Zuzalu

reflections about my experiences at Zuzalu, an experimental two month long pop up city organized by Vitalik Buterin - and thoughts on how vibecamp might play around with the concept

(disclaimer: while I did have discussions at the time with a number of people involved in planning and executing Zuzalu, it has been a while and I did not take notes while I was there. What follows is a mix of my own opinions, impressions, and what could very well be faulty memories. If I find out that anything here is inaccurate, I’ll update accordingly - and please feel free to contact me if you notice anything!)

INTRO 

This spring, I spent 3 weeks at an experimental pop-up city on the coast of Montenegro called Zuzalu.  Zuzalu is an AI generated name, and there’s no real consensus on how to pronounce it, which honestly kinda fits with the overall vibe of both the event and the nascent scene it’s emerging from.

The event itself spanned two months, from March 25th - May 25th. It was Vitalik Buterin’s idea. There are hacker houses with a small number of people for an extended period of time, conferences with a large number of people for a short period of time - Zuzalu was, in part, an experiment to see what you could make synthesizing those two formats. A large number of people, for an extended period of time.

The ‘city’ in pop-up city can be misleading, though - in practice, it felt more like a very long conference. The total number of residents and visitors was fairly low, and it was missing some of the vital components that would be necessary to consider it an actual city. Pop-up city is a compelling name, easily remembered and with pretty decent memetic power, so while it may take a bit of context to explain what it actually is, I don’t think it’s a bad choice. It also hints at the long term aspirations of the people involved. 

NUTS AND BOLTS

There were 200 core long term residents, sourced from a range of cutting-edge fields. While I believe they had a way for people to apply to join, my impression was that in practice it was primarily invite-only - and initially was kept fairly under wraps in an attempt to prevent people from showing up without permission. Long term residents were sent invitations initially by the organizing team, and then a few others were brought in to help identify other people that might be high-value to have in attendance. Each resident was given two guest passes friends could use (for a limited time - I think they were good for up to two or three weeks?), and some of the subevents brought in new waves of visitors. 

Part of the explicit ethos of Zuzalu, similar to how we approached venue sourcing for vibecamp, was that even if you want to build your own thing eventually, it makes more sense to gather people using existing infrastructure than it does to wait to gather until you have the resources you need to build something from scratch.

Why Montenegro? Though likely not exhaustive, some of the reasons for choosing that location included a desire to build a community that was not United States-centric, and that allows access to citizens of countries that tend to run into visa troubles when trying to travel to countries like the US, along with some political considerations that I didn’t get a deep look into and don’t feel qualified to comment on. It took place at a gated resort along the coast, in an area remote enough that, like Burning Man, if you were at Zuzalu it meant that you were invested enough to put quite a bit of effort into getting there.

Payments were made via crypto. It was $100 per week, and I don’t believe lodging was included in that. Long term residents stayed in apartments within the resort itself, with some people staying at the quite pricey hotel onsite. They ran out of space within the resort and directed visitors to book airbnbs in a village up the hill (approximately a 40 minute walk). The event was heavily subsidized by Vitalik, and likely others. I didn’t ask about how the financial side of things worked out - I know Vita Dao was involved in organizing, but not the particulars of the relationship with them or the other orgs that seemed to be tangentially involved. The weekly fees gave you access to a daily breakfast inspired, I heard, by Bryan Johnson’s diet, co-working space, and Zuzalu events. Being accepted as either a visitor or a resident gave you access to an anonymous identity system built using ZK proofs, called ZuPass. Some apps were built for that ecosystem, and my impression was that it was intended to be kept alive post-Zuzalu for regional and online coordination, but it’s currently disabled. Overall the tech felt unnecessarily complex to me - each private event announcement came with stern warnings about the necessity of having an active ZuPass in order to access them (we were told our QR codes would refresh often enough that even using an outdated screenshot would not be sufficient), but I was not the only one flashing an expired wristband to gain entry. I was not doing this because deception was the only way I could get in; I was told by more than one organizer that they would update my weekend visitor pass to become a weekly one, but they were handling so much of the event logistics manually that it always felt to me like it would be a burden to corner one of them in order to make good on the offer, and I pushed back my return flight last minute at least once.

