On March 19th, I co-hosted an event with friends from RadicalxChange, where we brought together a group of thinkers, builders, and curious minds in Paris for an experiment: What if we could prototype better futures - in a single soirée?
This is my personal perspective, and I want thank my fellow co-organizers and RxC friends without whom this event wouldn't have happened: Christophe Gautier, Michael Backlund, and Katia Lukicheva.
Why We Started
Many of us share the observation: we are living through a paradox.
On one hand, technological progress is accelerating at an unprecedented pace. On the other, our ability to coordinate as societies, across differences, interests, and worldviews, seems to be lagging behind.
From climate change to AI disruption, many of today’s biggest challenges are not simply technical problems. They are coordination problems.
At the same time, a number of emerging movements are attempting to address this gap, not by offering singular solutions, but by proposing new ways of thinking and organizing. This event was an attempt to bring these approaches into the same room and to see what happens when people actively use them.
From 4Seas Chiang Mai to Protopia Paris
In late January 2026, I traveled to Chiang Mai in northern Thailand as a grantee of the GCC. At the time, the city was hosting a dense constellation of gatherings alongside Eth Chiangmai from GCC’s cypherpunk congress to 706 events including an intimate book reading session where Vitalik Buterin joined.
Many of the events were hosted at 4Seas, a permanent Zuzalu node where something was emerging: a scenius, a shared collective intelligence.
I had first encountered this idea through the writings of Michel Bauwens, founder of the P2P Foundation, who lives in Chiang Mai and hosts a “Civilizational AI” workshop at 4Seas.
During one of these sessions, I participated in an interactive red/blue team game on the Commons, exploring how to protect and govern shared resources no matter if it’s a knowledge base or a local convenience store. The format was introduced by Sam Chua from SeaPunk, drawing from the Protocol Field Guide, and inspired the format for our own event.
What struck me wasn’t just the ideas, but the scenius that emerged from this environment: a convergence of neocypherpunks, thinkers, builders, artists, and wanderers, all contributing to a shared exploration of the future.
That experience sparked a simple question: Why not create something similar in Paris?
Protopia Paris
Over the past year, we had already been organizing small events and meetups in Paris. Many of these took place at the Learning Planet Institute, founded by François Taddei, whose vision is to inspire students to become “the best for the world” rather than“the best in the world.”
With his support, we launched Protopia Paris- an emerging community.
Protopia is not a utopia. It is a dynamic state, a society that continuously improves, always moving closer to a better future, but never reaching a fixed “happily ever after.”
We had initially planned to invite Michel Bauwens to join us in Paris. However, due to the war in Iran affecting travel routes, he was unable to attend. So, we held an online conversation, where I interviewed him about:
- cosmolocalism
- building a “scenius” in a city like Paris
- and how to prototype better futures
He spoke about many things from job displacement driven by AI to supply chains destabilized by geopolitical conflict. These are not isolated crises, but symptoms of deeper structural fragility, to which his answer is Cosmolocalism:
- What is heavy should be done locally.
- What is light should be shared globally.
In other words: production, infrastructure, and resources should become more locally rooted and resilient, while knowledge, design, and innovation remain globally shared and accessible.
This points toward a different vision of society: not a single centralized system, but a networked archipelago of regenerative communities, locally grounded, yet globally connected.
This conversation became the keynote that kickstarted the event. I highly recommend you to check out the full 20 minute interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLryrd-yR6U
The Civilization Prototyping Game
After Michel’s keynote, we introduced the Civilization Prototyping Game, an interactive challenge where participants were invited to break into small groups and attempt something ambitious: solve some of humanity’s biggest challenges in just 30 minutes.
The goal was not to find perfect solutions, but to experience different ways of thinking. Rather than learning about emerging movements through talks alone, participants would actively use them.
We explored three core issues:
- AI and the future of work
- The ecological crisis and collective action
- Truth, trust, and polarization
The Setup
With Christophe, we co-created an elaborate format. Participants formed groups of up to six people and chose a movement lens to guide their approach.
We initially prepared four movements:
- Planetizen— ethical dream-weaving: one’s dream can be another’s nightmare. How do we design futures that are inclusive and regenerative across perspectives?
- Plurality— coordination across differences: we are like fabrics; strength comes from threads going in different directions. How do we turn disagreement into something productive?
- d/acc — decentralized, democratic, defensive acceleration: moving from “don’t be evil” to systems that can’t be evil. How do we build solutions that are resilient and hard to capture?
- RadicalxChange — from ownership to stewardship: how do we redesign property, data, and governance toward shared and participatory systems?
This gave us flexibility depending on turnout, which we estimated could range from 30 to 100 participants. In the end, a little over 30 people joined, a smaller crowd than expected, but one that allowed for deeper interaction.
In total, we had 6 groups split between Planetizen and Plurality approaches.
