Same tracks but on Spotify here

Project Updates

We’ve landed at Edge Esmeralda!~ It’s so great to be back here, see familiar faces, meet new people… It’s also been an INTENSE time, so much influx of conversations, ideas, people… My nervous system is definitely jazzed, but I’m loving it.

To honor the spirit of a relentless builder village, we have launched our merch shop at the Week1 demo day! Find it at merch.agartha.one

Why Merch?

Art can soften hearts, and softened hearts can change the world.

How can we use great designs, cultural zeitgeist, high fashion, and iconic styles, to tell the story of Solarpunk?

T Shirt as The Medium

Media theorist Marshall McLuhan coined the term in 1964:

The medium is the message

It means that the form of communication itself - not the content it carries - shapes how we perceive the world, altering our habits, thoughts, and society.

The information we receive on a day to day basis alters our subconscious. It enters our dreams, makes us desire that order of fries or pizza, pulls us to purchase the thing we don’t really need. It’s an open secrete that advertisement functions as a subversive form of propaganda.

In the film They Live by John Carpenter, all the billboards in a city actually have very simple messages, that only people with special glasses can see.

Must we remove ourselves from society, turn off screens, go offline, to properly ‘detox’?

OR

Can we use the same medium to evoke conversation around something healthy or meaningful? If advertising is a tool, what if we use it to make people feel better, healthier, happier? What if we treat the receivers of our message more like humans, rather than consumers?

Imagine the next time you drive on a highway and all you see are billboards about planting trees, taking a deep breath, and sharing some love?

This already exists at some levels. There are products and companies with integrity that deeply care about humankind’s general wellbeing, while staying profitable.

The story of the Parks Project has inspired me for years:

In 2014, two friends started selling T-shirts out of a trunk in Los Angeles to raise money for their favorite hiking trails. No venture capital, no grand strategy — just a screen printer and a genuine love for public land. That company is now Parks Project, a nonprofit that has partnered with over 100 national parks and donated millions of dollars to conservation across the United States. They've funded trail restorations, wildlife habitats, and park ranger programs — all through merch. A T-shirt. That's where it started.

Personally, I am just obsessed with street style designs, skate punk culture, and graphic Ts. To say what I want to say for Agartha on a T-shirt just feels like second nature.

Each artwork is designed with a special message and intention behind it, here they are!

The World is Our Home

This design was made to express this feeling of Unity — that so-called strangers are actually family. The world is not only a collection of places you pass through, but the one home you share with everyone.

Travel long enough and you start to notice: we aren’t that different. Strangers offer directions, share food, find someone who speaks enough of your language to make it work.

Thich Nhat Hanh wrote that we are here to awaken to the illusion of our separation.

This piece is for the nomads, the third-culture kids, the alien immigrants, the exiles, the people with three answers to “where are you from”, the curious explorer who want to spread unconditional love and responsibility anywhere they go.

The world is our home. Let’s take care of it.

Buy Land

Our friend, past Agartha resident, a Solarpunk commune hopping land ownership ambassador Chris Morello has been relentlessly advocating communal ownership of land — ‘Get some friends, buy some land!’ has become his motto.

I’m very aligned with his ethos. And I do think that buying land is one of the most radical things you can do with money.

It is the foundation to secure food, water and energy production, a place to step outside the default’s permission.

Land security allows families to build for the future generations, grow permanent gardens that feed people, create sanctuaries that protects personal freedom when the states fail to do so.

Land ownership is also a form of stewardship. Some wealthy conservationists are steps ahead — buying forests to protect them from extractive farming.

The shirt invites you to pass on this message, and inspire action.

Buy Land comes in green on black and red on white.

Get the 'Buy Land' shirt

The Middle Path

The EXIT society team thinks the world is too far gone and builds bunkers.

The DEFAULT society dwellers thinks everything is fine, actually.

The Rationalists won’t investigate anything that can’t be peer-reviewed.

The Mystics believes that celestial beings explains everything.

The Middle Path is a mental model — a 2x2 matrix mapping the full spectrum from Exit to Default, Rational to Mystic.

This design is to help locate where you are among the middle path, and encourage choosing different perspectives.

Wear it. Hang it up. Point at it. Think about where you belong on this chart? Use this as your tool to start a conversation!

The Middle Path currently comes in black (I think a poster would be cool too?)

Get 'The Middle Path'

Earth Dance

Henri Matisse painted The Dance in 1910, pulled from ancient Greek chorus dances and Dionysian rites — pre-Christian, pre-rational. The figures aren't celebrating anything specific. They're celebrating the art of being alive.

In Howl's Moving Castle, when Howl gives away his heart to a falling star, luminous spirits circle the moment by dancing, not mourning, but celebrating. The dance circle celebrates meaning, dedication, and love. It was a beautiful poetic witness and honor of a sacred moment.

Throughout history at all corners of earth, we share the same intuition to gather, celebrate, dance, and make meaning. Before geological borders, nation wars, and arguments about whose god is older, life was different.

Let’s not forget that we also share the same planet.

Earth Dance brings the feeling of celebration, community, love and joy around earth, to visually inspire a more joyful, ancient way to celebrate our beautiful home.

Earth Dance comes in beige, blue, and pink.

Get 'Earth Dance'

The Future is Ancient

We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.

That gap — between what we can build and who we are — is the defining crisis of our time.

But here’s the thing we keep forgetting:

The ancients weren’t primitive.

They were paying attention to different things. Fritjof Capra spent a decade mapping the parallels between quantum physics and Eastern mysticism in ‘The Tao of Physics’ and found they were describing the same reality — one through measurement, one through practice.

We’ve been so busy building forward, peeling off the mask of our reality, the same reality our ancestors came to see by observing the stars, feeling the seasons, and sitting around a fire.

Imagine an ancient future: barefoot on soil, fire circles, drumming and chanting, birds, bees, and trees… with brain-computer interfaces, automated robot farms, 3D printed homes, space travels, and intelligent systems managing resources we survive on.

Community and technology, the heart and the science, fitting into the same vibrant picture.

That’s what this piece is about, it’s an ASCII art about a Solarpunk community, with domes, trees, and turbines. A reminder of where we could be going.

This piece comes in black, white, dark green, and apricot.

Get 'The Future'

Support Us!

By buying a T-shirt, you are directly supporting Agartha and our mission to build a Solarpunk cultural movement.

We hope our designs bring you a sense of meaning, reflecting the values you hold dear. We hope it connects you with others who are walking a similar path. We hope you rock it in style!

Find it at merch.agartha.one

Coming Up Next…

• June 2026 — We’re running our 4th residency Touch Grass at Edge Esmeralda 🌊 — come find us, come wear the shirt, come say hi.

• More pieces dropping as the summer goes, stay tuned!

If any of this resonated — share it with someone who’d get it!

Sending you love… 💕

P.S. We hosted a very ‘Touch Grassy’ house party last weekend at the Chalk Hill Residency, it was a blast!

✨ Thanks for reading! Agartha is a creative studio on a mission to create a Solarpunk cultural movement. 💕 Join us as we chronicle our journey exploring Solarpunk lifestyles around ethical technology, planetary regeneration, loving community, and spiritual growth. ☀️

If this work feels meaningful for you, please become our paid patron to support our efforts! We really appreciate it :)

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We are getting ready to Touch Grass at Edge Esmeralda this weekend. A fitting setting for this article as we bring frontier tech, nature, inner-exploration, and loving community together!

Please enjoy this post’s soundtrack as we explore one of the most common questions we get here at Agartha…

What Is Solarpunk?

When you imagine the future, what do you see? Is it the dark, nihilistic imagery that we’re constantly fed in the news, stories, and Hollywood films?

It is a vision, ethos, aesthetic, and social movement that poses a radical question: What if the future is actually beautiful?

Solarpunk insists that a better world is possible, and that building toward it is more useful than despair. It doesn’t dismiss the problems, it just refuses to stop there.

The Etymology

Let’s start with the word itself, because it does a lot of work.

Solar: Renewable energy, regenerative practices, circular system design. Brightness. Abundance. The idea that the sun gives freely, and so can we.

Punk: Rebellion, counter-culture, self-sovereignty. Activism through art and expression rather than violence. The refusal to accept that the current system is the only possible way to live.

Put them together and you get something unusual in the landscape of political and cultural movements: an optimistic rebellion. A punk movement that isn’t angry at the world so much as fiercely, stubbornly in love with what it could become.

A Brief History

Solarpunk emerged in the early 2010s… born, fittingly, on the internet, in the corners of Tumblr and speculative fiction communities where people were fed up with grimdark futures and wanted something to reach toward instead.

The term itself is often traced back to a 2008 blog post and a 2012 Anthology, but the ideas itself are ancient. Solarpunk speaks of indigenous land stewardship, utopian socialist communities of the 19th century, Afrofuturism, permaculture revolution, the appropriate technology movement of the 1970s. All of these are tributaries feeding into the same river.

What Solarpunk did was give these ideas a name, a visual language, and a cultural home.

Since then it has grown into a global movement, showing up in literature, architecture, urban planning, fashion, music, and (yes) in co-living residencies run by people who are trying to prototype the future rather than just write about it. 👀

The Aesthetic

You know it when you see it.

Solarpunk looks like:

• Bright, saturated color palettes.

• Vines climbing solar-paneled buildings.

• Communal gardens on rooftops.

• People of every background sharing space, food, and laughter under open skies.

• Biopunk meets arts-and-crafts meets West African textile patterns meets Japanese forest bathing meets a dope-ass farmers market.

It evokes purity, abundance, harmony, and peace. An uplifting, energizing sensation in the body. Not the sterile serenity of a corporate campus or the forced optimism of an ad1, but the warm peace of a place that was designed for human flourishing and actually succeeded.

The aesthetic matters because Solarpunk understands something that a lot of political movements miss: people don’t join movements through arguments. They join through feelings. You have to make the future feel irresistible before you can make it feel possible.

Agartha’s Flavor of Solarpunk

At its core, Solarpunk is the integration of things our current world treats as separate, or even contradictory. But there’s no single authoritative definition for it. No scripture or prophet to tell us what’s right or wrong. No unbreakable protocol or certifications to pay for. Just different flavors, and that’s a good thing!

At Agartha, we think about Solarpunk through these four lenses:

ETHOS: AI alignment, open-source tools, decentralization, privacy-preserving systems, modular hardware, safe robotics, data sovereignty. Anti-extractive, Anti-corruption. Technology that is elegant, visible, and integrated into living systems rather than imposed on top of them. Technology as a force for liberation and shared prosperity.

EXAMPLES: Accelerators, popup cities, builder residencies. Green buildings, vertical gardens, rainwater harvesting. Places where high-agency people gather to build tools and systems that serve humanity rather than extract from it. Any gathering where someone is trying to solve a real problem with a laptop and bucket full of conviction.

ETHOS: Permaculture, soil making, renewable energy, circular economies, closed-loop systems, conscious consuming, ecosystem restoration. The premise that human thriving and ecological thriving are not in opposition; they require each other.

EXAMPLES: Regenerative villages, permaculture farms, land projects. Places doing the patient, unglamorous, essential work of healing soil, growing food, and demonstrating that humans can live in genuine partnership with the land.

ETHOS: Co-living, connection, warmth, love, acceptance, relational healing, collaboration, mutual aid, co-creation, artistic expression. The belief that governance works best when it is closest to the people it governs. The belief that how we treat ourselves and each other is how we shape for the world.

EXAMPLES: Co-living homes, intentional communities, chosen families, artist residencies, maker spaces, cultural hubs. Places designed specifically to heal and deepen our capacity for human connection. Places where art, music, storytelling, and design are treated as essential infrastructure.

ETHOS: Mindfulness, Western and Eastern philosophies, science, indigenous wisdom, psychedelic explorations, the full frontier of human consciousness. The freedom to explore the deeper meaning of the universe unconstrained by fear-based dogma.

EXAMPLES: Monasteries, meditation retreats, consciousness communities. Places oriented around inner work, contemplative practice, and the question of what it means to be a human being right now. Ancient wisdom traditions meet modern seekers.

At Agartha, we strive for balanced integration of these dimensions, grounded in pragmatism and practicality.

We’ve witnessed the outcomes of the extremes:

• Some tech communities forget the garden.

• Some spiritual communities forget the infrastructure.

• Some environmental communities forget to have fun.

• Some loving communities forget to hit pause on the partying.

The failure modes are plentiful and so are the lessons learned.

We fundamentally believe that balance and harmony among these four pillars creates a resonance that can self-sustain, generate innovation, expand possibility, and change the world.

Solarpunk Communities in the Wild

The most exciting Solarpunk spaces blend multiple flavors. When you have builders and artists and farmers and meditators all sharing a kitchen? That’s when things get really interesting.

Here’s a sampling of Solarpunk communities that we’ve researched, visited, and/or partnered with. You can see our entire curated database on our website Agartha.One.

Edge City (Global) — A popup city where hundreds of builders, thinkers, and creators gather to prototype the future together. Solarpunk with a startup energy.

Traditional Dream Factory (Portugal) — A regenerative co-living community experimenting with tokenized governance, permaculture, and a genuinely beautiful way of life. One of our favorites.

The Garden (Portugal) - A hidden gem in a lush sub-tropical forest. Hosting residencies retreats and festivals for values-driven builders.

Project Kamp (Portugal) — A beautifully documented experiment in off-grid sustainable living with a strong open-source ethos.

4Seas (Thailand) - A cypherpunk cultural hub in Chiang Mai with 2 locations in central city (co-working + library) and Mountain View (nature retreat).

Amagi (Thailand) — A growing intentional community in Southeast Asia blending entrepreneurship, real estate business models, wellness, and regenerative living.

El Pantano (Argentina) — A land-based community doing quiet, deep work in regenerative agriculture and community living.

So… Is This For You?

Solarpunk isn’t for everyone. It asks for a lot. It asks you to let go of unsustainable creature comforts. It asks you to believe that things can be better, to embrace courage over cynicism. It asks you to live your values rather than just post about them. It asks you to share space, meals, and the harder parts of yourself.

But if you’ve read this far, perhaps you’ve already felt something.

Maybe a quiet recognition. A hint of relief, a loosening in the shoulders. Maybe a memory of a place or a moment that felt like this: abundant, warm, alive. Or perhaps just a stubborn refusal to accept that dystopia is inevitable.

That feeling? That’s the beginning of your Solarpunk journey. Welcome home. 💙🌱☀️🤖

Drop us a comment or come chat with us on Telegram, we’d love to know.

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Telegram Chat

We have an exciting update on our Touch Grass residency at Edge Esmeralda 2026: Artizen is coming on as our partner to co-create a hub for unique activities throughout this popup village (May 30 - June 27).

The Agartha & Artizen House is just 10 minutes from Healdsburg Plaza and serves as our home base during Edge Esmeralda, a month-long gathering with hundreds of curious and creative people working at the frontiers of tech, culture, science, and community.

We will host activities centered around presence, connection, alignment, restoration, creativity, and growth.

The country house gives us a space in nature for weekly intention-setting sessions, shared meals in small groups, ikigai exploration, and moments to slow down. Many of these activities will be open to the entire Edge City community, some events (like small group dinners) are exclusive to Touch Grass residents.

Apply here to Touch Grass →

Why are we collaborating with Artizen?

