, the event began and the two hundred guests quickly began rolling in. The parts of Zuzalu that were "centrally planned" were available from the start

On the crypto side, the 0xPARC team created Zupass, an identity system based on zero-knowledge proofs that you could use to prove that you were a resident of Zuzalu without revealing which one.

What happened from that point forward, however, was completely bottom-up

Soon, residents were creating sub-events and tracks started to emerge.

A four-day conference is a break from your life, but a two-month stay is your life. And for at least some people, it turned out that the small but highly focused network effect of a few hundred people who care about the precise thing you care about really can substitute the massive but much more unfocused network effects of the global megacities.

there remain plenty of experiments still left to do. Crypto payments, a long-time dream of the Bitcoin and Ethereum communities, were present but limited. No one even considered governing Zuzalu with a DAO.

A two-hundred-person community lasting for two months was either too short, too small, or both for such a thing to really make sense.

What the experiment did less well at was showing a clear picture of where to go from here.

many strands of evidence show that unless faced by a "push factor" as strong as a literal war of conquest taking over one's land, it is very rare for a demographically significant portion of a previously static population to pick up and move somewhere else. (free state project)

clear that large-scale emigration is still far from a grand solution to major geopolitical problems

There are plenty of historical examples of intentionally created, medium-sized, and longer-term gatherings that don’t overturn the world, but still leave a worthy impact.

Universities (university) are one good precedent to think about.

Monasteries (Monastery) are another example; a few years ago, the philosopher Samo Burja asked why there are no monasteries dedicated to perfecting software, given that many software engineers have made enough money and now desire personal spiritual progress.