This is a statement by Veronica and Burns, the initiators of the upcoming "ZuVillage Georgia" – our attempt of a refined second iteration of the Zuzalu 2023 experiment (series). Our addition builds on a triune directional protocol and on the application of the Zuzalu.city OS – both public goods, intended to safeguard and interconnect a plurality of techno-optimistic communities over a transnational cypherpunk network. Our ZuVillage is a prototype of this concept.
"What is the future direction of Zuzalu" was the central question at Zuzalu 2023. Later that year, as Zuzalu was called a "new culture," we began to consider a more specific, yet still open question: "What would be the most magnificent use case for a new culture, originating out of Zuzalu?" This is our attempt to answer both questions.
Below, we describe a Protocol and Prototype to guide the future direction of Zuzalu with what we believe to be the most magnificent use case for a new culture originating out of Zuzalu.
The Directional Protocol
The Directional Protocol addresses our analysis of the absolutely necessary elements of consideration for this use case. It constitutes a triune direction from first principles, sequenced in order of their interdependence:
1. Truth and Truthfulness as cultural foundation
We are accepting both the nebulosity and relevance of objectivity. We accept a plurality of cognitively sovereign individual minds able to perform as a collective intelligence in an open discourse as our most viable path towards a new culture of resilient enlightenment, intellectual autonomy and authentic self-expression.
Truth is the foundation upon which every culture is built. A culture no longer rooted in truthfulness is doomed to slide down on an uncorrectable path into a post-truth scenario: A culture that claims objective truth becomes dogmatic and authoritarian. A culture that denies the pragmatic relevance of objectivity becomes factually relativistic and intellectually dysfunctional.
Outcome-wise, both truth-claiming and relevance-denying cultures substitute objectivity with intersubjectivity: A culture that does not tolerate a plurality of intersubjective and subjective realities becomes a collectivist single point of failure. Exclusively an individual mind can experience reality – inherently biased by agency and circumstance. A culture that does not respect the importance of the individual mind's ability to make sense of the world autonomously equally denies the individual mind its own judgement. A culture that does not incentivize individual minds to hold each other responsible for the quality of their sense-making, reasoning and communication accumulates disinformation and deception. To safeguard objectivity from disinformation and deception, we consider the truth-model approach of metarationality.com to be our most viable path:
Objective truth is nebulous but relevant. Accepting Nebulosity of objectivity disregards Dogma. Accepting Relevance of objectivity disregards factual Relativism.
Subjective reality is dynamic and biased, but without alternative for seeking truth. Respecting Individual Agency disregards Indoctrination. Protecting Cognitive Sovereignty disregards Groupthink. Incentivizing Epistemic Responsibility disregards Disinformation of Self. Promoting Intellectual Autonomy disregards Dependency on Authorities. Incentivizing Intellectual Integrity disregards Disinformation of Others.
To integrate both in an effective way relevant for our use case, we conceptualize implications of intersubjective truth, that translate directly into the other 2 directions of the protocol:
Intersubjective truth is trust-dependent, pluralistic and relevant for coordination and intellectual progress. Subjective Trust of Individuals towards intersubjective common knowledge gives it Legitimacy. Reasonable Subjective Trust requires cognitive sovereignty for judgment, allowing us to rely on more informed Consent.
2. Trust and Trustworthiness as basis for coordination:
We accept the intransparent and corruptible nature of human agency, the irrationality of human intuition and the selective awareness of human instinct as parts of human nature. We further accept human autonomy and privacy as worthy of perseverance, and our conscious awareness and ability to reason as necessary to evaluate trustworthiness by risk-assessment. On that basis, we accept our ability to design less trust-dependent systems to rely on as our most viable path towards achieving a more cohesive, democratic and cooperative society.
Trust is the foundation upon every relationship is built. Without granting trust, suspicion outbalances openness. Without requiring trustworthiness, naivety outbalances rationality and reasonableness. Instinctual trust is often granted in unawareness, without a reasonable basis for trustworthiness. Without awareness, we cannot doubt the legitimacy of the granted trust. „Good Intentions“ are not a good reason to trust in an idea, system or agent. „Good Intentions“ often lead to the worst outcomes.
