Session Note @ PoR #2: "(Placeholder)"
Selection over volume, deep work, the local economy, politics from a distance, governance, and DAO
An open discussion with no fixed agenda tends to show what a group reaches for when nothing is imposed on it. At a villa in a coastal resort town in southeastern Vietnam, called Mũi Né, the session was held under the name "(Placeholder)", left blank for the conversation to fill, as it was meant to be with as little structure as possible.
The intention was to go a step deeper toward the psychological side of these gatherings: why people come, what the setting changes in them, and what the things they had tried before had failed to give them. Across different starting points, one distinction kept returning, less community against isolation than selection against volume. The notes below follow the arguments roughly in the order they surfaced.
The failure they had in common
Participants arrived with different disappointments that resolved to a similar shape. Incubators and startup ecosystems, recurring city-wide parties, a large snowboard camp: settings with little in common except the outcome, which was contact without consequence. A described it from the side of a home city, E from the side of professional networking.
A: I tried to find good communities in [my city]: more diverse, international, people working on startups, […] I didn't get any good connection or relationship out of them, even though I kept going and trying. (11:26)
E: I tried a lot of incubators and startup ecosystems, and what was missing was that you network with people, but it isn't relevant to your business. You end up with tons of contacts that are completely useless. (16:35)
The gap participants named is narrower than loneliness. These formats supply people in quantity and leave the sorting to chance, so the relationships that need aligned intent tend not to form. On this account a pop-up village gathers pre-sorted people, and the pre-sorting is what lets proximity turn into output. F's example had the density of a pop-up village and none of the intent.
F: I've probably been in a pop-up city, though no one called it that. Technically it was: a snowboard camp for 10 days. At its peak around 900 people lived in the same hotel. It existed around snowboarding, skiing and having fun, not work or professional networking. It was a terrible place to work. I tried, but the vibe is completely off; it's not about work at all. (09:19)
Deep work, and building over debating
The most repeated claim was that this setting produces deep work where other pop-ups produce discussion. For B it was the single difference.
B: They let me do deep work [...] The others focused on connection, experimentation and discussion, but not on the participants themselves creating something while they're here. (08:03)
The mechanism participants described is proximity under a time limit: when the people who can unblock a project are within walking distance for a fixed number of days, a feedback loop that usually runs over weeks can close in an afternoon. The same logic sat behind a preference for building over debating, shipping a version rather than settling the design by argument first. E traced this to the movement's own history, where years went to discussion that produced little a community could use.
E: For three years people talked about building this kind of society, disagreed on how, and wasted time talking instead of building. After three years there's still no tool a community can use; the existing ones are unusable. […] Now I come here, see the resident page, and it's exactly the app I'd been imagining, and they built it. It's a mindset shift: instead of arguing about how it'll work, build your own version, and if people like it they join. It's the startup way. (25:21)
C put the contrast between the two modes in a line.
C: It's fun to create while we're all here, because we create faster. If you just hang out and then go home to ship, it's more like a conference. (08:58)
What the setting changes
Beyond output, participants described the setting as changing what they could bring into one place and how they related to others while there. For B the draw was a venue for interests that normally stay apart.
B: [The founder]'s intention, which he posted, was that he recognised the multiple interests he has and had no place to be with people who shared them: blockchain, AI, longevity, and philosophies about how to move society forward. Before [the movement], I was interested in many things separately, exporting them into my own research and work and making connections one-to-one across these verticals. But I never had a place where I could talk about the overlap. (13:31)
For H the change was to a default working pattern, trading a solitary routine for time spent with people, if only for the length of the event.
H: I'm hanging out with people. Normally I'm just working all the time. Here I dedicate a significant part of my time to talking to others, and that happens at every pop-up city. I pause my daily routine. We're here for a short time, so it makes an impact. For me, pop-up cities are a distraction from my routine; I'm most productive sitting alone in my room at the computer, communicating with people, but online. It's hard for me to switch from one mode to another. I'm an introvert who knows how to pretend to be an extrovert, so maybe that's the nuance. (53:17)
B also placed the setting in a wider frame, as a filter for people looking past a left-right gridlock toward integrating differences.
B: What pop-up cities try to attract is people who recognise we're in a gridlock between left and right, and who now want to look at a higher level of consciousness: what's next, how we integrate the differences and transcend the blockages. We might still carry some emotion from the previous levels, but we at least understand that if we want this new world, we need a better way to coordinate around our differences.(38:35)
A described the shift in more immediate terms, as a lowered guard that a baseline of trust makes worthwhile.
A: What I wouldn't normally do, but do here, is let other people have an impact on me. Because I have some baseline trust or alignment in philosophy, I let myself be more open, have more conversations, try new activities, because that's more valuable than just focusing on my own thing and isolating myself. (32:11)
A missing layer: the local economy
A separate line concerned what a pop-up city still lacks. D described the absent layer as connection to the surrounding economy rather than a closed exercise among participants. On this view the current format remains internal, and the step not yet taken is integration with the place that hosts it.
