The Art of Escape from Domination - Digital Homeless Settlement in Dali

"Almost everyone is talking about 'getting out'. The team that has basically formed, the founding team will basically go out before the end of the year. The teams that have just started are all preparing to go out. No one has illusions. Staying is no longer the way to go. "

This is a note from an observer after a Web3-themed gathering of digital nomads in Dali was called off.

In the past two years, many Chinese Web3 project parties and developers have migrated to the southwest from Beijing, Shanghai, and Hangzhou under the gradually tightening policy pressure and the increasing risk of epidemic control, and stopped in Dali. A digital homeless settlement has gradually formed in the ancient city on the frontier of Yunnan. These young people from all over the world, who have no longer adapted to a fixed office, and live and work in the Metaverse most of the day, have also developed various types of offline autonomous living communities in Dali. "Distributed life".

For a long time, Dali was known as another life possibility besides "running" and "lying".

Dali

It is not the first time that Dali has become a holy place to avoid Qin when it comes to the art of escaping domination. In the past 20 to 30 years, following the cycle of China’s political environment, almost every artist who is not very obedient in the industry and marginalized people outside the system have gone to Beijing and Shanghai when they were relatively open, and then went all the way south during the period of political austerity. In the end, they often settled in Dali, trying to escape and escape from the system as much as possible.

The so-called "escape from the system" refers to breaking away from a top-down ruling system at all levels of life, including homeschooling, permaculture, ecological housing, and digital nomads that are popular in Dali. Often it is not intentional, but the people who come here, in the idle state of life, will enter such a cultural atmosphere, self-sufficiency, self-sufficiency, autonomy, letting go of excessive goals, and at the same time connecting with people from the bottom up. Make friends with utility. These things sound natural, but it is not easy in the highly competitive modern society. Facing the pressure of the system, travel writer Xu Song jokingly called Dali "Dali Fornia", the stronghold of Chinese hippies. Later, this statement was widely circulated at home and abroad, and "Dali Fornia" even became a phrase that the Pinyin input method would recommend by default. Xu Song said, "Dali's idle life allows many people to try things they didn't have the chance to do before... Residents spontaneously set up motorcycle groups, mountaineering groups, reading groups, sailing groups, paragliding groups, sunset groups. Red basketball teams, baking teams, and baby-making teams, yarn-knitting teams, bird-watching teams, etc.” Many have compared it to the American hippie movement of the 1960s, who opposed the Vietnam War with a rooted or nomadic lifestyle in rural communities and nationalism.

A book widely discussed by Dali Folia enthusiasts, and the title borrowed from this article - "The Art of Escape from Rule" (the title of the book is literally translated as "The Art of Not Being Ruled" is more accurate), the author, the famous American anthropologist Zhan Mr. Scott cites many examples to demonstrate that: There is a mountainous, jungle-like area in the Southeast Asian highlands with a regional population of about 80 million to 100 million, where mountain dwellers who seem impoverished to outsiders may have other pursuits : "Everything about them: means of livelihood, social organization, ideology, and even the controversial oral heritage of culture, can be thought of as carefully designed to stay out of state control." Dali, Yunnan, belongs to this highland area. Scott said that due to the existence of the Hengduan Mountains, it was once the largest and most populous piece of "extra-legal land" in the world that lived outside the national structure. This tradition of cultural diversity and tolerance of heresy has continued. For many stigmatized and excluded from the mainstream, "it just represents a political space that is self-governing, mobile and tax-free".

In Dali, there has been a wave of trends for several years to escape outside the state structure.

In the high-end community outside the ancient city of Dali, writers have moved from the north one after another since 2010. For example, several important works of Ye Fu were written when he settled in Dali. There are so many Beijing writers and artists gathered in the community that it was once called the "Beijing Village". The directors of independent documentaries, film festivals and independent music bands also follow a similar trajectory from north to south and finally stay in Dali. There are also political dissidents, social activists, and Dali is also a habitat for them to escape from the surveillance cameras of Tianluodi. Of course, there is no real "outside the law". Dali gives people a kind of nostalgia that does not exist in their hometown.

Web3

The latest wave of people fleeing south to Dali is not a disobedient artist or a poor writer, but a software engineer.

