A desert sunset over the playa A huge low sun sinks toward a flat cracked desert horizon beneath distant mountains. Stars emerge in the purple sky above. A small turtle silhouette walks in the foreground.

A letter between brothers

The Desert Letter— for Jeremy —

Coffins and showers first. Vision at sunset.

The heartbeat

Road-to-Playa Is Ticking

Jeremy — the camp is real and it's moving. Somewhere between the packing lists and the dust, Terrible Turtle Camp went from an idea we talk about all year into a thing with dates attached. Twenty to thirty turtles, converging on the same patch of nothing, to build the same something we always build. I can already hear the generator. I can already taste the coffee.

Here's where we are, brother — the road, as it stands:

  1. Jul 30 – Aug 1 Dress Rehearsal at the Gulch

    Full camp, on land, before the dust. We shake it all down where mistakes are cheap.

  2. Aug 12 The Trailer Leaves Colorado

    Coffins, showers, kitchen, shade — the whole skeleton of the city rolls west.

  3. Aug 24 Playa Arrival

    We drive in together, like always. The desert does what it does to a person.

  4. Aug 28 First Cooking

    The kitchen lights up. A camp becomes a family the moment it feeds itself.

For the camp, by family

What We Built for the Dust

You know I've been heads-down all year. What you maybe don't know is how much of it was pointed at home — at our camp, at the twenty-some-odd turtles who show up every August and deserve infrastructure that loves them back.

Turtle Ops

The camp's operations platform

Every moving piece of Terrible Turtle Camp, tracked in one living place — 277 items across 10 domains, from water to shade to kitchen to the trailer itself. The thing that used to live in a dozen spreadsheets and everybody's memory now lives somewhere we can all see it.

See the camp's heartbeat ↗

Terri

The camp AI

The camp has its own agent now. Terri runs on Turtle Ops — she knows the lists, the domains, the state of things — and she serves the camp without ever sending it a bill. Ask her what's outstanding before the trailer leaves. She'll know.

The Fork-This-Camp Kit

The gift that leaves with everyone

Everything we built for the turtles is packaged so any camp can take it and make it their own — released as open source, a gift to all camps. The playa taught us gifting; the kit is just the playa, applied to infrastructure.

No camp should ever have to choose between organization and magic.

The meditation

The Thing Under the Camp

Road-to-Playa is ticking and I've been thinking about what we're actually driving toward. Not the camp — the thing under the camp.

A city appears from dust because people create. And it disappears, clean, because nothing is extracted. No invoices on the playa. No platform taking its cut of the gift. Seventy thousand people build the most generous city on Earth, and then they pack it out and leave nothing but dust that remembers them kindly.

The playa is the original giving economy. It just doesn't scale past the desert — yet.

Here's the question that's been living in me all year: what happens when every camp, every artist, every family like ours gets their own crew of agents — ones that serve them, carry the logistics, guard the magic — and never bill them into silence? What happens when the infrastructure of a gift economy costs as close to nothing as the desert asks of us: just show up and create?

That's what I've been building. Turtle Ops is one camp's worth of it. The rest is bigger, and it starts the same way the city does — from dust, with friends.

The heart of it, by the fire

Expansive Circularity

There's a thing I've believed for years, Jeremy, and I don't know that I've ever said it to you as plainly as I'm about to. Around a fire is the right place for it. You've watched me live it every August — now here are the words. It's my personal theory of circularity, the one I carry everywhere:

“The more I give, the more I receive — the gift expands in a circular expansion. If I constantly need to ask before I offer — if I need a gatekeeper to be my employer — that is a contracting circularity, feeding inward, imploding. I create an expansive circularity — the gift moving outward, growing with every orbit — that will bring global peace, love, and prosperity.”

— Shaka's theory of circularity · the one he lives by

The playa is expansive circularity, brother — you've felt it every year. Nobody asks permission to offer a gift at the burn. There are no gatekeepers in the dust, no one standing between you and the thing you want to give. The circle out there feeds outward, and every gift makes the next one bigger. That is why the desert feels like freedom.

The default world runs the other way. Ask before you offer. Beg a gatekeeper to be your employer. Watch the circle feed inward — contracting, imploding — everybody waiting on a permission slip that never quite arrives.

So that's the whole of it, really. Everything I'm building is just the desert's math, carried past the desert's edge — an expansive circularity with room inside it for everyone we've ever loved.

And brother — the theory already runs in the wild: the P.I.T. universe — Public Information Transmission, a forkable protocol for the public good (front door: publicinform.com, live and growing). Genesis arm pits: The Esmeralda P.I.T. (esmeraldapit.com — 149 sessions open-sourced as a gift) and OSO P.I.T. (my ETHGlobal Delhi winner, Most Creative Use of ENS). After the dust settles, the road runs on to Goa and Devcon — the next pits. The pit provides. 🕳️

The only ask

The Sunset Showing

When we're out there, I want to show you one thing. In the dust. In person.

One sunset — you, me, the mountains going purple — and I'll show you what I've actually been doing all year. Not a pitch. Not a deck. Just my best friend seeing the real thing, in the one place where real things are the only currency.

No ask · No commerce · Just the dust and us

Same dust, bigger circle

The Circle Widens

And here's the part that makes me smile, brother — the dust doesn't stay in the desert. After the burn, after the pack-out, after the last moop sweep, the same circle of builders keeps traveling. This year the gifting spirit of the playa is on the road all the way to India, and the circle it's drawing is the biggest it has ever been.

  1. Oct 11 – Nov 1 Edge City India — Goa

    A popup village on Mandrem Beach, North Goa — hundreds of builders, eight to ten residencies, weeks of building side by side by the sea. And the hub at the center of it all is literally called The Circle. You can't make this stuff up. Edge City has convened over twelve thousand builders across nine popup villages since 2023 — and now the village comes to India.

  2. Nov 3 – 6 Devcon 8 — Mumbai

    The big Ethereum gathering at the JIO World Center — and this time its own framing includes “art, music, and spaces shaped by the community.” Not as decoration. As the point. The playa would recognize that immediately.

  3. Nov 6 – 8 Lights After — Mumbai

    Devcon ends two days before Diwali — the festival of lights — and ETHGlobal Mumbai carries the energy straight through the weekend. Builders arriving from every corner of the Earth, landing in a city about to set itself glowing.

No commerce in any of this, Jeremy — you know me better than that. It's the same thing it's always been: people showing up with gifts, and the gifts making room for more people. The playa taught us the principle. India is just the next horizon it travels to. Maybe one year you'll come see for yourself how big the circle can get.

The circle doesn't close. It widens.

See you on the road, brother.

— Shaka