The Process
Each group worked on one of the three issues using a structured Red Team / Blue Team method:
- Identify a crisis (Red Team)
- Propose a solution (Blue Team)
- Stress-test the solution(Red Team again)
- Map a pathway to reality
To collaborate, participants scanned a QR code on their table, which gave them access to a shared document on Fileverse, a decentralized, privacy-first alternative to Google Docs. There, they could contribute ideas in real time and build on each other’s thinking. This structure encouraged participants not only to generate ideas, but to challenge and refine them in real time.
You could find all the game worksheet here.
The Role of Elders
Participants were also joined by “elders” - experienced thinkers who circulated between groups, offering feedback and perspective.
- Katia Lukisheva (founder of Decoland) supported groups working on AI & Work
- François Taddei (Learning Planet Institute) and Michael Backlund supported the Climate Crisis discussions
- Lê Nguyen Hoang (Tournesol Association) supported groups exploring Polarization
They helped participants sharpen their thinking, challenge assumptions, and push toward more coherent and actionable prototype solutions.
Collective Sensemaking with Agora
Before the final debrief, I introduced a collective consultation using Agora, an opinion mapping tool that Nicolas and I built.
Participants were invited to react to a series of statements, such as:
- I tend to think about dreaming better futures
- I tend to think about preventing nightmares from happening
- I identify strongly with my citizenship
The goal was to map the diversity of perspectives in the room.
What we saw:
- Two distinct groups emerged around identification with citizenship
- Yet across differences, there was strong resonance with the idea of planetary identity
Common Ground:
- “Technology should serve collective needs, not just individual or corporate gain.”
- “I identify as a planetary citizen.”
- “I feel more motivated by collaborating with others rather than acting alone.”
- “Polarization is a major barrier to progress.”
Most divisive statement: “Innovation is moving too fast, and we should slow down.” This could perhaps serve as the context for another community debate even.
Detailed analysis here: https://www.agoracitizen.app/conversation/rjB5Rio/analysis
The Prototypes
During the debrief, each group presented their thinking processes as Planetizens or Pluralists as well as the prototype ideas.
Some of the highlights included:
- AI Ministry → A public institution that forecasts AI-driven economic changes and directly links them to social welfare systems
- An Anti-Productive Manifesto → Revaluing manual and care work, reducing “bullshit jobs,” and rebalancing how value is distributed
- Monthly Planetizen Assemblies → Local spaces for citizens to collectively imagine and govern long-term futures
- Community-Owned News→ Not driven by corporate interests or state agendas.
- Consensus-Building Workshops (starting in prisons)→ Radical spaces to experiment with coordination and dialogue!
*Generated by NotebookLM with our worksheet.
The Inspirations
During the debrief, we also highlighted a few tools and projects that embody the ideas explored throughout the event:
- Ground News: a news aggregator that compares how the same story is covered across left, center, and right-leaning media (primarily in a North American context), helping users better understand bias and perspective.
- Tournesol: a transparent, participatory research project focused on the ethics of algorithms and recommendation systems. It can be used as a browser extension to evaluate and improve content recommendations on platforms like YouTube.
What I learned
- The interactive format works, but it’s dense. The game was powerful, but also very demanding.
A participant reported that it was “30 minutes of scattered discussion, followed by 5 minutes of incredibly sharp ideas right before deadline.” It was hard to write everything down, and created cognitive overload.
- Onboarding is the hardest part.
Many participants needed more time to understand the framework, connect with strangers, and feel comfortable contributing
This suggests future iterations should simplify the process and provide clearer examples.
- Luma’s algorithm & Attendance management
We were quite unprepared when our event was picked up by Luma’s recommendation algorithm and featured under several categories: “Paris,” “AI,” “Tech,” and “Climate.” Our event description happened to include all these keywords, which significantly boosted its visibility.
Because the event was free and we didn’t immediately implement “acceptance upon approval”, registrations quickly surged and we capped it at 100 participants. While this was exciting, it also brought additional stress and logistical challenges.
In the end, although the majority of attendees discovered us through Luma, we still experienced a high no-show rate. This raised important questions for future events:
- Could we add mandatory questions and prioritize participants who take the time to reflect and engage?
- Would introducing a small fee (even the price of a metro ticket) improve commitment?
There are trade-offs in each approach, something that we’ll continue to experiment with.
What's Next
This event was not an endpoint - it was a prototype in itself.
The ideas generated are now part of a growing collective knowledge base. Some may evolve into:
- experiments
- working groups
- future events
Others may simply reshape how participants think. Both outcomes matter.
Like a participant, Yanis Cherfaoui, put it beautifully:
La vraie question n'était pas : comment prototyper le futur en 1h ? C'était : est-ce qu'on réussis à se connecter avec quelqu'un qui voit le même problème depuis un endroit complètement différent du notre ?
The real question was not: how to prototype the future in 1 hour? It was: how do we manage to connect with someone who sees the same problem from a completely different perspetcive?
Final Thought
The future is not just something we predict. It’s something we learn to co-create.
And that starts with creating spaces like this, where we engineer serendipity, where different ways of thinking can meet, challenge each other, and build something new.
This is just the beginning.
