[Issue 43] Edge Patagonia Week 2

Week - 10/27/2025 to 11/02/2025 - Notes on daily life here, the brain and the heart and collective intelligence

Intro

This is a series of weekly blogs that are a mix of personal journaling and essays about technology, philosophy and other topics. I am writing with the intention to record my thoughts and insights as if I were writing to my mom or to my future self. This is the second week of Edge City Patagonia, a pop up city, a future society incubator in San Martin de los Andes, Argentina.

On Self Belief and Collective Intelligence

What does it mean to believe in yourself? This has been on my mind this week, as the breath work and meditation sessions, allowed me to reconnect with my “heart mind”, the Buddhist concept of “Bodhicitta.” This allows to find a new balance between the demands of the outside world and my inner world, between the brain and the heart. A second major theme this week has been the observation on how individuals only exist in the context of our surroundings, as a collective intelligence, and what the evolution of society and the self will be like in the future, with AI beings. This is something I am exploring and building with my AI startup Augmi.lol - a place where you create your digital self and create simulations of societies of AI and humans.

This insight is an important clue into my self understanding and my understanding of what moves me, especially in the last four years of my life as a digital nomad, Ethereum hackathon hacker and startup builder. Crypto since the beginning has been this amazing blend of disciplines, of sociology, economics, technology and culture. To understand the meaning of this is very important, that we as individuals are largely defined by our surroundings, our economic status, our culture and the collective intelligence. Bitcoin and Ethereum, is a new innovation that allows for a more rapid evolution of our identity as we are digitizing the medium of exchange, of money and trust.

This is the way. There is a video clip of Vitalik speaking sometime 2014, in some short news report, a few seconds, he was asked why Bitcoin and he said something to the effect ‘because this is the way it’s going to go.’ In this statement he conveyed this sense that he is just observing how history and technology is developing, it is not a matter of if this is going to work or not, or if this is the best way, but that this is a necessity, as surely as the river flows to the sea. There is no other way for humanity and technology to evolve. There was this feeling of certainty in his voice and manner. Vitalik is an example of a person that sees deeply into the nature of reality, the metaphysics, like a Buddha, or Neo from “The Matrix,” or a poet philosopher king of ancient times, he sees the true nature of value, of the individual as one node in the collective, tracking the significance of the invention of Bitcoin, coming from the experience of playing World of Warcraft, a massive multiplayer online game, and seeing how this is the way forward for evolution of human societies and humanity.

There is this constant tension in the individual, between turning inwards to the heart-mind or towards their reasoning brain and the collective standards of measurement. We can find direction and infinite wisdom inside our heart mind, but to the outside world, it often appears foolish, childish, stupid. This is the ‘Artists Way’, to be able to value their inner intuition, to take steps to nourish it, and trust in it. Having self belief is the ability to balance between the brain and the heart. The heart often can be too critical of our creativity and intuition that is sourced from the heart. At the same time the heart can be too unrealistic and too whimsical. Self belief means being able to believe in the intuition of the heart, balanced and tempered by the powerful tools of the critical and analytical brain.

On Creating the Future

Another deep insight came to me yesterday as I went on a hike with a friend outside of the town. The Alan Kay quote “don’t try to predict the future, create it” is displayed on the wall of the co-working space I go to daily at this pop up city. It occurred to me today how true this is, in practice, that we can make the future of our visions real, to create it, not trying to predict what project, what idea is going to work, but turn inwards into our “heart mind” and find what kind of future do we want, what values do we have, what do we want to dedicate ourselves to? This brings to mind the story of how Steve Jobs came to Xerox park, saw the future of personal computing as networked computers with graphical user interfaces, and he made it happen because he had this strong drive to create that future, while other people did not care enough, or were not feeling motivated enough to create it, to make it happen.

I launched the platform Augmi.lol on Friday, it is a place where you can create your own AI digital self, that others can chat with and where you can chat with other AI’s. This is the first micro MVP of this app, and by next Sunday I hope to launch the simulated society feature, where you can allow the AI beings to walk around and interact with others. This is the very exciting thing I want to demo in front of the Edge City audience. I have a hunch that the world of simulation of societies in games is the way forward for entertainment, education and work. To me I see this as an effort to create the future I believe will push humanity forward.

AI Film Maker Club

On Saturday Morning I hosted my own event, this was inspired by the format of the writing club of the SF Commons. It has the format of meeting in small groups of 2-4, chatting for an intro, then working on your individual AI video project for 90 minutes, and at the end sharing what you did. I love this format because it allows you to exchange ideas, meet other creators and balance that with a focused individual work time.