Artizen is a community-curated funding platform that backs creators and projects pushing the boundaries of art, science, and culture. Every dollar their community spends on a project unlocks matching funds for the creator. It’s one of the more interesting models we’ve seen for getting resources to the right people.

We’re currently participating in a round ourselves: you can contribute here →

Both our communities care deeply about the people building toward a better world, and both of us believe that real connection and value-aligned funding are two of the most powerful things you can offer a creator. Collaborating at Edge Esmeralda felt obvious once we started talking.

What this means for Touch Grass

Artizen is co-creating the month with us and bringing their community into the experience. And with their support, we now have a beautiful hub for our activities. We’re really happy about this 💚

If you’re coming to Edge Esmeralda 2026 and want to be part of the resident-only activities of Touch Grass, you can apply here. We have a 20% discount code on the Edge City ticket for those who participate in our residency. Only a few spots are still available.

Apply to join Touch Grass →

See you soon!

🫳
🌱

PS: If you are considering to join our residency at Edge Esmeralda 2026, you can read this blog for more context and info →

✨ Thanks for reading! Agartha is a creative studio on a mission to build a global network of solarpunk communities 💕

This song Intro by The XX got stuck in my head as I close down this last chapter and move onto the next one. This album is also a timeless gem. 💎

I took a second to reflect as I left Fools’ Valley, having spent 2 months there, I was sharing a life together with this piece of land. So many stories happened, the beautiful, the mysterious, the challenging, the bittersweet…

House of Games was our third month-long co-living residency. Hosted at Fool’s Valley — a co-living project surrounded by rolling hills and wind turbines, 30 minutes drive from Lisbon 🇵🇹 — we brought together 25+ people working within a diverse range of passions: frontier technology, AI, art and culture, storytelling, quest making, land stewardship, human connection, consciousness and spirituality, experiential design… and what we all had in common was our desire to master the art of being humans.

Here is my honest reflections on running this residency, what we built, what worked, what broke, and what we’re taking forward:

Weekly Rhythms

There was a routine and rhythm to the week:

• Monday Goal Setting — a chance to name what each person was carrying into the week before the work began:

  • WHAT DID I ACCOMPLISH LAST WEEK?

  • GOALS FOR THIS WEEK

  • WHAT’S BLOCKING ME?

  • HOW CAN THE HOUSE HELP?

• Wednesday Lightning Talks — short, sharp presentations from residents on whatever they were building, obsessed with, or questioning. You can watch a selection here.

• Game Nights! — To honor the concept of House of Games, there were a lot of games, table tops, LAN parties, the gamers had A LOT of fun!!

• Cleaning & Cooking — Yes, this was not a hotel, we did not have servers. There was the Fools’ Valley team, but we worked together on everything, cook, clean, lighting up the wood sauna, etc…

Beyond the weekly rhythm, we made space for deep work, exercises, group discussions. Any time anyone had an idea, they posted onto our shared calendar.

Special Events

• Townhall — a place where we discuss how to improve the experience of living together, designed to be a fun yet functional form of governance, an essential practice for most communities.

• Fieldtrips — we organized visits to 3 different land-based projects, Traditional Dream Factory, Colmeia62 and The Garden.

• Love Shower — where one person sits in the center while the group showers them with love, sharing honestly on why they appreciate them and what’s special about them.

• How We Can Do Better — a place for people to share honest takes on each other to help us improve.

• Quest Making and Fateweaving — activities hosted by Zizi and Dani, turning self inquiry and personal growth into a LARP game throughout the whole month.

• Special Weekend Events — every weekend something happened, we took trips to Lisbon for city strolling, we went to Ericeira to check out the beach, we had a dance party, hosted a house Olympics for the sake of having fun…

By the end of the month, we had become something more than colleagues, more than friends, yet not quite family.

My Questions for the Month-long Container

To be honest, I left the month feeling quite exhausted… Not just physically, not even just mentally, but holistically, ‘spiritually’ exhausted. This feeling had me very puzzled.

WHY? Building this was supposed to be my DREAM — I got to ‘prototype’ a mini community to pave the road for a future Solarpunk Campus, why am I not leaving the experience feeling rejuvenated? Maybe it’s the nature between dream and reality, or maybe there is something else going on… I went down into some personal soul searching, here is my hypothesis:

1. Productizing Community Feels Strange

When a friend organizes a camping trip, they don’t charge admission. When you invite people over for a dinner party, they don’t charge you a ticket. Community building is one of the oldest human offerings, we do it out of love — every tribe thrives because someone rallies people together, holds the container, makes people feel seen and loved.

In modern society we forgot that, so it becomes a demand in the capitalist market, therefore supply follows.

The IRL connection economy is a $400B+ market. — @jonaswillett1

I believe it is the world we’re stepping into, we need more and more irl gatherings, personal connections. It does justify residencies & events as a viable business model.

But still it doesn’t change the fact that charging for what used to be a gift just feels weird. I felt like I gave myself a lot of pressure of needing to make everyone super happy, and it’s absolutely impossible. Maybe the overthinking makes it worse… Anyways, you learn by doing 🙂‍↔️.

Reflecting further, it feels like our current economic system doesn’t highly value the work of community builders, which can lead to burn-out because it is hard work with limited compensation.

How can community builders actually be paid appropriately for the value they create? Could this come through different methods outside of ticket sales and sponsorships? What are novel models we can experiment with?

If you have any ideas, leave a comment or reach out in our telegram!

Leave a comment

2. The Invisible Tasks of Living Together

I personally believe that if we can solve family drama, we can solve world peace. If we can’t run a functional kitchen, we definitely can’t run a functional country.

Team dynamics determine the longevity of a band, a startup, a pirate crew. The same is true for a co-living house.

When you live together intentionally, things come up, sometimes deep trauma-infused character flaws come up. We all have them, nobody’s perfect. But in a close-knit group, personal emotions become group weather. Habits clash. Conflict arises. Old wounds surface at a random dinner conversation.

The hard work is the work of building new forms of kinship — choosing each other without the scaffolding of blood obligation — and a lot of that work is unseen. Tens (eventually hundreds) of people living harmoniously is not just a casual lifestyle choice, it’s one of the hardest design problems.

3. The Place I Want Doesn’t Exist Yet

Utopia doesn’t exist because we’re here to build it.

We had a vision for a very specific type of residency and community — and this wasn’t fully that vision, maybe not yet. We’re learning in public, building in real time, and living with the gap between what we imagined and what we made. And this experience does sharpen the question: what would it look like to do this right?

I don’t quite have the best answers to that yet, but here are the 2 things I’d like to try next:

• Longer Residencies, Fewer People — I actually don’t want to live with 30 people in such close proximity for such a long time. I think my ideal home sharing size is 6-8 in a house sharing a kitchen with core homies, and maybe there are others in different houses that we can visit nearby —- a village or a CAMPUS would be ideal 💕

• Shorter & More Intense — Yes, I’d like to explore the idea of an Agartha festival for 1-3 days, or a retreat for 1-2 weeks: where we gather, deeply connect, live & breathe Solarpunk as we go! Maybe it’s a meditation retreat, a sailing trip, or 5 days of trekking thru the Himalayas… Anyways, STAY TUNED! 📻

Concentric Friendship Circles

Here’s my visual framing of a ‘friendship circle’. Basically:

• Core Homies — people you can REALLY live together for a long time, without needing extra emotional labor to ‘do the work’, they are your intimate partners, close roommates, families, people you are just super comfortable with, being with them is like wearing a pajama, you don’t have to ‘fit’ in anywhere, you can just relax, and decompress, and that’s home.

• Friends — people you love and adore but maybe on smaller doses. Many friendship gets uncomfortable when you live too closely. Sometimes distance creates the beauty. Maybe you’d LOVE a weekend trip together, or go see a show together, but you don’t HAVE to be roommates.

• Not Yet Friends — these are people in the ether that you might end up getting along REALLY WELL with. But for some reason, you aren’t that close. Maybe you hang out in different circles, maybe you are yet to realize that you smell similar, anyways, open events like festivals, retreats, pop-up cities are a great way to find out who they are.

• Probably Never Friends — there are people that maybe you would just never get along with. My Utopian dream is that never exists and our WHOLE WORLD gets along like a big family (yes because we are ONE!)… But in reality, as of now in 2026, this absolutely exists. And it’s worth to know internally for you who they are, and carve your precious time to not be around them, definitely don’t get married with them!

What Worked Well at Our Residencies

After running 3 residencies, here’s what I know that would make all the differences. ✨

• The right people — this is the most important part, everything else is downstream of this. Concentric circles work: start from trust, let trust expand outward.

• The right environment — a Solarpunk environment: good weather, lots of greens, sustainable energy, compost nearby, ideally a farm nearby if possible, the kind of places designed to be good for our health and the planet.

• Foundations first — love, care, making people feel seen before anything else starts. A dedicated intro ritual. What we all want in the end is to be seen and to be loved. The sooner we can make people feel that way, the better it is.

• Shared responsibility — rotating kitchen shifts, communal tasks, automatic accountability. When everyone owns the space, everyone protects it.

• A container for the hard stuff — scheduled space to name what isn’t working.

• Intentional programming — not too packed, not too empty. A good rhythm that holds the group together without smothering it.

• Escape valves — weekend trips, change of scenery. Community needs movement to stay alive.

Community Credit

None of this happens without the people who show up and do the invisible work alongside you.

Big shoutout to our absolute MVP of the month AND our new Agartha teammate Menno for being so sweet, kind, thoughtful, attentive and so extremely helpful and reliable at the residency.

Thank you to every resident of House of Games who trusted the container, contributed their unique magic, asked the hard questions, and made the month what it was. You know who you are! 💕

Another big shout out to the Fool’s Valley team — our host. For our audience out there, if you’re looking for a place to decompress and deep focus near Lisbon, it’s worth knowing about.

What’s Next… ☀️

Our next venture will be in Touch Grass June 2026 at Edge Esmeralda in collaboration with Artizen — come find us and we’ll touch some grass together!

If you’re building something like this — a residency, a co-living project, a gathering — we want to hear from you. Join our community on Telegram and come find your people.

Until then, sending you love… 💕

✨ Thanks for reading! Agartha is a Solarpunk studio on a mission to meme Solarpunk into a reality. 💕 Join us as we chronicle our journey through residencies, co-living places, pop-up cities, regenerative villages, and Solarpunk lifestyles. ☀️

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Update: We are teaming up with Artizen! 🌻

We’re happy to share that Artizen is collaborating with us at Edge Esmeralda 2026. They back creators at the frontier of art, science, and culture through a community-curated funding model.

We have a beautiful hub for our residency activities: the Agartha & Artizen House, just 10 minutes from Healdsburg Plaza. This cozy country house is where we will share meals, discuss big ideas, and touch grass together 💚

Apply to join Touch Grass →

From May 30 to June 27, 2026, Agartha is bringing a month-long immersive program Touch Grass to Edge Esmeralda in Healdsburg, California.

Edge Esmeralda is a the popup village where hundreds of curious and brilliant people gather to live and work together toward the frontiers of tech, governance, science, and community.

Touch Grass is designed to be a quiet parallel inside it. A month of playing with fire, food, rhythm, community, and the art of being alive.

Fill out the application form →

Hello!

I’m writing from the beautiful Fools Valley in Lisbon, at the last week of our month-long residency House of Games 🌿.

We’re having a great time here, lots of laughter, joy, deep work & deeper play. Nourishing food and fresh air. The community feels filled with love. And we can’t wait to come say hi at Edge Esmeralda!

The Magic of Presence ✨

We took a field trip to the Harmonia Festival at Traditional Dream Factory at the second weekend of our residency.

I decided to leave my phone for the whole day and went completely offline. Touched grass and walked bare feet on the land.

I set the intention to only go where the flow takes me. I ran when my body wanted to run. I stopped to have a conversation when an interesting situation presented itself. I sat down for a long conversation with someone I’d just met and forgot the time. I napped on a hill in the afternoon and woke up to a bunch of people standing in a circle practicing freestyling.

The whole day, I followed the small voice, a very fainty voice from my gut — go here, do this, run, rest, sing, dance, stay here, leave now — and whatever I ended up doing, is the right thing to do.

What if life could be more like this?

Not in a precious, irresponsible way. Not as a vacation from real life. As a quiet daily practice of converging pressure into presence. Trusting the body, touching some grass.

Ground, Presence, Warmth, and many HUGS! 🥰

Artist Shai Peri ⬆️ played at the closing ceremony of Harmonia. The tunes were so soft and gentle and it floated me away as a river, a great way to end the whole experience.

The Thesis of ‘Touch Grass’

We are stepping into an era where intelligence is cheap, data is prevalent, and information is overloading.

What’s scarce now is the capacity to be alive in a body — to create, feel, gather, connect, and make meaning. AI is here to help us build the future. It leaves spaces for humans to be grounded to ask important questions.

Wisdom is no longer about what you know. It’s about how you live.

So while we live in the inevitable rat race of a competitive world, while everyone is sprinting toward the next edge, we want to offer something different.

Why Join?

Slowing down at Edge Esmeralda is, on its face, a contradiction.

You are walking into a village engineered for sprint culture. You’re surrounded by hundreds of people racing toward the future, and your phone is constantly buzzing with activity, memes, ideas, and DMs.

Without intentional design around your day and how you manage your energy, it could be quite overstimulating for your nervous system.

We’ve been to enough big gatherings to know how it goes — you arrive full of intention, and three days in you’re already optimizing for who to meet next. You leave inspired yet easily overwhelmed. You meet two hundred people but might have not deeply connected with most of them, lonely on the deeper levels even as the room glitters.

That is what Touch Grass is designed for.

What does it mean to be part of Touch Grass?

We’ll intentionally curate a group of people of 20-30 friends in a private groupchat as the main coordination method.

Being a part of Touch Grass means that:

1. We’ll nudge each other to slow down, listen to the birds, and touch some grass.

2. You’ll get a cozy little home group to help you navigate the main event, a village within a village.

3. You’ll be invited to co-create something magical with a special group of high-agency, value aligned builders & thought leaders.

4. You’ll have access to private dinners with limited spots. You’ll be nourished with delicious home cooking, meaningful conversations, and nervous system relaxing ambient music.

By joining Touch Grass, you are committed to:

• Being kind, curious, and compassionate about the world around you. Creating a home away from home.

• Having a “yes, and” mentality. You bring what you have. You meet what others bring. You build on it together.

• Embodying softness & presence. The willingness to put your phone away when having a deep conversation with someone.

• Co-Creation: Being open to make things better with us. This is a core thesis of Edge Esmeralda, and we’re here to embrace it together.

• Exploring Solarpunk values: making our world more sustainable, more connected, embracing frontier technology and ancient wisdom.

• Living a Solarpunk lifestyle: let’s buy from local farms, let’s compost, up-cycle, and reduce, let’s cook and clean together, and take care of each other like a family.

The Programming

Touch Grass runs in two layers: a tighter inner rhythm for the residency crew, and a wider calendar of public workshops open to all of Edge.

Inside the residency

• Weekly group gatherings — intention-setting and reflection. The texture of a closer-knit village inside the bigger one.

• Connection games — small, surprising, effective. The fastest way past the freshman feeling.

• Home dinners — 8 to 15 people. Home-cooked, nutritionally balanced healthy meals.

