Earlier this year I joined this creative hacker R&D lab Mars College, and lived in this community-built desert commune for 3 months. The living condition was… rough as expected, but the community was the most diverse, authentic and creative I’ve ever witnessed. Through 3 months of shared trauma 🐛 and mula 🧘‍♀️ bonding with these wonderful beings, I was blessed to be given the courage and inspiration to embark on a journey of self-discovery through communities and DAOs.

So What is Mars?

To summarize Mars College in one sentence:

Mars College is an outdoor creative R&D lab where attendees build infrastructures together to live, skill-share, create and vibe together for 3 months.

Basically it’s a Burning Man camp with, a constant hackathon, a multi-disciplinary skill-share workshop, with the additional parties, arts and performances while maintaining basic survival needs in the desert

We were grouped into ‘tribes’ who took care of different aspects of our basic needs: Earth tribe for food and compost, Water tribe for clean water and waste dump, Fire tribe for solar & power, Air tribe for internet. We operated in a way of do ocracy --- basically if you want things to work and they’re not working, you fix it.

Daily life is usually very demanding and distracting, in the best way possible! Aside from maintaining basic needs, we were also fluxed with a crazy amount of self-organized skill share activities every day. Just look at a regular weekly calendar for Mars:

From ecstatic dance, poetry writing, ceramics and meditation to TouchDesigner lectures, AI art, bio talks and DAO workshops, the Mars College calendar was just intimidating to have notifications on.

The most amazing part is that all these classes are voluntarily taught and shared by the community, some are taught by actual college professors in the respected fields. It was free education at its core where the only entrance ticket is to help build and maintain the infrastructure that allowed these lectures to happen.

It’s a wonderful place to discover or loose your passion, to be expressive and accepted, loved and challenged, authentic and weird.

Mars is different for each every one of us. For me it has spiraled a whole journey of community & DAO explorations.

Previously I was living in Venice LA, working on AR experiments at Silicon Beach, hopping from skateparks to house parties, there’re always fun things to do. Life should be great! But I could not shake away this deep, unsettling, existential feeling on how weird it is to be so comfortable. I felt like I was not doing something right.

For a long time I felt like standing on the edge of cliff, wanted to jump to scramble this picturesque life of comfort but was unsure of what to do next. Being at Mars kind of just pushed me off the cliff.

Building Communities

During Mars College, a project sprawled out of a weekly working session ‘Decentralized Future Living’ where a bunch of us would meet weekly, share thoughts and resources about alternative lifestyles outside of societal default, and the kind of problems this initiative can help to solve.

As we meet weekly to discuss topics related to alternative lifestyles, off-grid infrastructure, community building, governance models… so many interesting subjects and resources entered the chat!

Solarpunks and DAOs, van lifers and digital nomads, farmers and eco villages, the subject just kept exponentially expanding. From Tamara in Portugal to Auroville in India, from Open Source Ecology to Balaji’s Network State.

The list goes on and it can probably be left to another article. In the end of Mars, we have decided to continue foster this community that are interested in studying communities (turtles all the way down!)

We launched Agartha ---- To Build a Future of Decentralized Networks of Regenerative, Resilient and Sovereign Communities.

My favorite creation was this meme we curated together that captures the essence of Agartha:

Agartha is still in its baby stage but we’ve been traveling and meeting many people interested in the same subject, and the group has been organically growing. As we are still working on a solid roadmap and ‘business plan’ for this project, right now this is just a study group for people to discuss about the possibility of next-gen eco communities (smart villages).

DAOs and Decentralized Cities

Raoul Pal made a great video explaining the DAO movement, from which I can summarize:

DAOs are an open-sourced format of self-organizing, self-governing communities that are co-creating social-economical movements. Collectively a new culture and a paradigm shift are being born in a completely decentralized eco system.

Ever since I realized what’s happening within this space, I became fanatically interested in the community. I think shit can be fundamentally game changing for loads of societal problems --- solving issues and creating impact through community building, cultural innovation and Moloch slaying

‘We don’t need to fight the problematic, we just need to out-coordinate them.‘

One thing led to another, I stumbled upon this article Vitalik wrote about Crypto Cities, where I found out about CityDAO ---- a DAO that’s building the crypto city of the future:

CityDAO is exploring making assets and governance digitally legible to unleash accessibility, interoperability, and opportunity.  What Nakamoto and Buterin did for value and compute, we propose to do for the physical world.

By engaging with folks in the CityDAO discord, I’ve gotten to become close with many contributors at CityDAO and started working as a co-facilitator for the Design and Community guilds. Last week we went to Wyoming to visit Parcel0 - the first piece of land owned by CityDAO and fractionalized on chain!

It was very exciting to finally meet up with a bunch of internet strangers and bond over frisbees and ideology talks.

Building cities is a tremendous task. So far it seems like CityDAO has attracted some diversely interesting, insanely talented ‘punks’ type of personas with vastly different backgrounds -- from corporate lawyers to theater teachers.

One thing we all share in common is that we are all dissatisfied with existing societal power dynamics and really want to change things. We are all passionate about the possibility of an autonomous on-chain city with DAO governance, and we imagine it can be a space that allows so much innovation to create community governed infrastructures, and regenerative ecology (environmentally, economically and emotionally).

We Are Gonna Build A City! #WAGBAC

What’s Next!

Working within the DAO space is intense but also extremely rewarding. Every new day opens up a gajillion tabs of articles and organizations to browse. Within all these massive organizations lies in these sub-communities that have fractal-alike effects within themselves and the eco system. There is much more to learn and witness.

The concept of a DAO is not anything new. Humans have been coordinating in decentralized ways and forming sub-cultural communities since the beginning of our existence. From the Shakers to rainbow gatherings, from Vipassana to Alcoholic Anonymous. Eco villages have been an autonomous phenomenon and I’m fascinated by the possibility of the hybrid space where eco villages intertwine with DAOs.

I along with many other folks in Agartha are all embarking on personal journeys to travel around and discover eco-communities as we go. Hopefully more interesting stories and resources will be shared along the way.

Thank you for reading thus far into my ramble ^_^