Janine Leger & Timour Kosters: Co-Founders of Edge City
Join host Matt Prewitt in an inspiring conversation with Edge City co-founders Janine Leger and Timour Kosters, as they dive into the transformative world of pop-up villages and cities. Discover the story behind Edge City's latest experiment, Edge Esmeralda, and learn how temporary communities are reshaping the way we live and work. Janine and Timour share their passion for experimentation, collaboration, co-creation, and their vision for building healthier, more dynamic environments.<br><br>From the Whole Earth Catalog to the Chautauqua movement, this episode explores the rich history of pop-up communities while introducing groundbreaking ideas like community currencies ("∈dges") and iterative social technologies. Tune in for an engaging and forward-thinking discussion that reveals fresh perspectives on the future of community building, collaboration, and social innovation. Don’t miss this illuminating discussion!
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Transcript
Hello, and welcome to Radical Exchanges. Today's episode is an illuminating discussion on the cutting edge of community building and social innovation. Matt Pruitt is joined by Janine Legere and Timur Costers, the founders of Edge City, to explore the fascinating world of pop up cities and villages. They start by discussing their recent experiences at Edge Esmeralda, one of Edge City's experimental most recent pop up villages. This leads them on a deep dive into the concept of pop up communities and their potential to reshape society. They map out some of the historical precedents for these experiments and go on to describe just how Edge City is creating spaces for technological and social innovation through exploring intriguing initiatives like community currencies. Whether you're interested in the future of cities, alternative communities, or cutting edge social technologies, this conversation offers a glimpse into a movement that could transform our approach to community and collaboration. And now, here is Matt Pruitt, Janine Leger, and Timor Costers.
Alright. I'm here with, Timor Costers and, Janine Legere, the founders of Edge City. Thank you. Thank you for joining me. Excited to talk to you both.
Thanks for having us, Matt. Good to be here.
So, I have just spent much of the last month at, Edge Esmeralda, and I know you have too. You're at the end of, running a a extremely complex, very successful marathon event. And, maybe it's a little soon to reflect, but I would love to hear your thoughts on, both how edge Esmeralda has gone and, and sort of, like, what it is, and maybe we can go from there into situating it within the larger context of the pop up cities movement.
Yeah. For sure. Maybe we'll start with what it is, and then and then we can chat about how it's been for the last month. So at Edge City, we convene folks who are working in the frontiers of tech, science, and society in what we call pop up villages, which are essentially, we gather groups of 300 people, and we live together, we work together, we create an environment for experimentation and collaboration. We usually last between one and two months. And the folks that we bring, we look for folks who are curious, kind, and kind of pushing the frontiers of, the fields that they work in. And the the environment is built around experimentation and really with a focus on cocreation and building and and, you know, shipping interesting products or technologies.
Do I miss anything? Yeah. In addition to that, I think two areas that we have been focused on as goals for what we're building is healthier environments for people to live. So actually, both healthier environments from a how people are interacting with one another, living in close proximity, spending time with others and trying to combat sort of the loneliness epidemic, while at the same time eating healthier meals, spending time outside, actually getting, you know, workouts in in the morning more encouraging just healthier lifestyles as a whole. The other aspect is who we're bringing in, not just thinking about people in these areas between the ages of 19 to 25, but actually thinking about multi generational families. We've got a number of families that have been a part of this first iteration, and the idea is to continue pushing that. Because if we're expecting people to be with us for or to be together for a month to two months at a time, that's almost, you know, six or twelve of a year. And spending that away from families on this environment that, like, don't necessarily cultivate the idea of, like, a real village versus just another university campus, defeats the purpose of shifting and experimenting with new cultural norms.
