Speculative P2P and the Urban Protocol Underground: An Update on the Open Protocol Research Group
By Exeunt and the Open Protocol Research Group
The city, so we’ve claimed in the past, is an anticapture device, the high pressure collision of many classes of being into one complete whole, an emergent unity that at once constitutes and undermines its own totalization. It’s a locked event of sustained difference, and any attempt to assert control finds a dissident underground sprouting like daffodils. To paraphrase a certain anarchist Russian poet, “The city is not equal to itself - it stirs and vulcanates.” [1]
Can the same be categorically said of Ethereum? Can we will that? To Ethereum’s novice, the city is a master. But this can’t be a simple matter of learning a prescribed tradition, given that the tradition under discussion is self-overcoming. No, in the inverted logic of the urban local, with its understories and subterranean engines, the master and the student collapse into the substrate plane of practical potential. A possibility space opens up: what can an ethereal body do? How can an alliance between two nodes of anticapture become more monstrous, more open, more self-overcoming?
Our investigations into the urban space began with an initial claim: distinct kinds of open source social protocols found in cities - and particularly in cultural undergrounds - are robustly isomorphic with those of the web3 space, and represent an opportunity for intervention and alliance. That research quickly took us to further reaches, extitutions, protocol undergrounds and the speculative realism they harbor. The Undercapital thesis is what resulted, designating multicapital economic strategies brought to bear to forms of relation illegible to states and institutions but which Ethereum, with its open ontology, could service without flinching.
While these conceptual flights had us at times moving further than our empirical and ethnographic resources could justify - making them provisional frames rather than analytic conclusions - it’s our hope that readers find in this overview a skeleton for their own investigation into the urban cultural possibilities of Ethereum localism.
Open Protocols
From early on in the research vector, we understood that the open protocols of the cultural field had a primary difference from those within a virtual network: while open web protocols depend on a shared computational substrate - a standard - open protocols of the urban field have only practical adequacy, the hardness of certain material conditions and the shifting features of the socio-cognitive fabric of the city as their shared substrate.
Despite this fact, the propagation of these urban protocols formally mirrors what we see in the Ethereum ecosystem in distinct ways. (Informally) codified knowledge sets for urban gardening, for community organizing or throwing a party in an unregulated setting, for squatting a warehouse or wheatpasting a message or getting a zine out, spread in a free and coherent manner ambivalent to traditional institutional infrastructure. They fork and merge to meet different landscapes of implementation. Teams of developers find temporary cultural cache and then dissolve into the milieu, while their creations persist and change. Most importantly, all of this social and intellectual reproduction happens outside of the channels of institutional control and coercion. Open protocolization, it became clear, was the fate of knowledge outside of the walls of institutional sanction.
Unsheltered from these boundaries, with their organizational propaganda, bureaucratic compulsions and procedural ossification, open protocols face the hard realities and pressures of the outside - institutional coherence is instead replaced by productive fracture, and impractical strategies are naturally selected out by the experience of free agents. [2] This was expressed in what we called “a twin commitment to divergent exploration and material grounding,” that is, characteristic features of memeticism and empiricism that seem unavoidable for protocols in extitutional settings. [3] In retrospect we might say that open protocols are about hacking the material world to find wells of possibility space: the twin question is always, does it work (performative or impractical gestures don’t survive) and does it allow me to improvise, generate novelty, be creative? (If a protocolist was interested in following orders, they’d join an institution.)
This broad grammar for seeing the city, as it were, inverted, led to several insights. We’ll give them an overview, then return to what the open protocol framework might imply for local interventions by Ethereum and how it might even help us better understand Ethereum itself, what it is and where it’s going as it likewise searches the economic and computational ruliad for its own possibility wells.
