Kyla: How did you get started with Interintellect?

Anna: My background is in philosophy and linguistics.  I worked for 12 years as a journalist, and cultural organizer. I also wrote numerous plays and screenplays. I worked with writers working on screenplays and plays as a dramaturg or a script doctor. And I worked a lot on dialogue analysis, for instance, with investigative journalists recording secret tapes. I kind of lived this very humanities life, I taught at a university, I published, I wrote poetry, lyrics, worked with bands, and was just kind of like living my little life.

I'm not really trying to do anything great with it.  And then in 2016, as a political immigrant now living in London, I started noticing patterns in public language that greatly concerned me. They reminded me of what was going on in Hungary before I left.  And I had a severe deja vu, and I realized that I just don't want the same thing to happen and kind of cascade out and start happening all over the world.

I looked at my CV and asked myself, If I were really, really compelled to step up and do something, what would I do? Then I took basically everything I had in my background. You know, I had built Hungary's then-biggest women's rights platform. I had managed rock bands. I had written all these movies and films.I have a theoretical background in linguistics and dialogue modelling. And I just kind of realized that I had to build an organization that makes a direct impact on the world, that writing and teaching were no longer enough in some sense in this particular field. And you had to build dialogue products with which people can, you know, act in an empowered way in the world.

A couple of years of experimentation followed. So this was maybe September, October 2016, and then by early 2019, the current shape of Interintellect was born. We went through an AI phase when I was building an AI language tool to understand conflict and polarization better. It went through a phase when I thought it might be a think tank with researchers that produces adversarial research.

And then this idea gradually emerged of letting seekers build a community that produces events around ideas in which the entire world can be included.  Apolitical and multidisciplinary choices and preferences within the community will keep the norm. We need to have really patient, open and open-ended conversations with each other. I basically became a little bit of an anthropologist of my own users, just watching what people were doing, polling them, seeing what they needed.

Soon this figure of the intellectual orphan emerged who doesn't really feel that any of the Cathedral institutions represent her - she might be a third culture person or at least within America having relocated - it might be a person who has never went to an Ivy League school, who is building up his or her presence outside traditional media outlets or platforms.

But it doesn't mean that this person wants to have a one-way intellectual life. It's beautiful to have a contemplative life of the mind, but we are also agentic citizens of the world and we want to have conversations because conversations are where things happen. That's where you find out how other people think, or if you have been wrong, or that's where through the combination of two people's ideas, the correct idea is born. Our lives are changed in conversation.

So that's what I've been doing ever since. Interintellect today is a curated marketplace for artists and intellectuals surrounded by a community who are very helpful for getting started and continuous support. We have all these events every day that people are running online and offline. Plus we also have a community tier where people pay us monthly or yearly and they get extra access to free events, members only events, offline gatherings, or discounts on major festivals or series.

Kyla: And a lot of it is decentralized, right? So like, decentralized infrastructure, taking advantage of things like Zoom. Has that been helpful, having that access?

Anna: Especially geographically, yes, but editorially as well because I really don't want to create a monoculture and I always encouraged all the people who use Interintellect to go all in on their own preferences and tastes.

We have multiple different subcultures within interintellect. We have psychedelic people and postrat people and tpot people and there is STEM, science people, we have finance people, I mean, people who attend your events, Kyla, right? I love the diversity. The one commitment we make is that this is a nonpolitical space where you will have constructive conversations with people coming together from a variety of different places.

You will have salons online or offline that are very, very chill. You will have some that are more intellectually challenging. You will have some that are more like debates or more like talks. But it's also really important that different geographies, even within America, carry very, very different needs and cultures.

I always tell our San Francisco or LA or Bangalore communities -  do your own thing locally. As what people in your city need, right? There are types of events that a New Yorker will want to show up to. There are types of things that you can do in San Francisco that you can't do anywhere else.

We rely quite heavily on local community leads. I definitely don't want to position myself in any way that I'm an all-knowing community lead. I have some ideas about places that I've visited, but I, you have to have the ability to know that it's people locally or locally within a subculture who know what's best for them and your job when building  a platform is just to help them.

Again, this is like the true decentralization when you even leave it up to people whether they want crypto or not. So if somebody in my community wants to be into crypto and, and, and, and, and, you know, if the public is interested in events, we will have those events.

But we are not pushing anything on anybody. I do think that eventually, as the community develops, we will have at least some co-op type, equity share, and revenue share structures.  , and just from a logical point of view - it is crypto products that offer the features that you need to do this smoothly, I very strongly think that in a few years we will have some of that.

Yeah, like an Interntellect token, almost. Yeah, absolutely, a token. We will have badges very soon for hosts as kind of a first step, but to increase the ownership of the most committed community members, definitely.

Kyla: Where do you think the future of the creative economy, where do you think it's going?

Anna: Right now, honestly, I don't know. I see so many mixed signals. I feel like we're living through a weakening of both centralized and decentralized systems. I know it sounds very illogical, but somehow they are evening each other out right now in mainstream culture in a way that very few people really benefit from. When you were on the panel with Sahil Lavingia and Coleman Hughes at The Future of Publishing event that we did together in April, we talked a little bit about how the most successful young creators like the three of you have to figure out a way to almost run their careers as a business where you have to combine the centralized and decentralized tools. All three of you were published by Penguin, right? Whilst you have this enormous online following. So everybody right now combines. But I think it's actually quite rare right now to be as successful as you three are. Eric Hoel just published an incredible piece on how difficult it is to live from writing today.

Right now for most people, it's the worst of both worlds. It's very rare to find people for whom it's the best of both worlds, especially young people, because if you're an older, more established intellectual, you can kind of transition or diversify your portfolio.

