Forest Dispatch: Living Cosmo-Local Chiang Mai

Hello dear readers,

Its been months since I've have had the headspace to sit down to write or Podcast.

These past two months I found myself immersed in what might be described as a "Scenius." Over 2,000 artists, scientists, researchers, healers, and technologists—pioneers at the fringes and frontiers of the mainstream—descended on Chiang Mai. They gathered for "pop-up cities" or a "Gathering of Villages" as we termed them here.

A year ago, I was standing on the edge of the woods, wondering if this was my path. Writing this now, I still don’t fully know what that "path" is. But every step into this metaphorical forest has been met with support and fellow explorers who inspire this Light Forest journey.

The Gathering of Villages "Scenius"

Brian Eno describes Scenius as "the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius."

The term pop-up cities refers to month-long gatherings where people from frontier spaces come together to co-live, learn, experiment, and connect. Unlike traditional conferences—short, intense sprints that interrupt "real life"—pop-up cities offer a chance to integrate everyday life, experiment with new habits, and make deeper connections.

This format isn’t entirely new, but the unique backgrounds of the participating communities make it stand out. Many attendees that identify as digital nomads, moving across continents without fixed bases, exploring areas like longevity, biohacking, networked nations, and digital public goods, regenerative finance.

There was a time when meeting and forming relationships online felt radical. Today, it’s mundane. Everything is online now–mediated by algorithms, bots, and corporate or governmental crawlers. The vitality once felt in digital spaces has diminished. Naturally, the pendulum is swinging back.

Interestingly, the swing is being led by those who once pushed the boundaries of digital life. The Web3 and crypto communities, which exist almost entirely in digital realms, are now seeking something different.

Remote work and digital life had been the baseline since the very start. The entire experience of life, the economy, the 'modes of production' are all primary digital, 'dreams within dreams'. If these nascent technologies, which still lacks proven, large scale applications, are to scale it has to be tried out IRL (In Real Life). Pop-up cities come from a recognition that we still exist as bodies in physical spaces and that the most powerful coordination and transformational learning happens here.

Pop-up cities are also a response to our collective longing for somatic connection and belonging. Digital life, for all its connectivity, often amplifies feelings of disconnection and isolation. Amidst terms like "loneliness pandemic" and rising global mental health challenges, these gatherings represent a swing toward embodied, intentional togetherness. The pandemic forced us deep into the depths of digital connection, to extract what we could from every last byte. Now everything is being flipped.

Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum co-founder, who also spent the month in Chiang Mai, credited with helping conceptualise and fund the first 'pop-up city', asks:

What if cultures or tribes that have formed online with their own goals and values could materialize offline, and new physical places could grow due to intention rather than random chance?

Chiang Mai, a digital nomad hub for over a decade, became the site for these experiments, with nods towards the promise of being close to nature and spiritual well-being. Pop-up cities provided the foundational infrastructure—physical and digital—necessary to coordinate. ShanhaiWoo, bringing in many Chinese communities, Edge City, an evolution from the genesis Zuzalu, Invisible Gardens, focussed on tech development. On top of this, people could organise workshops, retreats, talks, parties, hackathons, or playshops like Seapunk, to re-imagine solar punk futures rooted in Southeast Asia, or an 'Un-College' I organised with friend and collaborators Sam Chua & Lorilei. While the Crypto space helped incubate and fund this moment, the profile of people attending was very broad and diverse (more than I expected), many with few to no direct ties to Web3 at all.

Fellow Chiang Mai collaborator and P2P Foundation founder Michel Bauwens believes this Scenius is historical pivot moving to a translocal form of organisation fundamentally different from a city. I recommend reading it for a deeper analyses on this pop-up city phenomenon.

Now that some of the dust has began to settle, if i'm honest with myself, I'm not fully sure how I feel about any of this. Writing this note is an attempt to document some of my thoughts. Whatever this is I found myself in the heart of it.

I co-founded digi-cnx: network for digital commons a year and a half ago through which i've been organising gatherings locally. I'm part of Pagoda, an Asian network of Web3 community builders that was born in Chiang Mai in April, and was a Kernel Fellow earlier this year, where Light Forest was incubated. I've spent most of this year connecting and creating with many people in the Web3 space as well as others in Chiang Mai. What follows is some loosely structured thoughts and reflections stringing together some of the things i've been involved in.

"Cosmo-Local" Chiang Mai

This is a concept I learnt from Michel Bauwens on the Light Forest podcast and became a lens whith which some of us approached the pop-up city phenomenon.

