In March 2025, SeeDAO conducted an offline co-living activity in Nantang, Anhui. During this co-living event, we initially discussed SeeDAO's transformation from Web3 to digital nomads.
From February 2025 to April 2025, I, Baiyu, and some other SeeDAO members traveled for over two months. One part of the journey was completed with Teacher Yan from Rural Construction DAO, who took us through multiple villages in Pingnan, Fujian, Ronjiang, Guizhou, and Pujiang, Chengdu, visiting farms or agricultural activities in Zhuhai, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. Another part was completed by following SeeDAO members who had already become digital nomads. Under their guidance, we also visited several digital nomad bases in Anji, Zhejiang, and Ziyang, Sichuan.
During these two months of travel, we also participated in the Hong Kong Web3 Carnival and the Luhu Philosophy Festival in Chengdu. Such high-density research and the strong contrasts generated in the process made me more convinced that we need this transformation.
What to Build?
What exactly should we build? I believe this is not just a challenge faced by the SeeDAO community. We often hear the term "Web3 builder". But what are we building for? Or is this just a word of consolation when everyone is trapped in nihilism?
Build Ethereum? Build Bitcoin? Or build anywhere beyond these chains? What do these chains represent? Or more bluntly: build a casino?
Being in the industry, I never found the answer to this question. Until last year's second half and this year's first half, observing the practices of Nantang DAO and seeing the various changes Web3 brought to the local area (both good and bad), I realized: Web3 people actually don't care about how real, specific people live.
Web3 idealists are building an abstract utopia. Their imagination of this utopia is limited to the cloud, controlling the sky but unrelated to the earth. They seem to naturally believe that just by creating a better sky, people on the ground should migrate there. They are "preachers", and preachers can be scary. The "way" in a preacher's heart is above specific people and actual problems. They point directions, and thus become arrogant. I was once one of them.
Web3 pragmatists are building casinos. They transform the various concepts created by idealists into casino hype topics, and even without topics - MEME and PVP have become mainstream.
But what has Web3 contributed to real, specific life?
In Nantang, I raised a question: When rural construction and Web3 merge, is it primarily about rural construction or Web3? When Ethereum's ideology and the financial casino's high wages conflict with the village's own cultural concepts and low wages, how do we handle these conflicts? Or even more sharply: Are these Web3 people coming to rural areas to build the village, or to turn the village into Ethereum users? (This is not just an Ethereum issue, many public chains have this problem.)
Although Web2 platforms have centralization and strong control issues, they at least consider users' perspectives and develop products based on real user needs. However, those in Web3 who claim to have idealistic sentiments disregard people's actual needs, only hoping to set standards and wanting others to use their standards (indirectly, using the system's tokens), throwing away all the dirty and hard work of dealing with the real world. Isn't this extreme arrogance? How can such a Web3 possibly defeat Web2?
Technical Idealism vs Social Idealism
The cloud-based world has developed rapidly and has become a world that can rival the world of earth. Architects can imagine the order of the cloud world. They have their own value choices: capitalism/socialism; individualism/collectivism; freedom/fairness... They can design systems, establish standards, and adjust parameters based on their value dimensions. But these standards are abstract. Those legislating for the digital world play a god-like role, creating this world in the six days before humans arrive - although people had long inhabited the natural earth before entering the digital world.
I must point out the separation of two types of idealism: technical idealists and social idealists. Technical idealists want to provide better digital order for the invisible world, while social idealists want to provide better embodied life for the visible world. Currently, these two are in a state of separation. Those still committed to creating a better society will realize that the most important work now is to promote the fusion of these two groups, otherwise technology will spin idly, and those practicing reality will lack power. They might even produce some opposition.
In the recent dialogue between Balaji and Vitalik, they reached a consensus: the old world is collapsing. The world's future is not in Washington, it will be coded on-chain. In an increasingly unstable world, such rhetoric sounds exciting - it provides a direction for world development and technological progress. This rhetoric especially excites developers, as if developers would become the profession closest to the power machine. Developers might even replace state machines and directly control society's central nervous system.
