Monastery Model vs the Embassy Model of Community
Discusison
Parallel Citizen:
"At Network State Conference 2025, Vitalik described two models for physical nodes in this movement: the monastery, where a community retreats from the world to build something internally coherent, and the embassy, where a community establishes a presence within an existing society and engages with the local culture around it.
4Seas is an embassy.
The distinction shapes everything: what the space looks like, who walks in, how it sustains itself, what it’s optimizing for.
A monastery model creates its own world. It controls the food, the fitness, the schedule, the social norms. It can iterate fast because the feedback loop is contained. It can develop strong internal culture because the membrane is thick: you opt in, you pay, you commit. Network School is the clearest example of this approach operating at scale, with meals, gym, daycare, coworking, and housing all inside the same campus on a purpose-built island.
An embassy model does something different. It establishes a permanent presence inside an existing city, with all the messiness that implies. It can’t control the surrounding culture. It can’t curate its population the way a gated community can. What it can do is serve as a translation zone: a place where different worlds overlap and where people who don’t quite fit into any single cultural container can find each other.
Which raises the obvious question. An embassy represents a country. What does 4Seas represent? There is no decentralized nation behind it, no flag, no territory. The honest answer is that it is an embassy for a movement rather than a state: for internet-first, tech-forward people.
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The embassy approach means 4Seas doesn’t need to solve food, fitness, or housing from scratch. Chiang Mai already provides those things well and cheaply. What 4Seas provides is the reason to gather, the events that create recurring encounters, the ideological spine that gives the gathering a direction beyond “digital nomads in proximity.” The choice to partner with local gyms and restaurants rather than building those services in-house is an extension of this philosophy. Rather than constructing walls around services, you let the city provide them and direct your energy toward the thing only you can build: the cultural layer.
4Seas is not trying to be a nation or a state. That framing misreads the ambition. The goal as I understand it, is to be a successful, substantive, permanent node: present in Chiang Mai and growing alongside the broader movement. Not imposing itself over the city, but growing with it.
Having a permanent Zuzalu node in Chiang Mai makes geographic sense. The city is already a rotating host for pop-up events in this ecosystem. Where those events are temporary, 4Seas is the permanent infrastructure that remains after they leave. It hosts and supports a lasting post-popup permaculture."