So, having experienced it, it makes perfect sense to me. But and I'm sure you've noticed something as well, which is that when you try to describe it to people who are a little bit sort of, a little bit a notch or two away in the social network, it can be hard to categorize it. Like, so you know, I mean, I think the way that I have started to situate it when I try to describe it to, like, my parents, for example, is, is that there's, like, a new cultural phenomenon called pop up cities. Right? And I would love to hear from you, like, what you think this phenomenon is and where it comes from and where it's going. So, you know, maybe we can start with, with Zuzulu. Like, I know you were both at Zuzulu. Can you tell our audience a little bit about what Zuzulu is, what, or what impression it made on you, and, how that cultural event led to or flowed into, what you're what you're working on now?
Of course. So I was one of the co creators of Zuzeloo, and Timor helped with one of the tracks while we were there with AI in crypto. And, ultimately, SUSEV was an experiment that Vitalik Buterin thought of, where the idea of network states have been put out by biology in his book, which is like I've been talking about for those cities for a long time. And there are a few people that were actually experimenting with these sort of intellectual concepts that people were describing. So the idea was like, well, let's just experiment with testing this out and what's like a minimal viable experiment for a new way of living that we can put out. And when you look at things, biology has this great graph of essentially seeing that, like, we've done a lot of conferences for many people for short periods of time really well, and we've iterated on that a ton. And then we've iterated on the other side of the spectrum of, like, universities, cities, states, and what it looks like for long periods of time. But there's this missing area in the middle of experimentation around two to six month gatherings for 200 to 600 people. And the idea was just, like, let's see what an experiment looks like there. And from that, it was an extremely successful time of bringing together a few different disciplines, people from all over the world, and this concept of two month period being a timeline that felt like an experiment, but still felt like real life. And ultimately, getting to see what happens when you've got people in close proximity, sharing meals every day, learning on a weekly basis about different topics. And how we built it was this idea of like, let's build this as a public good. You know, community should be a public good. We should have access to learning environments. We should have access to healthy living environments and likes. And with that, we wanted to figure out, like, how do you get this to more people? Like, how do we actually create this more into a movement? Where Ethereum, as, you know, one example, is able to help further other frontier industries or more you're able to bring together new frontier industries or just bring together people in general to experiment with new ways of living. So with that idea of, like, turning it more into a movement, the concept of keeping it as one entity that kept throwing events on a regular basis felt limiting versus trying to spur on and create many different pop up cities from it. As a result, that's where we sort of were were thinking from our end, you know, did we just want you participate with other and, like, participate in other pop ups that happened around the world, or did we have an idea of what we wanted to see grow in the ecosystem and put that forward. And Edge City as a whole is one of many different pop up communities that has have been tested in the past year and that is being tested in 2024.
Yeah. And I can add a little bit about my personal experience as well because I think it illustrates a little bit about why I'm excited and you think you're both excited about this movement. So for those who don't know, specifically, to color in a bit more detail, Zuzadu was a two month event that happened in, Montenegro in a small town by the sea. And we had about 200 people who were living there full time and probably about 800 visitors over those two months. So there's about a thousand people who who came came and went throughout that time. And I joined about halfway through. I stayed there for a few weeks. And like Janine said, I was there to help organize, the AI track. And I the conference was amazing. We had a a great time, but I personally ended up having kind of a continuous string of very meaningful experiences in terms of the connections I was making, the experiences I was having. And afterwards, I was reflecting on why why that was and what it's what it meant. And I feel like it's something around it just feels very alivening to be in an environment surrounded by interesting, curious people who share some semblance of, interests and topics and have it be very multidisciplinary, so I'm able to learn a lot of different things that are at the same time. I'm also able to express multiple sides of my personality. So there's the side that really likes to get intellectual, but also the side that really likes to deeply connect with people and, you know, form bonds of affinity over just continuous shared experience and shared collaboration. We got to do everything from, like, coal plunging to DJing to experimenting new art forms to, you know, hosting panels, etcetera. So, I think those environments are uniquely good for creating bonds between communities. And that has a lot of downstream implications that, that I think we can get into on this call.
