Hey everyone, my name is Michelle, and I will be talking a bit about my project AKIYA today. In short, we are an initiative to renovate abandoned buildings in Japan into decentralized + collectively governed creative residencies.
So first, I’m gonna attempt today to answer a question that I get a lot, and the question is this “how did you come up with this idea?”
the short answer is that I wanted to do it myself. this project is really personal to me. as a way of brief introduction, i started my transition to a full-time creative after working in more traditional jobs in investment banking + product at a sf unicorn startup. i wanted somewhere that i could be in nature, integrate with local neighbors, and focus on my creative practice. i started looking into viable locations, japan being top of the list, and stumbled upon the akiya real estate crisis that is happening in the country: basically there is an overpopulation of dilapidated buildings, and i discovered that i could purchase a home for about a year’s worth of rent in new york, where i was living at the time. japan was looking better and better
i pitched the idea to a few friends to go in on a house with me — they were convinced, which i expected. but what i didn’t expect is that my friends kept telling their friends (who also wanted in) and over time, more and more people wanted to join, so we opened it up to the public. then joi san retweeted my tweet, an influx of people joined the discord, and the rest is history. ((there’s a concept in psychology i learned called the “value action gap” which basically is the space between what people say that they want and what people actually do: everyone wants to own a house in the japanese countryside, but no one actually does it. what AKIYA does, is that it provides a structure for people to do so, share the goods, and help japan along the way.))
we quickly grew into a digital community of more than 1,000 people centered around the same objective of purchasing an akiya: a network state in the making. there were so many ideas around the synergies that could happen from all these individuals working together, sharing resources, learnings, and even space in homes. moreover, with now an international community, we learned that the problem we were solving wasn’t unique to japan. many felt inspired by our initiative, and had ideas to do it in their own personal countries that were undergoing the same real estate crisis: with $1 houses in italy, ghost villages in india, abandoned homes in korea, and more.
but our first challenge was japan. in going through this research and purchase process, we started running into a lot of logistical challenges: both operational + country-specific, as well as budding community related ones. in short, there was no centralized playbook for any of these things. again: both for purchasing an akiya, as well as how to seed emerging online cultures into IRL locations.
so back to web3.
we need shared tools and systems for digital and physical coordination. and i believe we can do this in a distributed, web3-enabled way
to me, web3 means experimenting with different ways to connect and coordinate with each other, how to preserve public goods, and how to play infinite games with infinite people. it’s about sovereignty + collective ownership (specifically: psychological ownership: what it means to build something as part of a collective). it’s about how to trust each other, and ultimately about becoming good neighbors.
AKIYA is a really special project to me, because i truly believe that it takes a stab at doing all of these things, especially the last point, which is the foundation that enables the rest to occur.
so my question is now, with this project, could we make a playbook that allows for this kind of infrastructure?
with this project, i think we can. from a physical infrastructure standpoint, we can overcome operational challenges via tapping into our distributed but local networks. by doing so, we then provide space for the digital infrastructure regarding community practices to seed and develop over time. we do this by crystallizing our learnings into an open-source digital playbook, promoting real-time knowledge sharing, communal living and network connectivity. oftentimes, valuable lessons are lost when a community disbands, but by creating a knowledge sharing network among houses, we can continuously iterate and aggregate learnings across an international network.
through this process, we believe we can set a precedent, starting first in japan, a country that is characterized by a high trust society, large economic opportunity, and a government focused on collective wellbeing - all the ingredients necessary for success. // we will start by consolidating resources for people to buy akiyas of their own, add to our network if they so choose, and / or also enable them to launch communities within them, or the ones that we own as a DAO. we want to decouple active ownership from governance, but also make it possible for the two to co-exist and add synergies with each other.
even though they are geographically dispersed, it is important to note AKIYA is connected via a kind of coherent culture. while decentralized cultural experimentation and cross-pollination will occur, the memberships all represent belonging in a community of artists and builders.
AKIYA represents an ecosystem of ecosystems, and we’re looking to inspiration from federal and state charters to allow for both cultural and economic emergence and sustainability