Portability of Network States Nations Cultures

Should this pop up automatically? Or maybe I do need the USB-C. Oh, there we go. Okay. We're just going to do it from this view for sake of getting moving.

So we wanted to talk about the portability of network states, nations, cultures, network sovereignties, and really kind of just get to what would it take to sort of like instantiate these in new contexts and think about that friction kind of just get to what would it take to sort of like instantiate these in new contexts and think about that friction or lack of friction, ideally. So one kind of like general pattern is that First Nations were able to organize and pursue common goals, shared value, stewardship of resources, and higher purpose. Maybe that's a factor of scale and size, but they were energetically attuned without the sort of current construct of money and capitalism that we currently have. And something that is a thread within this space that I believe in is that we're kind of looking for a way to use technology to actually re-tribalize and take on some of those ethos. So we're going to make an abstract comparison to Docker in the world of software, which was a useful thing that kind of enabled abstract functionality to just run on disparate hardware.

And if we think of social software, like what we're creating with decentralized technology, there's kind of an interest in maybe how we can kind of think of the runtime of our network cultures and be able to reinstantiate these things in different contexts and start to get down to the nitty-gritty of, like, what does it take? What do people need? Do you need a wallet? Do you need to watch a video or take part in a forum to cohere on what the collective intention is? So another motivation, this is a picture of Janine giving a talk about Edge at Network State Conference.

So there's been a bunch of Edge City pop-ups historically. There's more coming up next year. Building on the Docker metaphor, what does it take actually to port over different things from one city to another and actually make them relevant, consistent, and continuous as well, and also maybe lower the cost. A small side note, as Nathan and I were preparing this deck, we looked at the Docker picture, and the Docker logo for the software is actually this whale carrying a bunch of containers, and we thought that was actually a very apt metaphor of this ability for us to actually package a bunch of things together and actually bring it to different environments. So in software, Docker allows the portability of code, and also of the runtime, the configurations.

And in physical life, the shipping containers actually themselves can be useful functional units of maybe energy, storage, food, and other physical constraints. This is now kind of brainstorming. We want to leave you with some open questions. And you can find us afterwards to talk to us about this. But we were thinking, like, what are the things that are shared across different pop-up cities around, for example, the Edge community?

And on the software side, we have things like common ethos, what brings us together, the call to mission of actually adventuring to be in this location, the lore of actually being funded with digital common goods, the moral code of how we interact with each other, the digital identity, which we hope to continue across different pop-ups, and also edges, right? The economy, how do you actually have shared communal good currency that exists post pop-ups? And also the hardware. So I'm giving Nathan to emphasize a bit more, but we believe also that it's important to focus on the hardware component of network states, not only on software, kind of giving instantiation to the physical pieces like energy, food, and education. Well, I think there's sort of like an option there.

It's like there is a lot that you can accomplish with just abstraction and just information, you know, in terms of like, are you running contracts on the Ethereum virtual machine or maintaining currency in a certain way. Also, as a choice, there's a lot of life that is material and exists in hardware. Where do we live? How do we take care of ourselves? Just diving deeper into this point, what would it be to have network sovereignties as a code where essentially like you can just automatically instantiate a whole stack and enable a group of people to try something out.

So I kind of like made a sort of funny little riff on a Docker file here where it's like, okay, from Edge to DLANA, like this one, add an extra communication network, add some generators, run a values forum collectively, so on and so forth. This is kind of just like a riff on the ethos-based innovation. I'm not going to go super deep into it, but simple things that you could do. A simple one is reuse your cup. What if you had a little network where you don't have disposable cups and it's an expectation that you bring your own software as common or you don't do sugar.

Let's see. I just want to think about some of the interesting implications from this as well. If we think about pop-ups from this open source model, right, there is a bunch of common operating systems in our brains, right, that sort of allows the plug-in to these pop-ups. And if we were to actually create repos for them, like kind of what they showed the sort of files, you can actually also allow opt-in process to the system, right? Today we have to physically go to a location and say, okay, we're going to bring everyone here, and that basically exists as a pop-up.

In the future, people will say, that looks awesome. We want that in our city. Let's, like, kind of git clone that open source repo of actually creating a pop-up, and then we can actually onboard and actually sign a pledge. A second one is actually, so it's an instance of using a pop-up, using online resources. And if you do have a pop-up, right, sort of like if it emerges and there's already other ones that are persisting, you can also plug into the shared network of food, services, security, energy, and so some models can get studied and forked.

So I really think that there's this like powerful metaphorical richness in actually looking at the movement. And we'll talk about Bhutan for a second well like one really tangible context of forking um is the new mindfulness city that they're building in Bhutan and the powers that be in Bhutan have expressed quite clearly that successful models in this domain can be instantiated in Gelifu mindfulness city City, which is really cool because we have soil and a context to play in this domain. So we'll be having a Bhutan meetup with Edge City people on Monday, so look for that. And both of us just came back from Bhutan, so we'd love to tell you more about that. And final thing for you to maybe read, if you haven't seen this book already, it's called, it's a book of, series of two books called Damon and Freedom.

And it offers a very vivid and very gripping narrative of actually the effort to create a global decentralized network state that fights in competition with existing capitalistic corporation paradigm and kind of goes to both kinetic and also psychological conflict, right, to sort of carve out new space and new opportunities