Network Nations Ep:4 Entanglement: Building Voluntary Interdependencies

Transcript

And we ran that experiment for four years. It was a a very fun experiment. The it was structured as a DAO and ultimately the the DAO itself shut down recently, no longer exists. There was a lot of people exchanging ideas, a lot of collaboration, just kind of this feeling of, oh, okay, maybe there is actually space to imagine and start to put into practice something new, some new ideas about, you know, what what the world could be. in your initiatives, in your projects. What are the people >> like we still have to create something that someone will go into our platform, they will go to the shopping cart, they will add a ticket, they will purchase

it, and they will show up. And there is a delicate balance here. Um, and I think it's actually smart um, for you guys at Edge to um, to do that carefully and to sort of like wait until you feel like you really know what citizenship is because it is a concept that I think should be taken seriously. >> Welcome back to the network nations miniseries on the green pill podcast. I'm Prim Philippe and together with Philix Beer, I will be your co-host in the coming episodes. Today we are witnessing across the world new kinds of civic communities which are beginning to take shape. Community that use the centralized technologies to govern themsel to steward shared resources but

also to act together collectively across borders. And this is what we call network nations. And so in this series we explore network nation as a new design space for civil society in the network age. Our goal is to chart an alternative path to the network state, one where technology is at the service of civil society and not the other way around. And so instead of reproducing today's power imbalances in the network age, we're asking a few question. What if network societies were built from the bottom up as shared commons rather from the top down as a startup venture? And what if they treated member as

co-creator rather than as customers? What if they practiced cooperation and mutual care rather than competition and extraction? And what if they cultivated sovereignty as a collective good for the many rather than as a private asset only owned by a few? And so in each episode we will bring together thinkers, builders and organizers, practitioners who are exploring this new frontier of community self-governance, helping us imagine how civil society can reclaim political agency in the network age. And if you want to dive deeper, please go

and visit our website networknations.network network where you will find our manifesto and many other ways to connect with our growing community of practice. Today we will be exploring the concept of entanglement which is essentially asking how communities can create deep interdependencies that transform loose networks into resilient collective and especially in a world where relationship are increasingly mediated by screens and algorithm. How do we create genuine bonds that hold communities together?

What mechanism can turn a simple collection of individuals into something much more powerful into a true community of kinship? And so we're joined today by two innovative community builders who have been experimenting with novel ways to bind people together across distances. John Hillis is the founder of Cabin, a network of rural co-l livingiving hubs for remote workers and digital nomads that span across the globe. And in the past few years, John has been actively exploring how physical spaces and shared experiences can create lasting bonds in those distributed communities.

Timor Casters is a co-founder of Edge City which creates pop-up communities at the intersection between technology and culture. And until now, HCT has brought together a very large number of builders, artists, and thinkers for those very intensive and timebound experiences that create much deeper and meaningful connections than typical conferences or meetups. Together we will explore how those communities are developing new form of entanglement from shared ownership and government structures to ritual practices and collective experiences that create this social fabric that is necessary for community to thrive. And then we will

try to understand how does entanglement practices can help us design networks that are both more cohesive and more sustainable. Great. So, thank you both of you for uh joining. Um I think we have both had individual and together a lot of conversation on the topic of entanglement. So to start with I think it would be nice if you can um give like a little bit of uh your story but in particular concerning the project and initiatives that you have been bringing about and to which extent like what was the inspiration or the drive to to

create those initiative and uh uh how do you see them related with the question of uh network national entanglement? >> Sure. Yeah. So, uh, I'm John Hillis and I founded an organization called Cabin, uh, back in 2021. It was, uh, the ZERP era, a very different time, and everybody was, uh, was very online in like the kind of post-pandemic, uh, times, and I'd been working at Instacart, the grocery delivery company. I was a product director there. And I left to go move out to the middle of nowhere in the Texas Hill Country um, and start building a village from scratch. And you know, I I had been thinking about writing some science

fiction about some of these ideas of building like a city that was not physically distributed across a bunch of different locations. And then I realized that I should just try to do it. Um, so I moved out and, you know, just started like building houses and and tweeting and uh, you know, out into the void and uh, inviting cool people from the internet to come out and um, help try to actually instantiate this this city in the real world. uh with the core idea that you know basically we were entering an era where people could earn money online um and so the the economic elomeration effects of cities may not be as important and you know people could work remotely and and elomerate instead around local communities and being close

to nature and we ran that experiment for four years. It was a a very fun experiment. the it was structured as a DAO and ultimately the the DAO itself shut down recently no longer exists. Uh but we ended up spinning out a nonprofit called the neighborhood village project which is you know continuing the work of of local community building around the country. >> Can you actually just explain for the for the audience like what's what exactly is the distinction uh between what cabin was intended to be and what the neighbors project is?