But to start with a diversified portfolio is really difficult. First of all, it's a lot of work. Also the two games are completely different. So you have two games basically. We see simultaneously, for example, a centralizing effect around Substack, right, as they build all these like social mediatype products as a way to compete with X. And as a result there's increased activity. A lot of people are hanging out on Substack, but it's also quite limited. Right? t's niches. Like we still today, the big blog posts that we are talking about, you know, Moloch, the Cathedral, the Gervais principle, like all of those big blog posts we are still talking about are pre substack.

But there's something structurally so insanely interesting about this decentralized centralization.  An oxymoron, right? You have like a limited cluster of insane activity that is within itself quite intellectually diverse. It is clearly beautifully designed.

Under a microscope, it has all the characteristics structurally of a centralized information system, yet it's not actually centralizing the world. It's just centralizing microcultures. And I think that in many ways is the worst of both worlds. Because if you're counterculture, and if you're within the microculture,  then you should be more punk.

Centralization is basically like a trade off when you say I give up part of my freedom in exchange for a more comfortable life. So if I'm in a microculture and it's very uncomfortable there, right? Because nobody else in the wider world understands what I'm talking about, but it behaves as a centralized system.

When you have the worst of both worlds, that's like a huge pain signal from the world. Like something is not right and people don't currently know what to do.

Kyla: And do you think like crypto and decentralization further would help that? Or do you think it is like going to have to be a mix of the two?

Anna: So first of all, crypto definitely has a pain signal built into it, which is this huge distrust of institutions. It’s built on a trustless world, right? And to me, that's very, very interesting. I think for me, it was Li Jin’s idea that crypto kind of helps make John Rawls more a reality kind of changed my mind about it because she brought in the kind of idea of the distributive justice into crypto that I'd never really considered before. And I'm really grateful to her for having written that John Rawls piece a couple of years ago. It's very hard to tell because it's still a baby, but for me, it's impossible to imagine a world where the blockchain is not going to be a foundational reality.

I look at Worldcoin and I think this makes sense. Obviously, we will have a much higher level of surveillance and digital presence in our lives, even more than now, like what we have now will look medieval looking back. I hope that when we get there, it's going to be a decentralized and trustless system and not some government monopoly as it is in China looking at your medical data whenever you are trying to buy, I don't know, a six pack.

Kyla: Right. Yeah. Like a social credit system.

Anna: Ideally, not that. And I think this is where worldcoin and AGI are so beautifully opposed. And it's so interesting that they come from the same people because both admit that the future will be technically a black box and we will have no idea how it works.

I mean, the same way as, I mean, half of your career is about explaining the Fed because nobody understands it, right? It's already kind of a black box but they are two very different  possibilities for the black box, right? Like AGI is a black box where nobody but AGI knows what's happening. So you are kind of in this infantilized world.

The Worldcoin idea or using crypto technology is not just for financial transactions, but basically any time you have to identify yourself in the world  is saying nobody knows, period. The system also doesn't know. And I think if there is comfort in the future, in the inevitable future, if there's no Great Filter and we make it there, that it's, it's more that. We want to be equal participants, right?

Kyla: I think that's definitely the general theme of worry. You see it in the political system too. Like people, there's so much reaction and people oftentimes don't know what they're reacting to. It's really tough - uncertainty is I think the biggest word right now.

Anna: Yeah, absolutely. And I think this is where your vibes thesis comes into play so much. I just started writing this new piece called Personal Theology, about what I call the “hope axis”. And I believe that in today's political landscape, it's the hope axis that's the most important and no longer the “wokes” versus the conservatives. The question of whether, I think, whether there is hope is going to be the fundamental question.

I believe that almost all moral reactions are taste reactions. So I'm very Kantian in this sense. So, you know, people who are like, technology is bad and social media is bad and people play too many video games and watch too much TV and read too many Telegrams, you know, or ride too many bicycles in the 1920s, you know, that's a vibe, that's taste, right?

That's morally denouncing people based on a gut feeling you have and but maybe, you know, an obsession with the future is also a kind of vibe. And it's also a kind of running away or the rejection of something. And I keep thinking about what.  What is an existence that doesn't reject either the past or the future, and whether we can kind of be there in the middle.

Kyla: I was reading Douglas Rushkoff, and he talks about how time is compressed to the past and the present and the future. And so it's almost impossible to not look forward and to look back because everything is now. Nobody knows how to process time because it's all, it's like super relative right now.

Anna: Our personal past is very recent and it's already insanely complex, right? So our past is not bucolic, like, Oh, there was this village and then my grandfather and my great grandfather, like let out the cows in the morning and fed them. And then we went and sang around the fire.

It's more like my parents had super complicated jobs and we moved around. So there was all this social media and there were all these subcultures and there were all these internet rooms. Are we going to romanticize such complex and modern pasts?

So even our nostalgia is incredibly complex and as complex as the present. You can't say that our pasts were innocent. So people are nostalgic about stuff where I'm like. I don't know why. I mean, okay. You're like fantasizing about 1986  like, wow, that was great. I for one think Chernobyl happened in 1986, how was that better?

Kyla: It's very rose-colored glasses, and yeah, I don't know. There's so much to talk about with that stuff. Any final thoughts?

Anna: Come to Interintellect. And if you want to have more crypto themed events, List them. And we will make sure that we will bring you non-crypto people as well.

About the series: Checking in on Squad Wealth is a 4-part editorial series investigating the path toward a blockchain-dominant future, where financial tools are intertwined with cultural narratives.

With essays by a storied cast of eminent culture and finance experts including Anna Gát, Gaby Goldberg, and Jose Fernandez da Ponte, and Kyla Scanlon.