A trip to Montenegro, where dreaming and disenchantment go hand in hand

At this moment, I have just returned from Montenegro for a day, and I am very tired, lying flat on the sofa. The company sent a message asking to rush to work on weekends. I reluctantly opened the office software, closed it again, clicked on xLog, and used writing to escape the upcoming obligation to beat workers.

The experience of the first two weeks in Montenegro was like a dream with a huge amount of information. The life that happened in a short week seemed to proceed at several times the speed. There were too many stories happening in multiple threads. Digest all the information.

Traveling to Montenegro is a random decision. Because it was too late to apply for a Schengen visa, my friend proposed to go to Montenegro for Easter. I thought it was good, so I agreed. The travel time is determined according to the flight price. Because the price of Easter is more expensive, we simply stay longer in Montenegro and return to London when the price of the ticket is reduced.

Two days before I came to Montenegro, I heard from my friends that a pop-up city event called zuzalu was being held locally. The teacher who is participating in Zuzalu is a web3 friend I met in the twitter space reading club more than half a year ago, and I met online. Because I was doing similar things, I built up a kind of trust in the dark.

K heard that I came to Montenegro, so he invited me to experience Zuzalu. In this way, a mistake started, and I started a different journey in Zuzalu.

First experience with Zuzalu

Before arriving in Zuzalu, I read several articles written by friends with great interest, and got a general understanding of Zuzalu: a two-month-long co-living experiment in Zuzalu, in a mysterious location for about 200 people from all over the world Residents are offered a 2-month stay. Every week zuzalu holds workshops and talks around different themes; the residents are also very active and organize various interesting activities spontaneously every day

On the first day I came to Zuzalu, I met V. On the way to have breakfast, my friend and I found someone walking behind silently, and turned our heads to find that it was V. Resisting the excitement in my heart, I asked calmly: Are you going to have breakfast too? Although I didn't know what I was pretending at the time, I felt that in such a life-like scene, there should be no such idolatrous behavior.

In the subsequent community life, I met a lot of bigwigs. But in fact, the feeling shown by everyone is just to be each other's partners in life. This special social relationship makes me very happy: the community does not have a very strong "networking" atmosphere, and even if people have their own social expectations, they will not behave too utilitarianly. Instead, an atmosphere of genuine connection was established in the community that downplayed utilitarian purpose.

Thinking: Do we want to create our own narrative?

In the process of getting acquainted with the ecology of the Zuzalu community, I enjoyed the freedom here, and gradually realized that I was disenchanting authority figures and narratives. On the first day I arrived, I participated in the "how to start a nation" lecture. The person who gave the lecture used a very entrepreneurial approach, analyzed several cases of launching 'successful businesses', and conducted some competitive product analysis. In the end, I came to an exciting conclusion: "if you can make a cake, you can create a country." Listening to this lecture is like listening to a sketch, which made me very happy, but it just passed away like a fun .

After attending some lectures, I slowly discovered that the previously incomprehensible, technically complex, and rhetorical narratives did not have much effect in practice.

It is not very easy for us (some Chinese blockchain practitioners) to understand many technical articles; but if it is not easy to understand, then don’t try to understand, and go freely according to your own thinking and reasoning Create it.

Blockchain is a technology, and we have the freedom to use it with maximum power. Network State itself is an experimental concept; how to define what a network state is is in the hands of everyone who is interested in this concept.

Even in such an open scene, as a different face, I still feel disconnected from my surroundings at times. An unfamiliar culture, an unfamiliar sense of humor, an unfamiliar way of life. But these unfamiliarities are not cold barriers, but a sense of strangeness from a different world.

During breakfast, I heard about a self-organized activity called 'use zen to embrace leadership'. Although 'Zen' has been popular in the West for many years and has been used in various narratives, it has long lost its meaning in the process of spreading, but when 'Zen' and 'leadership' are linked together, I always feel something strange. How does Zen's concept of so much meditation connect with such a utilitarian purpose as 'inspiring leadership'? But from the perspective of Americans, I always feel that the theme of this event is very popular.