>> Yeah, sure. So, and this will get maybe some into the the initial ideas of entanglement that we're going to be talking about today, but cabin the the original organization had two main differences versus what it is now. The first is that it was structured as a a set of rural co-living hubs in in nature for digital nomads where people could move out to the middle of nowhere and you know have great internet and great access to nature and live uh with friends and you know people people from across the world that were coming together and that part didn't end up working out uh you know long term because I think post pandemic a lot of people returned to the cities you know nomading slowed down and getting people to actually just relocate to the middle

of nowhere, it turns out is a very hard problem. Um, and I think one that's still, you know, pretty underestimated in our space. The other part of it is that it was a DAO. You know, I think that looked in 2021 like a a good way to do governance for this type of, you know, decentralized city. And I think as we've all learned since then, it's a lot more complicated than we thought perhaps to uh to create effective onchain governance structures. And so what ended up happening is we raised venture capital into the project and ultimately we created a set of entanglements uh you know between token holders that did not work out very well because we had token holders with you know differently aligned goals and and

beliefs about what the organization should do. And so, um, earlier this year, we we disentangled the organization and, uh, you know, essentially we returned all of the capital in the treasury to the token holders and we allowed people to go back to working on their own individual projects with, you know, some of the the resources from the community. And the reason for that was that we sort of reached this stalemate of entanglement. Um and we we realized that you know most of the value that an organization like ours can have particularly in this new iteration of the neighborhood village project where it's focused less on building these rural co-living villages and more on building the social infrastructure of existing

neighborhoods. It doesn't actually need as much entanglement or as much coordination or resource sharing across the network. What it really needs is, you know, a chat group and uh some support networks where people can help each other out, but most of the work, most of the value that's being produced is actually being done in these little individual local pockets. >> Cool. Uh thank you. Uh Timmo, you want to go next? >> Yeah, gladly. Um so I'm Timor. I'm one of the co-founders of Edge City. And briefly on my background, I spent about 10 years in tech. first as an operator and builder founder and then uh as an investor and it was during the time that

I was investing that I was invited to an event called Zuzalu which happened just over two years ago and was really a genesis point for a lot of these things. I think it's actually where I met both of you, funnily enough, at least in person for the first time. But it was essentially a two-month experiment that was initiated by Vitalic Buterine and my now co-founder Janine and some other folks. And essentially the structure of it was that every week there would be a different focus, a different theme. I think John, you came during like the new cities theme. uh I ran the AI week and then that led into the very first I think network nations week that happened

um which you were at P. So there was a lot of people exchanging ideas a lot of um kind of collaboration just kind of this feeling of oh okay maybe there is actually space to imagine and start to put into practice something new some new ideas about you know what what the world could be. And so I personally had a very meaningful experience there. I came out of it thinking, "Wow, that was such a wonderful um set of, you know, new connections that I was now entangled with. I felt personally entangled with the idea of Zuzalu. I felt kinship to the people that I met there. And I think I came out

of it with a key insight that these types of formats of gatherings, these pop-up villages are actually critical to go from purely online communities into something more interesting, to something deeper where people actually care about themselves and the overarching container to which they or community to which they belong because they've had these varied in-person interactions. And so out of that came Edge City. We essentially picked up the baton after Zuzalu decentralized and aside from the kind of personal experience and the community experience that is possible there I think there's this other interesting aspect of it which is you know what do you actually

do with that once people are there and they feel entangled in this community and I think what we've learned since is that these formats are also a really good way to actually experiment and test new kind of societal, social and tech enabled um institutions and processes and systems in actually an IRL container. So the reason for that is that it's a quite a long amount of time. They last one to two months. It has quite a quite a large number of people.

It's village size. So they range from several hundred people to over a thousand. And that basically gives enough surface area and enough time to actually try new ways of living, new ways of being and like new ways of structuring kind of society important things like how do we educate our children? How do how do we live alongside kids? How do we um you know create new governance models that we can use and actually start to you know govern shared resources etc. So for me the the kind of the why of this is I think it's clear and you write about this in the in the network nations essay very well um prima that the current set

of systems and institutions and you know processes were potentially well suited for a prior time but they are not the right answer to you know what we're facing in 2025. the barely internet native, let alone AI native. So the question is where will new versions of these things come from and and and where will they go from ideas into theories into practice? And I think for me the answer at least partially is in this in these uh pop-up cities because we've gathered all of these high agency people with interesting ideas. We've created an environment where they all really connect and start to really like spending time together and start to come

back and start to entangle in the kind of on the emotional and the community side of things and that gives us a chance to start to implement and experiment with um kind of more interesting ideas. So that's that's been Edge City for the last 18 months and you know we're keeping going. >> Yeah. Yeah. I I had the I had the privilege to experience many of them. So one question that I want to ask both of you is like it's always the chicken and the egg right is like uh there's a community uh that exist and then there is like a physical or digital or social

