Inside Zuzalu, a co-living experiment organized by Vitalik Buterin in Montenegro in 2023, as the techno-utopian “Network State” concept inspires more projects
Silicon Valley has always dreamed of building its own utopias. Who's ready to move in? — I.
The AtlanticKaitlyn Tiffany
Context & Ripple Effects
Zuzalu puts a physical, temporary community around an idea otherwise framed as online groups coordinating toward land and eventual political autonomy. Balaji Srinivasan’s account of the Network State supplies that broader model.
It also sits alongside tech’s recurring attempts to make digital ideologies tangible through shared spaces, rather than leaving them as platforms or virtual-world narratives.
First-order effects
Zuzalu gives Vitalik Buterin and Network State advocates a lived co-living reference point, making the concept more concrete for potential participants and organizers.
The experiment turns attention from abstract online affiliation to the operational realities of gathering a community in one location.
Second-order effects
New Network State projects face pressure to demonstrate real-world community formation, not merely online membership; the model described in the Network State framework makes land acquisition a central next test.
Hospitality and destination-development experiments offer a nearer operational precedent: Airbnb’s Samara community-center initiative similarly treated place-based community as a product to be designed.
Third-order effects
If repeated, such experiments could recast the Network State from a primarily digital-political thesis into a portfolio of place-based pilots, judged by whether communities persist beyond an event.
That shift would sharpen the divide between projects that can sustain governance and local relationships and those that remain temporary gatherings.
The trend: Tech communities are increasingly testing whether online identity and capital can be converted into durable, place-based social institutions.
To many in Silicon Valley, government is just another industry to be disrupted. @kait_tiffany on the techno-libertarians building their own city-states: https://www.theatlantic.com/ ... [image]
The horizon of techno-utopian thought remains feudal. But this is an impulse that's partly embedded in the tech bro ethos because of its roots in libertarian communalism, as ably chronicled by @fturner in From Counterculture to Cyberculture
a lot of powerful people in the tech world want to abandon the great American cities and start from scratch somewhere else. i wrote about their plans (and New York) for the March issue of @TheAtlantic! https://www.theatlantic.com/ ...
Great piece here. The techno-utopianism the piece describes is spiritually identical to the bourgeois retreat to the suburbs two centuries ago. A retreat from civic responsibility to exclusive, private leisure. “Don't fix the broken world; leave it, look away, focus on yourself”
“His family fought in the Revolutionary War; he has wanted to start a new city since he was 15 or 16 years old; the important thing to know about Praxis is that everyone who lives there will be amazing.” @kait_tiffany @TheAtlantic #longreads https://www.theatlantic.com/ ...
Another quite ridiculous form of settler colonialism, utterly lacking awareness of human dependence on functioning ecosystems and natural resources. I'm sure they'll decide some government is ok when they realize they need drinkable water.
really enjoyed this @kait_tiffany report on the increasingly popular, morally stunted fantasy of peppering the globe with conformist micro-dictatorships, and also why real cities (but especially new york) are cool and great https://www.theatlantic.com/ ...
At “a gathering last summer, would-be future residents of Praxis split into groups to tackle various big questions, including ... “In an ideal society, to what extent should women be working or go to college or be trained the same as men?” @kait_tiffany: https://www.theatlantic.c…