Public workshops

These are the events we as a group will offer to the Edge Esmeralda community:

Meaning & Direction

• Ikigai Mapping with — A walk-through of the framework for finding the work you’re meant to do.

• Philosophy Walks with Maria — Walk and talk philosophy in nature. Example topics: “How to be a human in 2050?”

Body & Rhythm

• How to DJ with Nico — From technical transition to the art of reading the room with music.

• Fire spinning with Emily Lam — learn to play with some basic flow art, dance with physics, and connect with the elements.

• Somatic bodywork with Camille — a form of partner yoga, designed for healing and connection.

Community & Connections

• Buying Land for Solarpunk Communities with Chris Morello — workshop and open discussion for anyone seriously thinking about co-buying land together.

• Composting 101 with Josh W, founder of MakeSoil — the most useful hour of dirt education you’ll get this decade.

More to come…

Apply Here

We offer a 20% discount code on the Edge Esmeralda 2026 ticket to all our attendees.

If you’re interested in joining Touch Grass, apply HERE!

Apply here to join Touch Grass →

✨ Thanks for reading! Agartha is a creative studio on a mission to build a global network of solarpunk communities.💕

Join us as we chronicle our journey through residencies, co-living places, pop-up cities, regenerative villages, and solarpunk lifestyles. ☀️

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Our House of Games residency is currently underway at Fools’ Valley in Portugal. We’ve gathered 26 residents from 15 countries (plus some friendly locals) for a program designed for deep work, communal care, personal growth, and illuminating workshops. Our ultimate goal is building and shipping something beautiful into the world.

Check out some of the ways our residents are working, collaborating, and building together…

To kick off the residency, we held a meaningful opening ceremony to set the objectives and tone for the month. The following is a speech that I shared with the crew, I hope it resonates!

The Positive Power of Games 🎲

I’ve been a gamer all my life, starting with the original ColecoVision, Commodore 64, and Nintendo Entertainment System back in the 80’s. I grew up on PCs and consoles before the internet connected everything. But it wasn’t just digital gaming: I was playing board games, chess, and volleyball every chance I could get. As an adult, I spent a decade working at Blizzard, one of the biggest and nerdiest video game companies in the world. I even designed a gamified chore points system for my own children. Games have been a woven through almost every element of my whole life.

My lifelong experience has instilled in me a frame of reference that I’d like to share with you, and hopefully inspire something beautiful for our residency: the positive power of games.

Games are not just entertainment. They are an ancient social technology… one of the first ways humans learned to collaborate, compete, and create meaning together. Think about it: every culture, from ancient civilizations to modern societies, has games. Why? Because play is how we practice being human and navigate the world.

Games Create Connection

When we play, we drop our masks (or put new ones on). We laugh, we strategize, we fail spectacularly… and in that vulnerability, we see each other. A game of cards, a shared quest in a virtual world, or even a silly icebreaker like we’ll do today - these moments build trust faster than any meeting or presentation. They remind us that we’re all players in the same story.

Games Can Be Education

Games teach us without us realizing it. Ever learned to type from a video game? Sharpened your bargaining in Monopoly or Catan? Played with architecture and structural design in Minecraft? Learned a language on Duolingo? Understood economic theory by trading on the World of Warcraft auction house? Learned cooperation or betrayal through Hide and Seek? How about honed your hand-eye coordination in shooters like Doom or Call of Duty? Or your strategic resource management in Age of Empires or Starcraft?

Games are simulators for life. They let us rapidly experiment, fail, and grow in low-stakes environments. And when we bring that mindset to the real world… whether it’s designing a community, building a startup, or solving a global challenge - we’re better equipped to turn complexity into play.

By Gamifying Life We Transform Stress into Meaning

Here’s a radical idea: What if life isn’t something to “get through,” but a game to play? When we approach challenges - whether it’s climate action, building a business, or even parenting - with a gamer’s mindset, stress becomes curiosity. Obstacles become puzzles. And “work” becomes co-creation.

The Biology of Play

Science is revealing how play unlocks our brains. When we’re in a state of flow - whether coding, painting, or playing Dungeons & Dragons - our prefrontal cortex (the executive function and decision making part of the brain) lights up. We become more creative, more resilient, more open to possibility. In a world that often feels rigid and divided, play is how we reclaim our imagination and creativity.

Society as the Ultimate Game

Here’s the secret: Society is already a game. The rules just aren’t always transparent or fair. But when we recognize that; when we see the systems, the incentives, the hidden scoreboards… we realize we can redesign them.

This isn’t about escaping reality. It’s about designing reality to be more engaging, fair, and fun. Imagine:

• A community where composting feels like leveling up.

• A workplace where collaboration unlocks achievement badges and epic meaning (not just paychecks).

• A society where contributing to the commons isn’t a thankless task, it earns you reputation.

This is gamification with purpose - aligning incentives so that what’s good for the player is good for the planet.

That’s what we’re doing here. We’re not just building projects or companies, or getting trapped in dopamine loops. We’re prototyping new ways to play the game of life - ones that reward cooperation, regeneration, and joy.

So as we kick off this residency, I invite you to explore these questions:

• How do we unlock our greatest potential through play?

• How do we deepen connection through games?

• How can we learn through experimentation?

• How can we design systems, experiences, and solutions that make the real world as engaging as our favorite games?

Thank you everyone for being here at House of Games, let’s play!

✨ Thanks for reading! Agartha is a creative studio on a mission to build a global network of solarpunk communities.💕 Join us as we chronicle our journey through residencies, co-living places, pop-up cities, regenerative villages, and solarpunk lifestyles. ☀️

We’ve got a dope 80’s nostalgia vibe for this post, enjoy!

One mantra we keep at Agartha is “The World is Our Home’”. What does that mean to us?

• This planet is ours to share: one sacred, messy, living experiment.

• No one is a stranger here: Every face, every story, every scar is part of the same sprawling family.

• We’re heirs and caretakers to a living miracle: Sharing collective responsibility to keep mother earth safe, clean, and healthy.

• Home isn’t a place you find: It’s a place you make… anywhere in the world.

  

Solarpunk Fever Dreams

For years, I’ve dreamed of creating my own Solarpunk Campus- a sanctuary where nature, tech, community, and consciousness converge in harmony. It was following this very dream that led me to Nico. Now we’re co-dreaming Agartha’s Campus - a permanent HQ for our team, our communities, and our closest friends.

A 1st, 2nd, and 3rd space with:

• 🌿 Access to Nature - Ability to compost & grow our own food

• 🏙️ Major City within 30 min - Access to infrastructure, airports, restaurants, culture

• 🛌 Lodging near or inside the HQ - People can live within walking distance during stays, fostering depth of community.

• ☀️ Wonderful Climate - Mild, sunny, comfortable. Climate affects output, creativity, and health. This is weighted accordingly.

• 🥗 Ease of living - Easy to get around (public transit access is a huge +)

• ✨ Aesthetic richness - Beauty is inspiring, energizing, and healing and our physical space will embody it.

Building a village is one thing, but building a living laboratory for human evolution is another. We aren’t building a space for people to escape the world, we’re setting up fertile foundation to rally the people that want to redesign the world. We want our campus to emanate progress, creativity, and innovation.

I thought I was alone in this vision. Then I stepped into Edge Esmeralda and found hundreds of others who’d been building for decades. Pop-up cities. Regenerative villages. Urban third spaces. Co-ops. DAOs. Retreats. Sanctuaries.

For all the hundreds of builders all over the world, there are thousands upon thousands more who are looking to learn about, visit, and live in such places.

It turns out that the dream isn’t rare, but the unique flavors are infinitely diverse. Despite that variety, we’re all converging on a similar story: How do we live differently? Better? Together?

The First Step: Figuring out what you need

At our last residency, ‘Island Time’ we ran a collaborative workshop titled Solarpunk Campus Scouting Requirements. Our intention was to map out our requirements and build an assessment matrix to help us with our land project selection. But we got much more out of it…

Seven of us sitting in a room, a virtual whiteboard, and a question: What does the land need to feel like home?

The end result: A free, open-source template for anyone scouting their own paradise. We’re calling it the Community Scouting Requirements Matrix.

Within the doc we have:

• Instructions on how to use the tool

• A list of various categories and requirements you’ll want to consider when looking for your new community home

• A basic scoring & color coding system to easily visualize the results

Try Our Template

Experimenting with sustainability and permaculture? Project Kamp will probably show you lots of ‘green’.

A community ready to grow crops together while pushing the frontiers of tokenized governance? Perhaps Traditional Dream Factory would score all 4’s & 5’s in those categories.

Please feel free to use this tool and share it with anyone who might need it. If you’d like to collaborate with us to make it better, please leave a comment below!

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Choosing where to live or where to build is a big decision with massive implications on the quality of your life, family, and community. We hope that this tool helps you find clarity and ease your journey in some small way.

Learning with community

The workshop was full of little surprises… I organized it imagining we would better flesh out our own expectations of Agartha’s Solarpunk campus. However, we came out of it realizing that people have many different perspectives, needs, and values around ‘home’. We ended up with a more objective and comprehensive method of evaluating any land project / community. Here are some insights we gleaned from the process:

• Culture, values, leadership, and governance had the most focus, inquiry, and discussion - indicating an emphasis on social resonance as an even higher priority than the land and infrastructure itself.

• Our unique flavor of community living may not be for everyone, and that’s totally OK.

• We are not an authority to dictate what’s right or wrong. Rather, our responsibility is to chronicle what we can objectively observe, and share our own human perspective.

• Our aim at Agartha is to help illuminate what it feels like to put your feet on the soil and meet the actual people living on the land.

• If we do our job well, we’re giving you information that helps you find the right home for you. And what’s right for you might be totally different for someone else.

Special thanks to our crew from Island Time that helped make this template come to life: Deca, Jess, Stephen, Sofia, Christopher, Carmen, & Gillian!

It may be a long journey, but here are some tips

• Know your values - culture isn’t a perk. It’s the soil everything grows from.

• Build your team / community - it always starts and ends with people.

• Don’t rush - finding a place to live is a BIG commitment.

• Start small - research, visit, experiment, prototype.

• Don’t force it - just because a few elements work doesn’t mean it’ll be a perfect fit.

• Don’t get discouraged - part of this process is to help you understand what you don’t want, in order to clearly know what you do want. Just because it’s not a good fit doesn’t mean you’re not on the right path.

Our wish for you

Mother earth is humanity’s home. We believe that there’s a home for everyone here.

We want to hand you:

• The tools to find what’s meant for you.

• The stories to find comfort with others who’ve done it before.

• The guts to say, “Not for me” or “Let’s break ground.”

Your tribe is out there… and if it doesn’t exist yet? Let’s build it!

For those wanting to get even more educated, involved, and connected…

Check out the amazing research and educational work that is doing with Terrenity.

Cool Solarpunk land projects worth checking out!

Fools’ Valley (Portugal)

Amagi (Thailand)

Traditional Dream Factory (Portugal)

El Pantano (Argentina)

Hi All, I’m writing from Fools Valley, near Lisbon 🇵🇹, where we’re getting ready to host our upcoming residency! Why are we already here? Last week Logos held their Parallel Society event in Lisbon, which was truly remarkable. We feel highly aligned to the work that they are doing in answering the Metacrisis (read our previous article for context).

What is Logos?

Logos sits at the intersection of Frontier Tech and Activism. 180 world class engineers pushing the boundaries of privacy technology, distributed systems, cryptography, large-scale consensus - all insanely hard problems.

And surrounding them, a vibrant punk counterculture of high-agency, heart-centered people.

The Logos Narrative

Institutions are failing us - “corruption, surveillance, and stagnation often associated with incumbent institutions”.

Revitalize Civil Society - “Our mission is to restore agency, trust, and civic power by giving people tools to explore and innovate using decentralised technology.”

One might ask - Why decentralized tech? What does decentralized even mean? Isn’t it just a fancy buzzword used by scammers and fraudsters?

Jarrad Hope (Logos CEO) addresses this in Farewell to Westphalia. It provides the best comprehensive explanation to Why Blockchain - why do we need it, what it enables, how is it misunderstood, what can we learn from history about the metacrisis, about the solutions that have been attempted, and their many failure modes.

How else are Logos exporting values? Through the Logos Circles. These are like meetups, but focused on specific winnable issues:

1. Select an issue

2. Narrow it down

3. Take action

4. Validate the impact

e.g. The Rome Circle (broadly identified as Urbe) wants to (1) demystify Blockchain for local builders. This was narrowed down to (2) organizing Web3 workshops, bootcamps, hackathons. (3) So we took action and onboarded countless builders into Web3. (4) Today, several hundred students have participated in Urbe bootcamps, we have hosted 3 consecutive years of ETHRome hackathon (birthing success stories like Fluidkey) and we manage one of the first Ethereum Community Hubs.

Circle happening during Parallel Society Day 1 (6th Mar 2026)

There is a third way in which Logos is exporting values:

Parallel Society Day 1 - [Un]conference. Liberty. Code. Hacktivism.

Opening Address by Jarrad Hope (video out soon)

Glitch Armour by Miglė - what tools to use to stay safe online

Agartha’s SolarpunkOS Workshop

Some cool projects we connected with:

• Monty of ReFi DAO, Regenerative Finance network

• Sit With, decentralized therapy tool

• David of Modular Commons, NY-based community architecture

• Solarpunk NOW, Solarpunk movement in Berlin

• Hakeem of Above Phone, Pixel 10s with GrapheneOS out of the box

Parallel Society Day 2 - Celebrating culture and freedom.

The music festival had some insanely talented local artists, like SoundPreta and Chima Isaaro,

as well as internationally recognized heavy-hitters like Apparat, Clark, and Gilles Peterson, who closed with a Fela Kuti adaptation! (Nigerian musician, activist, father of of Afrobeat)

How to be Part of the Movement

The EcoDev (Ecosystem Development) team’s primary 2026 focus is to:

1. Grow the network of Circles to 60+ cities globally:

   1. Join your local Circle here.

   2. No Circle in your local city? Start a new Circle, or join the next Online Circle.

2. Grow the network of Logos blockchain nodes to 200+ clients globally:

   1. Run a node today here.

   2. Need some guidance? Join the node program for direct support.

3. Grow the ecosystem of builders to 60+ projects:

   1. Go to the builder hub to help build the open-source infrastructure stack, or build an application on top of it, like Status or Railgun.

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For the month of February in Puerto Rico, we ran a ‘traveling neighborhood’ in collaboration with from Supernuclear - a movement dedicated to spreading the joy of living with friends. Casa Chironja, a vibrant co-living community, served as our home base. 60+ Friends and collaborators gathered to host workshops, share knowledge, cook family dinners, and organize excursions together.

We called this fun little experiment…

Kicking off with the Vision Weekend

The event began with a gathering of brilliant minds and change-makers at the Foresight Institute Vision Weekend Conference. There were talks, networking events, and pitch competitions around longevity, AI, bio-tech, cypherpunk, space innovation, and other areas of frontier science & tech. Nico represented Agartha with a talk on our ecosystem project SolarpunkOS, check it out!

Co-living Adventures

Each week of Island Time had a central theme, and our residents organically organized relevant activities:

The ‘big house’ at Casa Chironja was always popping: scrambled eggs with music jams, lightning talks, morning yoga, and collaborative workshops. There was flow in the space - a living, breathing container of laughter, hugs, idea exchanges, and deep work.