Attendees (both residents and visitors) coordinated primarily using a telegram hub. Everyone had the ability to create new topics (like channels in a discord server), and were encouraged to do so. Some topics were used for discussions, some for announcements, and some to build and coordinate events (both repeating and one-off). The co-creation ethos was pretty strongly highlighted by organizers. 

Each week had a different theme/track, with associated attendee-run subevents of varying degrees of formality. Tracks included topics like ZK proofs, Ethereum, AI safety, longevity. I came for the network states and charter cities conference, which was, as far as I could tell, the biggest and most formal of the subevents. That conference was co-organized by Niklas Anzinger and Mark Lutter, and you can read their write ups about Zuzalu here and here.

Zuzalu ran weekly hackathons (also within theme??) but as one of the rare non-technical people wandering around, I didn’t end up with firsthand experiences with those- but did enjoy sitting in on the demos and loved the spirit of them.
There were also town hall meetings every week, which were a powerful way to solicit feedback, reorient focus back to values and big picture, and encourage community involvement.

One thing the organizers got really right was breakfast - for four hours every day, you knew you could go to the same spot and run into other Zuzalans generally open to sharing their tables. The other restaurants were open to the tourists visiting the resort as well, and tables even of people you recognized were often home to closed meetings where mysterious and high-powered deals were presumably being brokered. The benefit of having opportunities for these kinds of unpredictable, serendipitous connections baked into the design of social containers cannot be overstated, and is the core of why I’m so bullish about projects like Jason Benn’s The Neighborhood SF and Priya and Andrew’s Fractal in NYC.

But aside from breakfast, there was no central gathering place at Zuzalu. It was often either raining or uncomfortably warm out in the sun, and sitting outside of designated sitting areas was not allowed (“Nonono, excuse me, you may not sit on the ground. This is a Five Star Resort!”).  Inside the restaurants and cafes, you were required to continue purchasing items off the menu at regular intervals if you wanted to work on your laptop, or sit waiting to see if a familiar face might walk by. I lost track of all the endless cappuccinos I ordered. Even many of the benches and chairs that didn’t look like they were part of one of the establishments required a twenty euro fee to sit in if you weren’t ordering. The only area that really had free seating for large numbers of people was the co-working room, which was understandably kept as a no-conversation zone.  


IMPRESSIONS

Zuzalu was *elite*.  The website has been updated a few times since the first time I looked at it, but initial impressions were that of Serious Intellectual Topics. Cutting edge ones, which added another layer to the already juicy status cake. I remember one of the pre-arrival info sheets warning people that they should expect to pay around $50/day for food - I scoffed at that; I don’t pay that much living in SF and SF isn’t exactly known for having a low cost of living. But I easily spent twice that some days; I was staying in the village and it wasn’t easy to source groceries or go back to cook during the day. This was not just any vacation spot, this was a 5 star resort (as the staff seemingly felt compelled to remind us whenever we innocently broke arbitrary rules). We were rubbing elbows not only with the number of billionaires that came for Zuzalu, but as the days warmed, increasing numbers of Russian oligarchs there on holiday with their designer bedecked wives (girlfriends? mistresses?) as well. It felt surreal, with the restaurant staff that rotated between venues on different days adding to the ‘this is a fucking sitcom’ feel, like bit actors being recycled for new roles episode to episode. The resort was gated, requiring passing through a security check point to access, and the dome Zuzalu set up to host talks in was behind a literal velvet rope - but perhaps the only way to avoid that particular aspect is to not have well-known billionaires and pop stars as part of your guest list. It was an inherently dehumanizing atmosphere, and the excess everywhere contributed to me subconsciously taking the environmental and climate projects less seriously than I think I would have otherwise.

