the discourse around ai and the left has been weird and confusing so i was on @culturejourno to talk about it i think there are three questions to ask yourself to know where you might stand in the landscape - is ai dangerous - is ai "magical"? - is ai in a financial bubble?

Flashback to when the Summit was featured on @euronews piped.video/watch?v=wpeyHyDb…

Tiny robots. Lasers. No one in charge. So Kanno's Lasermice spent the summit communicating through pulses of light, reacting to their neighbors until the swarm began to sync on its own. A decentralized network you could watch scurry around the floor.

You saw the talks, the performances and the people on stage. Behind you, someone was watching the sound levels. Above you, someone had spent hours getting the lights right. Before you arrived, every mic, screen and projector had been checked (and checked again). A shoutout to the tech crew who made sure the spotlight stayed on everyone else.

You got two days of digital freedom, decentralized tech and a lot of very different experiences to enjoy. But do you know what it took to make all of that happen? A lot of cables. A lot of boxes. A decent amount of pizza. And enough coffee to keep an entire volunteer crew moving through Funkhaus. Some infrastructure is more decentralized than others.

A lot of thought went into the Web3 Summit merch. Every detail was designed to feel like it belonged, from the artwork to the things you'd actually want to take home with you. Judging by how quickly some of it disappeared, you liked it too. We might need to make more next year.

Before Playground.dot could become a place to experiment, build and play, someone had to build the thing itself. The tables. The tools. The quests. The infrastructure running underneath it all. We built the infrastructure. You got to enjoy the Playground.

We didn't want people at the summit thinking about infrastructure. They were meeting people, trying new things, building, learning and grabbing something to eat. And that's exactly the point. The tech should work while people get on with everything else. Like paying for lunch.

90 people deployed a decentralized app at Playground.dot. Most had never built on Polkadot before. 272 .dot domains were published. 49 apps were forked from someone else's code. Some people arrived with little more than a laptop and an idea. They left with something they'd actually built running on Polkadot. That's what Playground.dot was for.

Who owns the things you post online? Who profits from your data? How much should an AI know about you? Digital freedom made headlines at Web3 Summit, as @euronews came to Berlin to talk to Yanis Varoufakis, Bill Laboon, Joshua Davila and others about who gets control over our lives online. Turns out, Web3 has a lot more to talk about than crypto.

The idea is simple: the person who produces data should be the one who benefits from it. That's the ideal. Getting there is a process, not an overnight utopia, and it's what web3 is working towards. Polkadot Mobile and Desktop are built on technology designed to move us closer to that world, where the person producing the data, the individual user, remains the owner of their own data, and of the benefits stemming from that ownership. More insights from @BillLaboon at @Web3summit 2026 below.

Before Web3 Summit, Funkhaus looked like this. Empty halls. Empty stages. A lot of space waiting to be filled. Then you arrived. Dozens of conversations, ideas, introductions, debates and chance encounters later, it looked like this. Same place. Very different Funkhaus.

Resonant Ecology did not look the same on day two as it did on day one. Rahul Sharma's installation sensed movement, presence, and participation, and responded. A living visual ecosystem that grew, decayed, and reorganised around the people inside it. Every visitor left a mark on it. Nobody controlled it.

One structure. Many hands. No single author. Sheraya's One of a Kind invited everyone at Web3 Summit to help assemble a 2.5-metre wooden sculpture by drawing on it, writing on it, leaving their mark on something that could only exist because strangers chose to build it together. Decentralized creation. In wood.

In a space full of screens and code, Veronika Janovec worked with clay. Her installation Actions Toward Sculpture brought something rare to a Web3 summit - slowness. Every gesture visible. Every decision made in front of you. The material fragile, the process unhurried. A reminder that not all creation moves at the speed of a deploy.

Art on the canvases. Music in the air. Wood shavings on the floor. And in the Playground . dot area: a Proof of Delay app conceived on a delayed train, a cargo-ship DAO, a cypherpunk manifesto, and a rock-paper-scissors game that 34 people starred before the day was out. Different kinds of making. Same energy.

Even @gavofyork got into the groove at the Live-Coding Music workshop at Web3 Summit. Turns out building decentralized infrastructure and making music have more in common than you think. Write the code, hear it play, change a line, hear it change. Music as a living thing you shape in real time.

Music is code. Code is music. The Live-Coding workshop at Web3 Summit put a laptop and headphones in your hands and asked you to make something from nothing. No instruments. No sheet music. Just logic, sound, and whatever you were brave enough to try. Creation is chaotic but catchy, don't you think?

While some corners of Funkhaus were filled with ambient music and wet paint, another corner was filled with keyboards, terminal windows, and the quiet focus of people shipping something for the first time. 190 developers. 272 .dot domains. 49 apps forked from each other's code. Web3 Summit contained multitudes.

Not everything in Web3 has to be digital. Ascending Transmission made something you could hold. You made a series of choices. An app by Metakosmia turned them into a shape. A laser engraver cut that shape into metal. You left wearing something that did not exist before you arrived. A small, personal proof that what you bring to a space leaves a mark.