Wamo

Description

From the organizers of Wamotopia:

"Summer of WAMO (瓦猫之夏, Wǎmāo zhī Xià) was the seminal event held in August 2022 that defined the "Zuzalu of China" before Zuzalu even existed. It was the "Burning Man" for Web3, featuring workshops on DAOs, zero-knowledge proofs, and cyber philosophy – and attracted ~2000 nomads from around China.

Although local authorities shut down some of the main physical gatherings (citing COVID-19 regulations), the spirit of WAMO survived. Participants simply moved to smaller courtyards and bars, cementing the idea that the community was decentralized and unstoppable. Since then spores have spread around the world, and a garden of mushrooms sprout everywhere from the Bay Area to Chiang Mai. Today the question is not “what is WAMO?” – the question is “who is WAMO?”

The name "Wa Mao" literally means "Tile Cat," a feature of traditional Yunnan architecture believed to ward off evil spirits. As events come and go, WAMO has emerged as the protective spirit of the Dalifornia ideology and the wider crypto nomad diaspora. The guardian spirit symbolizes collaboration, open-source, abundance mindset and actions with positive externalities which overcome the evil spirit of parasitic extractive competition (Moloch) discussed above.

WAMO is a Scenius – a term coined by Brian Eno, defined as the collective intelligence and creativity of a cultural "scene," contrasting with the myth of the lone genius. WAMO is a portable feast of people not a single location – like the Viennese coffeehouses frequented by Trotsky, Freud, and Wittgenstein or Paris Café’s of Hemingway, Picasso, Sartre, Camus and Beauvoir. WAMO emerges in all hackerspaces and co-working venues experimenting and prototyping in art, music, philosophy, and technology. And there is a growing unnamed confidence that the future will not be built in the walled garden of MIT or Stanford – but at a popup city sprouting wildly in Argentina or Montenegro. While the phenomena has gone global – with countless names and projects in innumerable places – today a next wave is building in the highlands of Southeast Asia where, for generations, diverse tribal peoples have strategically adapted their entire way of life outside conventional social, political and economic paradigms of control. Today new digital tribes are practicing the art and science of not being governed, using new tools and technologies – primarily crypto and AI."

More information

When is WAMO? The next chapter begins Jan 21 2026 in Chiang Mai.

How to join WAMO? WAMO is fully peer-to-peer: to join, simply send a signal, to receive a signal.