jon on pop up villages
via michel bauwens tweet [https://x.com/mbauwens/status/1810259426038972757]:
* Learning from popup villages.
Jonathan Hillis
https://words.jonhillis.com/popup-villages/
“I have participated in 3 popup villages (Zuzalu, Vitalia, and Edge Esmeralda) and each one has given me increasing conviction in popup villages as an important form-factor for growing network societies. This essay includes some reflections on successful popup villages, why they work, and where they could go next.”
jon – @JonathanHillis: building @cabindotcity advising @seedclubvc onchain @ hillis.eth Cabin jonhillis.com
notes/quotes from jun 2024 article – Learning from popup villages:
I have participated in 3 popup villages (Zuzalu, Vitalia, and Edge Esmeralda) and each one has given me increasing conviction in popup villages as an important form-factor for growing network societies. This essay includes some reflections on successful popup villages, why they work, and where they could go next.
The right scale and duration
A decade ago, Balaji shared this classification of cloud formations, which charts form factors for network societies by scale and duration..t The dotted line indicates the frontier of “unobserved formations”. I’ve added a red arrow to indicate where popup villages are pushing out the frontier:
scale we need: nfinitesimal structures approaching the limit of structureless\ness and/or vice versa .. aka: ginorm/small ness
oh my (and why i decided to add page.. 1000 people for 1 yr is a people experiment.. a sabbatical ish transition.. mostly local.. beyond cloud.. because a model/way for 8b people to detox leap
On the top-right of the frontier, cohousing compounds like Radish are bringing together dozens of people for multiple years. On the bottom-left of the frontier, Burning Man has built the world’s only popup city of tens of thousands that comes together for multiple weeks each year.
Now, with popup villages, we have seen hundreds of people from the internet gather for multiple months at a time. Not only does this put popup villages on the frontier of cloud formations, it puts them right in the middle of the chart. This seems to be a sweet spot for developing network societies..t Popup villages are long enough to build relationships, but short enough to not require permanent relocation. They are big enough to be vibrant, but small enough to be feasible.
but.. not vibrant enough for global detox leap/re\set
*At this scale, busy people can commit to come for a few days: just long enough to give a talk, meet some new people, and contribute to the local culture. Nomads can join for months at a time and live in a constant co-created university. People can start to form an interwoven network of relationships that carries a culture forward across ephemeral events.
*oi.. red flag
need: a sabbatical ish transition
how we gather in a space is huge.. need to try spaces of permission where people have nothing to prove to facil curiosity over decision making.. because the finite set of choices of decision making is unmooring us.. keeping us from us.. ie: whatever for a year.. a legit sabbatical ish transition
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
ie: imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness)
Ultimately, popup villages serve as a strong foundation for permanent ones. They create incredible ephemeral events—and a big opportunity for a demand-first approach to prototyping permanent places.
Learnings from effective popup villages
Zuzalu, which defined the model for a popup village, was spearheaded by Vitalik Buterin and happened in Montenegro in April/May of 2023. It brought together an incredibly high density of people from across crypto, AI, network societies, new cities, longevity, and other interesting areas of cutting edge tech. Personal highlights included singing karaoke with Vitalik, a Grimes deejayed dance party, and late night dinners with other network society builders.
vitalik buterin.. vitalik on network sovereignties.. vitalik on degen communism
While it was an unforgettable event, it was also an early prototype. The location (a remote resort in Montenegro) was too expensive, inconveniently located, not a good physical space for community building, and didn’t result in longer-term plans for a more permanent hub. But the strength of the model and the people it attracted overcame these issues, and led to Vitalik sponsoring a grants program to spin off more instances of popup villages around the world
to nika dubrovsky: st vincent might be interested (too much of cancerous distraction for me)
Vitalia, a network city for longevity, received a grant from the Zuzalu spin-off program. They hosted a popup village in February 2024 in Honduras. Vitalia was different from Zuzalu in two key ways: they focused the event mostly on one topic (longevity), and they did it in a place where they intend to build a permanent home base (Prospera).
By focusing more narrowly, Vitalia was able to attract an aligned audience and go deeper on longevity: a biohacking lab, workout groups, healthy food, cold plunges, a biomedical hackathon, and relevant speakers like Bryan Johnson and Aubrey de Grey.
Even more importantly, Vitalia was hosted at Prospera, a special economic zone in Honduras that has the ability to offer biomedical treatments not approved by the FDA. This makes Prospera a great permanent home for Vitalia and the companies in its community that want to be able to work on longevity treatments. By seeding a focused community with recurring popups and the intention to build a more permanent location, Vitalia has developed a deeper sense of purpose and permanence than Zuzalu.