However, for farmers who grow food from the land, for millions of people about to be replaced by AI and robots, why should they be excited about such rhetoric? Perhaps the power center coded on-chain is no better than the real Washington. "The world's future is on-chain" only provides a technical ideal, without offering any social ideal. It remains abstract, even arrogant. - What if someone is not on that chain? Wouldn't they be cut off from the mainstream of world development? Can those who firmly believe the world's future is on-chain coerce others to use the chain?
Web3 invented an imagination of cloud-based order but did not invent an imagination of earth-based life. Unfortunately, we all live on earth and cannot inhabit an overly abstract utopia.
No System is Worth Becoming an End in Itself
Perhaps due to the dissolution of grand narratives and the prevalence of nihilism, people seem to need to attach themselves to a system more than ever. Those who create systems are also particularly eager to turn a system into a purpose and sell it to people lacking spiritual support. These systems are not limited to Web3; similar trends can be seen in spiritual circles, social organization innovation circles, and left or right political circles.
But I want to say that no abstract system is worth becoming an end in itself. Ethereum is not, Bitcoin is not; a world dominated by AI is not. If SeeDAO has fallen into a rigid and abstract system, then SeeDAO is not either.
What is worth building and caring about are specific people and specific lives. If these systems cannot serve specific people, cannot help them address their specific life challenges; if they are just self-entertaining in the legislators' kingdom and hope that people in the living world will adapt to the digital world's rules (Code is Law), they will fail. Taking a step back, even if such people prevail in the future, their victory will be a disaster for ordinary people.
If there is something that its construction is justified, it should be the memories of specific individuals. Making a person's memories of life beautiful and igniting their confidence in life is a positive and legitimate construction. If, under the guise of building a certain system, people's memories become particularly painful, even plunging them into deeper emptiness, such construction is problematic.
Perhaps, what we need is not a Web3 Builder, but a Life Builder or Memory Builder. We need people who can create better life memories for those lacking a sense of meaning and confidence in life. We certainly need systems that serve Life Builders or Memory Builders, but the system is not the purpose. The purpose is people and their lives.
I really like what Teacher Sun Zhe said, let's get straight to the point.
What does turning towards digital nomads mean?
Turning from Web3 to digital nomads is actually shifting from technology-driven idealism to society-driven idealism; from caring about technical architecture to caring about specific people and life.
We used to care more about the history of Bitcoin and Ethereum than the spiritual issues and unemployment situation of young people. Many people in SeeDAO are digital nomads themselves, yet we never thought about how to concretely serve them. Perhaps, this phase should be coming to an end.
For some niche communities, Ethereum or Bitcoin are meaning and purpose. However, for a broader world (allow me to be blunt), they are not the purpose, but a means. If they are tools, we don't need to sanctify or purposify them; if they are means, there's nothing particularly worth building, and we don't need so many builders.
Of course, SeeDAO's shift is not about abandoning technology and returning to pastoral poetry. Technology and humanities have always flowed in our blood. But our attitude should not be technology consuming humanities, but humanities embracing technology. The purpose of our experiment is not to move the future world from Washington to the chain, but to answer (touch upon) this question: How will future people live.
As a social practice combining emerging technologies, SeeDAO's white paper defines SeeDAO as follows:
"The meaning of SeeDAO's existence is to build a blockchain-based society aimed at pursuing a 'good life' (i.e., happiness). Its specific form is a digital city-state composed of a unified network space and physical nodes scattered in different regions. In pursuing the 'good life', the city-state's goodness is reflected in three points: promoting connections between people; promoting individual inner discovery and emergence; providing public life beneficial to everyone."
In this definition, we envisioned a relationship between the cloud and the earth. This definition already implies a 'nomadic' lifestyle. Moving from one place to another without cutting off the connection to the whole. We were once obsessed with imagining the cloud, yet hesitated to push our ideals forward, which perhaps explains why our practice stalled.
Perhaps it's time to abandon our obsession with the cloud and build the concrete world.