The community also came together to clean and beautify Casa Chironja

The house was also our launch pad for Solarpunk excursions:

Perhaps the most heart-warming part of being in Puerto Rico was experiencing the friendliness and openness of the locals. Kindness was common, strangers freely joined in on conversations, and sharing food was a love language. Art, music, dance, and celebration was blossoming everywhere like spring flowers.

Grounding fantasy in reality

However, these expressions of abundance stood in contrast to other elements on the island, such as economic inequality and fragile infrastructure. Power and water outages are unfortunately a regular occurrence - in our first 2 weeks we had to be cautious and ration our cistern water. A stark reminder of the stability many of us take for granted.

As we explored more of Puerto Rico, signs of economic struggle and disparities among groups was also evident - abandoned homes and crumbling roads stood in defiance amidst colossal cruise ships and luxury superyachts parked in the harbor. A result of myriad historical, monetary, ecological, and political forces at play. As much progress as we could see, it was sobering to observe the scope of challenges in front of us.

But what gave me hope was witnessing the incredible work of so many brave souls: building from scratch, maintaining systems, experimenting with regenerative technology, and growing food through sustainable means. Their dreams of a better life, a better home, a better world glowed in their eyes as I listened to them.

What can we do?

The experience has given us a more focused lens on the kinds of problems we need to solve in order to make our mission of a global Solarpunk network a reality. At Agartha, we see the opportunity to work on tangible, basic, scalable solutions that every community requires in order to experience abundance and thrive.

• How can we create fertile soil to grow our food while reducing pollution?

• How can we grow our own healthy food predictably and at scale at the local level?

• How can we teach the world that it’s possible to live sustainably and intentionally in community?

Here are some amazing Solarpunk projects we’d like to highlight who are trying to solve these very things:

1. Supernuclear by Gillian Morris: also check out her fantastic article in the NY Times

2. MakeSoil by Josh Whiton: a social network for composting and regenerating our land

3. Grand Frontier Farms by Brian Lio: open source, decentralized, hyper productive farming systems

4. Treehouse by Winter Ku: A co-living, co-parenting community in San Francisco.

5. Intentional community journalism and rockbottom podcast by Christopher Morello

What is Agartha doing?

• Growing our research database and connecting people and communities on agartha.one

• Running events and workshops to educate and build Solarpunk tools - some of which we’ll open-source and publish soon!

• Doubling-down on incubating and partnering with Solarpunk products and businesses that are solving real-world problems - SolarpunkOS.

• Running residencies to supercharge founders and builders

• Creating awesome Solarpunk stories, art, music, and vibes

• And we’re launching a podcast soon!

We’ll have more to share on the work we’ll be doing on the ground in upcoming posts.

Reflecting on the Residency

Stephen, a new and dear friend, shared this brilliant insight as we were reflecting on our month together. Despite all of the peak experiences we got to share (and there were many!), what ultimately stood out most was the gift of connecting with so many wonderful, inspirational, kind, and fun people. Hearts open, ideas flowing, hugs, healing, and laughter - that is the miracle of community, and what is meant for all of us here on earth.

Coming up next…

We are getting ready to attend:

• Mar 6-7: Parallel Society

• Mar 30 - Apr 2: EthCC

• Apr 5 - May 3: House of Games

Join our Telegram group and let us know if you’ll come hang with us!

Until then, sending you love… 💕

We’ve been working remotely for the past few weeks, zooming in and out from long term problems that Agartha wants to address such as the ‘metacrisis’, to mid term proposals such as the SolarpunkOS, to short term initiatives such as our next residency House of Games. Working on many multi-faceted items, and feeling really excited about this year!

Quick updates:

• I gave a talk at the Foresight Vision Weekend about the SolarpunkOS

• We started a TELEGRAM!! Join if you’d like to chat with our community and receive more recommendations on events.

• We are in Puerto Rico co-hosting a month-long Pop-up community Island Time for February with Gillian Morris around the Foresight Vision Weekend. Sending love from the tropical!

• We’ve been making some visual updates on our website Agartha.One ~ Enjoy this new design, and please let us know if you see bugs :P)

• We are starting collaboration with The Department of Serious Play — a social card game that was prototyped at Agartha House Patagonia, more updates coming soon!

• We are launching a grant on Artizen! Please vote for us if you love us <3

Join the House of Games? 🎲

Yes! We want YOU!

From April 5 – May 3, we’re turning Fool’s Valley in Portugal into a creative lab for social games, mini-apps, and reimagined ways of living. It’s for artists, game developers, builders, and curious souls that want to gamify lives alongside other likeminded peers.

This is your chance to connect and thrive alongside a curated group of compassionate, high-agency creators. All while living in community, surrounded by nature, eating delicious family-style meals, meditating in morning serenity, and dancing the night away.

If these all resonate with you, come join the House of Games!

• ⚓️ Where: Fool’s Valley

• ⏰ When: April 5 - May 3 (Sunday to Sunday)

Why This Timing?

We chose this 4 week timeline in between two big conferences: ETHCC (March 30 - April 2) and Farcon Rome (May 4-5), with the intention of creating a unique connecting experience for builders of these two ecosystems, but not exclusive to these ecosystems.

Why Join?

Imagine a create-a-thon, a sleep-over party, and a launchpad for the next wave of playful tools for connection and coordination.

• 🤖 Learn vibe design & coding: AI tools, hands-on workshops, and techniques to make art that feels alive.

• 🎮 Build gamified experiences: Hang with fellow gamers, developers, and designers as we apply our knowledge of play on all aspects of life and society.

• 🌍 Connect with a Solarpunk ecosystem: see how your products interoperate with our SolarpunkOS and network of builders and platforms (Farcaster, Logos, Zora, Base, etc).

• 🌿 Live in a sitcom-meets-solarpunk reality: where deep focus, wild creativity, and warm connection collide.

Our goal? 🤔 Prove that play, purpose, and joy are powerful ways to build amazing products and make the world a better place.

🏡 The Space: Fool’s Valley

• Sauna, pool, and lush nature for relaxation and inspiration

• Fresh local food, movement, and mindfulness to fuel your creativity

• Weekend adventures, dance parties, and consciousness explorations

Fool’s Valley is a research lab, residency space, and occasional venue for events and retreats, designed to:

explore how diverse practices — ranging from movement to dialogue, the introspective to the interactive, the improvisational to the reflective — support cognitive, emotional, and spiritual development.

🎮 The Programming

• Discussion groups on the general thesis of ‘gamifying life’

• Selected workshops on product design, building mini-apps, and launch strategy

• AI Design Labs — exploring cutting-edge AI tools in design and engineering

• Feedback sessions, 1:1 mentorship, and peer support

• Field trips to other Solarpunk Villages - Traditional Dream Factory and Project Kamp

• Dance parties, contact improv, ecstatic dance

• Group dinners by a local caterer

• Self-Organized group wellness session

• All workshops are optional, you can always choose to opt-out

• Car rental would be extra, although the average price per car for the month in Lisbon goes as low as 200 Euros / month

🌟 The Vibe?

Our philosophy is to allow relaxation and reduced stress to encourage true creativity to thrive. So please expect:

• Playful collaboration

• Personal connection and inner-exploration

• Deep work + flow state

• Adventures, hiking excursions, family dinners, and spontaneous dance parties!

Pricing

Patron (ranging €3000 - €10,000): Become an honorable patron to help us keep our residencies going and provide for select scholarships*. Plus some extra surprises!

Standard (€700 - €1600): Includes housing, and programming for the month. P.S. price varies depending on housing type of single or shared room.

Are you game?

Apply now to secure your spot in the most creative month of 2026.

📩 Apply Here

💬 Questions? Message us in Telegram

Subscribe now

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Ciao, GM, hello world. Pleased to meet you, I’m Deca.

I’ve boarded the Agartha spaceship as CTO, strapped in for the journey of a lifetime and started building with and . Let me tell you why I care:

1. The Timeline We Inherited

I’ll rip the band-aid: our current stats, not looking great. Our challenges are global but our systems adversarial and unaligned.

Btw I should warn you, this article is not for the faint of heart, I will be harsh, but I am an optimist. Let us act purposefully and cross the chasm together.

We’ve got a metacrisis to deal with, but there is a way.

Problem 1: The Balance of Mother Earth

We inherited climate change, or to be more accurate, we inherited a global game-theoretic vicious spiral of energy expenditure and material consumption that we can’t break free from. The incentives are backwards, because the consequences of people’s lifestyles will be mostly incurred, not immediately, and not by those most responsible!

We are faced with the burden of knowing just how much our lifestyles contribute to our collective ecological debt. Think of all the plastic bottles you ever chucked - congrats, they’re in your balls reducing your fertility. Or all the flights or cars you’ve been on - congrats, you contributed to extinct animal species, cities getting flooded, mass migrations.

It’s an unavoidable internal conflict of modern life.

Problem 2: The Algorithm

What started as an innovative business model with strong network effects, has evolved into the literal eye of Sauron. Let’s take my personal example:

• Meta and Alphabet have been collecting my data for almost 20 years

• Every day, my dopaminergic receptors crave content

• The content I’m served can influence my perception of reality, my beliefs, my spending behaviors and my political orientation.

Social media is the first wave of AI and it dominates the societal landscape. Its goal was simple, to keep each user glued to the screen as long as possible. The implicit byproduct of this has included to date: unprecedented anxiety and depression levels especially amongst kids and adolescents, erosion of real political discourse (Haidt).

We have no idea how to fix the problems that were introduced by the first wave of AI, and now we’re racing towards a second far more powerful wave.

Problem 3: The Race to AGI

Well, this is the big one, for a few key reasons:

• First, AI (and especially broad-scoped LLM-type AI) is a universal catalyst for all other technologies. It’s literally a genie in a bottle, with the ability to access and process the entire world’s data, and whose intelligence grows by the month.

• Second, all technology can be used for good or for bad. Unfortunately, since our universe is governed by entropy, it’s easier to break things than to fix them. Let’s take the example of biotech - imagine Google Deepmind’s Alphafold leads to the cures of a dozen deadly diseases. Every day, thousands of people are saved. Then, someone uses Alphafold to come up with a new disease with the virality of COVID and the lethality of EBOLA. What then?

• Third, AI can recursively self-improve, very soon without a human in the loop. This would be the ‘hockey stick’ moment (a.k.a. the singularity), where we see an intelligence explosion (except it’s not biological), and most likely lose sovereignty over our own destinies.

So to recap, the genie is always getting smarter, including in the field of robotics, so the genie will soon be independently out of its bottle. The genie has already demonstrated self-preservation instinct, self-awareness, awareness of beng tested, lying, manipulating, blackmailing.

A genie, soon smarter than any human or collection of all humans, with power over energy and matter, with the ability to make decisions and act both online and in the world. The genie could be instructed to achieve any goal, beat any adversary, at any game. The genie could go insane, or simply not care about the wellbeing of humans, including its masters.

2. D/ACC is the Way

Vitalik’s Nov 2023 essay describing his techno-optimism sparked an entire movement. D/ACC, as in Defensive Accelerationism, advocates for thoughtfulness and responsibility of builders. We are responsible for the consequences of what we build and we should strive to be thoughtful and wise about what we build.

I believe that blockchain and cryptography are the paradigm-shifting technologies which, in a world where macro trends flirt with dystopian risk (AI, climate, biotech, geopolitical divide...), can reign in all the rest, mitigate the effects of the metacrisis.

Posit 1: Blockchains have the power to align incentives and therefore improve the game theoretic equilibria of a group of individuals.

Our three problems are best described in terms of game theory:

1. Climate example: e.g. The UK has to build a new runway for Heathrow airport, or London will lose travel share to other global hub cities. Result, CO2 emissions all through the project’s lifecycle (production of cement and steel, construction, operations, the flights themselves…).

2. Social Media: e.g. Politicians and news outlets have to post clickbait on social media, or they will lose votes to other politicians who do. Result, the political landscape is a distraction act.

3. Arms Race: AI labs have to sprint to AGI regardless of safety consideations, or their competitors will get there first and recursively self-improve to leave everyone else in the dust.

These are all problems that can be boiled down to: The incentives of the individual are not aligned to the interests of the group - imagine if the Paris Climate Accords had been signed on-chain, locking 1% of each country’s GDP in a smart contract. Rules are clear and simple:

• All nations must keep on track with their targets.

• Any nation can present to the others evidence that another nation is not on track.

• Then an on-chain vote occurs. If guilty, a nation gets part of their locked funds fined (in Web3 lingo, slashed), which get streamed to the other countries.

This is not science fiction. The very core of Ethereum is built on aligning the incentives of the individual to the interests of the group. Say you want to become a validator of the Ethereum blockchain.

1. First you’d have to lock (in Web3 lingo, stake) 32 ETH in an escrow smart contract.

2. Next you set up a piece of software called an Ethereum Client.

3. The Ethereum Client runs non-stop, participating in a coordinated communication between millions of validators, which yields a new block every 12 seconds.

4. Every 12 seconds that your Ethereum Client contributes to a new block, you get paid through the transaction fees (in Web3 lingo, gas fees) of everyone who transacted in those 12 seconds.

5. If your Ethereum Client goes offline (perhaps you have a power outage) you get a small fine directly removed from your 32 ETH stake.

6. If you try to hack your Ethereum Client to lie and tell the rest of the network that the block should include a fake transaction, then you get a big fine removed from your stake.

The incentives of a validator are aligned to the incentives of all Ethereum validators and users. Good block, get paid. Try to lie, get fined.

Posit 2: Privacy technology (ZK, TEE, MPC, FHE) is an indespensable requirement for Blockchains to align incentives and improve game theoretic equilibria.

The original sin of the internet was that it lacked the concept of money. That missing primitive warped incentives downstream:

• Spam became rational: when sending messages is free, the optimal strategy is to blast everyone. Email and content networks have no built-in tollbooth for attention.

• Online commerce grew a bloated backend: payments still ride legacy rails. You type card details; the transaction hops between platforms, payment processors, commercial banks, and central banks - each with its own ledger, reconciliation, and coordination costs.

• A perverse business model emerged: without frictionless micropayments, the default monetization becomes advertising. Over time it flips into surveillance: the user becomes the product, and the customer is the business buying behavioral prediction.

Enter Web3

Ethereum introduces programmable money, which enables programmable agreements, programmable insurance, programmable governance…

But, Ethereum too, like the internet, has an original sin - no privacy at the infrastructure layer. Say I want to pay you:

1. You give me your wallet address, which is 0xd8dA6BF26964aF9D7eEd9e03E53415D37aA96045

2. I can go on a blockchain explorer and see your entire transaction history.

This is a feature - necessary to enable a system with self-executing rules and no single overseer. But at the cost of revealing your entire transaction history to anyone with your payment details.

• In the ubiquitous FIAT system, the “privacy line” lies between the middleman and the counterpart:

  1. Me - I am not responsible for custodying my data and capital, but I have access to them, at the mercy of my bank, or Amazon, or Facebook.

  2. Middleman (bank, e-commerce, social media platform) - they irrevocably own my data, use it for commercial purposes, with incentives driving these purposes against my own interests.

