Cultural Variety Is Crazy Hard To Fix

Cultural Variety Is Crazy Hard To Fix Vitalik Buterin (VB) on culture : Zuzalu in 2023 was an experiment: bring ~200 people, from multiple communities -Ethereum, longevity, rationalism, AI - together in one place for two months, and see what happens. ... fall away over time: novel governance designs, and a search for legal autonomy. ... Over time, popups would get shorter in duration, smaller in scope, and more generic in substance, ... I have started advocating for Zuzalu-inspired communities to start having permanent nodes. ... I always fear the “regression to the mean” that they will turn into glorified coworkingspaces, and lose all of their cultural or experimental interestingness. ... We have too much of a two-level structure: individuals, very powerful large-scale actors like states, and nothing else. ... a successful “intermediate institution” ... needs to be some kind of neo-tribe ... that focuses, and meaningfully innovates, on the thing that humans do that isn’t generic: culture. ... people make the mistake of thinking culture is something that can be explicitly laid down by mission statements and top-down edicts. ... Mistake of over-identifying culture with the purely aesthetic, subjective and group-identity-oriented parts of culture: food, music, dance, dress, architecture styles, and ignore the parts that are functional, whose success or failure drives the success and failure of civilizations. ... Many things ... require “immersion” to succeed: lifestyle habits, local public goods such as air quality, work habits, lifetime learning habits, limitations on use of technology, etc. Doing anything truly interesting and unique requires “depth”, and substantial collective investment and effort to create an entire environment oriented around better serving those needs. These things cannot easily be done by an individual ... Culture is a big complicated blob where actions, consequences, statements by leaders and theories by intellectuals all influence each other in every direction. ... What we want is a better “world game” for cultural evolution: an environment where cultures improve and compete, but not on the basis of violent force, and also not exclusively on low-level forms of memetic fitness (eg. virality of individual posts on social media, moment-by-moment enjoyment and convenience), but rather on some kind of fair playing field that creates sufficient space to showcase the longer-term benefits that a thriving culture provides. ... Cultural innovation works better when it arises out of a collection of habits, attitudes and goals that are shared by a particular group, and adapted to the group’s needs. ... So far, I have told two disjoint stories. One is about smaller-scale community-driven projects, and experimentation in culture. Another is about larger-scale politics and business-driven projects, and experimentation in rules. ... I predict that in general the “market structure” will split [these] tribes and zones into distinct categories, because these are different things that require different specialties that are complementary ... People just have to get off their butts and actually create these alternative cultures and environments, and doing it is hard. Startups are also hard. But startups have had a multi-billion-dollar...

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