(scroll to the end to get involved, or talk to me directly)
a one-month pop-up city in buenos aires, from late march to mid april 2027, where audacious, interdisciplinary, international minds from every background live together and let ideas compound into things for the long-term future.
when i was fourteen, i went to an art exhibition on one of the highest floors in shanghai. i rarely cry as a kid, maybe once a year (not an exaggeration lol), but i looked down at the city that night, and tears ran down my cheeks.
lights, cars, countless people, each living their own life, lit up the city like stars in the sky. i saw how beautiful the city was, i saw how big the world was, i saw how different and uniquely gifted we each are, i saw how much of a miracle it is to be alive. i saw potentials.
i find myself chasing that feeling ever since.
we’re marching into an era of innovation scarcity. we demand people with the audacity to imagine a drastically different world. and i believe that in the right environment, almost anyone can be that person. however, our outdated culture and embedded institutions (e.g., education systems, capital systems) reward rule-followers, punishes risk-takers and rule-breakers, and the currently existing institutions that have the potentials to produce them each pull in a narrower direction:
the startup world promises to do its job, but venture capital rewards ideas that are legible and scalable within a few years, producing solutionists who lack the patient to question the premises of the “problem” they’re solving.
academia promises to do its job, but it rewards specialization, credentials, and measurable output.
corporations promises to do its job, but it keep innovation inside institutional walls, where resources and decisions concentrate.
the result is a world optimizing toward a local maximum, a system built by and for the old world, while we fail to even notice the higher peaks we could reach.
today, in face of insurmountable global issues like climate change, nuclear risk, tech disruptions (i.e., AI, biotech…), exponentially widening inequality…we need novel and diverse imagination at a global scale, and our institutions weren't built to produce it.
hackathons are good attempt to encourage and democratize innovations. i've attended, observed, and helped host multiple hackathons across china, united states, and japan, and what i kept noticing is that the missing ingredient is rarely skill or technology…it's imagination.
and imagination has a limit that no amount of effort removes: we can only fully see from inside our own worlds. people with resources tend to build for people with resources, and as AI widens the gap, that gets more dangerous. we need diversity. a room of similar people can only imagine similar futures. we need not just political democracy, but technological, economic, epistemic, institutional, and creative democracy.
i envision, for one month in buenos aires, in a pop-up city built from scratch, a deliberately mixed group of people, across disciplines, cultures, generations, and economic backgrounds, will live and create together.
no one is assigned a problem or a track. first, citizens collide with unfamiliar people and ideas. they get time to wander and let ideas and questions emerge. then they commit to an attempt and build. everyone is obligated to leaving something behind: a prototype, an artwork, a paper, an organization, or an honest report of what failed.