infrastructure that comes about because of that and then that infrastructure is actually furthering the the ties within the communities right and so when I here uh when I hear you describing the various uh the different communities or initiative that you are talking about and correct me if I'm wrong um it feels to me that like for instance cabins seems that cabin started more as an infrastructure which which had the intention to then create a community um whereas HCT started as a community f that then wanted to find ways to foster itelves by

meeting physically or by creating more infrastructure around. And then the neighboring village feels also more of that type, right? The neighboring village is actually existing community that wants to create further infrastructure for finding its better. Is is that correct? >> Yeah, I I think that makes a lot of sense. I would say that yeah, one of the big learnings we had with the initial phase of cabin. One of the best ways to bind community members together is through the creation of things. Uh may maybe the only like truly effective way um is is to actually like build things together or you know h have some like community cannot exist for its own sake

really. it it needs to have like you know ideally something that people are doing together. And so for for cabin initially, like one thing we found early on was that build weeks were this really incredible way to tie people together where you know people who had never met before would show up and uh be in the same location and actually like build a sauna or build a you know uh like patio pergola or you know build a house uh build a bath house and you know like the act of doing a a physical thing together is like an incredible way to get deep quick because it like surfaces team dynamics and um helps people feel this

like sense of shared accomplishment and at the end you know you can all stand there and look at it and be like yes we did this together we like formed our community through the act of doing this thing and so that was an informative lesson for us that has has carried forward um and I think to your point that's that's a big part of the um you know drive of the the current neighborhood village project is um if you pre-build all the infrastructure and then you just try to put people into it. It's harder to get that sense of community than if you um you know go around to all of the people in the local area and you knock on doors and you start a chat group and you're like hey what do we what do we want here? You know and you start with maybe a

recurring event and then you start to think okay what what are the other things like we could have a collective tool library. We could you know have a place where we all take our kids and and hang out and you know clear out a park or whatever it is that like you need in your local area. the act of creating that thing is is also the thing that creates the entanglements. >> Can I make a little um a little zoom in a dual click on this because you said one sentence and I just want to make sure we are on the same page on that sentence. You said that you cannot create a community for the sake of itself. Uh but when I hear what you're saying, it sounds as if like the community seems to still be created for

the sake of itself. It's just that you cannot just commune. There needs to be activities for but there's there is an important distinction between doing things for an external purpose but what you describe as activities are actually activities for the community to be a better community, right? >> Yeah, that that's a great clarification. So yeah, community should be for itself, but you almost have to like trick people into that often because like very very few people there's actually like an adverse selection if you're just like hey you know like I want community like you know if if you just attract all the like um disconnected people together it's hard often for those people to

connect and so like you see this all the time whe you know whether it's like it doesn't matter it can be you know, um, kids who are into Pokemon cards or adults who are into motorcycles or people with families who live in the same neighborhood, like there has to be some, uh, mutual point of connection that then allows you to create the scaffold of the community. >> Yeah. Yeah. So, the way we the way we we we like to speak about it in the network language is that the the doing is a means to an end. So you need the doing as a mean in order to achieve the end which is the community as opposed to vice versa where sometimes

the community is a means to an end where the end is doing something external right and so who is the instrument to what and I feel like in your description it feels that the doing is the means to the end that is the community right >> yeah I think that's a great way to frame it >> we have a similar thing where all of our events are co-created And I I agree that you need some you need to be doing something together in order to actually allow for that connection to to take place. Even if it's something, you know, where people co-organize a workshop together or they teach the kids how to vibe code or they present their startup

at the demo day or something. It's that act of creating the container. It's kind of you know it's kind of recursive. It's like okay people arrive they learn that they have permission to create the thing that they are stepping into. They do that they feel very good about it because it just feels good to participate. There's obviously, you know, connection through hardship is like a well-known thing and and then they feel more entangled and ownership over the thing that they've made and so they want to invite their friends or they want to they're proud of the thing, you know, etc. The one thing I think that's different for us to what

you said initially primover is that we started as a community and then created the gathering to in order to essentially have some place to meet slash something to do. And I think there was kind of this almost immaculate conception moment with Zuzalu where it kind of it was like such a weird mix of people that would not have otherwise I think identified with themselves together. And we had something similar at the first edge where it was a wide variety like we had our kind of pre pre community from the Zuzalu days. We had all the other people that we knew. Word also spread. But I

think actually the strongest factor was that we just put out a bat signal and we had some initial copy on the website. We had essentially values northstar messaging very lightweight. We were not we were not, you know, ten commandments about it or one commandment or or whatever the the other framework is. Um, we were just, you know, here is loosely what we're into and here's kind of what's going to happen and you guys are going to come and help us do it. And then we just saw saw who showed up and it actually self- selected for a very interesting group and then over time the community has started to solidify and then kind of create itself.