In China over the past two decades, this profession has often been synonymous with "young and rich". They have to work "996" or even longer hours, sacrifice their health, and at the same time devote themselves to the rapid and high growth of the entire industry, sharing the dividends of China's Internet entrepreneurship wave in the past 20 years. But now, China's Internet has entered the "national advance and private retreat" channel, the overall economy is down, control bans are emerging one after another, the risk of unemployment for engineers has increased sharply, and income and welfare have declined, but they are still being eroded by the 996 work system. As a result, some people start to want to choose a new way of life - or, alternatively, a choice.

The pandemic has exacerbated this impulse. After the epidemic, digital homeless settlements began to appear in Dali sporadically who could cope with their work by working remotely. In 2020, three Silicon Valley engineers and the local organization 706 co-founded 706 Dali Space, which is more targeted through the operation of co-living space. , gathered a tribe of "digital nomads".

The organizers quoted Tsugio Makimoto, the former CEO of Hitachi Semiconductor and former CTO of Sony, in the definition of "digital nomad" in the 1997 book "Digital Nomad": "The future of human society, high-speed wireless networks and powerful mobile devices Will break down the boundaries between occupations and geographic areas, and thousands of people will sell their houses to embrace a new way of life that travels the world while relying on the Internet to generate income, these people make first-world money through the Internet The average income, but choose to live in places where the price level of the developing world is, they are called Digital Nomad (Digital Nomad). This lifestyle completely frees them from the 9-to-5, office block and annoying commute."

Such co-living spaces are not unfamiliar to Taiwanese readers, where young people can share public spaces and live together in a rented way. The initiators call this "a life experiment", and the goal is to form a sustainable community that mixes online and offline in the face of the rapidly rising "digital homeless" generation, "to build a distributed life network based on the foundation of the digital homeless community." , let "space and people evolve together" and help everyone who comes here "find their own new life in Dali Fornia."

Entrepreneurial teams and engineers in the fields of cryptocurrency and blockchain, which have been deeply affected by the policy, have become the new residents of this wave of digital homeless people in Dali.

China will launch the "digital renminbi" in 2020, becoming "the world's first real-name digital currency issued by the central bank". Vigorously support Web3 technologies such as blockchain and Metaverse for industrial upgrading and digital transformation.

But at the same time, China strictly states that "virtual currency-related business activities are illegal financial activities", explicitly prohibits all personal digital currency transactions, and imposes punitive electricity prices on the private mining industry. On September 15, 2021, the People's Bank of China, the Cyberspace Administration of Notice on Preventing and Handling Hype Risks in Virtual Currency Transactions. In August 2018, after 173 domestic virtual currency exchanges and 124 overseas trading platforms have been completely closed, by 2021, even if the server is overseas, it is illegal to provide relevant business activities to domestic residents in China.

Under this policy situation, blockchain and cryptocurrency entrepreneurial teams either leave China, or live in Kunming and Dali in the southwest. Dali has even gradually become one of the centers of China's Web3, especially the DAO community.

A life of escape from domination

706 Dali Space, as one of such physical bases, seized the opportunity and hoped to hold "the most interesting/free/romantic Web3 event in Dongba District", calling on these young people who are wandering in foreign places to share "the passion for technology". , the exploration of the DAO's governance and self-organization spirit, the thinking of public goods, and the imagination of the community and the future of Web3".

The 1,500 tickets for this big party will be killed in seconds after the sale. A week before the event, thousands of people poured into the ancient city of Dali one after another. In the end, before the event began, the local police asked to cancel it because of the epidemic.

Interestingly, although the event was canceled, it seems to have played a certain characteristic of Web3 decentralization: various derivative and temporary events appeared in the bars, lawns, seaside and even streets of Dali.

One of the participants left a message: "In a few days, I seem to have forgotten the existence of the organizer, because as long as the topic you are interested in is the main venue, it is indeed decentralized." Another participant said: "Escape from domination is art elsewhere, life here."

But if even the space of Dali cannot be extended, young people who are unwilling to lie flat can only be "moisturized". This is what the sentimental passage at the beginning of the article said was widely circulated in China's Internet circles. The author also wrote down this statement: "In the era of Web1 and Web2, we could copy to china and fight in the domestic market, but now we can't. The domestic market is gone, we can only go out and compete with other countries on the world stage. The team is head-to-head, the bayonet sees red and grabs territory, returning to the era of great sailing.”