So if I can give you some of my own reflections, I'm curious what what you think about it. I mean, one of the things that strikes me about the pop up cities movement is is that it's bringing together so many different things. And it's almost hard to it's almost hard to define the common thread between all of the different cultural phenomena that it is uniting, but pop up cities seem to be the thing uniting them in a way. So here here here are some of the phenomena that I have in mind. Right? So one is this sort of, like, digital nomadism, let's say. Right? And kind of, like, a different sort of relationship with place. So you can imagine basically people creating and that in when I look around in certain kind of quadrants of the tech world and so on, I mean, that it seems to me that there are some there are people, you know, kind of, you know, going from thing to thing throughout the year and get developing a a new relationship with place and creating communities that are a little bit less, they're sort of, you know, not completely placeless, but are a little bit less place grounded than in the past. Right? There's, like, something going on there culturally. And, and then some other phenomena are, you know, that it's uniting our, let's say, just, like, technical innovation. Right? So that so there's you know, there are people thinking about a handful of different, problems in technology. I mean, there are people thinking about AI. There's people thinking about crypto. There's people thinking about, sort of the frontiers of biology and longevity and things like that. Communities that are interested in and that are at the leading edge of these areas seem to be attracted to this kind of experiment. Right? So it's another thing that it's bringing together. And and then maybe the third thing, which is sort of like a new kind of urbanism, which so for for example, like, in for in California, for example, there's a lot of people thinking about new ways of setting up cities, you know, you know, walkable cities, Yeah. Just, you know, all kinds of new ideas about about urbanism and trying to fix what is perceived as the dysfunction of cities in the West Coast and all that kind of thing. Right? So there's there's some of that. And then and sorry. I said there was three. And the fourth thing is is, like, you know, net network state, that kind of thing. So another this this kind of, you know, political dimension of, of organizing, organizing new kinds of communities that could conceivably perceive themselves or be perceived as, political sort of entities, which also of course overlaps with a lot of ideas that have been in the crypto sphere for a long time. Now that's just like a you know, that all that is so many things. And yet when you, you know, at one of these pop up city or pop up village events, you can feel them all there. You can feel all these things sort of swirling swirling around each other. And so I wonder if you can say, like, where you think that this cultural phenomenon is going. Like, do you do you think that, you know, with the benefit of hindsight or after it's developed for a few more years, do you think it will crystallize in in terms of a focus on one of these directions more than another, or do you also perceive this kind of openness to the direction? Yeah. We just would love your thoughts about that.
Great question. And good good sort of points around just how many different directions it can go. And I think it's something where, like, from our standpoint or at least how I'm looking at it is, like, we're in the earliest, earliest stages of this concept and these ideas and perspectives, and there's a lot of theory that has been pulled together around what it all can be, but sort of there's a running joke around, you know, someone who's trying to build a network stage who hasn't thrown a dinner party. And it's how I see it is, like, we sort of have to start small and grow and be comfortable with recognizing that, like, creating place, creating culture, and creating sort of, like, totally new ways of sort of social norms and in a way social technology takes time. And I think a lot of the people who have been thinking about these concepts are coming from the tech world. That moves a lot faster than those in the physical world. And as you can see, like, we're calling each city, you know, building pop up villages right now because that only describes what the thing is. And what we found with Zuzulu was a lot of people were like, well, this wasn't a pop up city. This was, like, much smaller than that. And the the sense of scale was was somewhat off. And I think there's a there's a real value in being able to build and share language of where we are in the different stages of growth. So right now, it's very much so these pop up villages, those could grow and feel more like a pop up city, or it could feel like how we're thinking about it. It's like if we have many pop up villages around the world that almost make up a city in different places. So it's just, like, network of villages that we have, and this concept of seeding new cities. So one thing that, you know, we've done here is Edge City has partnered with Esmeralda, which is going to be a full time village that might become a town that might grow. So there's the idea of a pop up village actually seeding a full time space and recognizing that that'll take ten to fifteen years. And that's not gonna take a year to build that that physical, you know, new permanent space. They'll take a long time in building the culture that could see that it's valuable. And I think it's similar with network states, like, the concept of actually creating new nation states. And if and step one is, like, can we actually bring a group of people who want to be spending time together, and living in a different way together that, like, even just see the idea of, like, this is feasible before us moving towards anything, at that scale.