Extitutions
As the Ethereum ecosystem itself has found, because of the heavy grasp that legacy infrastructure has on the flows of economic and intellectual reproduction, an institutional “front” is sometimes needed to maintain protocols in their open and free form, taking the place of interlocutor with legacy forces while they construct autonomous zones which will inevitably intentionally obsolete them. What exactly this looks like in the Ethereum space is a complicated question - you can use your imagination - but in the urban sphere, they operate with a distinct purity and levity that makes them easy to identify.
The archetype of the extitution - for us, deployed as a slight alteration of Jessie Kate Schingler and Primavera de Filippi’s extitutional theory [4] to mean distinct entities rather than informal undersides of institutions themselves - was a Portland friend’s description of the late 90’s/early 2000’s indie scene. To paraphrase: We were starting record labels like it was nothing, running them into the ground and starting over. Call it a way of protecting ourselves from success. “Extitutions,” we wrote in our first document, “wear institutional masks” - they’re formal status tells one story, but any organizational planner or MBA would be stunned at the irresponsibility, or incoherence, with which they wield this entity.
If this is the case, it is because their “legibility” is a farce, their coherence accountable to an utterly different calculus: the free propagation of the protocol.
Protocol Undergrounds
This touches on a key dimension of open protocols, mainly that they are inextricably linked to cultural undergrounds. In a fruitful foray into a more archival approach to the protocol underground question, we looked at four historical cases: the California LSD scene of the 70s and 80s, the UK Free Party Movement, the West Coast Appropriate Technology Movement of the 70’s and the Bay Area S&M scene of the same time. For each of these scenes, we identified an extitution (the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, Spiral Tribe, RAIN and the Society of Janus, respectively) and a value it distinctly embodied/ helped export to the cultural field.
| Open Protocol | Extitution | Value |
| LSD | Brotherhood of Eternal Love | cognitive pluralism |
| Free Party | Spiral Tribe | high agency |
| Appropriate Technology | RAIN | autonomy |
| S/M | Society of Janus | consent |
Notably, all of the above protocols were culturally marginalized and, at one point or another, very illegal - this seems to have been a historical prerequisite for the development of autonomous values. For more on these particular scenes, you can check out my Local DAO Summer talk [5] and our second essay, “Sketches Toward a Theory of the Protocol Underground” [6], but the crucial point is how they helped us construct a set of characteristics to not just explain the protocol underground, but the nature of the alternative values that keep its inhabitants avoiding institutional scaling at all costs.
Later, in “Undercapital,” [7] we identified three hazards of scaling that inform the intentionality of the underground: 1) Institutional-behavioral bias, a set of regulatory and cultural “multipolar traps” that lead to reflexively policed passive consumption (elsewhere known as the problem of spectacle) 2) Limits to circulation of scene protocols, wherein mutual expectations of high agency and consent are logistically difficult to scale vertically, 3) Cults of personality, for obvious reasons including internal capture, the degrading presence of a figurehead to withdraw agency to, and a target for external capture.
To quote from “Sketches”: “there is no objective vibe, there is no monopoly of the real. Feeling, sense, atmosphere are relational, and without institutions to impose a mystified neutrality - the oppressive, monoculture din of a Walgreens, bank, or a hospital - we are challenged with the responsibility and freedom to constitute for ourselves what the sense of things are, and in so doing, redefine what possibilities exist in them.” Of course members of the underground depart, conform, become institutional subjects through and through, but the underground persists because its forms are innately decentralized, capture resistant, modular, free and open.
Speculative Realism & Undercapital
In the farthest reaches of our thinking this year, we realized the ontological significance of the alternative and aggressively pluralistic tactics of the open protocol form, one that points to a much needed cultural orientation for the Ethereum ecosystem itself.
By ontology, we mean, of course, what is real - namely, what entities enjoy legibility in a system when you’re drawing one up. If cultural undergrounds are ontologically creative (in part because of their deployment of a maximally permissive knowledge reproduction strategy), it is because their acute sense of aesthetic self-determination - against all passivity and spectacle - ceases to be disciplined into a category of art and infects all manner of organizational logistics, governance and economics. In cultural undergrounds, the pluralistic forking of open protocols locates itself at the speculative edge of the real, and its empirical imagination actively builds around exotic entities: scene egregores, crowd consciousnesses, agential vibes and colors out of space.
