2026-11-04 –, Jasmine Stage 4
Together with the audience, we will run a simulation of creating two new states. Online-based vs land-based. I will ask the audience: Will you join a nation that started as an online community, or help existing communities coordinate better?
In twenty-five minutes, the audience will create its own civilisation, deciding who is allowed in, where we live, and how we settle conflicts. We will then compare your choices with actual network-state and pop-up city trials.
The future of where and how we live is up for grabs. One vision, the network state, starts as an online community with shared values, then gathers in physical places and seeks recognition. Another imagines decentralised, coordinated states: existing cities and communities using new tools to govern themselves, share resources and cooperate across borders. Which future is better, and for whom?
Instead of a lecture, you’ll vote your way through founding the “Beanbag Republic” in three rounds: membership, land and conflict. After each vote, we'll show how real experiments like pop-up cities and charter zones handled the same choice. We finish with an open AMA and show you how to keep building your own state all week—no prior knowledge needed.
I'm a strategy and operations executive with 17+ years spent building and scaling businesses across fintech, regulatory advisory, and emerging technology ecosystems. I founded and led sendit.Money, a cross-border digital payments and remittance platform I built from the ground up, owning the full product, raising from institutional investors (including UK government-backed funding through Innovate UK), and building partnerships and infrastructure across five African markets. Before and alongside that, I spent seven years as Managing Director of a regulatory advisory firm working across government bodies in East and West Africa, and I currently sit as Chief Strategy Officer of a pan-African technology accelerator, where I mentor 200+ early-stage founders.
I co-lead ZuAfrique. Right now, I'm drawn to the post-AI world and the intersection of AI and human consciousness, using coordinated states and decentralised communities as a trust and coordination layer. I've been experimenting at this intersection for the last 10 years, using the Humanlayer Framework to positively impact over 1,000 lives along the way.