Reasonable Trust requires evaluation of trustworthiness, and functions as a substitute for Truth – an objectified affordance factor based on risk assessment.
Instinctual or intuitive trust is a substitute for Awareness – an affective pacifier that creates selective blindspots, allowing for executive efficiency at the cost of safety.
Trust in human agents and trust in systems are affected in similar manners, but have different implications. A system that is trust-dependent requires trust into some centralized external authority, which becomes a single point of failure. Trust-less systems offer a technological solution that enables the user to evaluate the trustworthiness of the system by understanding the algorithm. There is no external single point of failure, which adds to the autonomy of the user. This is not always a viable option, but can free up cognitive capacities for risk-evaluation in cases where it is needed. Lowering the overall trust-dependency in coordinating a society is often more effective than trying to raise the trustworthiness of human agents. The more we can design our coordination model in a trust-minimizing way, the more bandwidth we have to build reasonable trust in other people. For a human agent, it is usually more promising and faster to get trust granted on unreasonable affection than over reasonable trustworthiness. This creates incentives for every one of us to use these circumstances in one's self-interest.
Every human being is also a centralized, intransparent, ever-changing, complex system with its own agency. The functions of trusted human agents in a trust-dependent system can be reduced to their role, in order to rationally or reasonably estimate trustworthiness.
The individual mind is always a centralized system, it even relies on the centralized nature of its mind. The intransparency of human agents can be a result of privacy or them updating mental models, both necessary for their cognitive sovereignty. In order to protect the individual's freedom of thought and expression, consideration about their integrity and quality of reasoning needs to become a civic duty. Even more so if the human agent is acting in a role of influence. The legitimacy and competence of people acting out different roles needs to be questioned like the integrity of a system. This enables us to develop our awareness and competence in trusting others for good reasons. Collective intelligence tools are utilizing the insights of the cognitive sovereign individual. In order to make these tools work, both truthfulness and trustworthiness need to be considered as relevant. We see these ways as some of our best viable options to lower the trust-dependence.
D/acc is a framework for evaluating technological development gameplans. It recognizes the huge benefit of technology and the opportunity costs of not accelerating, while it also identifies dimensions of relevance for human individuals and civilization. It is broadly applicable, not limited to AI. Due to its emphasis on defense-favoring choices, democracy, decentralization and differentiated technology development, we consider it the best viable gameplan for this use case.
D/acc focuses on the needs of humans and humanity, and the challenges that could arise.
Humanity is deeply good, most worthy of proliferation and expansion across the universe.
Humans are uniquely able to conceptualize ethical frameworks, investigate and update beliefs, self-correct behavior, coordinate towards shared intentions, and care about the consequences and quality of their judgment.
Human Nature is inherently imperfect in agency and judgment, individually and collectively.
Human Nature is highly limited in its potential to self-improve recursively compared to AI.
Utilization of technology is necessary to enhance Human potential, but not broadly good or safe.
Advancement of technology was so far the primary driver behind broad enhancement of human civilization and individual freedom, safety and overall quality of life.
Acceleration of technology is necessary to enhance and safeguard human civilization adequately to human potential, but profoundly and increasingly complex and consequential.
The author further names 4 dimensions of defense: info, cyber, bio, physical.
We argue that there is a hidden 5th dimension of defense, what we would call "mind-defense," because it addresses the individual cognitive sphere.
The Zuzalu.city OS
The Zuzalu.city OS provides a digital infrastructure for this use case, guided by the ethos of Cypherpunk. Provided tools that we plan to use on our experiment:
a zero-knowledge proof passport
a discourse forum, that is gated to these passports
a trust-less voting platform
a permission-less venue booking system
a composable data layer providing interoperability between these.
The Prototype ZuVillage Event
Our goals are to provide better circumstances for intellectual cross-pollination and rational discourse, to decrease the dependency on trust in centralized authorities in our community, and to collaboratively work on tools, concepts and a potential game plan for the future of Zuzalu.
Our attempt to refine the experience we had at Zuzalu 2023 for ZuVillage Georgia:
The first Zuzalu experiment had its fair share of difficulties, but the most concerning for us were uncommented moments of groupthink, such as anti-intellectual propaganda presented as fact without critique from the community or influxes of visitors attracted to join for social status seemingly without consideration of the overall experiment. Amusingly, Rationality itself was increasingly virtue signaled by community members that recognized the Initiator's and other high-profile guests' interest in the subject – fortunately this translated into higher attendance of Rationality meetups and generative exchange between "newcomers" and long-time frequenters.