Yeah. I think something we've noticed is that there is so much value in bringing together this kind of, collective energy into one place for a particular period of time that's long enough to still be ambitious and that the stakes are high and people do take it seriously. But it's it's still, you know, temporary in that people can come, they can experiment, and then they can, you know, take learnings and and go back to the real world. And so these environments we're starting to see, are just perfect places to incubate things like Esmeralda or new physical towns. I think they're also perfect environments to incubate new movements and ways of thinking, new social technologies. So I think if I had to combine all of the the four points that you made, it's essentially folks who are thinking about what is something new that is interesting for the world. And we just see a lot of value in creating environments for that kind of open exploration and emergence. So emergence is one of the key values and one of our core design principles. We want to create the container and then see what is built within that. A lot of that is, it could be frontier technologies. You know, a lot of folks work in the frontier of tech need these kinds of environments where they can meet peers. They can meet people working in other frontier fields. They can incubate some of their early ideas that might seem bad at first, but, you know, every good idea seems bad when it's when it's just starting out, and it needs a bit of that, like, a bit of that care and not to get trampled on too early. And, like, I see that in this new network societies, network nations coordination space. We you know, to give a specific example, we've been working with Primavera de Filippi to develop her concept of coordinations, which are now, we now refer to them as network nations. And the idea is, you know, like you're saying, can we conceptualize these new types of communities that could over time start to develop some kind of political identity, shared resource management, etcetera, you know, would there be a better place to develop that theory, that actual, like, line of philosophy than within a proto network nation itself? And and I think that's kind of the the thing that we're providing, a experimentation ground. And, well, I would actually love to hear from you, Matt, if you're open to sharing a little bit about the experiment that you ran because this is something that we were very excited to have within the context of at Jasmeralda. Yeah. So curious if you wanna talk about that.
Sure. Yeah. Well, let me let me ask one question, and then we'll and then and then let's let's talk a bit about that because I, the experiment we ran was a community currency experiment, which we called edges, where we were testing out number of ideas that we have have worked on relating to basically how to, how to stand up a community currency, how to create a system of of, value accounting that, that works in kind of a in a in a in a small community and attempting to sort of solve some of the problems of past community currency efforts. But one I guess one just one thing I want to squeeze in here first is when you think about the history of, pop up cities or the sort of prehistory of pop up cities, a few precedents come to mind for me. I'm curious whether these precedents make sense to you, whether you see important distinctions or or would push back on them. You know, one possible precedent might be the sort of whole earth catalog back to the land, cultural phenomenon, you know, if from, you know, the, let's say, seventies, you know, it went beyond that, but was largely in the seventies. You've also got, Burning Man, which I've heard named as kind of a a precedent for network nations, in particular in contradistinction to network states, which is another interesting distinction that we may we may wanna double click on or not. And, and then going back further in history, you know, Michelle Balans, from p two p foundation, who's a, you know, amazing thinker, has been in this space for a long time. At a talk at Esmeralda, he brought up the comparison to, like, medieval monasteries after the fall of the Roman Empire. People sort of clustering into monasteries, starting to build social institutions, around those centers of gravity. I thought that was also just an interesting point of comparison for, like, what's what's going on with, with pop up cities. And I'm I'm just curious if you have any reactions or or pushback to to those, those comparisons.