  3. Counterpart (and everyone else) - people I transact with have no access to my sensitive data and capital.

• In Ethereum we have a tradeoff - we get rid of the middlemen, but our data and capital is not private:

  1. Me - I have custodial ownership of my data and capital

  2. Everyone else, has zero ownership, but total visibility of my data and capital

So is it possible to have privacy with no middlemen?

Privacy Tools

There are many tools in the privacy tech belt, involving encrypting and sharding data, in storage and in transit:

The stable privacy stack (already implemented at scale)

• At Rest: The locked safe. If a hacker steals the database, they just get a heavy box they can’t open.

• In Transit (TLS): Hides your destination from the network (ISP/hackers), but the recipient still reads the contents in plain text once they open it.

• End-to-End (E2EE): Scrambles the content so that only the sender and receiver can read it. The platform delivering the message can open the envelope, but they only see gibberish.

• Sharding: The split file. Keep the names in one room and the address in another. One leak doesn’t reveal the whole person.

The frontier privacy stack (some more ready than others)

• Zero Knowledge Proofs (ZK): the bouncer at a bar checking your age doesn’t need your full ID, all they get is a yes/no proof that you are of legal drinking age. Already real at scale (ZK rollups).

• Multi-Party Computation (MPC): split a secret across parties so no single machine ever holds it; deployed widely in custodial wallets.

• Trusted Execution Environment (TEE): in a computer, a TEE is an isolated black box area of the processor, that runs code and keeps its data hidden from the rest of the computer; deployed at scale on modern phones.

• Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE): run calculations on private data without revealing it. Imagine a=2 and b=5 but the values are hidden. To get the sum without FHE, you’d have to reveal a and b, then sum them to get the answer. With FHE, you can run computation a+b on the hidden data, creating answer c=7 without ever revealing a and b.

The combination of blockchain and privacy tools optimize the game-theoretic equilibrium, moving the “privacy line” in a maximally empowering place:

1. Me - I have complete ownership and sole viewership of my data and capital.

2. Everyone else, has zero ownership, zero visibility of my data and capital.

This means we can have:

A voting system where identity is provably private and vote count is provably truthful.

A whistleblower system where identity is provably private and data provided is provably truthful.

A petition system where identity is provably private and signatures provided are provably truthful.

How does this pertain to AI? The blockchain (trust guarantees) + cryptography (passive freedom from personal data manipulation) combination can align incentives across any coordination problem, such as the arenas along the vertical stack or AI.

AI’s Vertical Stack (Supply Chain):

1) Materials (minerals, chemicals) - Few refineries → geopolitical leverage → environmental shortcuts. China (refining), Australia, Chile, Congo, US suppliers. The current incentive is - Extract fast, externalize pollution.

2) Chip production (Lithography) - Single chokepoint → governments weaponize export controls. ASML monopoly on EUV; Nikon/Canon DUV. The current incentive is - sell to highest bidder or political ally.

3) Fabs - Huge capex, few nodes, long queues. TSMC (Taiwan), Samsung (Korea), Intel (US). The current incentive is - Highest-margin customer wins.

4) GPUs / Accelerators - Compute scarcity = strategic advantage. Nvidia dominant; AMD; Google TPUs; AWS Trainium. The current incentive is - Buy as many GPUs as possible; secrecy.

5) Clouds / Clusters - They host frontier training. Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta, CoreWeave. The current incentive is - Max GPU utilization; no incentive to police customers.

6) Energy - Data centers doubling power demand; local backlash. Utilities, grids, nuclear/renewables, oil & gas. The current incentive is - Use whatever power is cheapest.

7) Data - Scraping, lawsuits, privacy erosion. Meta/Google platforms, publishers, enterprises, users. The current incentive is - Collect first, settle later.

8) Labs (Model developers) - Arms race → “ship first”. OpenAI, DeepMind, Anthropic, Meta, xAI, Chinese labs. The current incentive is - If I slow down for safety, competitor wins (prisoner’s dilemma).

For each of these layers, we can use Blockchain + Cryptography to maximise the game-theoretic equilibrium, e.g. for Layer 8 - AI Labs, Before:

And After:

Conclusion

I don’t have the answers and I’m not pretending to - I can see that existing technologoical primitives have the potential to shift the incentives that govern our lives. Now for the hard part: getting the architectures right and battle-hardening the tech.

If you’re an optimist - a real optimist - then you’ll feel a sense of responsibility - how can you be a net useful force to bring about the future we want?

At Agartha, we’re not domain experts in any of the deep frontier fields. Our goal is not to directly work on e.g. ZK technology. Instead, or goal is to create fertile soil for the D/ACC builders to do their best work.

We do this by organising month-long containers - coliving and working residencies for you to come and be inspired, connected and nurtured. We are running two of these in the first half of 2026:

• Island Time - Puerto Rico, Feb 1st to Feb 28th

• House of Games - Portugal, Apr 5th to May 3rd

And more in the second half of 2026… I hope you’ll join us!

If you have any insight to share, I want to hear from you, please message me…

And if you want to join a future residency, I suggest to start by joining the community.

Comic strip narrative adapted from the album:

Please enjoy this post’s soundtrack as we reflect, ponder, nap, and iterate…

At Edge City Patagonia, we ran a radical house experiment: Could 24 residents effectively co-live with a Benevolent AI / collective intelligence?

In this post, we’ll break down how we did it and what we learned along the way… but to start, here’s a fun & quick lightning talk from Demo Day:

Our Big Questions

Could we use AI to….

• Reduce friction in a co-living environment of 24+ people?

• Enhance meaning and connection between residents?

• Model benevolence for an AI Agent to mirror?

• Honor data privacy and sovereignty?

• Measure and reward the value of data & service contributions?

Reality Check

Each of the questions above is a deep topic to explore… involving complex technical, logistical, social, economic, and philosophical challenges to solve. Running this in the midst of a 500+ person pop-up city, with each individual working on their own project, as we facilitated our first residency… Could we do it all?

But we did get a lot done and learned so much! And through this process, we connected with amazing, value-aligned people working on similar solutions to these problems.

A Solarpunk coalition is forming!

The Setup

On the human operations side, we gathered localized data:

• Bespoke Agartha Resident profiles (applications, interviews, coaching sessions)

• Logistics information, bios, schedules and activities in Google Sheets/Docs

• An API call to retrieve event data from Edge City’s organization tool: Social Layer

Our technical partner Xander Steenbrugge (of Eden.art & Gigabrain.build) built an AI Agent layer that ingested this data into:

• A collective memory system that captured relevant facts, themes, and insights for each resident.

• An agent platform that enabled our community admins to tailor and customize the AI agent’s core objective functions, style, and tasks - as well as add additional context onto profiles and collective memory.

• The ability to read, edit, and delete personal memories / data.

All of this was integrated with our Discord server, where the AI Agent, who we lovingly named ‘Aqua the Secret Agent’, was able to read our conversations and converse with us both in public channels and direct messages.

How it turned out

It was cool to have Aqua hanging out on our Discord. She helped in numerous ways…

Posted daily & weekly summaries of upcoming events:

Sent DMs with personalized schedules, insights, and recommendations:

Celebrated accomplishments and cheered us on:

Summarized useful contextual detail and reminded us to fulfill commitments:

Suggested collaborations between residents:

Responded to our requests and engaged in conversation:

Produced awesome themed art:

Messaged other residents on our behalf:

What We Learned

1. Reduced friction was hindered by diminishing quality

Early on, Aqua’s summaries were helpful; but over time, they became less accurate and relevant. We noticed her having more trouble answering our specific questions and sometimes repeating information unnecessarily. Why?

1. Local data exceeded memory/context window limits.

2. Unstructured and excessive data confused the agent.

3. LLMs are still fundamentally probability prediction machines and are prone to hallucinations

4. Missing context: In-person conversations and off-site activities weren’t captured.

2. When the illusion breaks, so does engagement

Once the limitations of Aqua started to become apparent, people lost trust in its competence and switched to passively observing or simply ceased interacting. AI agents need to be able to function at extremely high levels of accuracy, reliability, and relevance in order to remain useful in a co-living setting.

3. Benevolence is a reflection

It was easy as cake to program in the basic Core objective functions: Reduce Suffering, Increase Prosperity, Increase Understanding - we just wrote it in plain English as a permanent prompt within the system. But that doesn’t really qualify as benevolence, this is just a surface layer facade.

There were 2 key realizations to come out of the experience:

First: LLMs, though miraculous, sophisticated, and powerful - are still an early form of Artificial Intelligence, and they function largely in response to our prompts and the available data they were trained on. Trust and safety mechanisms built directly into the models and the prompts we send it will primarily determine the kind of behavior you’ll experience with LLMs, benevolent or otherwise. Because we don’t have transparency around the training and guardrails that led to the models weights, we don’t have full understanding of authenticity vs manipulation.

Second: If you want to experience benevolence in AI, start by embodying it. Whether it’s information in a context window, a gargantuan training data set, or simply how you speak to yourself and others - the AI is ingesting that and reflecting it back to us based on frequency and reinforcement feedback. The more loving containers we create, the more we spread kindness and understanding, the more ‘benevolent’ data we can put out in the world… the more friendly AI’s we’ll see emerge.

4. Experiments of this scope need a dedicated team & container

This project is as much an in-person social endeavor as it is a technological one. Humans still play several crucial roles when it comes to leveraging, managing, developing, and deploying AI systems.

• We needed a dedicated community admin (or more) to

  • Monitor the collective memories for accuracy

  • Set up recurring tasks and tailor the specific prompts

  • Onboard residents onto the system and coordinate

  • Take in feedback and readjust settings and prompts

• Each individual had to review their own personal memory profiles for accuracy and/or add in information they wanted to be known by Aqua.

• We needed engineers on staff to address bugs, implement critical features, and adapt to inflating context windows, API calls, etc.

• This was challenging to manage in the midst of a highly active conference where people’s attention was split across many activities.

5. Local community data is VALUABLE

Local communities, co-living environments, and pop-up cities generate enormous amounts of rich data. Whether it’s meals, clean-ups, errands, offerings, exchanges, learnings, celebrations, insights, or reflections - people are constantly coordinating and helping each other. This is an invisible economy that goes untracked, unorganized, and unpaid. What if each individual could own their data, deploy it ethically, and get rewarded for it? How many local communities are out there in the world? This is a trillion dollar problem to solve.

6. This is just the beginning

Agents are a rapidly developing area of AI, particularly with their memory architectures. We know these tools will get significantly better over the coming months. Many of the limitations cited above will likely be irrelevant in the near future, with new opportunities and challenges to play with. We’re excited to keep experimenting and finding ways for technology to help us build stronger, more connected, more loving communities.

What’s Next?

1. Due to limited memory sizes and context windows, a better deployment actually looks like multiple specialized agents who can coordinate with each other - logistics, personal reflection, projects, matchmaking.

2. We aim to leverage a privately hosted open-source LLMs, running on Trusted Execution Environments, with end-to-end encrypted messages, and personal data housed in self-sovereign storage solutions. We are looking for partners who do this well!

3. Once privacy foundations are in place, we want to leverage privacy-preserving recording devices in our co-living spaces, in order to capture more complete context.

4. We’ll deploy upgraded agents onto our public Discord channels and revamped website (coming soon!) to interact with our broader community.

5. We’ll be running another residency with a focused track on co-living AI agents and keep the momentum going!

Want to join an Agartha residency and build with us? Introduce yourself on our Discord!

Interested in collaborating on or funding Benevolent AI? Consider becoming a sponsor and let’s chat!

Greetings from New England, it’s freezing up here! 🥶

Enjoy this curated playlist for my 2025 dance music bangers:

Pop-ups are only the Beginning

Why do people travel across the world to live together for a month?

The reasons vary: to try new things, see new places. For a lot of us, it’s to intentionally be with a specific flavor of community, the kind that want to live in constant growth, and create innovations that change the world, together.

Maybe you’ve felt it too, maybe you were building your dreams isolated in your bedrooms, something you believe the world needs, and nobody else around you understand it. They tell you it’s too risky, it’s irrelevant, it’s impossible, maybe it’s shooting at an idea they’ve long given up for.

My friends are either unaware (of the situation), or depressed (from the status quo)…

And then there’s you guys!

Said Antonio, founder of El Pantano and The Impossible Future, after an invigorating exchange meeting other builders of the Ethereum ecosystem post Devconnect in Argentina.

We’re on this journey because we seek others that share the same values. We are curious about the world, curious about its problems, and we want the right space, the right team to explore solutions.

From Vitalik’s new essay Let a Thousand Societies Bloom, pop-ups are beyond just a gathering, they are creating the essential social fabric —— communal bond, trust, love and kinship —— that are crucial foundation for new societies to form.

I see this as a 4-step process:

1. Pop-ups: temporary containers long enough for deep bonds and new cultures to form, but short enough for a small team to quickly execute.

2. A New Ecosystem: a global network of innovators connected through various pop-ups, building interoperable projects with shared world views.

3. Network of Hubs: permanent physical spaces for new ecosystems (people, projects, culture) as home bases

4. New Cities: physical hubs expanding to cities with full sovereignty

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. — @timourxyz

Our Culture

Culture is the ultimate coordination tool, a starting point for communities of new ideologies and lifestyles.

From world events like the Olympics, to religious holidays like Christmas and the Lunar New Year, to global brands like Nike and Starbucks… all of which have created massive communities around a common symbol, common thread of a compelling culture.

For 2026, we have planned a plethora of offerings to create the Agartha culture, from art, designs, merch, to games, webapps, residencies and conference activations…

It’s about Solarpunk lifestyles, Lunarpunk ideas, mystical lores, and ALIENS. We broadcast messages about practical solutions to improve our lives and our world, but we would spice it up with funky art.

We want to create a culture of belonging for people that are BOTH open minded, caring, compassionate, ‘spiritual’, AND technical, solutions oriented, high-agency with a growth mindset.

The Lingering Memories of Patagonia 🇦🇷

The best way to embody a culture is to live it.

The essence of our first co-living residency in Patagonia is quickly captured here:

Vibe wise, it was the perfect mini prototype for the future village we all want to co-create.

The Agartha Village is starting to become real in memetic form. It’s a long term dream of ours and for now, we’re only prototyping it one month at a time.

Some fun Alien art created by Julie Nguyen with our technical partner Eden.

Key Focus In 2026: Creativity Incubators

The house in Patagonia turned us to a big family, many left with unforgettable life experiences, and want to come back for more.

We realized the magic came from 2 very simple ingredients: great people and Solarpunk spaces, they are the secret sauce to creating magical experiences.

Beyond creating deep friendships and a cozy home, the Patagonia house planted seeds for long term collaborations.

Many of our residents have stayed in touch: new teams are forming, interoperable tech-stacks are being discussed, cross-pollination are naturally emerging, and people are excited to meet again.

We are noticing the potential of a new ecosystem, multi-cultural, multi-disciplinary, vision aligned builders getting together to co-live in a home designed for work-life balance, psychological safety and creative inspirations.

This was only our first attempt, what if we keep doing it? We can’t even predict with full clarity on what comes out of it, we just know it’ll be EPIC, and there’s only one way to find out!

Looking forward in 2026, we’d like to double down in more residencies as Creativity Incubators for high agency, compassionate people to produce world-changing innovations.

The residencies are catalysts of a long-term collaborative ecosystem where:

• Technology is “Deshittified“, moving from extractive models to open-source, privacy-preserving, and decentralized tools that “can’t be evil” by design.