We contend that group pitfalls are inevitable in a project like this, yet can be mitigated through careful filtering of applicants, individual education on cognitive biases and methods of rationality for all attendees, and a culture of critique for all presentations and discussions. The ZuVillager application asks potential participants to think critically about the core topics of our experiment: individual sovereignty, defensive acceleration of technology, and cypherpunk philosophy, along with an example of a belief that has been updated within the last 1-2 years. We do not search for specific answers to any of our questions, but rather that an applicant puts in an effort to think and express their thoughts – a reflection of how they are likely to engage as a ZuVillager. Despite feedback that some applicants may not go through the effort to fill out a long application, we consider effort a key filtering mechanism and would rather optimize for quality than quantity.
To equip ZuVillagers with a shared intellectual foundation, our pre-programming for the weeks leading up to the start of the experiment and our entire first week are focused on rationality, metarationality, cognitive sovereignty, and collective sense making. We will also incorporate gears-level discussions into all subsequent programming and seek to establish truth seeking as a prerequisite expectation for scientific and technological discussions. We will encourage long-form written discussion on our ZK-gated discussion forum before, during, and after our experiment.
Living and working with others for an extended period of time requires trust, as does embarking on an ambitious movement to build new forms of technology, scientific funding, and even governance. Intangible feelings of trust grow over time through shared experiences, however select systems can optimize for trust within a community and safeguard against common pitfalls. Security and privacy policies are two necessary systems to establish trust during an experiment like Zuzalu. As such, our technology stack is restricted to privacy-first software, despite the tradeoff of less convenient UX.
We also establish a strict, zero tolerance privacy policy for all content shared publicly to require explicit consent from all involved individuals. During the first Zuzalu experiment, a severe breach in trust was caused by disregard and lack of consequences for breaking privacy rules. At ZuVillage, the policy will be clear to all attendees and breaking this rule will result in immediate expulsion. If community members cannot trust that others will not share their photo without permission, privacy-concerned individuals will not be able to participate and attention-seekers will propagate.
A community that values privacy, decentralization, and open source software is willing to overcome the friction of using early technologies that align with our values. A long-term crypto city experiment enables a unique critical mass of willing and technically-adept users to prove functional possibilities of emerging technologies, and our experiment is designed for this purpose. We are working closely with the Zuzalu.city software infrastructure project to provide use cases and accelerate development through hackathons and building together during ZuVillage.
Our ticketing system is built on smart contracts that issue the ZuVillage Zero-Knowledge passport, which then provides access to the ZuVillage Community Space on Zuzalu.city for permissionless session booking during the experiment as well as all other ZK-gated applications. ZuVillage will be the first test case for these features which will continue to iterate and be used by future experiments of its kind.
Our focus is on providing the physical and digital infrastructure necessary for the experiment to flourish, and our experimental goal is for data to be gained for the community, for projects, and for individuals that can be carried on for future iterations.
As experiment initiators, we take a neutral stance wherever possible and intentionally avoid any terminology of "core organizer" to prevent arbitrary hierarchy from clouding the experiment. However, we are not neutral on a handful of key aspects: cypherpunk and defensive acceleration as philosophical guiding principles, and the importance of protecting and enhancing individual cognitive sovereignty as prerequisite for all else on a community-level. These principles inform the technology we are using and building to operate our ZuVillage and the unconference design of the programming itself.
What are we experimenting with?
