This note is the second letter in the 104-days-of-summer-vacation series.

Dearest Reader,

It’s impressive to me that we live in a time where we can gather 200 (revolutionary-ish) people looking to start a new country in an already sovereign country, without getting suppressed or attacked in any form.

I’m talking about Zuzalu, a pop up city in Montenegro which brought together longevity advocates, web3 developers, artists, lawyers, community builders, and aspiring nation builders for two months of intentional co-living.

I first heard about Zuzalu super randomly through Gavin and some other friends who were extending invites with essentially the gist of “COME FOR THIS, we’re going to make a network state, it’s going to be FUN, we’ll figure it out as we go 🤪“. To which my normal response would’ve been “Heck yes”, but unfortunately my UCL degree and the associated exams did not concur.

Nevertheless, today, I went to watch the post-Zuzalu sharing meeting in Singapore and I’m super grateful to all the presenters who were there to make it happen - Amber, Gavin, Tom and Balaji. I want to just take some time to unpack and share some of the things I learnt during the session in this letter.

I think to start, it’s worth just appreciating how amazing the scale of Zuzalu is. From what started as a kinda-sus invitation, getting to the 200-strong community that gathered in Montenegro is really a testament to what people can do together when they put their mind to it. Amber’s talk really hit this point home, Zuzalu was as much bottom-up as it was top-down, and critically, it provided the tools necessary to cultivate bottom-up community. Her descriptions of spontaneously organized 8AM cold plunges with David Hoffman didn’t do much to alleviate the FOMO of anyone at the meetup.

Facilitating this was the Zuzalu Stack, which provided a suite of services from a privacy-enabled local twitter to a private polling system, all connected to a digital passport. The presence of the Zuzalu Stack, plus the thoughtful organization around incentivizing community-proposed events is what, I think, elevates Zuzalu from just an experiment to a form of design fiction.

The brilliant part about Zuzalu for me, was how it took the rather abstract idea of the network state as envisioned by Balaji, and made it tangibly real - real enough for people to ask “okay so if this is possible, why aren’t we doing it”. Which is why one of the takeaways from the meetup was that there will be more Zuzalu-type events, the 2-month coliving-conference configuration works.

However, as many of the speakers mentioned, Zuzalu itself is a vision of what-could-be, not an actually sustainable long-term city (it crucially needed to be family-friendly). Which is perfectly okay, it wasn’t meant to be! On this, the follow-up talk by Tom and Balaji focused less on Zuzalu itself but more on the abstract concepts demonstrated in its design fiction, even highlighting some problems/considerations moving forward.

One of the important things I learnt from those talks was the idea of sovereignty on a continuum - which essentially explains the network state as an aspirational end state, much like how Google is a hard-to-get-to aspirational end state for startups. Zuzalu, with its community of aligned individuals, integrated digital passport, tools and rented land, is not a network state. Still, it lies on the continuum somewhere in-between an intentional community and a startup city, which is the probably closest we’ve got so far.

The aspirational end state assertion is important because the big question in the implementation of the network state is whether it is possible to have sovereignty without force. The answer given by both Balaji and Tom, was decentralization, where armies will find it difficult to simultaneously target communities which are physically spread out all around the world.

There are two issues with that. Firstly, although armies will find it difficult to simultaneously target decentralized communities, equivalently the small communities being targeted will find it very difficult to defend or retaliate. Secondly, the closest real life examples of these sorts of networks are terrorist networks, which do go up against existing hierarchical institutions and are aggressively prosecuted through collective multi-national efforts (equivalent to being outlawed). So it’s clear that existing nations have a lot of power to stop any upstart network state from exerting sovereignty in directions that they deem a threat.

I think these arguments might entirely miss the point that Tom and Balaji are making. In a brief conversation with Tom, it occurred to me that network states are likely to start with simple non-threatening kinds of sovereignty, which are mostly opt-in additional rules rather than the overwriting of existing laws. For example, you might be required to only sell certain kinds of health food in a longevity network state. A real-life aspiring network state, culdesac, builds car-free neighbourhoods which doesn’t violate existing laws but adds on further restrictions (the car freeness!).

Which comes back to the idea that network states are aspirational end states. Getting national sovereignty is very hard and so the road to it is naturally hard to see. But still that doesn’t mean that proto-network-states like culdesac are heading nowhere, instead they actually provide real, tangible social benefits today. Maybe the path to the sovereign network state is hidden and just requires more organizations like culdesac to move towards it.

Or maybe it’s not possible, and it’s just what it is, aspirational. Just like representative democracy, liberty and equality fueled the American dream in the early 20th century, self-sovereignty, community ownership, local governance and network states power an equivalent Zuzalan dream. And the American dream gave us lots of cool things, so I would expect the Zuzalan dream to do the same.

Still, I’m not sure if I’m completely a believer yet, I’ll have to visit one myself. But I’d definitely be excited to give it a shot.

~ Shan