Despite all that, there is an argument to be made that experimenting in containers only accessible by the privileged is better than not experimenting at all - and possibly even better than experiments run where the people involved would be bankrupt after an iteration or two - as long as the ultimate goal is to make it more and more accessible over time. I do truly believe that Vitalik and Janine Leger, the primary organizer of the event, are out to make the world a better place. I had never read any of Vitalik’s posts or watched any of his interviews before Zuzalu, and I consistently found myself surprised and impressed at the depth of the care for the world he exhibited and the thoughtfulness and humility with which he did so. 

The people there were, by and large, incredibly invigorating to be around. I had very few days that felt like a vacation - most were extremely productive in that they were filled with serendipitous and impactful new connections and extremely vibrant conversations with people I was far more likely to find alignment on values with than I would out in the world at large.

As the first iteration of an event with aspirations to become much more than just ‘an event’ over time, I think it was a success an very much worthwhile. Most of the criticisms I had were shared by the organizers and are things they are actively workshopping. I came away from it inspired to think bigger about my own projects, more confident about my place in this new world I’ve found myself in and what I have to offer it, and with many new and wonderful connections.


WHAT’S NEXT FOR ZUZALU

One thing I haven’t really touched on yet, and won’t get too detailed about in this post, are the higher level goals the people building Zuzalu are aiming at. I don’t feel very confident that I know all of what those are, and some of them are still being built - both by the original organizers and the residents/visitors who feel motivated to help shape what it will become. There were explicit nods to Balaji Srinivasan’s Network State concept throughout, and from here they want to become something like a community of communities, to collaboratively build infrastructure to support many diverse communities within the global Zuzalu ecosystem.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR VIBECAMP

If you’ve somehow made it here and don’t know what vibecamp is, that’s for another post (sorry not sorry). Vibecamp is closer to my ideal event/gathering of humans than most festivals are, Zuzalu was closer to my ideal than vibecamp is, and I suspect that whatever version of a pop-up city the vibecamp community could come up with would be even closer than either of them. I feel like what I really want is to be in these concentrated mixes of smart people motivated to make the world a better place, with the festival norms of ‘it’s okay to talk to strangers’, ‘it’s okay to be playful’’, and that of constant collaboration and co-creation - but as daily life. What would that look like? How would you design it? I would want people living within walking distance, a full and diverse schedule but not one so packed (and therefore draining) as you’d get at a festival. I appreciate the reasons for making Building and Thinking the primary goals of these kinds of gatherings, but my intuition is that we can do those things together best when we can connect on a deeply human level that’s easy to leave by the wayside when it’s not the focus. An oft-repeated refrain of mine these days is that when you get together smart, motivated, caring people, they naturally talk about and work on Hard Problems because that’s just what they love to spend their time on. I share Nick Cammarata’s belief that happiness increases productivity/competency, and view being embedded in a healthy and robust social fabric as a vital component of achieving and spreading said happiness. The team organizing vibecamp has been moving towards co-creation, pluralism, and deeper connection as some of the values we care most about, and any experimental events we design would likely reflect that.


CALL TO ACTION

Share your thoughts! How would you build something like this? Is having a weekly track the way to go? Tracts act to draw in temporary visitors who might not come otherwise - and I do think having waves of fresh faces come in was a net positive at Zuzalu. If so, what would kind of tracks would you like to see? If not, how would you design things so people do actually build while there, in addition to vibing? I imagine anything the vibecamp community organizes would be much less tech-oriented than Zuzalu, but I’m not sure that ‘full postrat’ is necessarily the way to go either. Where would you host it? How long should it be? Can you think of a better name to use than vibecity?

FINAL THOUGHTS

Zuzalu was an incredible thing to participate in. It was especially moving to witness OGs of the seasteading/charter city world such as Patri Friedman (his post on Zuzalu can be found here) and Mark Lutter taking part in a new cities conference with 250 attendees after so many years of slogging away, speaking to much smaller crowds.

There is something happening in the world, something that will have profound impacts down the line that I don’t think anyone can predict, and I’m fucking thrilled to be a part of it all.