We are creating a temporary crypto city that offers a crypto-native experience with key processes handled on-chain
After applicants are accepted, they contribute via smart contracts programmed into Zuzalu.city, which result in an NFT that simultaneously functions as a ZK-based passport for access to ZuVillage's digital and physical infrastructure to self-organize events and social activities
We are testing a digital community convening offline for long-term co-living and coworking, coalescing around shared topics of interest while planning and building relevant technologies to power and enable experiments like ours
The technologies we build and test are decentralized and open source, and can be considered digital public goods that act as web3 alternatives to existing technologies
Zuzalu.city offers an "app store-like" digital space for its communities, bridging the gap between web3 tech and users so web3 builders can focus on building
By living and building together for an extended period, we accelerate the iteration process by testing technologies continuously throughout the experiment
We are attempting to create an intentional community that encompasses diverse frontier technologies, thought-schools of intellectual heterodoxy and tribes of the meta
With backgrounds in the rationality community, we attempt to replicate a clear communication culture of open discourse, productive disagreement, and freedom of expression found at rationality and metarationality meetups
By providing resources, virtual workshops, and an entire week dedicated to cognitive sovereignty, we seek to empower all participants to improve and implement their individual sense and decision making skills
We see individual cognitive sovereignty as prerequisite for all community-level decisions such as governance
We are attempting to establish a governance structure that can enable future financial sustainability and growth for our community
We will hold a series of workshops and discussions with experts in decentralized governance and legal engineering with the goals of creating a democratic process for decision-making and ultimately agreeing on a governance structure to carry forward after the event ends
We are testing the directional protocol with the hypothesis that it will safeguard the most vital dimensions from interfering with each other in a dysfunctional way.
We are exploring potential long-term partnerships with the country of Georgia
Select officials will visit our ZuVillage and participate in discussions on special jurisdiction possibilities, existing free trade zones, technological innovation trajectories, and opportunities for digital nomads
We aim for at least 10% of our population to be Georgians and people living in Georgia already, and are coordinating scholarships for local students and web3 builders to attend.
Central questions to collectively elaborate answers to about ZuVillage Georgia may be: "How can we scale into a decentralized network of seamlessly interoperable communities?" and "Which maps and tools are available or buildable for that, and what are their implications on different use-cases?" This is the direction we aim to let the experiment unfold.
This is a statement by Veronica and Burns, the initiators of the upcoming "ZuVillage Georgia" – our attempt of a refined second iteration of the Zuzalu 2023 experiment (series). Our addition builds on a triune directional protocol and on the application of the Zuzalu.city OS – both public goods, intended to safeguard and interconnect a plurality of techno-optimistic communities over a transnational cypherpunk network. Our ZuVillage is a prototype of this concept.
"What is the future direction of Zuzalu" was the central question at Zuzalu 2023. Later that year, as Zuzalu was called a "new culture," we began to consider a more specific, yet still open question: "What would be the most magnificent use case for a new culture, originating out of Zuzalu?" This is our attempt to answer both questions.
Below, we describe a Protocol and Prototype to guide the future direction of Zuzalu with what we believe to be the most magnificent use case for a new culture originating out of Zuzalu.
The Directional Protocol
The Directional Protocol addresses our analysis of the absolutely necessary elements of consideration for this use case. It constitutes a triune direction from first principles, sequenced in order of their interdependence:
1. Truth and Truthfulness as cultural foundation
We are accepting both the nebulosity and relevance of objectivity. We accept a plurality of cognitively sovereign individual minds able to perform as a collective intelligence in an open discourse as our most viable path towards a new culture of resilient enlightenment, intellectual autonomy and authentic self-expression.
Truth is the foundation upon which every culture is built. A culture no longer rooted in truthfulness is doomed to slide down on an uncorrectable path into a post-truth scenario: A culture that claims objective truth becomes dogmatic and authoritarian. A culture that denies the pragmatic relevance of objectivity becomes factually relativistic and intellectually dysfunctional.
Outcome-wise, both truth-claiming and relevance-denying cultures substitute objectivity with intersubjectivity: A culture that does not tolerate a plurality of intersubjective and subjective realities becomes a collectivist single point of failure. Exclusively an individual mind can experience reality – inherently biased by agency and circumstance. A culture that does not respect the importance of the individual mind's ability to make sense of the world autonomously equally denies the individual mind its own judgement. A culture that does not incentivize individual minds to hold each other responsible for the quality of their sense-making, reasoning and communication accumulates disinformation and deception. To safeguard objectivity from disinformation and deception, we consider the truth-model approach of metarationality.com to be our most viable path:
To safeguard the individual mind's ability to judge subjective reality, we see the approach of Anna Riedl towards taking epistemic responsibility in the meta-crisis to be our most viable path:
To integrate both in an effective way relevant for our use case, we conceptualize implications of intersubjective truth, that translate directly into the other 2 directions of the protocol:
2. Trust and Trustworthiness as basis for coordination:
We accept the intransparent and corruptible nature of human agency, the irrationality of human intuition and the selective awareness of human instinct as parts of human nature. We further accept human autonomy and privacy as worthy of perseverance, and our conscious awareness and ability to reason as necessary to evaluate trustworthiness by risk-assessment. On that basis, we accept our ability to design less trust-dependent systems to rely on as our most viable path towards achieving a more cohesive, democratic and cooperative society.