>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean I think that's why it's always chicken and leg. There was like an initial sense of community that then got reinforced and and eventually keep reinforcing itself for every edge city. So I have an interesting question for for both of you. Um I was listening to this very interesting for lack of a more sophisticated word uh debate between Curtis Yarvin and Glenn Ry listen to this. It's a it's a debate podcast which is the question is basically should the US be ruled by a co dictator? Um where Curtis is claiming yes and Glenn is claiming not. Um but then at some point there is this interesting question that emerged which

is like you know when you speak about a startup and a company the people you call them customers or users. when you think of uh national state the people you call them citizens right and so what I want to ask to both of you is like in in your initiatives in your projects what are the people you know do you call them citizen do you call them I mean independent of what what's the actual word that you use but are they like closer to a citizen type of thing are they closer to a consumer type of thing to a user or is it something else that uh need to be named >> I'm very excited to watch that debate. I

think that would be very interesting. But I think in our case, yeah, in our case, >> I think our aspiration is to move towards the citizen side of side of the spectrum and with, you know, with all of the things that that entails in terms of people's identity relationships to the broader thing. um people's you know participation in the governance of it maybe in the democratic processes of what we're creating and at the same time I think early on in our journey there is still this interesting almost user-like relationship where we

still have to create something that's compelling to people right like we still have to create something that someone will go into our platform. They will go to the shopping cart, they will add a ticket, they will purchase it and they will show up and there is inherently that kind of transaction, right? I guess it's somewhat inherent in the traditional citizen state relationship, but it's obiscated through like tax systems. Um, in this case, it's very clear. It's like you pay and you show up and you have the experience, but we're still there trying to entangle you into the co-creation act of it. Um, so I would say we have not taken the step to

actively call and and actually put the nomclature out there of like actually calling our people citizens yet. I know it's something that Cabin did in some degree and and I was a proud um cabin citizen. So, I'm excited to hear what John has to say, but I think in time there is that's the direction that we would like to go. >> Yeah, I I agree with uh Tammora. It's like there's a delicate balance here. Um and I think it's actually smart um for you guys at Edge to um to do that carefully and to sort of like wait until you feel like you really know what citizenship is because it is a concept that I think should be taken seriously at cabin. Um, you know, citizenship was

like we initially only handed out a very limited number of citizenships because we we wanted to seed it with, you know, meaning and and um have it be something that, you know, was aspirational and exciting for people. But, you know, to to's point, when you're starting out, like you you you have to make something that's financially sustainable. You have to sell tickets. You have to, you know, whatever it is. And th those two things can definitely be at odds with each other. And I think ultimately that was, you know, like the the thing that we came to at the end of Cabin's life was this tension between trying to build a venture-backed business, a DAO, and a

community-driven network, which I think all three of those things tend to serve very different purposes. And that was the core tension that was holding Cabin back and what that was was, you know, essentially causing us to to be in a a governance standstill because ventureback startups work really well when they have, you know, small focused teams rapidly pivoting to try to find hyperrowth business models that are financially viable in the short term and, you know, have users. to your point Primma Vera um you know Dows work work best more as like a a credibly neutral governance mechanism I think they've been most effective at distributing ecosystem grants from existing cash

flowing protocols but not necessarily at building their own independent businesses and then communitydriven networks I think you know tend to work best when they can serve as like a loose connective tissue for many people to independently or adjacently explor explore similar ideas. You know, having things that are both a a or that are a community um you know, a like governance system and a business model at the same time uh are are really challenging because community members don't really want to be users, but you need users to make the thing financially sustainable. And so it just creates um some some really challenging tensions

that frankly I I don't know that we've seen a lot of projects around in the space long enough to fully explore and and come to terms with. One thing I'm very excited about with um with Edge is that they've taken a little bit of a different approach here, you know, and they've created uh nonprofit um to operate the core um events because events are not a great business um or at least certainly not a venture scale business. Um and yet they're creating a tremendous amount of value of the collisions and entanglements of all these, you know, amazing people coming together at these events. But the value of that, you know, is somewhat different from the value of the production of the

event. And so figuring out how to dance with these things and and you know, have them work together, I think is a is a big challenge. >> Yeah. And I think it also to go back to the previous conversation, I think it's also inherently connected with like what's the mean and what's the end. Meaning that like a startup is really specifically a company has a mission and the mission is not the people of the company. The people of the company are serving the purpose of the company whereas a state at least in its uh in its romantic conception is actually designed to serve the people right. So I think like if you if you create a

company that is intended to serve the people this is very novel I like I don't think there is many of those uh those approaches but I think a lot of those things are actually exploring like a it's often times starting as a company but with the intention of serving the people then there is the company functions that kicks in and then it creates some uh I think it's a very I I'm my my bet is that we need to create something novel in order to escape this um this um this kind of duality. Right.

