Blog

February 21, 2025

The following appeared as the introduction to the publication *Ethereum Localism: Grounding the Future of Coordination*, released on the first day of GFEL Boulder 2025. Find the book here for purchase or for free at greenpill.network . The first General Forum on Ethereum Localism gathered web3 regens, community organizers, open source contributors, commons economists and mycopunks at a warehouse under Portland, Ore.’s Hawthorne bridge to talk about local implications of the Ethereum thesis. The GFEL series, first posed as a memetic...

February 21, 2025

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...

September 10, 2024

The following essay marks a significant expansion of both the open protocol strand of our research and the archival detour into what we have called “the protocol underground” that precedes it in this pamphlet. In it, we attempt to explain the behavior of the underground through the lens of the virtual, a philosophical concept for the real and materially embedded trace of potential that exists within or perhaps alongside the world of proper things. This trace is articulated in a...

August 13, 2024

Mark Lakeman is the founder of City Repair, a social permaculture group in Portland Oregon active since the 90’s, and the architecture firm Communitecture, which does accompanying work in ecological design and place-based community infrastructure. Being the instigator of several legendary regulatory coups in our city, Lakeman was a clear first choice for our interview series, which concerns autonomous, protocol-based strategies for building community infrastructure beyond institutions. While Lakeman agreed with many of our science fiction impulses about scaling the city’s underground capacities...

July 10, 2024

The movement Philip groans—­ the undercommons, the underlanguage, underground, underwater, which is the ­ people’s macrophone—­ wants to know/make the relationship between form and instability, when the informal becomes a form of life precisely insofar as it is where forms of life come from.­ There is an ecol­ogy of unaccountable self-­positing, unaccountable­ because what’s more and less than self, disposed and without position or deposition, makes this positing in refusing being bought and sold. The logistics—­ the analogistics, the ecologistics—of...

June 29, 2024

When we first suggested the theme of Ethereum Localism in anticipation of the GFEL conference, it was a totally open ended provocation, meant to stir up a diversity of interpretations. The result was definitely generative, putting varied bioregional thinkers in sync, exposing members of the Ethereum community to the Collaborative Finance (CoFi) meme, and even helping to spur the creation of the MyCoFi book. It also sprouted a conversation which eventually led to the temporary suspension of PDX DAO until...

May 26, 2024

This piece was published roughly two years ago under the Commons Technology Project, a core piece of the collaboration that would later become Ethereal Forest. The premise of an organizational inspiration guided by “the material problem at hand, a heretic faith in the terrain” runs through Ethereal Forest and is a key theme in the project of the Open Protocol Research Group, a key element of our vision of Ethereum Localism. We are, in the most literal sense, empiricists. *Toadvine sat...

May 6, 2024

TL;DR: GFEL is taking place from Friday, September 13th to Sunday, September 15th in Portland, Oregon, with pre- and post-conference days on Thursday, September 12th and Monday, September 16th. Apply to attend Attention anons, regens, neotechnics alike. GFEL 2024 nears. Once again we chose Friday the 13th as the date because, why shouldn’t we? The odds are against us. For the regenerative systems we work for to succeed, some entrenched power interests are going to need to have some very...

April 4, 2024

The Open Protocol Research Group is Ven Gist, MacksWolf and Exeunt. We are a research initiative of Portland’s Ethereal Forest DAO, and currently conducting interviews in the Portland region to gain insight on the informal structures that animate our present - and the promise they hold for our future. Last year, Portland’s crypto localist initiative Ethereal Forest - which had already been concerned with intersections of web3 and urban resilience strategies - went a step further in its research practice to...

February 8, 2024

Tl;dr As a corollary and expansion to Vitalik Buterin's philosophy of technological optimism (d/acc), we invoke Lewis Mumford's *neotechnic revolution, a transition to decentralized power structures catalyzed by alternatives to fossil fuels. Mumford envisions a technologically advanced form of the medieval workshop and horticulture based production modes, a decentralized manufacturing apparatus which we argue aligns with both Vitalik's defensive technology thesis and the web3 project at large. We end by proposing a Quadratic Funding round to catalyze research and development...

January 30, 2024

At Ethereal Forest we take it as our duty to spread the twin ethos of decentralization and direct democracy, to energize people’s sense of the organizationally possible and to awaken people’s capacities for coordination and commons self-management. One of the best ways we can do this is by evangelizing the web3 tool of p2p-enabled, low-overhead spontaneous organizations that we call DAOs with their now vast library of composable inputs for radical democracy and participatory economics. In accordance with this mission, Ethereal...

November 8, 2023

Wherein we rid ourselves of the PDX DAO name, so that its ghost might possess us. In the aftermath of the General Forum on Ethereum Localism, after taking a breath from our immersion in the web of new connections and entanglements, we’ve come to consider the event a wild success. A global community gathered to discuss (in makerspaces and warehouses, DIY saunas and ecovillages, and never without a joint on the loading dock) the enigma of localism, the hydra of its...