Trust is the foundation upon every relationship is built. Without granting trust, suspicion outbalances openness. Without requiring trustworthiness, naivety outbalances rationality and reasonableness. Instinctual trust is often granted in unawareness, without a reasonable basis for trustworthiness. Without awareness, we cannot doubt the legitimacy of the granted trust. „Good Intentions“ are not a good reason to trust in an idea, system or agent. „Good Intentions“ often lead to the worst outcomes.
Reasonable Trust requires evaluation of trustworthiness, and functions as a substitute for Truth – an objectified affordance factor based on risk assessment.
Instinctual or intuitive trust is a substitute for Awareness – an affective pacifier that creates selective blindspots, allowing for executive efficiency at the cost of safety.
Trust in human agents and trust in systems are affected in similar manners, but have different implications. A system that is trust-dependent requires trust into some centralized external authority, which becomes a single point of failure. Trust-less systems offer a technological solution that enables the user to evaluate the trustworthiness of the system by understanding the algorithm. There is no external single point of failure, which adds to the autonomy of the user. This is not always a viable option, but can free up cognitive capacities for risk-evaluation in cases where it is needed. Lowering the overall trust-dependency in coordinating a society is often more effective than trying to raise the trustworthiness of human agents. The more we can design our coordination model in a trust-minimizing way, the more bandwidth we have to build reasonable trust in other people. For a human agent, it is usually more promising and faster to get trust granted on unreasonable affection than over reasonable trustworthiness. This creates incentives for every one of us to use these circumstances in one's self-interest.
Every human being is also a centralized, intransparent, ever-changing, complex system with its own agency. The functions of trusted human agents in a trust-dependent system can be reduced to their role, in order to rationally or reasonably estimate trustworthiness.
The individual mind is always a centralized system, it even relies on the centralized nature of its mind. The intransparency of human agents can be a result of privacy or them updating mental models, both necessary for their cognitive sovereignty. In order to protect the individual's freedom of thought and expression, consideration about their integrity and quality of reasoning needs to become a civic duty. Even more so if the human agent is acting in a role of influence. The legitimacy and competence of people acting out different roles needs to be questioned like the integrity of a system. This enables us to develop our awareness and competence in trusting others for good reasons. Collective intelligence tools are utilizing the insights of the cognitive sovereign individual. In order to make these tools work, both truthfulness and trustworthiness need to be considered as relevant. We see these ways as some of our best viable options to lower the trust-dependence.
3. Defensive Techno-Optimism as civilisatory roadmap
D/acc is a framework for evaluating technological development gameplans. It recognizes the huge benefit of technology and the opportunity costs of not accelerating, while it also identifies dimensions of relevance for human individuals and civilization. It is broadly applicable, not limited to AI. Due to its emphasis on defense-favoring choices, democracy, decentralization and differentiated technology development, we consider it the best viable gameplan for this use case.
D/acc focuses on the needs of humans and humanity, and the challenges that could arise.
The author further names 4 dimensions of defense: info, cyber, bio, physical.
We argue that there is a hidden 5th dimension of defense, what we would call "mind-defense," because it addresses the individual cognitive sphere.
The Zuzalu.city OS
The Zuzalu.city OS provides a digital infrastructure for this use case, guided by the ethos of Cypherpunk. Provided tools that we plan to use on our experiment:
The Prototype ZuVillage Event
Our goals are to provide better circumstances for intellectual cross-pollination and rational discourse, to decrease the dependency on trust in centralized authorities in our community, and to collaboratively work on tools, concepts and a potential game plan for the future of Zuzalu.
