# d/acc social tech from a swiss perspective | Devcon SEA

- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2025-10-07
- Duration: 10:05
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-BRjAO-5s2MA
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRjAO-5s2MA

## Description

Zuitzerland‘s thesis on how a permanent network state sandbox can serve as a „free social space“ and aid in scaling d/acc governance models beyond Swiss borders. Zuitzerland aims to build on the social technology developed over 700 years of decentralized governance in Switzerland, a thriving nation state, that’s no. 1 in innovation per capita, and one of the world’s only direct democracies.

Speaker(s): ⁨Isla Munro⁩, Una Wang
Skill level: Intermediate
Track: [CLS] d/acc Discovery Day: Building Towards a Resilient Utopia
Keywords: Decentralization, Economics, Governance

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Devcon SEA was held in Bangkok, Thailand on Nov 12 - Nov 15, 2024.
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## Transcript

thank you yeah hi everybody uh I'm really excited to be here talking about DC um so we want to tell you about Dak the Swiss way um un and I are working on zerland which is a network State and Society sandbox that has come out of all of this zozulu madness [Laughter] um yeah so how did all of this begin um we were at Zulu in Montenegro and had just an incredible time literally life-changing experience uh if you haven't been to a Zulu pop-up City yet um it's definitely a very different experience to a conference experience and really meaningful and um it's led to us actually really coming up with a concept of how we want to launch a permanent Network states and box in Switzerland um and we're working on a joint venture Now to create a livable um living lab uh in in Switzerland in a beautiful Alpine region so I'm going to tell you a little bit about that why a permanent sandbox um when vitalic made the call to decentralize the Zulu movement I was uh very honestly slightly obset the experience in Montenegro had been so amazing and I couldn't really imagine a space like this being created again in the same way by a random bunch of people in a decentralized manner um and I wrote a big post on the Agora Forum about how free social spaces were so important and that this what was created with Zulu and Montenegro was kind of like a social technology that had been created and a free social space that had been created where radical social Innovation and technological innovation but person Al most interestingly social Innovation can happen and um a place where we can work with existing models and new models and experiment and iterate in really interesting ways and I was worried that we wouldn't keep that free social space alive and that sandbox alive if we decentralized but interestingly we took the challenge on and we said like well Switzerland is the home of the ethereum foundation and it's home to many many early crypto companies and if if not in Switzerland then where should there be a pop-up city so we went a bit deeper and we really started looking at Switzerland and what can we actually do in Switzerland as a pop-up City that's very meaningful uh and you may know this quote from balic diak or defens of accelerationism um essay where he says actually Switzerland is often considered to be the closest thing the real world has to a classical liberal governance Utopia and it's very much true um you know values back and forth uh and everyone's going to have their favorite thing Switzerland is an incredible country uh I've lived there now both of us have lived there around 10 years and it's incredibly successful so number one for Innovation per capita in the world uh for the last 13 years running uh it's a direct democracy um and it's still working and I think that that's what makes it fascinating it's one of the only direct democracies and I think a lot of people are scared that democracies don't work especially direct ones uh and Switzerland has made it work in a way that we think is a very very interesting and they've actually been working on decentralization and democracy for the past 700 years and they've been very much a part of the humanism movement and they have this incredible social technology that's developed over literally 700 years of iterating and working together and we realized as we started thinking about this more that this is a soci social technology that we should be building on top of rather than starting from scratch um and we realized also as we looked into it more that the secret source that a lot of Scholars actually write about why switzland is successful is actually defensive accelerationism in other words um so they Define their mentality as having a very good balance between caution and progress uh they manag to innovate but they do it in a way where they don't they move reasonably fast but they don't tend to break things uh and so Switzerland has managed to become not only fast and a great innovator but also a very stable and strong economy and actually even has for example a kind of a Ubi um if you become unemployed for whatever reason in Switzerland you have up to two years your income covered by a an insurance um so instead of leaving people on their own when something happens they in they reinvest in the people and in their human capital and it's quite an interesting model because it's based on sort of insurance rather than a purely um social support um so it's an incredible place and there's a lot that we can learn and we believe that it's a great place for Network states to uh iterate and to build a Sandbox where we can build our own kind of network State and Society but also iterate and build other network states and soci societies and have them build with us um and core piece here is the balance of the state between the individual interests and Collective interests and this is really what we think that switzland does well is they balance the cipher Punk values with the solar Punk values and when in doubt they protect individual freedoms and things like privacy uh interesting example of kind of some of the weird stuff in Switzerland so when you first move to Switzerland they actually they give you your residence and your address and then they say and by the way here are some iodine tablets just in case there's nuclear war and it's funny because it's like Switzerland is probably the last place in the world that actually expects to have nuclear war but there you go you get your iodine tablets um they also have bunkers for example that could house the entire population in the case of War um and so even though they do everything in their power to actually protect against that situation they have um ways that they can be protected from the worst possible outcome so yeah I would hand over here to Uno um based on all of this we've decided to do an 8-week event in May and June 2025 and have a bunch of you amazing people over and for a really long sleepover and to nerd on AI privacy ZK Russian ity Dows exis governance and in particular really learn from Swiss democracy um but there's actually more to this and is going to tell you about that the SL I don't know what to say so um instead of not only conceptually Isa mentioned a lot about how we're conceptualizing um Switzerland as a perfect DX and box place and also for fast iteration bridging Web Two to web 3 through governance and what we can learn from Switzerland um but at the same time we want to build it into a permanent leing lab um and Isa has talked about how important it is to create a this social space as part of social technology um for social for creating this safe social space we think that we want to build this permanent place at this uh potential um Park that we can have residents to come in and different people come in and have fast iterations and different products that we can test in a scale that matters which means that we can actually accommodate 6,000 to 10,000 people onite and have um testing all different kind of social Technologies onsite and one uh one thing that we firmly believe is that why we need a Sandbox in Switzerland is also change with the regime tends to be incremental and path dependent we need a little safe space that we want create and carve out from existing good Society to have a pathbreaking Innovation and this is where we see have the potential with a permanent location and um as for Switzerland we believe we have the best ingredients to make it happen we have really great people all the zuza people I think I see half of here probably are zalian and we're great and then um we have the culture and philosophy as Isa explained the D and solar solar lunar Punk integration and also we want to have space and infrastructure to make rapid iteration happen with all of this I we think that we can make meaningful radical social technical uh social technology happen and our rough plan from 2025 and to 2030 is ADD with 2025 the first two three years we want to have po of villages and Pioneer residency and have a a basic Ren inovation on uh at the physical location and from 2026 to 2029 we want to have experimental Villages and scale up a little bit and with living labs and sandbox and have deep Tech uh on on the park and with 20130 onwards we want to have a real high-tech civilization accelerator Village on site um I was meaningful of uh being careful with the time I think that's our slot U thank you for your attention hope you're excited as excited as us about this and uh welcome to connect with