Michel describes cosmo-localism as an organizational paradigm where everything “light” (knowledge, ideas) is shared globally, while everything “heavy” (such as farming, manufacturing, and tangible resources) remains local. With new 'commons' centric institutions outside aegis of market and state. As part of the Uncollege we hosted a three-part series on cosmo-localism and civilization transition, which you can view on digi-cnx.

Cosmo-localism represents a paradigm shift, responding to the kind of globalisation that fosters monocultures and erodes biodiversity—both literally, in terms of the soil and ecology, and culturally, in terms of diversity in beliefs, traditions, and financial systems.

The Light Forest interpretation of cosmo-local also includes a recognition of our cosmic connection to all life, as well as the relationships we hold with the land and climate in the places we reside in. To be cosmo is to be connected to the earth, and to be grounded locally it to be cosmically connected.

Having lived nomadically across four countries since I was 18, I once saw the idea of staying rooted in one place as a relic of the past—something to escape. The freedom to move across borders and participate in globally connected communities felt radical and empowering. Yet, as I’ve grounded myself in Chiang Mai and re-learned my relationship with food and nature, I’ve experienced many shifts. How much of my restless nomadism was fueled by a lack of connection to the earth and nature?

Experiencing the pop-up cities felt like stepping into a quantum reality – experiencing the many versions of me: past, present, and (perhaps) future, across the cosmo-local spectrum.

In September, I co-organized a workshop titled Future(s) of Cosmo-local Chiang Mai with my friends and collaborators Chen Yiching (Vivian) and Shakil Ahmed. We brought together 26 leaders and changemakers from Chiang Mai’s local organizations, pop-up villages, and digital nomad communities.

Through the lens of cosmo-localism, we explored future(s) where digital nomad communities and Web3 pop-up villages are better connected to local communities and issues. The goal was to foster more conscious relationships with the city and its environment.

Planetary Health

Participating in the Nature Health node part of one of the popup villages, Edge City, I was introduced intimately to the idea of 'planetary health' an interdisciplinary framework that links the health of nature systems (e.g. climate) to our bodily health.

At the start of October, Chiang Mai experienced it's largest flood in recorded history. The Ping river that provides water for the Northern and Central Thailand, and flows through the city, flooded the riverbanks forcing hundreds of thousands of people from their homes but also deposited a toxic sludge that seemed to destroyed everything that it touched. Decades of de-forestation and encroaching of the Ping river was now being hurled back at all of us. A violent, forceful grounding and reminder from mother Godess Pra Mae Kong Ka, that there is no 'other' to outsource our 'externalities' in an interconnected web of life. In April when I participated in the Pagoda gathering we experienced one of the hottest heat waves combined with peak AQI levels. While we gather to shape the future, we are forcefully reminded to be truly awake to the present in the hope that can we listen and shape transformative future(s).

So what is mother nature communicating to us?

During the healthnode workshop, Dr. Ora, director of the School of Public Policy at CMU, ran a brief speculative policy recommendation exercise that she also conducts with Thai government policy planners. We were asked to embody an element of the Ping River and provide policy advice from its perspective.

I chose to be a rock.

At first, my mind resisted—“I don’t want to be a rock; I should be something more dynamic.” But as I leaned into the stillness of the rock, the mind quietened down.

"Be still. Do nothing", I felt the rock speak to me from within.

It is easy to be dismissive of Rocks that seem passive and incapable of exerting change on its environment. As a character Max in Tyson Yunkaporta's Sand Talk, yarns:

Stones to me are the objects that parallel all life, more so than trees or mortal things because stones are almost immortal. They know things learned over deep time. Stone represents earth, tools, and spirit.

This moment of stillness invited reflection: What if all of us paused, even briefly? What would become possible? We all remember the miraculous changes to natural environments during the pandemic when tourism and travel paused. How much of our 'seeking' to solve inadvertently exacerbates them in unseen ways? I'm reminded of Bayo Akomolafe's words

the crises lies in our response to the crises

The Health Node began on the banks of the Ping River with a grounding exercise led by Tony Lai. We connected with the soil deposited by the recent flood, embodying the interplay between nature’s cycles and human activity. I enjoyed a walk in the forest visualisation meditation guided by Charlie Fisher and Sophia Bazile. Our discussions on planetary health often converged on a shared insight: spirituality must be integrated into this framework. Dr. Geordan inspired us with the concept of "care-chains"(above)—a relational approach to addressing health that moves beyond individualism. To have conversations on the state of our world grounded in a shared understanding that at the root the only problem is seperation is rare and refreshing. At Pagoda, similar themes surfaced during gatherings with friends from the Global Majority (Africa, LatAm, and Asia). Together, we held space for perspectives rooted in the recognition of interconnection, both individual and collective.