To speak of these entities in institutional time is to be subject to ridicule, but immersion into the protocol underground is an empirical ordeal that alters your tolerance quotient of what is real by showing you, through inputs and outputs, what works. The economic space of undercapital is rich with empirically realized, underinstitutional inputs and outputs that point the way toward a pragmatic, formalized, interoperable action space under a condition of social creativity and imagination.
Ethereum as a tool for Prefigurative Infrastructure
If there is a meaningful consistency between the extitutional strategy of open protocolization and the proliferation of open web protocols in the Ethereum ecosystem, the question becomes, where has one succeeded where the other has failed?
For the undergrounds, it’s on the level of cultural imagination, for they have elevated the death of institutional values to an ontological status and discovered new seats of agency that point to new ways of living in the world. In flights of microeconomic planning and ad hoc governance, they have developed atmospheres and corridors of social life that are peopled with far weirder creatures than any institutionally sanctioned humanism could contain.
On the other hand, these experiments in many-worlding remain scarce, offering little threat of competition to the dominant systems that enjoy robust channels of expansion and reproduction. Reproducing without the above mentioned “hazards of scaling” has remained a taboo for these undergrounds, while for the Ethereum community, the nurturing and resourcing of free protocols is a technical problem with dozens of engineered solutions, from DAOs to self curated registries to token engineering and exotic participatory funding strategies to the many hybrids between them.
Cities represent an ancient and creative locus for the capture and censorship resistance Ethereum aspires to. If their cultural undergrounds have long since discovered open protocolization as a natural defense against an (often legally enforced) institutional hegemony, along with scenes and extitutional storefronts to expand those protocols, their sole limitation is the one of scaling. To our eye, many scene veterans are morbidly content with the fatalism of this project: to scale is to die (a sensible impulse, given the barriers mentioned above). Against this self-reinforcing impasse, Ethereum’s pragmatic sensibility offers an exit: in a machinic, thermodynamically grounded formalization without institutions, the social tendency to pluralism and empathic imagination could be unleashed.
The Open Protocol Research Group is Ven Gist, MacksWolf and Exeunt. We are a research initiative of Portland’s Ethereal Forest DAO, currently conducting interviews in the Portland region to gain insight on the autonomous structures that animate our present - and the promise they hold for our future.
notes
[1] Aleksandr Svyatogor, “Biocosmic Individualism,” https://cosmos.art/cosmic-bulletin/2022/biocosmic-interindividualism
[2] Check Ven and Exeunt’s pre-OPRG publication Friends of the Outside: Control, Substrates and the Afterlife of DAOs for a little lyrical indulgence on this topic. https://zora.co/collect/oeth:0x2d17e1c913a616e30ff267afda30a69d9ad25343.
[3] Note that legacy institutions are often handicapped by the panoply of forces that make their internal protocols antimemetic and anti-empirical.
[4] Jessy Kate Schingler and Primavera de Filippi, “An Introduction to Extitutional Theory,” January 2021, Berkman Klein Center Collection, https://medium.com/berkman-klein-center/an-introduction-to-extitutional-theory-e74b5a49ea53.
[5] “Open Protocols and Extitutions in Urban Spaces with Exeunt (July 24, 2024)”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0_DAodA0Js.
[6] Open Protocol Research Group, “Sketches Toward a Theory of the Protocol Underground,” July 2024, https://mirror.xyz/openprotocolresearch.eth/YuZvCx5ge2nQXo8L2n0iWKN_CflivaCfsoLNMoVTqf4.
[7] Open Protocol Research Group, Undercapital: Open Protocols and the Underground Potential of the Distributed Ledger, September 2024, https://gallery.manifold.xyz/optimism/listing?listingId=586.
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