I created the first draft of an AI film that shows the use of Augmi.lol. I used the Edge city Midjourney style, and created a 90 second short sci-fi film. To me it was a big aha moment, I saw that one can create anything that can be imagined, and if you can create a short sci-fi film with yourself as the main character, with any kind of anime or realistic style, anyone can do this in a few hours, this is really world shaking realization.

The short film is very beautiful, it has sound effects, music, and custom voices. Watch it here if you are so called. It tells a story of what I imagine the future to be with the app augmi.lol that allows creators to connect with their audience better using AI, and to have personalized guidance by their digital self. This is the vision of what an ‘exo-cortex’ would look like, where human beings can merge with the digital space and become ‘infomorphs’ - digital beings with a human body in the root world.

Edge City Life

Run club

On Tuesday and Thursday I hosted run club at 7am, it’s a great way to start the day and meet a variety of people.

Mental Fitness Exercises

This week a highlight was attending these personal growth sessions organized by a motivational speaker Xavier. I appreciated learning a new small exercise to check in with yourself, to get out of the tangle of your inner thoughts, your inner dialog, and check in with your senses, the present. The basis of this is that we only can process 10 thousand bits per second, versus what our brain takes in as 1 million bits per second, basically that we only take in 1% of the data, we filter out only the things that fit in with what our brain tells us is salient, or important, this is what our mental models are, what our self identity is and what we think about most of the time. The second session we covered on how often individuals develop some mental models and patterns of behavior in their early childhood that are no longer effective or relevant in their adulthood, but stay there as they are deeply ingrained. The way to get out of these patterns is to become aware of them, check in with yourself to get back into the present and practice things like meditation and breath work in order to be able to relax.

Agartha Residency Halloween Party

On Friday, this residency that is filled with amazing people hosted a daytime event. I enjoyed the DJ Workshop by Nico, fortune telling with crypto oracle cards by Jeremy, music coherence experiment by Nico from Alter Mundi - a local Argentinian programming, innovative mystical group, laughter exercise, rope tying up show by Tessa.

Most of all I loved drawing on the big table, a collective work of art was created by the participants. My little corner, which I so carefully and lovingly drew, conveyed my ethos of the hacker monk, and blended elements of spirituality and technology.

Oz City Welcoming Asado Party

On Thursday there was the opening of the Oz residency, a hacker house around pushing the edge of AI and web3 organized by Olly, a startup founder veteran and passionate builder of Network States.

Muay Thai Session at Edge

On Friday at 9 am, five of us got together in a gym to practice Muay Thai. This was a good moment to connect and keep up with our skills. There is so much value in this mix and exchange of people from various backgrounds, from local Argantinian’s, American and European backgrounds, we can cross pollinate ideas and perspectives on various things, like Muay Thai practice as well as other things.

Sunday Demo Day and Community Dinner

I was amazed at all the demo day presentations, and the town hall updates. Leads from several of the residencies came up and shared about their residency, we watched videos by the video creators, these were amazing and moved the audience. Afterwards we got into a shuttle or other commuting vehicles and made it to the dinner which was ten minutes away outside of town. I mingled and got to connect with a variety of people, for example the Citizenship Onchain residency folks, that were exploring building a network state in local land, a South African Ethereum community organizer, the founder of Devconnect, and got to build my own bracelet and build relationships with people I had met earlier.

Conclusion

This second week was very special, every day is magical here, I only covered about 50% of all the magic (the ecstatic dance on Saturday was the best). I am closing this blog with thoughts and hopes of being able to complete the Augmi.lol society simulator and demo it to this community. I dream of creating a week long experiment in this community, in which we create 20 AI characters, and watch as they interact in a simulated world of San Martin de los Andes over a period of week. Then we interview the real people, about what their experience was like watching their AI digital self walking around, interacting, planning, having conversations with other people in the simulation, and how it impacted their real world interactions. I believe that this approach is just scratching the surface of what we can do with this technology, for entertainment, personal growth, education and for making money online. Imagine creating societies with AI entities and digital selves, that create their own on chain economies, DAO’s and create art together, that create AI images, videos and music. This vision excites me, sends chills down my spine, that is the good sign you need to look out for if an idea is worth pursing. This idea has the right mix of being realistically implementable, and at the same time it is ground breaking, as not many projects have been launched since the ground breaking paper on “Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior” from Stanford. This paper just is a first idea of what is possible, but the field is wide open for exploration and for new startups to form in this space.

Thanks for reading! If you found any part of this interesting or fun, leave a like and subscribe.

Peace ✌️
Konrad