On a Friday morning in early May. The waves crash against the rocks in a small bay on the Adriatic coast. The sky is very gray and it thunders incessantly. Since arrival in Montenegro the weather has been bad. It was too stormy even for the pilot to land the plane, so it was diverted to Croatia.
The date MIT Technology Review was invited to is a special one. It is a gathering of people who would like to live extra long. You are interested in various biotechnological approaches. One of these biohackers, which the reporter drives to the venue, says that half of his luggage consists of “dietary supplements and other powders”. Many attendees wear stickers that say “Longevity,” longevity. Everyone is very friendly and you can feel the spirit of optimism. Almost everyone you talk to is confident that humanity will find a way to slow or even reverse aging. And some of the participants even have a bold plan to accelerate this progress.
Welcome to Zuzalu
For thousands of years we humans have been searching for the fountain of youth. But progress so far has been slow, to say the least. Although many companies are working on ways to slow or reverse the aging process, it is incredibly difficult and expensive to conduct any studies at all. It is therefore difficult to say whether a treatment is achieving its goal. And, oh horror, groups like the World Health Organization (WHO) don’t even consider aging a disease.
But now a community of people is working on an alternative concept that might even lead to the establishment of an independent state. Aging is “morally bad,” they argue, a problem that needs to be solved. They view existing regulations and laws as obstacles to progress and call for a different approach. Less bureaucracy enables more innovation, they say. People should be encouraged to self-experiment with unproven treatments if they choose to do so. And companies should not be constrained by national regulations restricting drug development and testing.
Around 780 such people came together in a “pop-up city” in Montenegro to explore how they could create such a new state – a place where like-minded innovators could work together in a whole new legal framework that would give them free reign to create Self-experiments with new drugs against aging. Some of the participants were just visitors passing through. But the committed among them were here for two months.
The meeting, held at a luxury resort in Tivat, Montenegro, lasted until the end of May. The makers dubbed it Zuzalu. Each week of the event has a different theme, ranging from synthetic biology to artificial intelligence. The overarching focus is longevity, cryptocurrencies and the idea of creating a novel legal system.
Concept from the Ethereum father
“Zuzalu is not just a conference,” says Laurence Ion, one of the main organizers, to the audience at the event. “It’s an experiment in living together and exploring how to turn a place on the internet into a physical presence.” The concept was penned by Vitalik Buterin, creator of the cryptocurrency Ethereum – although organizers emphasize that it is a collaborative effort. The word Zuzalu has no meaning, says co-organizer Janine Leger, who works at Gitcoin, a blockchain platform. The name was – who would have thought it – created using the generative language AI ChatGPT, although it didn’t work after the first prompt. The event logo was also created by an AI image generator. Also with human input. Buterin spent hours on it, says Leger.
Over a cup of tea, she and her comrade-in-arms Ion shared that they wanted to have as little hierarchy as possible. The members of the core team behind the event each received ten invitations. The invitees then got their own invitations. However, Leger and Ion did not want to reveal who was on the list. Other attendees peddled the names of celebrities, politicians and billionaires said to have attended.