This resonance around interconnection with nature didnt always feel universal.

Techno Future Tribes

My perception is that one common narratives and assumption underpinning the philosophies around this Gathering of Villages "Scenius" is that our future will be a one that is more digitaly connected, whether through AI or crypto.

The pop-up cities become intentional experiments in creating futuristic spaces so that people can feel into what such worlds may look like and build for it today. Its a compelling theory of change. After all our world is a reflections of our collective minds and thoughts. At Edge City, the largest village that came closest to resembling a city with 800+ people, some of the experiments included NFC chip enabled wrist bands using privacy preserving cryptography that you could tap with a phone to pull up someone's profile information, and a community currency. AI generated art was up on the walls and the official brand identity. Biohacking tools like Oura rings populated conversations in Telegram groups, along with 'Dont Die' meme from Bryan Johnson, reflecting desires to to quantify health.
The energy and capacity of these communities to explore and build is undeniably impressive. But while we push the edges of digital connectivity, are we equally prepared for its polarity: a more offline, digitally disconnected world?

This may be due to enforced conditions of surviellance and authoritarianism. It may even be one we chose out of our own desire. Optimising instead for a 'less is more' attitude to the level of appropriating technology into our daily lives. Sensing in to intimately understand what our bodies might be communicating.

This 'future' exists today in some parts of the world, including our neighbour Myanmar embroiled in an armed uprising against a military government that took power through a coup 3 years ago. Pervasive Internet shutdowns, distrust in the financial systems, and a lack of trust.

These are issues we have been tracking within digi-cnx community and we used this moment to faciliate a sharing by Myanmar scholars and activists of the most cutting edge information and research highlighting the need to build off-grid communication tools and blockchain that works in these conditions to an audience of some of the the smartest 'digital public goods' technologists from the Funding the Commons Residency, thanks to fellow Pagodians Songyi, Yiching, and Chris who ran it. As my friend Adam reflected at the event, this is a type of innovation too.

embodying cosmolocal

One week I teleported myself from these maddening crowds to Pun Pun Organic Farm and Seed Bank where I participated in a week-long course on "self-reliance", learning everything from growing food to creating the necessary infrastructure to live off the grid. I didnt chose the dates of the course but the timing made for an experience of contrasts along the cosmolocal spectrum.

After a week of flying high in heady spaces discussing the future of nation states and philosophical discussions around civilisation transitions, this was a reminder that perhaps the future that I needed to start preparing for today is one which we cannot rely on industry to get access to clean and nutritious food. I may be able to self-custody my Bitcoin in the event of world war three but can I grow rice and the food I need to live, if global food systems kill off natural food?

Perhaps future iterations of pop-up cities and co-working spaces could also equip us with these life skills especially for those of us digital natives that grew up in urban jungles.

The joy that is inherent in us doesnt need technology. Yet so much of our focus is placed on getting the technology right, rather than connecting to the joy first. It can be seducing to watch videos of a family playing together in the living room while robots and AI controlled systems cut the carrots and mow the lawns, or perfectly sanitsed spaces that are controlled and safe.

Technology often promises to reduce friction in our lives, freeing up time to spend with loved ones or pursue meaningful things. But do we know what to do with this time? For many of us, we often drift into scrolling social media, playing video games, or working even more. As my friend Yucca, a Burmese activist observed, there’s a lurking authoritarian impulse beneath techno optimist visions

My time at Pun Pun reminded me that the there is so much joy to be experienced when are are intimately involved in the "mundane" processes of cleaning, fixing, cooking, that we seem to try to fix with tech. I do feel that Technology has a role to play, but where?

These were some of the themes that came up at a Light Forest workshop (the first in person workshop!) that I hosted at the ShanhaiWoo pop-up. Building on my research, some of which is captured in this artcile Living "Intelligently" with AI. We discussed questions around how we can design technology or socio-technical systems that allow us to better tap into our 'Real Knowledge' i.e. inherent joy and wisdom of the body. I also got to play out with my new handpan (the copper turtle) which has been a dream in the making for 3 years!

Now as I write this, I find myself deeply grateful. This period has been filled with opportunities to make many with new friends and connect more deeply with old ones. I’ve met incredible people building their own versions of Light Forest—many of whom you’ll meet soon on the podcast.

Doing this kind of work—creating new spaces can often feel tough. Mainstream policy, media, and academic circles seem far removed from this energy. But every new connection makes this world bigger and more real. I'm dreaming what a Light Forest pop-up city could look like. I am keen to follow many of the new threads and inspirations that have emerged.

I’ve packed a lot into this post already, so I’ll leave it here. Thank you for reading, and until the next dispatch!