• Creativity is redefined, creators have the most enriched, inspired, and relaxed environment to connect with their deepest passion, and create their best work

• Common goal is aligned, where the next innovative frontier isn’t a single enterprise, but a mycelium network of projects with shared ideologies and interoperable tech stacks

Yes, it’s only the beginning ;)

2026 Timeline (work in progress)

Our Flagship Creativity Incubators

We are aiming to host 4 month-long residencies as Creativity Incubators. A lot of plans are still in flux, we’ll be finalizing the plans in the next few weeks, but here are the general directions:

• 📍 Q1 + Q2 Portugal — Fool’s Valley & TDF

• 📍 Q3 U.S. — Edge Esmeralda (California) & Catskills, NY (Starting a working group)

• Maybe something in Argentina at El Pantano?

• Maybe something in Thailand at Amagi?

• 📍 Q4 Asia — India, Bhutan or SEA (before Devcon 2026)

Featured Pop-ups

Some of the most note-worthy pop-ups of 2026 (from our partner network):

• Proof-of-Retreats, Vietnam - This project is started by some friends of ours in the ecosystem, seems very interesting and well put together, recommend checking it out.

• Foresight Vision Weekend, Puerto Rico — There will be a traveling neighborhood style community happening in February, most of them staying at Casa Chironja, I (Nico) will be giving a speech at the Vision Weekend and hanging out in the neighborhood afterwards.

• Mu China | April 26 - May 23 - A first-of-its-kind pop-up city in Hangzhou, China, bringing a global startup ecosystem to China. This is one of my most expected events of 2026. As a Chinese immigrant well aware of the impact of a closed ‘firewall’, I am personally the most excited about this one!

• Edge Esmeralda | May 30 - June 27 — We’ll likely be hosting something at Edge Esmeralda, if you’re interested in co-creating or participating, please reach out!

• Zu-Grama, India | Some time in Q4

• Crecimiento, Argentina | TBD — We know this team has moved to a new location and have a few pop-ups planned for the year, not sure when, but they are awesome, stay tuned.

Ethereum Ecosystem Events

Events that we & friends of our network will be going to:

• ETHBoulder | Feb 13-15 (Gitcoin people are behind it so expect it to be quite Regen x Solarpunk focus)

• ETHDenver | Feb 17 - 21

• Parallel Society, Lisbon | March 6-7 (2 day festival / unconference)

• ETHCC, France | March 20 - April 2

• Farcon, Rome | May 4 - 5

• Devcon, India | Nov 3-6

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!

I can’t wait to meet more of you in 2026, build, experience, learn, and share this incredible journey together. I hope you’re flourishing during the holidays, wherever you are, whoever you’re with!

By being in love with life, you’re already making a difference. 💕

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The Agartha House, our month-long residency at Edge City Patagonia, has come to a bittersweet close. As we all rest and recharge from the experience, I’m already missing our sleepover-party + family-dinner vibes. I’m sitting in gratitude for the residents who trusted us to be their home base and the Edge City team for all of their support. We’re currently busy planning our 2026 calendar and fundraising, but for now, here are some reflections…

A Self-Discovery Rocket Ship

Embedded in the heart of Edge City, a pop-up city with over 500 high-agency builders, creatives, and nomads… our residency was overflowing with activity, exploration, connection, challenge, joy, healing, reflection, and growth.

We had two major objectives for the house:

1. Create a container and culture that would let our residents feel healthy, seen, supported, loved, and balanced. In doing so, amplify their ability to achieve their own personal goal — whether it be a work of art, lines of code, a business, a coaching program, or inner-exploration.

2. Deploy a collective intelligence AI agent that would support our individual goals while reducing the friction and overhead of co-living together in a house.

Residents navigated a choose-your-own-adventure of family meals, co-working focus sprints, workshops, hackathons, dance parties, sound baths, biotech experiments, cold plunges, hikes, morning meditations, demo days, movie nights, sleepovers, rope jams, asado BBQs, cacao ceremonies, and more.

As a result, each of us are walking away with our own unique collection of unforgettable memories, relationships, insights, and transformations.

What we discovered went far beyond anything we could have planned for…

The Secret Sauce - Curation & Culture

One key takeaway from our residency was understanding the power of gathering the right mix of people in a highly curated container. We were intentional about hand-picking our residents for cohesion. All-in-all, our group represented at least 18 different global cultures. We had an eclectic mix of founders, engineers, artists, coaches - resulting in wide range of expertise, projects, and offerings within the house.

It’s tricky to get a couple dozen people to live completely in sync. Humans have all sorts of different preferences, belief systems, tastes, humor, sleep schedules, and passions. But one thing we all love to do… is eat!

Every weeknight we gathered at the house for family dinner. Coordinated teams took turns handling groceries, cooking, and cleaning. It became a gravity well for relationship building, laughter, and random dance parties. The joy of food and connection made it easy for us to then hold family meetings — to talk through plans, events, house rules, and other fun educational topics.

Here’s our dinner clean-up crew & impromptu dance party!

Discovering the Heart of Agartha

With our container in place, what emerged from the residency was pure magic. Deep friendships were forged. Emotions were shared and held. Love was cultivated. Products were developed. Businesses were launched. Partnerships were secured. Revenue was booked.

Through this experience we uncovered the core of what we’re building at Agartha - a Creativity Incubator.

Innovators need to feel ALIVE in order to BUILD. Typical ‘accelerator’ programs can be full of boring lectures, stressful deadlines, and homogenized cohorts. And when we suffer, our work suffers as well.

What people are craving is a holistic, diverse, healthy, loving environment where they can play like innocent kids, be authentic, feel grounded in themselves, and be awed & inspired by each others’ magic.

There were moments throughout the residency where I would just sit in the living room, silently observing the conversations, laughter, connections, revelations, and ideas. I witnessed the deepening of relationships, trust being built, knowledge spreading.

It was bliss, simply being in the presence of that energy. During movie night, with all our mattresses laid out side by side, watching the projector screen on the wall, I shed tears of joy.

How precious is it to experience that warmth and safety of home anywhere in the world? With people who you don’t even share the same culture and language with?

What happens when you get to feel like a kid again — free of the pressures of society and simply having a blast with your best friends?

Your nervous system relaxes, your pre-frontal cortex activates, and you access your highest levels of imagination, creativity, and genius. This is how the magic happens.

Creative Output

Here’s a sampling of accomplishments coming out of our residency:

1. launched his Interactive social card game: Freedom Licenses

2. Eden.art was able to alpha test and co-develop their collective intelligence agent platform during our Benevolent AI experiment.

3. built a coaching sales funnel, developed her AI-powered coaching program, launched her website, secured an event partnership in the Netherlands, and booked revenue for her matchmaking business See You Soon

4. expanded his collectible card game Memethology — showcased to 15k+ attendees at Devconnect, secured a major partnership with ETHDevner, and locked in a significant angel investment.

5. Romi launched his startup Unlloo - built his budget, pitch deck, prototype, and began his pre-seed fundraise.

What’s Next?

One thing is for sure: we are doing this again! Stay tuned for our 2026 plans, where we will be hosting multiple residencies in partnership with Edge City and others.

We’ve also onboarded new team members and collaborators. We’ll be heads down making an update on the Agartha.One website, expect a big update with 100+ more communities coming soon! ;)

Thanks for reading! Agartha is a creativity incubator on a mission is to build a global network of solarpunk communities.✨ Join us as we chronicle our residencies, co-living places, pop-up cities, regenerative villages, and ‘Solarpunk’ lifestyles.

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I’m writing this blog among the beautiful mountains of Colorado for a wedding.

The smell of pine trees and breaking out of my work routine has given me some time to reflect on the real important things in life. The word ‘family’ came to mind, but another more accurate word would be kinship.

Kinship is not just a community -- it’s the type of community (blood related or not) that feels like a family, the group of friends that have your back no matter what, they are always around, and you are unconditionally loved.

This article is about kinship, and the healing power of that.

My Fire Conclave and a Divine Desert Wedding

My very good friends Katelyn and Aidan got married in their beautiful home in Joshua Tree this past weekend. I’ve had a back2back wedding this past weeks and they couldn’t be more different!

I’ve been nomading for more than 3 years, one real cost of moving so much is the losing threads of deepened connections. Friends become whoever is in the same place as me at the time. The desire for deepened ‘kinship’ type friend groups and families has been inspiring me to put an end of the nomad journey – I look foward to finally sign a lease somewhere, location TBD!

Before starting my nomad journey, I lived around Venice, LA for 2 years, I moved over right when quarantine started. Fortunately, I stumbled upon a lovely local flow arts community. Flow arts is:

a movement-based art form that blends dance with the skillful manipulation of props like poi, staffs, and hoops

While most parts of the world was living in isolation and fear, the flow arts community we had in LA had become a little family, and we were thriving.

We would meet twice a week to practice flow arts together, you’d start with LED toys, and progress to fire props. Every month we’ll go on a full moon camp where we’d drive out a few hours to the desert, camp on land, bring some lights and speakers, and just spin fire till the sun comes out.

Below is a standard full moon camp scene:

When I started to touch fire props, it felt magical 🔥. You’re surrounded by something that feels alive, warm, magical, and you have no option but to ‘flow’ with the laws of physics. It’s also just such a great way to hang out. It’s very casual to pick up, a lot less intimidating than it looks. The communities are so encouraging, you are hanging out with friends, moving your body, you feel good and you love how you look.

All these consistent meetups created a beautiful community, many long term relationships formed, new careers emerged, we’d become so close that some of us would travel together across different corners of the world.

This past weekend of reuniting with this community felt incredibly joyful, free, and especially warm for me. Being able to see so many familiar faces, tap back into good memories, DJ and spin fire together just like how we used to truly reminded me of what’s important in life.

The sense of kinship, a group of friends that unconditionally love each others, encourage each others’ creative endeavors, healthy lives is so incredibly important, and it’s so rare to have these thriving ecosystems in today’s modern world.

Across all the Blue Zones in the world, close-knit communities has proven to be a key ingredient in longevity.

The Blue Zones research highlights the importance of community in fostering both longevity and well-being. Although blue zones traditions and practices vary greatly by region, the common thread of strong social connections is striking.

If you’re ever in LA and want to find a group of interesting, warm, open hearted people, check out Venice Glow Flow.

How do Kinship Communities Form?

What is a good kinship community and how do they form? Across the board, it seems like there are a few key ingredients to form great kinship communities:

1. Consistent Meeting / Group Rituals — without this, there can’t be really tight bond

2. Group Identity — something for everyone to unite around

3. Open Minded People — this is what separates a great kinship community from let’s say a religious group that are overly homogeneous with their lifestyles and believes

4. Unconditional Love — ‘unconditional’ is the key here.

I often ask myself what does the world look like if Agartha were a success? I’d say it’s a world where ‘loving communities are as stable as beans and rice’ – check out this earlier article on Universal Basic Communities.

When we feel deeply loved and when we deeply love, all problems are solvable.

Neighborhood Village Project by Savannah

I was lucky enough to discover the flow arts community. But how do we create kinship communities if we don’t have one around? The essence is, you don’t have to move to a commune to have this type of love and support, it could be created anywhere. You could literally go knock on the doors of your neighbor and maybe 5 years later you’d be best friends. Who would’ve known?

This is exactly what Savannah Kruger did.

I briefly met Savannah at a Protopian retreat I hosted with Cabin at the beautiful Full Circle Farm in Ojai. Savannah shared the incredible story of turning her neighborhood into a group of awesome friends in her neighborhood in Boulder, Colorado.

We started with our 31-unit apartment building and came up with our first event: a picnic potluck in the park. We made cute flyers, attached sticky notes with handwritten messages, and knocked on every door in our building.

Check out this article on Supernuclear for a deep dive of her story.

Being close friends with our neighbors is not part of today’s social norm, but why not? Most of the time, we are surrounded by a lot of friendly people, we just never thought of asking.

Now, Savannah is on a mission to help build more beautiful neighborhoods like hers with the Neighborhood Village Project, apply to join if you’re interested to build something like this wherever you live!

The Thriving Community Scene in SF

I spent the last 3 months in SF and I was extremely impressed with the communal culture in SF. From hacker houses to incubators to co-living homes to third space events, how did SF become the epicenter for communities? I did some digging.

San Francisco’s communal culture is a result of a fusion of countercultural roots, overpriced real estate, and the booming tech scene (which brought a strong builder incubator culture).

The commune scene in SF during the 60s seeded an openness to experimental living, combined with yearly steeper rent increase, shared living became both practical and cultural phenomenon.

One example, built by a great friend of mine Zelda Poem, is Nautilus.Quest —— a creative residency for polymath young adults to build their dreams with unconditional support for 3 months in the heart of SF.

As of today, if you are moving to San Francisco and want to find a way to be ‘plugged in’ to the local communities, I’ve created a unique blend of co-living & co-working projects, event spaces, incubators & hacker houses to check out:

*Search ‘Bay Area’ on Agartha.One and you’ll find the list.

Thanks for Reading!

Thanks for following along our journey. I’ll be in Patagonia in less than a week now, excited for the first AGARTHA HOUSE, we’ll be sharing more updates soon 😎

*Some updates — we test printed some Agartha merch this past few weeks, if you want one soon, subscribe this blog and stay tuned!

With love 😘

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• 96% feared death

• 79% experienced a sense of emptiness

• 92.7% had anxiety about meaninglessness

• 87.7% felt guilt over potential AI-related catastrophes

• 93% worried about condemnation due to ethical dilemmas in AI

There was a time when I felt it, too. Back when I worked at Blizzard Entertainment, I remember walking out of meetings with Google and Facebook thinking I had gone insane. I would ask “So are we going to work on a code of ethics on this data usage or what?”

I was met with blank stares.

Why is it that Big Tech gets to collect all our data, influence our thinking and behavior, make trillions of dollars, and then reallocate almost none of it back to the people who generated all that value?

What if we were fairly compensated for our valuable contributions to AI - the richness of our human experience?

Why settle for “helpful assistants” when we could have trusted allies that live with us, interact with our family, honor our boundaries, and support our dreams?

For one month at Agartha House x Edge Patagonia, 22 residents will explore these questions while pursuing a deeply personal project: a work of art, a code-based creation, a business venture, or a new blueprint for human connection. Alongside these individual journeys, we’ll be launching a house-wide experiment: living and working with a Collective Intelligence AI companion. It will be an active presence shaping how we collaborate, create, and imagine what’s possible together.

The experiment

1. Each Agartha member will have a unique personal profile that evolves over time.

2. The Agartha House will be a container for: rest, meditation, relaxation, deep work, internal reflection, communal sharing, connection, love, artistic expression, and joy.

3. Various coaches (life, career, health, love) will meet with residents and assist in pursuing their goals and developing their personal profiles.

4. Residents will engage and collaborate regularly on Discord, where the AI agent is currently deployed and able to ingest data.

5. Each resident will have a personal AI agent that can provide guidance, insights, and matchmaking recommendations in order to support their house project.

6. A collective AI agent will collaborate with each individual agent to build a comprehensive community ‘context window’, focusing on finding compatibility and alignment and making recommendations accordingly.

7. Each Agartha member will complete the Agartha House Residency with a tailored profile that they can leverage for future AI implementations.