>> One more thought on that. Uh so I'm I'm currently doing like a bit of a um you know side gig right now helping out the new mayor of San Francisco um Mayor Luri uh with with public safety. And so I've been spending a lot of time within the San Francisco city government. Um, and so I've now seen the other side of this too, you know, and you're right, there is this real duality. And I think that um, in pretty much every way that the the city government operates, it's like a perfect mirror image of how industry operates. Like they just could not be more opposite. And I think it's because we've developed this like very dual system in which you know industry serves a profit motive and uh you know

government is supposed to like serve the the people. And so there's there's there they just like uh culturally, structurally, organizationally do do everything opposite to each other to try to serve these different purposes. And it doesn't work very well. Like it's uh it's just it's I don't know how else to put it. Um and and so I totally agree with you like trying to figure out how to bring the best of both of these worlds together uh I I think is one of the core challenges of our time. >> Yeah. So we like to um within our little net of national space we like to think that you know you always have like the public sector the private sector and then you have this third sector which is

the commons and that a commons based approach to some extent at least benefit from the best of both worlds in the sense that it's uh it's taking like the locality and the grassroot or like you know the people organized aspect of things uh without having this very big institutional thing but also is actually addressed from like a civical perspective to serve the people. So it's like by the community for the community as opposed to by the community for someone else which are the users uh or by someone else for the community which will be the state approach. Yeah, we still need to figure out that uh institutional structure that can make

this work. So uh one of the way in which we try to speak about entanglement like in a entanglement is a very complex topic. So we're going to try and like disentangle it a little bit. But one way in which we speak of it is like entanglement is when you start creating interdependencies between different people or different nodes in such a way that the success of the individual becomes inelitably connected and almost inseparable from the success of the collective. Right?

And the more the more it is associated and the more it is hard to dissociate then the more there is entanglement which we also present this concept of entanglement as a solution to this big problem that uh uh is often encountered which is the tragedy of the commons which is when when you start doing things collectively when you start having collective resources you always have one person that will overconume or underprovide side uh which we call the free riders and therefore things breaks apart right and there is this kind of tragedy that no matter what you do there will always be free riders and unless you have like very sophisticated control

mechanism and sanctions then the commons will also deplete because of over consumption or under provision and of course the solution is monitoring and sanctioning and what we're trying to propose is actually maybe there is another solution because monitoring functioning is not is is solving the symptom is making it it's creating a cost for defection but it's it's not reducing the inherent incentive of defection. And what we like to think about is that entanglement is actually solving the problem at the root because if you're entangled and your success is unseparable from the success of the collective, you don't have an incentive to prering on the collective because you're also free riding on yourself. So

anyway, this is like theory to be validated of course. Um and so I'm curious uh in your uh in your cases uh in your project is like do you have examples in which there is this form of collective first not because of altruism but because of actual entanglement where people selfishly recognize that they will win better if they are actually contributing to that collective that they belong to. Yeah, I I have a couple couple thoughts about this. Um the first is that um you know I think I think scale just matters so much in these

conversations and I think it's very easy in the context of you know talking about uh nation states and network nations and and you know these sort of things to to think at these like very large scales of you know millions or hundreds of millions or even billions of people. In my experience, most of these problems just don't don't apply as long as you keep the scale small enough. Um, and you know, even even sort of the like astramm uh like graduated punishments and stuff like that like that that even that isn't necessary at like a very small scale, you know. I just think about like my local neighborhood and and our park and like people generally kind of take take care of our local park and like have

good behavior and it like that's a great commons uh that like does not need really any management or any entanglement or um it's just like the fact that it's people that'll like see each other every once in a while is enough social pressure to keep people from doing bad things. And the fact that I I guess maybe the home ownership is like the entanglement. >> Yeah. Like so so it's actually like the commons is I guess adjacent to homes which are privately owned which which probably helps with the sense of entanglement you know ultimately like uh most of the pressure is not it's it's just like the social pressure of um being a part of a community. And so I I think like that's the most powerful form

of entanglement in my mind. Um but obviously it just doesn't scale very well. Um I think the the other form of entanglement here that um is probably like under appreciated is um like the entanglement of uh like mutual um social debt. Uh, and I don't use debt here to mean like monetary debt, but the debt of like I hosted the barbecue last week and you're hosting the barbecue this week and now like the other neighbor feels pressure to like maybe host a barbecue at some point or contribute in some way, right? Or we have like um you know you borrowed a cup of sugar from me and now

like later on I feel more entangled and like have this ongoing even if I never borrow a cup of sugar from you. It's just like I I have this sense that like uh you know we are now more entangled because I have this cosmic debt to you of one cup of sugar. And I I think like those sort of entanglements are are actually the most the most powerful ones in like a community context. Now if if you're trying to talk at scale, I think this is an example where like now actually the um you know industry corporate world side of it perhaps has developed better like scaled solutions to these things with equity um you know and like literal shared shared ownership of like an overarching entity. You know

when I when I was at Instacart I felt highly motivated to contribute to the whole because I I owned a piece of it. And so, you know, I think like uh th those are probably the examples that resonate the most for me in terms of um how entanglement is is actually effective. >> Yeah, those are great points. I think there's a couple of mirrors there for what we're up to. I think it's incredible to see the amount of effort that people put in to create amazing experiences for others in this space and or you know use each other's projects.

