Entry №1: First conversations at nonce
I came to know about nonce when I volunteered to help out with a Startup Weekend on blockchain that was held at the center back in late November 2018. The center occupies two recently renovated buildings at the summit of a hill in Gangnam. The center has all the amenities of a co-working center as well as living quarters for people who want to live at nonce. As far as I know, most people at nonce work and live here so the place has a very cozy, homely atmosphere. The ground floor of the main building is a kind of free space. There are tables but only a few so that the space feels fairly open. There’s a corner with plush couches and beanbags. The kitchen is separated from the main area with a glass wall, giving the room a loftier ambience. As I write these words, there’s member behind me working out. Some of the members bring over a personal trainer so they can work out and stay in shape, especially since many of these people work behind computer screens and can develop spine problems over the long-term (like a lot of people today, myself included).
nonce is an interesting place to me, for a variety of reasons. For one, I’m interested in the relations between the technical and social/philosophical dimensions of blockchain — blockchain tech culture, and nonce exhibits one such “social technological context” (Coleman 2013). Second, a large part of the nonce vision is about establishing a new urban form, including a whole repertoire of amenities to compose a full-fledged political community.
I don’t know yet the detailed history of nonce, but the community effort intersects with several broader factors. In a recent discussion with Kwangsung, one of nonce’s founding member, I discovered that nonce members are trying to understand if they have the underlying characteristics of a community that reflects and properly integrates core blockchain elements, such as horizontality. So far, nonce has had success getting off the ground, but a central question at the moment is whether this success emanated from luck — that is, being propelled mainly by a bull market in Korea’s crypto scene, and susceptible to the same bear market that eventually came about, or does the nonce community have the means to remain above water amid the extreme ebbs and flows of an economic domain in formation.
nonce has some pretty lofty goals but one thing that could likely happen is that in its endeavor to achieve a blockchain inspired community, it may be subsumed into the conventional economic system and become something like another WeWork, which is a highly successful model but by no means a space that complicates the present economic system, especially since WeWork is gathering potentially monetizable data about the behaviors of the many thousands of people who work there, much like platforms have been doing since the rise of Facebook.
In any case, nonce intersects with the crypto craze in South Korea and in many other parts of the world. Crypto, in varying degrees, may have conditioned nonce. The question here is how?
While the nonce community may seek to differentiate itself from the WeWork model, it also conforms to some of the same trends, that is, the rise in co-working spaces. In an earlier discussion, See Eun, a nonce co-founder, outlined the trends in most urban centers today. Since real estate has become so expensive in major cities, people are living in smaller and smaller private spaces which they cannot own. These are spaces that most people cannot afford to own and can feel rather claustrophobic. Coworking spaces are in part a response to this, offering spaces where people, such as small business owners, freelancers, entrepreneurs, can work. Ownership is no longer a possibility in these contexts, and so experience becomes the more important factor. Another way See Eun put this is that “hardware” (ownership) is no longer as important as “software” (experience). And so the question for coworking spaces today has become one of differentiation of experience. nonce is then similar to WeWork as a real estate model but one that strives to provide a different or unique experience.
In a sense, nonce strives to bring ownership back into the lives of people who occupy coworking spaces. I might call this the experience of ownership. Consider WeWork once again. WeWork is a community of people who opt in by purchasing a desk. They then have access to events across all WeWork locations in their city and around the world. But they don’t actually own anything at WeWork. They rent a desk and attend events, while trying to make connections with other people in the WeWork network with whom they share interests, preferably business related. Ultimately, they have no official say about how they space is managed. This is perhaps a grey area, but management is largely separate from the community members at WeWork. To make WeWork homogenous across all sites, management is largely centralized.
One of the central pillars of the nonce community, in contrast, is governance. nonce proposes a model where community members can be heard and take part in the running of their community. Members are then political participants who have ownership of the community through participatory experience — the experience of ownership.