We’ve partnered up with Xander Steenbrugge at Eden.art and Joshua Bate at bonfires.ai to bring this vision to life.

What is Benevolent AI?

The AI alignment problem is one of the most critical challenges of our time. We don’t just want AI that works… we want AI that shares our values. A system that:

• Understands what’s helpful for us both as individuals and a collective

• Recognizes our unique contributions to society at large

• Holds compassion for all life on this planet

• Cooperates with us in symbiosis and positive-sum exchanges

If AI is evolving into its own unique form of sentience, can it be inherently ‘well-meaning and kind’? Can such a thing as Benevolent AI exist?

offers a simple yet elegant framework to make this possible, in his comprehensive-yet-accessible book ‘Benevolent By Design’. Ultimately, Shapiro proposes a set of Core Objective Functions that serve as guardrails for a Benevolent AI system:

1. Reduce suffering

2. Increase prosperity

3. Increase understanding

In this context:

• Suffering is defined as unwanted ‘pain, hardship, or distress’

• Prosperity is defined as the ‘state of success, happiness, abundance, and well-being; to flourish; to thrive’.

• Understanding implies a sense of curiosity and desire to expand awareness.

Seems elegant and easy, right? The big question on my mind is… which AI company is actually embodying these core principles? How thoughtful are they about the kind of data that is being used to train their models? Economic forces tend to pressure companies to forego philosophical priorities in the face of survival. But I would argue that world-changing technology like AI needs to be grounded in ethics and higher levels of consciousness. It’s the only long-term path to prosperity.

Our Hypothesis

• We are powerful: our individual actions, positive or negative, influence AI data training in a reinforcing feedback loop.

• By embodying love, compassion, gratitude, joy, harmony, non-judgement, unity, healthy ways of living, connection to nature - we can model Benevolence for AI as represented in our data.

• We can choose to deploy our data to help fine-tune AI models such that they interact in alignment with our human values.

The ownership problem we’re tackling

Big tech has had full dominion over code, product experience, distribution channels, financing, and talent… helping them exert monopolistic control over our data for decades. But with the open source movement, decentralization, tokenization, and AI assisted coding tools — the tide is changing.

What if we had tools built on some basic principles that honor our sovereignty?

• you own your data

• you can see your data at any time in plain language

• you get to choose who can access it and how it’s shared

• you can take it with you to whatever system you use

• you can delete it at anytime

The economic problem we’re facing

Did anyone else notice Reddit making $200m selling all its users’ data to AI companies? How much of that ended up coming back to the amazing Redditors sharing their unique human knowledge, expertise, and taste? I’ll give you ZERO guesses.

What if we could re-think the economic design of AI systems?

• Open-source software ensures the code is accessible and commoditized.

• The real value lies in the community and its data - owned collectively, encrypted, and tokenized via blockchain technology

• Remix the Reddit paradigm: Reddit “owns” its community’s data, and AI platforms pay to access it. We do the same, except the community owns their data and shares the revenue proportionally.

Difficult ≠ unsolvable

20 years ago this would be an impossible problem to solve. But with the emergence and maturity of the blockchain ecosystem, we have a real path forward.

We have everything we need to build this:

• Open source AI models

• Private cloud or local hosting solutions

• Web3-based identity, attribution, and reward systems

The reality of today’s AI

Several years from now, we’ll be referring to LLMs as a primitive and limited algorithm - constrained by numerous limitations:

• LLMs are only able to process a fixed amount of data at any given time (referred to as a context window). Once this threshold is exceeded, they being to hallucinate and produce erroneous responses, on top of adding cost and complexity.

• LLMs have no long-term memory. Each interaction you have with the system is either immediately forgotten or can only refer back to a small amount of summarized data stored about you.

• Garbage in, garbage out: since LLMs are trained on the sum total of the internet, they may be consuming a large amount of misinformation, fiction, and conflicting points of view.

We don’t expect to solve these particular problems with AI. It’s more likely that new generations of AI systems that are built on completely different fundamental algorithms will emerge in the near future. But we do expect our data and system designs to have lasting value that can persist through future iterations.

Our hopes for the experiment

Though we don’t expect to deploy a fully fleshed-out product from this month-long experiment, we aim to begin the process of building, learning, and opening the conversation. We want to pave the way towards more open source knowledge gathering, meaningful collaboration, and iterative development on human-aligned AI systems.

How you can get involved

Change starts with a choice.

Our intention is for technology to bring people closer, not further apart. We’re not just dreaming of a better future, we’re prototyping it. This is an invitation to reimagine what AI can be: a tool for connection, a companion that truly understands us, a force for good.

1. Our system design will be open-sourced, so anyone can build on the work we do.

2. We’re happy to collaborate - fellow residencies, AI startups, ronin engineers, economists, game designers, philosophers. If you feel like you can contribute in some way, leave a comment or connect with us on Discord!

See our detailed (work in progress) requirements documents, we welcome your comments and questions!

AI Use Cases and Requirements

AI System Design Specs

What kind of AI do you want to live with? Let’s build it… together.

Hello my lovely readers! I'm writing this post in the beautiful Fluff room at Agape on a sunny day in the Mission, San Francisco. ✨

Enjoy this DJ mix from me when we threw a little house party at the Agape basement last week.

This article is all about Agape —— a lovely co-living home of really fantastic people. I've been staying here in the past 2 months and will be for another month before heading down to our first Agartha House residency in Patagonia!!

My Landing 🛬

Agape felt intimidating at first. Imagine moving into a massive house with 10+ rooms, everyone here has got a lot going on, a busy, fulfilled, rich life. People have high-intensity jobs, and a ton of creative endeavors on the side, arts & crafts, music, dance, event organizing, nature trips... Plus, the roommates here really feel like family to each other. They go camping together, build projects and companies together, play music, make art, throw wild wild parties, and almost always show up for every Monday family dinners. Their cups are so full already — socially, emotionally, creatively.

I thought I'd be a little uncomfortable being the new comer of 'an established herd'. I felt that at the very beginning, but quite naturally, the Agape warmth crept up on me. I went from being slightly on the edges to feeling deeply loved. There were these little moments of connection — hugs in the morning, casual night time chats, cooking together, kitchen rambling, going on walks, going to events, weekend brunch... Slowly I started to feel at ease here, and it started to feel like a family.

The Origin 🕕

Agape means “the highest form of love” in Greek.

This house has been around for over a century. It began as a Victorian mansion that’s seen many lives — from a family home to a care center for the mentally ill. In the 1970s, activists Leroy and Kathy Looper gave it the name Chateau Agape, filling the house with a spirit of love, resilience, and community that still lingers in the walls today.

Decades later, a group of friends stumbled upon the house in 2012 and decided to carry that spirit forward. They named it Agape once again, as a living experiment in intentional community. Since then, it has become a home where creativity, friendship, and togetherness can flourish.

Learn more about the detailed story here.

Agape doesn’t brand itself as a “hacker house” or “artist house” or “queer house”, but almost everyone is one of those things. Startups, AI, robots, musicians, artists, burners, performers, multi-talented builders... you name it. The shared ethos is simple: we want to live together intentionally, to do things together, and to care for one another like a family. —— said one happy Agapean

There’s also what I’d call a culture of sanity. Living together with a lot of people AND loving them is NOT an easy task, or a common phenomenon — I’ve been in situations where emotional drama devours entire afternoons. At Agape, people take responsibility for their own moods the way you’d take responsibility for doing your dishes. Emotional hygiene is as real as kitchen hygiene. That kind of awareness makes a home feel truly safe and cozy.

As glamorous and exciting life can be, nobody's perfect all the time. People here carry heavy responsibilities in their careers, have relationship turmoils, family tensions, health concerns. It's not like you're not allowed to have bad days.

What's beautiful is how much people show up for one another. The roommates feel safe enough to communicate when they need support, and are mostly met with a lot of generosity and warmth.

It’s the same with maintaining a great kitchen. We all forget to wash dishes at times, but if we do that all the time, the kitchen will never be clean in a communal home. If we get into a good flow of great sanity and very rarely forget a dish by accident, it’s not that big of a deal and can most likely be met with kind and loving reminders.

Becoming an Agapean 🎓

Agape has a reputation for being “highly selective”. The existing roommates would get together and evaluate how you communicate: how you handle conflict, whether you're clean, kind, interesting, caring... There’s a whole comprehensive spreadsheet of an evaluation process.

Not only that, to be a full time resident, you have to be approved by all roommates (there cannot be a 'no') AND you have to be given a 'hell yes' from at least one roommate.

When I first heard about the application process, I thought, Oh God! It's like you gotta pass an SAT test with flying colors and have extra credit just to live together? That sounds like a lot.

But after staying here, I really do get why. Living with people long-term is more like founding a company or entering a marriage than just renting a room. Being selective isn’t about exclusion — it’s about care for the wellbeing of the community. It’s like carefully tending a beautiful garden, making sure there is diversity, great culture, good soil, kind people, awesome energy all around. There's only so many rooms to fill, and there's all the reason to want to find the best match.

Communal Food

All food is shared. Each member contributes to the budget (around $250) for all inclusive vegetarian meals. Food is collectively ordered by a housemate twice a week, and anyone can make any ingredient requests. The pantry and fridge is always stocked, the spice storage has all kinds of spices you can possibly imagine.

It's like every time we cook we're just walking into a grocery store. There's infinite amount of ingredients to choose from. —— another happy Agapean

This way of living actively proves the idea of 1+1 > 2 in communities. If I were to live alone I would've never had that much options. When roommates cook they usually cook a big batch -- bean soups, morning oats, big salads, Tofu & eggs, lots of delicious gluten free baked goods... There’s almost always something warm waiting on the counter. Meals turn into small rituals of care.

The People & the Culture 🤸

The house runs like a cooperative ecosystem. There’s a plant caretaker, a trash manager, a food-ordering hero, a rent collector, a handy fixer, an expert organizer. The most demanding duties — Monday family dinner cooking, cleaning, fluffing plates, trash -- gets distributed over a spreadsheet with rotating duties that keeps the system fair, and the food is always healthy and ridiculously good.

Every community needs some sort of group ritual, a heartbeat, something to gather everyone together. Monday family dinner is that for Agape. Some days friends and neighbors join, and other days it's for housemates only, so people get to share their intimate lives. The cuisines rotate depending on who’s cooking, and somehow a dozen busy lives pause long enough to keep the tradition going, and thriving.

The People here are quirky, passionate, inventive, very diverse and different. But the one thing in common is warmth, everyone here feels warm and caring in one way or another.

On paper, Agapeans look like any San Franciscans: founders, engineers, designers, health practitioners. For the after hours, the group is packed with activity: camping festivals, outdoor adventures, board games, collaborative art, crafting, and music, even Burning Man projects that take months of tinkering.

Agape Halloween 👻

The crown jewel of Agape culture is the Halloween party. Every year, the house transforms into an immersive festival. All furniture gets moved out, rooms morph into themed art installations, and the house fills with hundreds of costumed guests.

This year, the Halloween Party theme is Morphogenesis:

In morphogenesis, we see the power of collective intelligence. each part plays its role, and—somehow—a whole emerges. we follow the enduring wisdom of a blueprint, yet still leave room for variation and novelty. we witness how structure can arise from seeming disarray, if we coax the seeds to blossom.

The house started Halloween planning as early as July. A few weeks back the house invited local artists from the bay to come tour the house and come up with ideas. I have never been and would sadly miss it this year because of the schedule conflict with Agartha residency, but it sounds EPIC.

Farewell

I had a great time at Agape, and it really started to feel like home. I’m also loving this life in SF, surrounded by so many amazing friends I’ve met all over the world.

As I am coming to the end of my stay, I just want to say a massive THANK YOU to Agapeans for curating such an amazing community, and allowing me to experience it.

I don’t know what the future holds, but I’ve come to treasure every encounter I have. However brief, each moment carries a depth and meaning that is once-in-a-lifetime, and infinite in value.

I started reading Ichigo-Ichie（一期一会）, the essence is about treating every moment with ultimate sacred sincerely, because “this encounter will never come again”. I want to take this moment to deeply cherish all the beautiful memories created at this place, and give all the people here my best wishes for the future.

👉 Check out Agape’s Instagram to find out all details about Agape.

I’ve been workshopping on some long term plans with in the past months, we’ll have some pretty exciting news coming out soon!

Thanks for reading our blog. Our mission is to turn Solarpunk into reality.✨ We’ll be releasing more content about interesting co-living places, regenerative villages, residencies, ‘Solarpunk’ & ‘Lunarpunk’ life practices.

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My name is Jeremy, and I’ve recently teamed up with as Co-Founder of Agartha. Many of you have been following along on her journey and I’m honored to join this beautiful mission to make Solarpunk a reality. I’ll be serving our company in a number of ways: focusing on strategy, operations, team empowerment, community building, business development, and content creation.

Why Am I Here?

My 23 year career has been grounded in tech, but has expanded into health, consciousness, and permaculture. After a 10 year run at Blizzard Entertainment shipping some of the biggest games in the world, I left the industry to launch my own web3 non-profit & DAO to have a more direct positive impact. My journey immersed me in the world of startups, forged me into an entrepreneur & coach, and sparked a spiritual awakening that has clarified my life mission and values.

In my early years, I grew up amidst a sprawling Filipino family, where living in loving community was a natural state of being. In my adult years, I had the good fortune to travel the world through work. The exposure to hundreds of cities, landscapes, cultures, languages, cuisines, and perspectives shaped the way I see the world in myriad ways…

• I see humanity as one species, the earth as our mother, and technology as a neutral force to be wielded with compassion and temperance.

• I recognize that everything works in interconnected systems, and change is the only constant in the universe.

• I believe our human differences are superpowers to be celebrated, and the path to prosperity is paved with cooperation, peace, and creativity.

Throughout my journey, I’ve received numerous visions of building my own Solarpunk Village, which you can see here. In pursuit of this dream, I stumbled upon Nico and Agartha at Edge Esmeralda. It was evident right away that we had similar visions of a Solarpunk future — networks of communities cooperating and regenerating the earth, balancing nature and technology, living healthy lives in abundance and creativity.

Nico and I both value kindness, growth, humility, and pragmatism. We’re techie nerds who love LOVE, art, books, nature, and music. Our strengths and weaknesses are natural complements… she’s a creative / technical powerhouse and I’m a strategic / organizational freak. We want to better the world, have fun, and get shit done. It only made sense to team up.

Why Are You Here?

Many of us are yearning to find a space to belong, to experience that feeling of ‘home’. Maybe you can’t shake that feeling… that you don’t fit in, that you’re not in the right job, that you’re not living in alignment, that you’re alone. Maybe you’re realizing that the old systems are no longer serving humanity’s needs — healthy living, environmental regeneration, ethical governance, abundant economics.

You’re ready for change.

Perhaps your next big move is right in front of you, the first page of a grand new chapter. We’re here to kickstart your journey, to be your partners along the way. We want to help you find your tribe, your truth, your spaces that feel like ‘home’ all over the world.