It is also a strong example of the symbiotic relationship between existing states and special economic zones that provide favorable regulatory anvd legal frameworks, and communities that want to build on top of these frameworks. You can think of it a bit like blockchains, which have L1s with base-level security guarantees and L2 communities built on top of them:
Most recently, I attended another Zuzualu spin-off called Edge Esmeralda, which is still happening as I write this in Healdsburg, CA (June 2024). EE is popup village designed to help seed a nearby permanent village called Esmeralda, the Chautauqua of the West. It has been my favorite popup village event so far for a few reasons: location, co-creation, and family-friendliness.
Healdsburg is a charming town of 11,000 people an hour north of San Francisco. While California is a bit more expensive and less globally accessible than other locations, it was also a short drive for the high density of strong builders in the Bay Area. The town itself was the right size to make most of the venues walkable/bikeable and had a great town square at the center for people to casually meet up. The organizers brought in a couple hundred Burning Man bikes, which helped make it easy to get around and added to the vibe.
Edge Esmeralda was spread across a dozen or so hotels, coworking spaces, and other venues to host events. The range of spaces made it easy to cowork during the day and participate in abundant programming on nights and weekends. Co-creation was highly encouraged, and they made it easy for anyone to add events to the shared calendar, which allowed people to host constant impromptu workshops, panels, and discussions:
While all of the popup village events I’ve attended have had elements of co-creation, it’s great to see how much the technology behind these events has made this easier.
tech we need: tech w/o judgment
a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of measuring, accounting, people telling other people what to do
Edge Esmeralda was the first explicitly family-friendly popup village. It takes a village to raise kids, and popup villages are a natural fit for families. Every night at community dinner, there was a kids table full of markers, playdoh, and toys. Cabin hosted some gatherings for families in the park. There were activities and camps for kids of various ages. That said, there’s lots of room for future popup villages to become even more family friendly, particularly with shared childcare.
need.. everyone in the city.. as the day.. via city sketchup ness et al
*There’s something magical about getting together with people and building the place you want to live. It is the practice of functional sovereignty—proof of work that your community can create the future it wants. Building together is an act of collective action and self-governance. It brings people together towards a **clear common objective and creates a tangible, valuable outcome for the community. Whether you’re creating a solarpunk college, a biohacking lab, or a community garden, what you build and how you build it is the real world manifestation of your community’s values.
*but needs to start from.. be org’d around.. listening to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & using that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness).. otherwise just perpetuating sea world
network sovereignties et al
**if not 2 missing pieces.. then same song
It takes a village to raise kids, but it also takes kids to raise a village. That’s why Cabin has oriented ourselves towards building a network city for families, and Esmeralda has intergenerational living as its first design principle. Cabin’s Obvious Truth, Raise Kids Together, doesn’t mean everyone has to have kids themselves—it means that everyone in the community gets to be a part of raising the village. That’s ultimately how you grow a long-term culture.
deeper point is that it has to be all of us for the dance to dance
How to get involved
If you read this and want to get involved in the popup village movement, here are some upcoming opportunities to join:
- Vitalia Summer Program, Prospera — July 1 – 31, 2024
- ZuVillage Georgia, Georgia — July 19 – August 31, 2024
- Zuitzerland, Switzerland — August 24 – September 14, 2024
- Digitalia, Italy — September 14 – October 14, 2024
- Edge City Lanna, Thailand — October 10th – November 10th, 2024
- Network Society Camp, Austin, TX — October 11 – 14th, 2024
Most popup events have limited capacity and choose attendees by application. To make your application stand out (and to have a good time at these events!) think about what you can contribute that will help grow the culture of the popup village.
we need a problem deep enough to resonate w/8bn today.. a mechanism simple enough to be accessible/usable to 8bn today.. and an ecosystem open enough to set/keep 8bn legit free
ie: org around a problem deep enough (aka: org around legit needs) to resonate w/8bn today.. via a mechanism simple enough (aka: tech as it could be) to be accessible/usable to 8bn today.. and an ecosystem open enough (aka: sans any form of m\a\p) to set/keep 8bn legit free
thinking restate/update 7.18.. and 2\ short findings restate in 2019
1\ undisturbed ecosystem (common\ing) can happen
2\ if we create a way to ground the chaos of 8b legit free people
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be you. 