D: It has to mingle with the real economy of the local city. That's the key: we call it a city, which means many layers, social, economic, governance. For us it's still an experiment among ourselves. (14:33)
Politics
The one subject the room set aside was partisan politics, by norm rather than by rule. When it surfaced, participants moved it to the level of game theory or geopolitics, treating a leader's decision as a system to understand rather than a position to take.
C: It's a good point to have political debate, but bring it up from the perspective of game theory, to understand why a country became the way it is. Open up the map, look at the big political games. You're not debating the situation itself, you zoom out and look, at Trump for example, to understand his decisions and predict his next move. That's interesting to me: knowing what's going to happen next. (36:51)
The counterpoint came from G, who held that building a new system leaves no way around politics.
G: "Practically, you can't escape these things. When you talk to people you start to understand them through these topics, and if you're building a new system you need to dig deep, to have the whole historical background, to understand what you need and what to avoid." (48:04)
Where the room did engage, participants attributed the possibility to a shared level of knowledge rather than a shared opinion. E described both the permission it created and the condition behind it.
E: I allow myself to debate here, because I can go deep and people know enough. […] Here I unlocked the ability to debate constructively. Debate is a new love language. (33:09)
E: We could talk about politics in these circles and it would be fine, not because people don't have an opinion, but because they have an educated opinion. That makes it possible to argue, with far better tolerance for others. (39:37)
A governance and democracy thread
A parallel conversation, carried by participants who work in that field, described how DAO governance decays as it scales. H put the root in size.
H: "The system dynamics depend heavily on the size of the community. Here we all know each other and can talk, so it's easy to align. When the numbers grow, things change, because you have no idea who's on the other side. You can't talk to anyone." (54:58)
The failure modes named were voting as overhead, participation narrowing to a few delegates, and the framing of a proposal quietly determining its outcome. The material concerned DAOs specifically; current pop-up cities largely do not run on that machinery, so it sat adjacent to the session's main subject rather than inside it. Within the thread, one strand looked forward rather than back, to a model built with AI rather than inherited.
B: If conflicts come up, maybe we get AI to help resolve them. Then maybe we figure out a new model of governance that's AI-facilitated, one that could make a more peaceful society. Over time that model could scale to a larger pop-up city, and eventually be adopted by existing states or similar communities. (44:50)
The rest traced the decay in detail. H set out the progression from broad participation to overhead to delegation.
H: In a lot of DAOs it starts as 'every vote counts', and then voting itself becomes a huge overhead. A founder I know, with years of experience stewarding one of the first DAOs, said people perceive it as: we already gave you our money, and now you want us to vote. Mostly people don't want to vote; they only vote when they don't like something. If everything goes fine, you've effectively selected managers, and if they deliver, nobody cares. (54:58)
H: I've seen a shift from direct democracy to delegation. Votes get delegated because it's a huge overhead. In one DAO, every decision was voted on at first, and when you have two or three proposals a week, each 10 to 20 pages, you can't do it. So it gets optimised. Participation in governance is an overhead. (54:58)
Participant I put the same dynamic as something that can be engineered rather than only drifted into.
I: But I think that's also a strategic manoeuvre. When people do want to have a voice, if you lean in and inundate them with paperwork to read and things to do, they will self-select out, and then they can't argue that you didn't hold space for the thing that they could have naturally bubbled up and said. (58:33)
H's closing example was a case where no one intended to manipulate and the framing still shaped the outcome.
H: In one DAO where I was deeply involved, and watching others, it wasn't manipulation by design. It was just 'everyone has to vote', and it turned out voting is really hard. It was a small group, and nobody wanted to manipulate. But I realised it happens across DAOs: even how you frame a proposal, forcing a yes or no, creates many small manipulations that scale up. (59:26)
Against this, C stated the pop-up village's current position.
C: We don't try to do any governance. We don't need it. (01:00:09)
Limitation
Proof of Retreat is designed to attract and retain people who want deep work and unstructured conversation, so the prominence of those themes partly reflects who the programme selects. The session is one observation of a self-selected group, not a general account of pop-up cities, and is recorded here as such.
Participants (anonymised)
Familiarity was self-reported on a 1–5 scale defined in the session, loosely applied and in places assigned by others, so the figures are texture rather than measurement.
Familiarity (1–5) | In the room as | |
|---|---|---|
A | 5 | Facilitator |
B | 4 | Ran the earlier brainstorm; co-building a software project |
C | 5 | Long-timer; building a software project |
D | 4 | Organising a pop-up elsewhere |
E | 5 | Serial pop-up attendee |
F | 3 | Newer; observing more than talking |
G | — | Works on a technical/space project; governance-minded |
H | — | Deep DAO governance experience |
I | — | DAO and democratic-design background |