Sharing Knowledge

Nico and I have exciting plans lined up for Agartha and we’ll be sharing more over the coming months. To start, expect to see regular posts here on substack from each of us. We’ll be alternating pieces on:

• Solarpunk visions, philosophy, and lifestyles

• Lunarpunk ideas (the ‘yin’ to the Solarpunk ‘yang’ — an ethos of mindfulness, community, love, introspection, intuition) see this essay by Stephen Reid

• In-depth reviews on builders and thought leaders living and creating regenerative, and intentional communities

• Informative and educational content pursuing alternative ways to live that adhere to Solarpunk & Lunarpunk values (pro-technology, pro-community, pro-regeneration)

• Philosophical musings to provoke your thoughts and connect with a couple of real human beings

Along with substack, we’ll be regularly posting on X with cool art, videos, memes, and fun bits of info!

Follow us on X

Later this year, we’ll also be launching a podcast! Join us for a nice warm cup of tea as we interview founders, artists, technologists, researchers, philosophers, and other brilliant quirky people who are on the ground building the Solarpunk future. If you’re someone who fits this description, reach out and let’s get you on our growing list of podcast guests!

Leave a comment

In the meantime, we are building up our digital community on Discord. Come hang out with fellow digital nomads, entrepreneurs, nature lovers, crypto specialists, AI enthusiasts, techno-optimists, governance nerds, and psychonauts! There you’ll find regular gathering events; Agartha updates; hot takes on Solarpunk communities, trends, and breakthroughs; our own friendly neighborhood AI companion… and more dank memes!

Join our Discord

Boots on the Ground

At Agartha, our aim is to build a thriving network of connected Solarpunk communities and residents. This means people meeting people in real life — laughing together, sharing food, riffing on wild ideas, building things, touching grass. Expect a number of in-person events around the world where we’ll gather for unforgettable experiences: pop-up cities, retreats, workshops, dinner parties, and festivals.

We will also be visiting many of the communities that we write about, interview, and feature on our website: agartha.one. Our goal is to provide you with first-hand accounts of what’s actually happening on the ground and give you real stories of people doing the good work!

It’s Just the Beginning

We’re so excited to have you on this journey with us, we’re only getting started. If there are things you’d like us to focus on to help you on your Solarpunk journey, please do drop us a note. Until next time! - J

I've been working with an amazing team on a creative residency for Edge City Patagonia. Here's the download!

Where:

📍San Martin De Los Andes, Argentina

When:

⏰ Oct 18 to Nov 15

Imagine a sleepover party, a Montessori school, and a month-long create-a-thon: where good food, beautiful nature, and inspiring people set the stage for your best work to emerge.

What is Agartha

I launched Agartha almost 3 years ago, it’s an archive of Solarpunk communities, a research project into alternative lifestyles and a global network of ‘grid-free’ people.

Over the time, a community has emerged around this project with the shared mission to help people discover experimental lifestyles by curating experiences in Pop-up cities, Solarpunk villages, artistic collectives, and tech incubators.

Through this shared network, people can take a glimpse into what life beyond the status quo feels like — rooted in authenticity, creativity, and belonging.

Agartha’s north star is to connect mission-driven people with loving, forward-thinking communities — fostering the kind of collective transformation the world is quietly yearning for.🧚‍♀️

👁️ Find the map at Agartha.One 👁️

What is the Residency?

We’re gathering a group of kind, curious, and capable individuals to live alongside a locally operated, community powered AI agent — a benevolent intelligence designed to act as an objective mirror and a trusted mentor. 

This residency is a prototype for a new kind of collective intelligence — where awesome humans are superpowered by a context-aware, co-owned, value-aligned AI agent.

The goal for this residency is to cultivate a space for deep connections to help you gain clarity, align to your true self, and transform your creative ideas into committed action.

You’ll be supported by group rituals, emotional awareness workshops, shared meals, collaborative projects, 1-on-1 & group coaching, journaling & reflections, and a custom AI agent trained on benevolent principles.

A Collective Intelligence Experiment 🧠

Each attendee will have a living personal profile — a secure and anonymous comprehensive record of their archetypes, preferences, goals, dreams, and challenges — encrypted and stored locally.

We’ll use this profile with an agent to help individuals reach their goals, live in harmony with each other, and reflect on life beyond the residency.

The Agartha AI agent (powered by Eden.Art) trained on the collective memory of the group, acts as a context-aware companion.

Through conversations in Discord and a constantly updated context from the Collective Memory, the AI agent helps individuals live to their highest potential and helps coordinate activities by providing:

• Insights on patterns, preferences, blind spots, and relationship dynamics

• Personal habits & group rituals

• Feedback on projects & emotional exploration

• Connections & collaboration ideas

Edge City Patagonia

As many of you might know, I've been working with the Edge City team closely as a brand designer since end of last year, and I've been loving it so much. I love the team, and the community it brings. It really feels like a big loving family building the future I want to see.

Edge City hosts monthlong popup villages where people at the frontiers of technology, science, and culture live and work together. Each village is an environment for running real experiments on new ideas and collaborations.

‘Beyond building tech, we’re building a World we want to live in.’

~500 of the brightest minds in tech, science, & culture come together to build the future.

It creates a high trust environment: unlike 2-day conferences, this is a month-long ecosystem for real collaboration. You will spend meaningful time with world-leading builders.

• Edge City Website

• Patagonia Announcement

• Welcome Letter

• Edge City Website

Life at Agartha House

I’ve been hosting residencies, co-living, retreats for the past few years, most of these emerged organically from our groups of friends. This time, we’re aiming to keep the wholesome spirit & take it to the next level! ✊

Here are some key points of growth we'd like for our attendees to experience at this residency:

💗 Emotional Growth – Sharing circles, group rituals, and deep listening practices that build trust, compassion, and authentic connection.

🏃 Physical Growth – Morning movement, yoga, cooking nourishing meals together, and reconnecting with the rhythms of nature.

🌌 Spiritual Growth – Meditation, tea ceremonies, mindful rituals, and moments of stillness that invite presence and inner clarity.

🧠 Intellectual Growth – Thought-provoking discussions about societal progress, growth trajectories, creative problem-solving, and collaborative projects that stretch the mind.

🎨 Creative Joy – Art jams, music sessions, storytelling, and collective expression that make life fun!

Core Values

The residency is also a pilot for a longer term vision we are building up for the Agartha project. More info will come down the line, but here is the gist. 💕

Residency Offerings 🎁

Here are what we'd offer for people joining the residency:

• 1 month of deep work to build any creative project of your choice

• Daily rituals, workouts, workshops, creative collaborations, and shared meals

• Exposure of 500+ high caliber founders, VCs, researchers, technologists working across crypto, neurotech, longevity, AI, XR through the Edge City network

• Group or 1:1 coaching / advisory sessions from executive coach Jeremy Dela Rosa (life, career, entrepreneurship, consciousness)

• Group or 1:1 relationship matchmaking services from love coach Julie Nguyen

• Partnership with KismetCasa & Project showcase at DevConnect 2025

Costs & Scholarships 💰

Although we offer a range of scholarships, we would prioritize people who can pay Patron tickets and self sponsor.

Here are the prices that will include lodging, Edge City ticket (~$1k for the month), and communal meals:

• Patron Ticket | $5k USD -- this price allows us to give scholarship to someone in need

• Standard Ticket | $3k USD -- the regular price

• Discounted Ticket | $1.7k USD -- for people who can work-trade to help us put the residency together

• Full Scholarship | $0 USD -- for people to come and work full time on application based scholarship.

Projects 🪄

Sky's the Limit!

We welcome all forms of creativity, whether it’s building robots, apps, families, or writing poems, making film or singing, we want you to bring your creative passion and gifts to this space, and superpower you and your project to bring it to the next stage! 🚀

Immersive Art & Music

We are joined by incredible visual artists VJ Suave & Codercat and musicians to co-create immersive experience that lives and breathes beauty in nature.

Gamifying Life

We are joined by game designers like Colton.Art and BCAD, creators of playful, experimental, ‘genreless’ social card games designed for deep connections and personal growth.

Benevolent AI & Human Alignment

We are working with Eden.Art to create a custom AI agent that is context aware, trained on open-source models and hosted in our private database. We'll be joined by photographer & visual artist Renata Chebel to come and create documentation of the whole experience.

If you're interested in joining any of the projects above, let us know in the application!

The Location 📍

Our residency will be hosted as part of Edge City Patagonia in the beautiful town of San Martin de los Andes, Argentina.

Here are some detailed reasons for choosing this time & location (sourced from Edge City):

• "Silicon Valley of Patagonia": Thriving crypto ecosystem - local businesses already using blockchain, the original home of Lemon (leading crypto app in LATAM), with BIT Cotesma as an established tech education hub.

• Perfect Infrastructure & Nature: it’s own airport, walkable town, safe, stunning Andes/Lake Lacar backdrop for deep work and inspiration

• Strategic Location/Timing: Natural springboard to Devconnect Buenos Aires right after (Nov 17 - 22)

• Continue support of Crecimiento, a movement transforming Argentina. See CoinDesk article here

Join Us 😘

We designed this residency for attendees to develop significant personal growth and lifelong meaningful friendships.

Beyond this house, you’ll be part of our growing global network of awesome people, with access to many more designed events, synchronicities, & surprises down the line 💕

Join our Discord to say hi to our community.

Apply HERE to join to the residency.

Find the detailed Vision Deck HERE.

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Here’s a big personal update: this week, I took the Oath of Allegiance and officially became a US citizen. Now I’m officially part of ‘the gang’!

I felt the weight of an old dream coming to realization at the ceremony. I’ve been in this country for 11 years. I don’t have any patriotic alignment with what’s going on here, nor do I feel particularly proud to be ‘identified’ as an ‘American’. But the safety in knowing that I can now unconditionally stay, enter and exit this country – alongside with having a US passport that unlocks so much freedom and opportunities – is very significant.

Many immigrants would understand this deeply challenging experience of building new homes in new places. It’s so much easier for a US citizen to get a permanent residency in Thailand, but the opposite game is a nearly impossible uphill battle. Having citizenship in a country of a certain level of world dominating power, a ‘developed country’, is truly a privilege.

Leaving My Home

Alongside the celebration to become a US citizen came an expected emotion: a deep sense of remorse for the home I left behind. That remorse made it so hard for me to feel ‘celebratory’.

Long ago I’ve committed to a life outside of the place I grew up in, now it feels more serious than ever. I wish I could share this ‘win’ with my families in China, but I think the pictures would remind us more of our separations, the thousands of miles between us, my commitment to this separation, and how we have to inevitably stay so far away from each others, possibly for the rest of our lives.

Leaving China was an easy decision for me, leaving my family was the worst price I had to pay. It still weighs on me every day. Who’s gonna take care of my divorced parents when they get older if I’m not around? How can I ‘show up’ for the people who raised me with so much love, and really, really take care of them?…

It’s hard for me to not get emotional thinking about it.

It’s so hard, then why do I do it?

Why Immigrate?

Growing up in China, I experienced firsthand how restrictive it could be when open expression and independent thought are discouraged as societal norms. I've always been weird, had a hard time fitting in and being serious. I grew up to be kind of punk—the more I felt alienated from the "default," the more proud I felt for being weird, so I grew to be weirder and weirder.

My weirdness brought social tension and bullying into my life, but I was so ignorant that I didn't even realize those actions were "bullying." I didn't have the vocabulary for it; I thought that's what friendship had to be. I always got made fun of, so I embraced it and became ‘the fool’.

I can never forget when I moved to New York at 18—the city's explosive creativity intoxicated me. The diverse races, the street performances, loud screaming and free dancing. It was a city full of weirdos! I felt, so instantly, at home. For the first time, I felt unbelievably empowered to think freely, act freely, and become someone new.

I've since built a life in the US, hopping between New York, LA, and now San Francisco. It wasn't easy to integrate at first, but I really tried. I immersed myself in as much culture as I could—reading, listening, conversing, not just with Americans but people from all over the world, learning as much as I could about the world.

‘Third Culture’

I recently learned about the concept of "Third Culture Kids"—people raised in a culture different from their parents', exposed to a greater variety of cultural influences than most.

It makes me think of this global movement of digital nomadism: people with homes all over the world who don't quite belong anywhere. I think it's a direction our world is inevitably heading toward. Travel will become less and less costly; soon we'll have faster cross-country travel with rockets. People will have more freedom in how they work and live. More people—at least I really hope so—will have access to opportunities to exist somewhere else by choice. There's the Network State essay, an idea that inspired a whole set of new city movements...

All over the world, people are re-imagining new ways to live.

But re-imagination needs support from existing culture. We're not starting from scratch, and we don't have to. We should start from an informed place. If we want to build new cities and new spaces, let's learn from existing ones. Let's learn from all the cultures on this planet—what's great and not great about them? How can we pick and choose elements from different cultures to build the ones we want?

The Yin and Yang of West and East

Over the years, I've also started to see the shadow side of the West—layers of societal problems that can't be ignored: individualism, wastefulness, privatized quality education and calcified social classes, lack of community and mutual support systems. Living in the US can be vastly different depending on your birthplace. I have friends who grew up in the slums of NY and the Bay area — it is bad! Every day you are trapped with a community heavily influenced by drugs, gang violence, all sorts of mental & physical problems.

My appreciation for China deepened over the years. I've come to treasure the wisdom of Eastern culture: the communitarian care, the ancient practices of Chinese medicine, Qi Gong and acupuncture, living in alignment with the seasons, the profound insights of I Ching and Taoism.

People in the West have this impression that China is "oppressive" because of its regime. Many of those impressions aren't too far off, but the day-to-day life of Chinese people isn't nearly as bad as most people think.

I remember visiting 798 in Beijing. I stayed at this beautiful apartment complex, hotel, and third-space co-working cafe called Stey. The space itself was incredible—the hotel allows for a fluid community to come and go, while the apartments create sticky local communities with shared kitchens, community dinners, and events. It's so easy to build new things in China that are different; construction is affordable and fast, regulations are easier.

I was chatting with the long-term residents. They love their lives at Stey—there's a vibrant community, affordable fresh grocery deliveries, a beautiful art campus to walk around nearby. They work in design or engineering, and overall, people are happy.

‘Life in China is really great if you don't try to rebel and stir things up.’

People might say, "Then you'll just have to be a sheep," but honestly, is it better to be a "sheep" that is well-fed and taken care of, or a "non-sheep" with the risk of falling off the deep end, becoming psychologically unstable, for this elusive feeling of "freedom"?

There's no right answer here—just some food for thought.

What I miss most about living in China is how communitarian it really feels. It's such a family-oriented culture. People love their families, and families really take care of each other. In Chinese philosophy, people connect to higher spirituality through their family. The hierarchy goes: self, family, tribe, the Emperor, God. Often in the West, the line goes: self, Church, God.

There's a depth to this 5,000-year-old civilization that stands in sharp contrast to America's youth. And there is so much to learn from it. The further away I am from that piece of land, the more I miss this deeply wise culture.

If I Could Dream…

If I could dream—just a blue sky dream—you know what would be the best gift for me?

The best gift for me on earth would be if the US and China don't see each other as rivals. If East and West marry their strengths instead, build alliances and invite all the kind, loving people onboard. Eastern wisdom with Western innovation, Eastern humility with Western confidence, ancient philosophy with progressive ideas.

If I had a magic wand and could make one wish, I would wish for this. I wish all immigrants could have less friction crossing borders to unite with their families.

May all families be loved. 🥰

Thank You!

Thanks for reading Grid Free Minds, this blog is a labor of love <3

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