I have I have so many reactions. I love this topic. So we could go on a whole separate part two podcast about this. But, I mean, very quickly, I think my very kind of, like, story and lens on this is that pretty much at every every era of human history, the people at the time have had to respond to the challenges of that time and therefore have had to form new ways of thinking, new institutions, new ways of governing, you know, community building, etcetera. And as Michelle Balans talks about, that often takes the place takes the form of something he calls a seed form, which is essentially a group of people going slightly outside of normal society. Not necessarily fully removing themselves, but maybe just taking some time away or join, you know, the monastery in the, medieval ages like you talked about and using that as a space for experimentation that then seeds new ideas that can then propagate within the rest of society. And I think this is quite a grand comparison, so I almost hesitate to make it. But I think there's something that rhymes there with what we're doing where we're not completely removing people, but just for a short space and time, we create an environment for experimentation that I think that some of the things that can come out of that will, you know, have the capacity to be, quite influential. And so a good point of comparison is the back to the land movement of the late sixties and seventies where we were actually quite different in that we're not asking people to completely leave society behind and, you know, go to the farm, join a commune, and and, you know, that's it. Right now, you know, we live in a networked time, so we don't actually have to do that. We all have Wi Fi. We can go to a place like Healdsburg, develop ideas, and then share those learnings with the world and, and and take in the input from the outside world as well where it's relevant. There's also something, for the Chitaku movement.
If you want go into it? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
So something we've learned from Devon, who's our collaborator on Eddy Esmeralda, is, something that was called the Chitaco movement, which started in Upstate New York in a town called Chitaco in the eighteen hundreds. And it actually became a really profound thing in The US, where pretty much every summer for a couple of months, there would be this public learning festival, essentially, for adults and children. And, you know, university professors would come and give public lectures, etcetera. And this spread throughout the country, and there each town well, many towns participated, and the ones that did had Chautauquas every summer. And it's actually something that's still going in Chautauqua, New York. And it's something that Devon grew up going to and actually wants to, you know, use as a frame of reference for, Esmeralda, a new project. And for me, this was actually quite profound because I realized, like, wait. There is quite a bit of historical legacy here. And the idea of having, you know, a month a year where people come together to to learn from each other, to teach each other the things they've learned throughout the year, I think is sound very compelling. Like, that's definitely a way that I want to live my life.
Yeah. And to add to that, I would say that there's there's so many moments in history to look at. And I think thinking about seniors, just sort of the idea of, like, scenes of genius where you're bringing people together and we're seeing, like, accelerated progress. That's a that's a, like, historical, reference that, you know, we've been looking at, like, where has there been these seniors hubs? Where have they existed and why? And there is so much about the sort of, like, close proximity, getting people from different industries to spend time together, having these environments for talks. So it's like the English coffee shops. And during sort of like what what happened in in France with the salons and the idea of, like, these moments of time that brought people together that had sort of shared learning, shared ideas across different industries, and it really did you've got these moments that have, like, truly accelerated progress and have had some of the best thinkers and best ideas come out of them. So in a way, some of the historical context that we're looking at is not just specific places, but it's also scenes that have happened within
culture. Yeah. That's a great point.
Yeah. That's fantastic. That's amazingly, helpful context. I mean, what another just another shot thought to share here is, I I've actually I've had some interesting conversations with, Barry Through from, Gray Area in San Francisco, the art space. And we we had an interesting conversation about about about Burning Man where we both of us said some sort of critical things about it that could get us pretty much canceled by lots of people that we love and respect. But it's okay. You know? The what what my and I think it's an important point to make, which is that that, I think from from the point of view of, San Francisco culture, you know, where where Burning Man is, like, super integrated into the heart of, you know, lots of things that are happening in in San Francisco. There's actually there's kind of a point of view from which it hasn't been good for San Francisco's culture in the following way. It kind of sucks energy out. There's so many people who are thinking about what they're gonna do at Burning Man all year and putting time and energy and resources to Burning Man that it's like, you know, cultural things that could be, you know, enhancing the Bay Area are instead, you know, going up in flames and dust in the Nevada Desert and that that's it. I think that there's a there's, you know I mean, one metaphorical way that I sometimes think about it is you've got sort of water and earth elements and fire and air elements. And Burning Man is all fire and air. It's all it's all temporary, fast, generative, ideational. It's not really, like, reweaving community in place as much as it might be. And I think one one of the things that I love about the property city movements is that, it's finding some something in between those two. Right? It's it's taking some of that generative fire and air energy and, locating it in place partly in this really interesting kind of intermediate way. So I just wanted I just wanted to sort of put that out there as a a framework that occurred to me.