Um, a lot of people create things at Edge City or they demo things at Edge City or they experiment, you know, they launch their product and get feedback and people will put in hours of their week to actually use the thing, give feedback, etc. to no actual, you know, benefit to themselves yet. Obviously, you could imagine in the future a more kind of a more overt entanglement somewhat similar to equity where we could have a shared pool of equity in all of the startups that we've helped incubate or have invested in or something like that and every member of the community has some small share in this. Um there have been Dows early on that tried to do similar things and that

concept is quite strong but you almost at at a small enough scale like John's saying you almost don't need that because people I think the the social capital of being seen to be doing something good for the collective is greater even than the potential financial entanglement where people like to host the thing and then share there in the telegram group of like, oh, we hosted a barbecue and etc. or you know, we're about to host one. You guys should come. Um, we've seen this actually with uh residencies that we've been running at Edge City. So, the the next event that we're doing, which is in Patagonia, will actually be structured as a

collection of about a dozen residencies, and most people attending will be part of a residency. And they are their own, it's kind of fractal. They are the essentially their own little pop-up village, but it's 30 people instead of 300. And they have their own focus areas and norms and, you know, values and things like this, but they can benefit from being part of the greater whole. And they're usually run by volunteers and people that really want to provide something for the broader community. And that's just something that's really cool to see. I think over time we can definitely imagine more kind of I guess strong entanglement or something that's potentially

you know financial capital instead of just social capital. Um another thing I think that's interesting though is that something I've noticed is that we've seen people develop identity bonds to the broader concept of Edge City. I think because they've had so many meaningful experiences, they've met so many people. They've had, you know, just a long time. I think some people have spent over 60 days at some kind of Edge City event. And what's nice about that is that then you start to get into this realm of um imagined communities like the Benedict Anderson idea. He obviously was talking

about nation states and how people without ever meeting their fellow countrymen face to face will die for them or will pay taxes for them or you know go to long you know go to lengths for them. We don't have yet that level of um commitment, let's say, but there is already this thing where we've had I think over 12,000 people come to an edge city event and no not a single one of those people has met more than 100 or 200 of those folks and yet they still feel themselves part of this imagined edge community that's you know that they feel willing and able to actually provide you know spend energy providing for and I think that's really cool. you

kind of almost have a seed of that nationhood or maybe network nationhood that um that can kind of emerge over time. One one note on what you just said to more because I totally agree with you and I've experienced this at at Edge as well that like there's just such a great desire to you're seeing other people contributing and you're like oh I I want to be a part of that. I want to do that too. It's it's kind of the same thing with Burning Man camps. Like I was talking with my partner in the camp uh some some of the people who who organize it about like >> you know what what what's the difference between people who like do really well in the camp and who don't and it just came down to this. It's like are you a net value ad to the community and if you

are then like the community is going to further bring you in and like appreciate you and you're going to get entangled with it. Um, and so I I think like I the only addendum I'd add to what you said is and and maybe even the broader framework of entanglement that that Premier V has been talking about is I wouldn't necessarily call like economic and legal entanglement, you know, like uh strong entanglement. I'd maybe call it like formal entanglement because I actually think that the the like social cultural entanglement can be stronger and and you know more valuable. And in some ways what what I've found at least through you know the the experience of like winding down a DAO is that actually

the economic and legal entanglements it's not necessarily that they're stronger but they're certainly more formal and therefore like more complicated to unwind. But I if like the world wants if if like the if the community is not benefiting from them, it's not a good thing that they're like harder to unwind. >> Yeah. No, just a comment because uh we were discussing in another episode the question of like what are the different form the different I wouldn't call it like hierarchies because I don't know if it's really like one is better than the other but the different degrees or flavor of entanglement and we had identified the the first the it kind of like construct on top of each other but maybe not but anyway the first one was

like social entanglement which is like when people start just like hidden kinship. The second one is cultural entanglement which is it's not just a relationship that I feel kinship with other people is that there is a culture that is created around it because of those relationships. The third one is economic entanglement which is like now I I put a stick I'm vested economically into something and then the last one that we name was the structural entanglement uh which in my view is the strongest but I think different subjectivity might have different opinion but like structural entanglement is really like it's when you become part of the other right so like an insurance

pool is economic entanglement but like equity The swap is actually structural entanglement because we are sharing of blood right and uh of course human sharing the blood is a bit complicated. So like structure but you know we do we do some kind of structural entanglement via legal mechanism. So when when two people get married they become part of each other at many level because there is a legal tying. Um so that's one way of simulating I guess structural entanglement but I think the most the most beautiful one is really like to understand what are those things in which it's not just that I like you because one day I might stop liking you

