he’s 16 now he drives, has a job and a girlfriend but he still lets me hoist him up to place the 🌟

the mistake so many people make is seeing university professors as intellectuals when they’re actually employees at a combination hedge fund and healthcare conglomerate that operates a small luxury resort/sports franchise where student-customers occasionally take classes

Another Liminal Learning cohort started yesterday, at the stunning Elbow Lake in Ontario, Canada. Some musings in lieu of FOMO, as I'm not there as a guide for this Quest...

Great essay by Vitalik. Some brief thoughts: TL;DR: Society has a hollow middle; power is concentrated in the state and corporate oligarchies, leaving the individual isolated. We need "neo-tribes" to act as intermediate 'civil society' institutions. Part of our goal at @JoinEdgeCity is building the cultural R&D and economic engine to fill that gap. The Missing Middle Society today is a barbell. We have the state and the corporate oligarchy on one end, and the individual on the other. We’ve lost the "intermediate institutions" that Tocqueville identified as the training ground for democracy and agency. Neo-tribes fill this space. People find deep meaning at Edge because they finally feel a sense of group agency. Culture is the Main Output The main output of a popup is culture. Vitalik frames culture as "working machinery" rather than a museum piece. I agree. Everything is downstream of culture. We use popups to build the rituals and social ties that allow a coherent tribe to emerge naturally. Execution = Sustainability We are focused on reaching sustainability as soon as possible. It is a necessary condition for experimentation. To avoid a "regression to the mean" or grant-dependency, projects must relentlessly execute on a business model. Financial independence is the only path to real autonomy. Popups as R&D Popups are the bootstrap phase. A 1–2 month stay is enough to create a "social imaginary" and build ties strong enough that people actually care about one another. This essay is a reminder that we need to just go for it. We have to try things that are novel and high-stakes to avoid becoming just another coworking space. -- We are laying the foundation for the tribe piece now. If you want to collaborate on the long-term zone and new town phase, reach out.