Zen is a concept in my own culture, but when I heard it in this scene, it felt very strange. If I were to describe it myself, my concept of Zen Buddhism would not be clear. My culture is just a subconscious feeling that affects my every move, and I haven't had a good communication with the outside world.

That's when I realized again that as a person with a completely different identity, background, and way of thinking, I really have to think, write, create, and spread my own narrative. What I even need to think about is not 'whether to create our narrative' but 'how to create our own narrative', not 'how to create our narrative' but what kind of things we want to express and create.

Hackathon by mistake

I thought coming to Zuzalu would be just an experience, but I didn’t expect to participate in the build myself. On zuzalu's official website, the introduction to zuzalu is a pop-up city community. But under such a grand dream, the organizers put forward the problem that needs everyone's help to solve when holding the 'building zuzalu' is still very practical: how to make the organizer arrange accommodation more efficiently, and how to make zuzalu fragmented Time organization, how to get zuzalu to get funding, etc.

I came up with the idea of participating in a hackathon when I saw a web product that was a collection of events. Because Zuzalu self-organizes so many events, creating a timeline that showcases them all was a priority.

Although the official website is where events are officially announced, community members most often use telegram to organize events. Zuzalu's 'social hub' telegram channel is the main place for zuzalu to release activities, each activity has its own sub channel: one of the most active channels is the 'cold plunge' twice a day, the organizer leads everyone to 8:00, 1:00 p.m. to the sea for a cold water bath. In addition, there are activity groups such as pot dinner, board games, hiking, etc. There are so many channels that I can't finish reading several pages.

When I saw the online release of activities, I felt that it was impossible for an activity collection website to solve the problem of information overload in the telegram channel, and it was impossible for community members to abandon their original information exchange habits and switch to the official website for operations. After realizing this pain point, a product idea was born spontaneously. My team and I made a telegram bot that stores community discussions on-chain. The bot can not only realize the function of storing and displaying the event information in the telegram to the chain, but also record the history of the evolution and development of a real community by storing the content of the conversation. In the end, our project zuzu.log won the third place in the Hackathon in Building Zuzalu.

I was really happy on the day I finished the presentation. Walking on the road, I was recognized by many unknown people and praised the 'really nice presentation'. The organizer praised us privately, and proposed that the history of the community needs to be recorded and displayed.

To be honest, compared with many other projects, our project did not use any very cool technology, nor did we draw any special cakes for the judges to eat. I think the main reason for winning the hackathon this time, besides the fact that the ppt is doing very well (I am not humble), is because we have made products that can precisely solve the pain points.

I want to dig out more real needs

I think I know enough about web3. But after creating web3 for so long, it seems that the most important function that designers need to do has not been fully realized: to find some down-to-earth application scenarios for blockchain technology.

I will no longer build castles in the air, nor cheer for mirages. Blockchain is an underlying technology with its own value, but when we want to apply this technology to all scenarios, it is the moment when creativity really dies. The blockchain needs to break the circle, and I also need to break the blockchain circle, go to the real world to see, understand the locality of different regions, talk to real users, and create useful products for real needs.

write at the end

I met a lot of interesting people in Zuzalu. If I want to tell the story, I probably have to write another article about it. But the experience in zuzalu is a parallel process of dreaming and disenchantment: disenchantment of narrative and disenchantment of idols. Blockchain practitioners always have an ambition to subvert the system; but how to create a better future cannot be obtained from repeatedly chewing on other people's narratives. We have to be creators, thinkers, make our own observations, draw our own conclusions, and tell others about it, so that we can change the world with our own hands.

This article started on the day I returned from Montenegro and has been written for several weeks. It's three in the morning, I'm sitting in the airport waiting for another flight to Montenegro, and I'm determined to finish this post before boarding the plane. My head is already dizzy, haha. Many friends who have worked with and never met, see you IRL!

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