you know and then I run so it's the question of like everything that enable rage quit is not entanglement even though there is you know everything is good when it works well the problem is when it stop working well are people sticking and trying to solve the problem or are the people rage quit quitting and I feel like in the in the example that you both have given I see how those are very clear representation of why it makes sense to contribute when everything goes well uh but I don't know if I'm hearing uh ways that express that even when things don't go well because of the entanglement we will fix it we

will we will work hard to make sure that we're still sticking to the to the collective because we still believe that it is better for all of us to stick to the collective even though I could just run with my money, you know, I could just like cut the social ties. So, you know, I think that like the entanglement is a little bit more than just a win-win game. It's a win-win game that also has a lose-lose. You know that that that it's not a prisoner dilemma. A prisoner dilemma is like always have this incentive of defection. Uh where but but lose nonetheless. Whereas the entanglement actually defection is gone. Like the

incentive of defecting is gone because it's so obvious that you will lose as an individually by defecting. Yeah, it's interesting to think about the exit cost of these communities and to what degree you want to build those, you know, structures into place. For example, it's very difficult to exit being a US citizen. And that probably has, you know, helped in the sense of people like, all right, well, I'm I'm in this no matter what. Let's try and figure it out. you know maybe that like you knowund whatever 30 years ago didn't work out but >> or eventually it did right so >> yeah I don't know with with edge for

example we are not at a place yet where we want to create any kind of you know difficulty in exit like participation has to be voluntary and therefore also we want people to be able to decide not to come I think one potential fail mode of all of these things that's always there is you don't want to become a cult. You don't want to become like two, okay, we're in this together now, you know. Um, but to your point about social cultural economic and then structural entanglement, I think it's I think you need all of the above. They do build on each other and you need them all kind of

simultaneously. For example, with Instacart, you could be an Instacart shareholder, but you might think, well, you know, there's 10,000 other employees. My boss has forgotten about me. I'm just going to check out and they're they're going to be fine. Like, what am I really going to do? Right? So, you still need the aspect of the like social capital that you're building on your team with your boss, with your colleagues. You're showing up, you're managing the operations, you're shipping the code or whatever. Um, so the economic and maybe even the structural, the equity swap isn't quite enough. You still need those other things as well.

>> Yeah, I I agree. You definitely need the base layers. Yeah. And maybe this is part of why they're like the base layers is because like the we are humans and we we human together and like those are the things that are the acts of you know being humans and being relational and like those are the things that actually matter most to people dayto-day more than like the potential of some future payoff or something like that. I think that like you are right Prima Vera that um economic and and legal you know more formal entanglements do create the ability for people to work through hard times but they also can create a lot of like additional layers of resentment or

like challenges in in working through um the hard things. And you know, I've I've seen this play out with um with you know, companies, with Dows, with um family like dynamics like you know, it can can kind of happen in like um uh lots of different ways. Uh maybe I'm more of like a both a a like libertarian and like an optimist about like um social relationships. Um but I I feel like um you know the the ability to exit is actually like a crucial part of the types of organizations that we are building relative to nation states is

that you you can exit and if it's not you know the right fit there there are other options and that like most people are attracted to being a part of a thing being a part of a group being a part of a mission and so by default people actually do want to, you know, entangle instead of repel. Um, and so I I would make the case that both the like social entanglements are can be more powerful than um, you know, people realize and also that the formal entanglements can be um, while they will like formally tie people together, they may actually uh, like repel the people in practice.

>> Yeah. I mean I don't think I don't think the goal is to eliminate exit at all cost but it's just like it's intentionally even from a libertarian perspective I think can be accepted like I intentionally choose to entangle myself because I want to be vested and this vesting of course has a stake that uh that is that is harder to remove. Um this conversation actually make me think of something uh if we go back to the conversation about like citizens versus users is that entanglement could actually be this interesting continum in which if I'm not entangled at all I'm just a user but the more I choose to untangle myself which is voluntary basis but now but now you trust me because I

have a strong stake into the system because you know I cannot just run then giving those untangled actors more of a citizenship role which basically just means like the more the more you demonstrate commitment and entanglement the more you benefit with higher influence in the governance of the system because of course I know that your decision is a long-term decision and it's not just like a pump and dump decision right um so in this way like we can kind of navigate like not everyone has to be like 100% entangled but people that are so entangled that they are one with the system. Probably you want to give them more voice than

someone that is just contributing. It's nice to contribute, but if you're just contributing, but you're not entangling, then it's harder to trust you because I know that you can run at any moment if you find a better uh a better system, right? So perhaps this is a nice way of um of playing between this continuum of like user versus citizen. Yeah, I think that's a really interesting point. Even just the term user, you know, like I know a lot of because it's like the other connotation of that is like drug users or like you know, it's like it tends to be these very transactional relationships. Um and so I think to your point like yeah uh the downside of like