Our attempt to refine the experience we had at Zuzalu 2023 for ZuVillage Georgia:
The first Zuzalu experiment had its fair share of difficulties, but the most concerning for us were uncommented moments of groupthink, such as anti-intellectual propaganda presented as fact without critique from the community or influxes of visitors attracted to join for social status seemingly without consideration of the overall experiment. Amusingly, Rationality itself was increasingly virtue signaled by community members that recognized the Initiator's and other high-profile guests' interest in the subject – fortunately this translated into higher attendance of Rationality meetups and generative exchange between "newcomers" and long-time frequenters.
We contend that group pitfalls are inevitable in a project like this, yet can be mitigated through careful filtering of applicants, individual education on cognitive biases and methods of rationality for all attendees, and a culture of critique for all presentations and discussions. The ZuVillager application asks potential participants to think critically about the core topics of our experiment: individual sovereignty, defensive acceleration of technology, and cypherpunk philosophy, along with an example of a belief that has been updated within the last 1-2 years. We do not search for specific answers to any of our questions, but rather that an applicant puts in an effort to think and express their thoughts – a reflection of how they are likely to engage as a ZuVillager. Despite feedback that some applicants may not go through the effort to fill out a long application, we consider effort a key filtering mechanism and would rather optimize for quality than quantity.
To equip ZuVillagers with a shared intellectual foundation, our pre-programming for the weeks leading up to the start of the experiment and our entire first week are focused on rationality, metarationality, cognitive sovereignty, and collective sense making. We will also incorporate gears-level discussions into all subsequent programming and seek to establish truth seeking as a prerequisite expectation for scientific and technological discussions. We will encourage long-form written discussion on our ZK-gated discussion forum before, during, and after our experiment.
Living and working with others for an extended period of time requires trust, as does embarking on an ambitious movement to build new forms of technology, scientific funding, and even governance. Intangible feelings of trust grow over time through shared experiences, however select systems can optimize for trust within a community and safeguard against common pitfalls. Security and privacy policies are two necessary systems to establish trust during an experiment like Zuzalu. As such, our technology stack is restricted to privacy-first software, despite the tradeoff of less convenient UX.
We also establish a strict, zero tolerance privacy policy for all content shared publicly to require explicit consent from all involved individuals. During the first Zuzalu experiment, a severe breach in trust was caused by disregard and lack of consequences for breaking privacy rules. At ZuVillage, the policy will be clear to all attendees and breaking this rule will result in immediate expulsion. If community members cannot trust that others will not share their photo without permission, privacy-concerned individuals will not be able to participate and attention-seekers will propagate.
A community that values privacy, decentralization, and open source software is willing to overcome the friction of using early technologies that align with our values. A long-term crypto city experiment enables a unique critical mass of willing and technically-adept users to prove functional possibilities of emerging technologies, and our experiment is designed for this purpose. We are working closely with the Zuzalu.city software infrastructure project to provide use cases and accelerate development through hackathons and building together during ZuVillage.
Our ticketing system is built on smart contracts that issue the ZuVillage Zero-Knowledge passport, which then provides access to the ZuVillage Community Space on Zuzalu.city for permissionless session booking during the experiment as well as all other ZK-gated applications. ZuVillage will be the first test case for these features which will continue to iterate and be used by future experiments of its kind.
Our focus is on providing the physical and digital infrastructure necessary for the experiment to flourish, and our experimental goal is for data to be gained for the community, for projects, and for individuals that can be carried on for future iterations.
As experiment initiators, we take a neutral stance wherever possible and intentionally avoid any terminology of "core organizer" to prevent arbitrary hierarchy from clouding the experiment. However, we are not neutral on a handful of key aspects: cypherpunk and defensive acceleration as philosophical guiding principles, and the importance of protecting and enhancing individual cognitive sovereignty as prerequisite for all else on a community-level. These principles inform the technology we are using and building to operate our ZuVillage and the unconference design of the programming itself.
What are we experimenting with?
Central questions to collectively elaborate answers to about ZuVillage Georgia may be: "How can we scale into a decentralized network of seamlessly interoperable communities?" and "Which maps and tools are available or buildable for that, and what are their implications on different use-cases?" This is the direction we aim to let the experiment unfold.
-Veronica & Burns