I've actually got some some thoughts on that too and fully agree with it. And so it goes back to, like, when I started working on just, like, communities. Like, essentially, I had this real frustration with the temporary, like, speed at which we spend time together. Like, the Monday through Sunday concept of time that we've created and the idea that work happens Monday through Friday, and then you only had sort of free time Friday evening through Sunday, meant that we've created experiences that are shared on weekends with people, and we've done that for a crazy amount of time. Even though the work environments that we're living in are completely different today than they were when we sort of, like, were farming. Right? Like, we we needed to make sure we got a certain amount of things done to get us over the line in the spring, summer and fall so that the winter, like, we were safe and had food. But now it's like we're just online the whole time, and it's like the work environment couldn't have shifted, but hasn't shifted as much as I would have expected. And all that to say is we've built social time around these, like, very temporary amounts of time of typically forty eight hours, which to me feels like an insane amount of time to expect people to open up to one another to, like, really come up with new ideas and to really, like, ground it in a meaningful way. So the the the piece that I was sort of, like, really all about seven years ago was this idea of, like, sustainable communities. How are we supporting sustainable times? And I was, like, very adamant about traveling for weekend trips. I would say no to more than four weekend trips a year. And the focus was on, like, at least spending, one week, if not one month, in any given place that I lived or spend time so that I was actually building versus just participating in what was going on. And then when I sort of flipped that into this concept of, like, I could also help build community this way and, like, promote the idea of, like, sustainable community versus flash cultures that we build. I have this sort of, like, view in my head of most people's timeline and their sort of color is gray with these flashes of color on weekends that are just like big splashes that are hard to integrate into daily life. But everyone should have this weave of color in their, like, lifetime line, of ideas, of people around them, of projects, of just, like, abundance in a sense of purpose and shared experiences. So when sort of shifting towards the the work that I went through previously doing, which was building sort of full time cul de sac communities and doing that, starting to do that in Austin. The the pop up city idea was this perfect amount of time and experience of, you know, thirty it takes thirty days to build a a habit. And at least having thirty days with people has created this much, like, a much greater sense of, like, real place and, like, sustainable culture that's built and sustainable connections that are built and ideas that can, like, actually develop and go from just a seedling to a sprout even if it's not a tree yet. But that that idea of then being able to take those concepts back to where you're from versus completely extract them just for the weekend or week long event that you're doing somewhere is one of the the hopes that we have with the pop up village approach.
Yeah. And I think this points at something really important here, which is, something actually that, Matt, you talked about in an essay you wrote. And if listeners haven't read it, I think it's called something like secret societies, network, Zuzalu burning man network cities, etcetera. And it's the one of the main things I got from that essay is about the importance of social technologies and and alongside the things that we normally think of as technology, like software and hardware, etcetera. And we, I think, we firmly believe and agree with you that we need to be spending as much time developing the social technologies that govern the way that we live and the way that we build community as we do on the other things. And that can be simple things like the the norms and the practices, in our communities, the way that we structure our weeks, the way that we structure, shared meals every evening. And to Janine's point, and I've actually thought about it this way, but if it does take thirty days to form a habit, or it's, like, twenty seven or something, then this is actually, like, the perfect amount of time to be able to cocreate and then develop and then have those things stick, actually, that then people can integrate them into their day to day lives. Yeah. That's great.