you know trying to make governments look too much like startups is is that like users are inherently transactional. And so I I think this framework of thinking of like citizenship via increasing levels of social entanglement and then you maybe more formal entanglement makes a lot of sense. >> Yeah. >> Okay. So now we can go into the fun part which is the speculative part. Um so here we talk about like the present and the past. So I'm curious given all the conversation we had um with regard to your specific communities uh is there any desire or whatever inspiration of actually doing something adding a new

mechanism or a particular feature that will incite incentivize people uh to get a bit more entangled. And what will that mechanism look like? >> Yeah, I think in our case, I have a loose, let's say, entanglement road map that I haven't actually written down anywhere, but it's kind of bubbling up through conversations I've had with the team, with the community, and just in my mind. And I'd say we're probably at like a three out of 10 on that road map, meaning right at the beginning. And we're missing quite a lot. So in general, yes, the desire is there. Like I would like to move edge in a direction

where people over time start to feel more of their identity as being part of this community. They feel like they want to participate more. They want to be at the events. They want to build their startups in the community. They want to, you know, share their academic papers on our forums, etc. Right? What are we missing to get there? I think a few things. One is we still don't have really a sense of any kind of identity layer or credentiing or you know something that you can look at either a digital or physical you know totem of your belonging essentially. And that thing by the way

should also be you know on an open protocol that allows people to be part of multiple communities and it should be you know obviously something unchained something that people can um yeah it's just in the open and I can be part of you know Ftopia or something like Cabin or Edge City and the communities will all start to entangle through the people that they share in common. I think that's actually kind of a beautiful thing. Um, >> what else are we missing? We're missing a way to manage and uh manage shared resources. We're missing some kind of probably light constitutional framework of what it even really means. What

what's you signing up for here? Um, and then over time that we're missing the structural and e economic entanglements as well. And that's something that will take longer, right? because that would mean probably some kind of token or you know shared equity or things like this and that will just take I think many years to define how to do well but yeah TLDDR that's the that's the loose road map. >> Mhm. >> Yeah. I think >> for me there there's maybe an irony here which is like um I I believe that the the the interesting most interesting and valuable thing that we are all creating um you know in the context of network

societies, network nations etc is moving beyond this like Westfallian model of sovereignty grounded in in physical territory. And yet I think that the type of entanglement that I'm most interested in developing is a an entanglement of place. It's an entanglement of um people living in the same place and as a result being deeply uh interconnected with each other, seeing each other all the time and and also being dependent on each other, you know, having shared physical resources. Um, and so I I think if I could wind the clock back and, you know, uh, start start over with Cabin, I probably would spend a lot more time

just focused on our first neighborhood out in the Texas Hill Country. Um, and really really try to build a village there. And that's the type of work I'm doing doing now in the um the town I live in in California because I I think that um you know like there there is just no greater sense of uh entanglement you can have than than with like the people you see every day and the places that you interact with every day. Um, and so I think if we can figure out how to bridge this gap where we're like locally entangled but then relying on functional versions of sovereignty within those local places instead of of territorial versions of sovereignty within those local places that will, you know, allow us to have the best of both

worlds. >> Yeah. Yeah. Very cool. Cool. I'm looking forward to seeing those developments. Um and I I really want to go and visit um your uh neighborhood village and you need to come and visit us. Um okay, last question. >> Uh it's a very challenging one. Um but a very needed one is like um I would love if you can give you know if you were to try to explain to someone either a 5 years old or a 90 years old or whatever appear what is entanglement? I think I would just say um interdependency

interdependency between people, between communities um yeah ways in which like uh larger structures are built out of the interdependencies of their component parts. >> Mhm. >> Yeah. Yeah. That's you stole my word, John, but yeah, that's exactly how I would have framed it. I think this this idea of interdependence is is quite beautiful and it's also something that is I think just a a a fact of the universe. We are all interdependent with each other with the environment around us and it's a truth that we would be you know we would do well to remember more often.

>> I think I I would I would I I like it if I were to try to do that that very challenging thing. I think like I would say that entanglement is is the acknowledgment that interdependence is great you know it's not because we are all interdependent it exist in the world but like I think entanglement is like the proactive attempt at actually adding interdependencies as opposed to just trying to reduce them or just observing them. uh it's actually terri it comes with a conviction that the more interdependence we create with the people of course not with everyone but with the people that we want to be entangled with then the better off we all become I think

>> yeah well said love it >> cool we have a definition okay um now is last word what's your last word >> what's your last Bye John. >> Entanglement. >> Entanglement. >> Yeah. >> Come come come to Patagonia. Come to Edge city Patagonia October 18 to November 15. >> The only way to really understand entanglement is to experience it. And the best way to experience it is to go to Edge City or to the neighboring villages.

>> Awesome. Thanks so much for having us Pura. This has been a fun conversation. >> Thank you. Yeah, that's great. >> Yeah, this is great.