Maybe that's a a good a good segue into, to talk about edges, which is another sort of cultural you know, it's a it's a social technology. It's an experiment in, and it's an experiment in basically creating a form of money that is a little bit more grounded, a little bit more rooted. Right? Like, so you can you can think of sometimes I picking up on that earlier metaphor of kind of fire and air versus water and earth, I think of money as very much the great vaporizer. Right? It kind of, it kind of sucks everything up into the air. Like, I I mean, I I I the the old Karl Marx quote is often plays in my mind was, you know, everything's solid, melts into air. Right? When we when we turn things into money or we turn things into in in into capital, there's a way in which that kind of, pushes apart the usual ties of of community and and and relation. And, and yet we really can't do without it. We do have no idea how to build a society without, money and exchange and and capital. Right? So, what we what Radical Exchange, is trying to do with its community currency work and, you know, Edges And Myrtle that was like an amazing place for us to experiment with this and learn more about how to do it, is you we're trying to build community currencies that people don't think of as a financial asset, basically. Right? We're trying to, you know, build community currencies that that, that are able to hold hold energy and exchange in in a community, enable people to have something of value without that they can easily exchange without thinking of it completely as a speculative asset. Mhmm. And, I mean, there's a lot a lot to say about it, and I'm happy to sort of share some some thoughts about, about what we what we learned, about, you know, the details of the experiment or what we learned at Edges and Rolled. But I'm also curious, you know, if any reflections
that you you have about about it. Yeah. I mean, I think you're you're pointing at something really interesting. Like, I'm I'm definitely not a monetary theorist, but I do intuitively understand why when value is created in the community, if it's do not denominated in fiat, that makes it easy for that value to be taken out of the community because the incentive is just to, you know, go spend it on any number of other things in the world. So this is kind of yeah. This is why this kind of experiment is existing to us, and we want to be a place where some of these kind of frontier ideas can be experimented with, especially if it's something that fits within a context of, let's say, you know, there's 300 people here at any one time. There's, again, probably gonna be about a thousand that came in through the doors during the month. What is that a good container for? I think this is an example of something that's actually perfect. So from your perspective, it was really cool just to see how engaged people got, how excited. You know, you you never really know to begin emergence. You never really know what's gonna happen when you introduce something like this. And there were I mean, there was, like, a meme contest. There was a very lively Telegram chat, a bunch of people, getting very engaged and having their own ideas about how to use this, people integrating it into their products. And that's the exact kind of thing that we want to see in our spaces.
And on that, like, I was super excited to see this experiment happen just because, like, it's the the pop up nature of what we're doing allows for this, like, true sense of playground where, you know, it's like, okay. If if it didn't go well, like, it didn't go well, but that's fine. It was just a month. And community currencies are like it's it's kind of a, like it could be a pretty crazy thing to adopt at scale. And there's so much complexity to it, but being able to do it in, like, a very sort of, like, stripped down, easy to access environment for for play, I think, was awesome to see it, like, take off and not be seen as, like, this crazy big thing that people have to not be scared of, but something that, like, people were just, like, having fun engaging with. And I think new ideas having, like, a fun element to them are so important. Mhmm. And I actually feel like we're just at the beginning of experimenting with edges. Like, I I think, if anything, this month taught us, like, how hard it is to even get people to understand what it is and how to engage, and the reminder of, like, how low friction that onboarding for anything has to be. And I think that's, like, another, you know, reminder for just, like, the crypto environment, like, more broadly. It's just, like, onboarding is hard and, like, low friction onboarding is, like, the most important thing that we can be working on. So that was just, like, more of a a great pace to experiment and this this awesome, like, at least validating side from our end of, like, oh, doing a pop up multiple times over a year. You know, that was, like, an interesting one of, like, do we do that? Do we not? Do we do something once in every game? Do we do something only once a year? It's like I I'm super excited for us to spend the next three months being able to sort of go back and forth. I'm like, how can we improve it? Like, what can be you know, what can be done differently? And, like, having that concentrated build time for the next couple of months before us going to Thailand and then trying the experiment again, at the next next Edge City, which is Edge City, Lana in whichever.
Yeah. Totally. I mean, I agree with agree with all of that. And though I I fully concur that we're just at the beginning of the Edge's project because, and I, you know, basically, I I'm I'm there we we learned a lot. There were things that went really well. There were things that could have gone better with the way that, you know, Edges was was used and and the way that people, you know, thought about it and engaged with it at at GESMIRALDA. But all of these little things that we learned, well, actually, let let me take let me take a step back and then say what I was gonna say. Taking a step back, what we are really trying to do is to get better at the art of making successful community currencies. Right? It's not a science. It's actually not even really a technology thing, although it uses technology things. It's basically a kind of a a social cultural happening, you know, to create a successful community currency. And, there's no there's no cookbook for it. Most community currencies have have failed, but it's the kind of thing that if if, like, as a culture, we could get better at it, we could build potentially really interesting pluralistic networks of interacting community currencies that don't eat each other alive, that don't all get sucked into the global market, that don't, you know, wither and die. If we could get good at, you know, striking that balance and creating a, like, a pluralistic system of bounded currencies that could potentially change the world. Now in order to do that, you need to run social experiments. You need the right kind of social experiment ecosystem. Right? You can't just you can't just, like, program tests into your into your computer and, you know, test it like a program. And similarly, you can't, like, you know, if you just kind of put together a multimillion dollar one shot, like, gigantic initiative that doesn't give you enough reps. I don't know where other than, like, an you know, you know, I mean, the the the sort of pop up city movement, the Edge City ecosystem is, like, I I can't even think of, like, where else we would be able to do this iterative learning process of, you know, getting better at at at, standing up a, and a community currency system and a and a local exchange structure. So it's really exciting. I mean, I and I think that that's actually just one example of the kind of experiment that, pop up cities might be able to facilitate in the coming years. And, I've just find that really exciting. I find it really exciting to imagine that that this kind of work could help us get better at, you know, basically not not just at at, I mean, it'll it will accelerate various technical fields as well, I'm sure, but it'll also help us, like, you know, create new, contexts for responsible social experimentation
and help us improve our institutions. Yeah. I think you you hit on something so true around, like, it's an art and not a science. Like, there's there's an aspect here where people are like, well, what's the framework? Like, you've you've done this a couple of times. Like, there was Zuzulu, there was ZuConnect, now there's, you know, H. E. S. Merelda. Like, it needs to be this open framework that we can share. And it's like, we we are desperately trying to build that. And at the same time, it feels so much of an art. Like, there's just so much that, like, truly feels like people and place, and just weaving this, like, very complex system of coordination that, like, even, you know, we don't even fully understand or have seen. But it's these, like, it's this art that can be then played with even more so of, like, building more art projects into it, that incorporate technology and that incorporate social behaviors and that incorporate just, like, people's time and energy, in some capacity that, like, are really hard to test out and experiment within existing systems that are so ingrained and so sort of, like, tried and tested and hard to, like, just use rigid environments for experimentation. So I'm thrilled that you guys were able to actually take advantage of using the space and testing things out because that's exactly what we wanna be seeing. Super. Well, I think that's a great place to,
to close. I'm grateful for, for your time and, also just, really, really excited about the the work that you're doing. Would encourage everybody who's interested in it to, to to dive in and start paying attention to, to Edge City and other pop up cities and pop up villages. And, yeah. I would also urge, anyone who's skeptical about it to let down their guard and check it out, take another look. This is this is a really, really interesting, thing. I have learned a lot and look forward to learning more, through working with you all in the future. And, so yeah, thank you.
Thanks so much. Thanks so much, Matt. This was great. Take care. Alright.
The Radical Exchanges podcast is executive produced by gee Angela Corpus and is co produced and audio engineered by myself, Aaron Benavides. If you would like to learn more about RadicalxChange, please follow us on Twitter at rad x change, or check out our website at radicalexchange.org. And if you'd like to join in the conversation, we'd love to hear from you. So hop on our Discord where we have channels discussing topics like what you heard today, as well as topics like plural voting, community currencies, soulbound tokens, and more. There will be links to all of these in the description. Have a great day and stay radical.
