What is Ethereum Localism?

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(opens PDF in separate tab). It also sprouted a conversation which eventually led to the temporary suspension of PDX DAO until such a time as there is a sufficient network infrastructure in place to generate a meaningfully decentralized City DAO by that name (the time is nigh!).

Still, it fell short of synthesis - ultimately, crypto people talked about crypto stuff, localists talked about the city and the bioregion, and how exactly the two touched stayed by the wayside. And that’s okay. But as we move forward with both Local DAO Summer(opens in a new tab) and the General Forum on Ethereum Localism(opens in a new tab), it feels like the time for us to offer a frame - still one among a plural many, please take this as a challenge - for the ETH Localism question.

Ethereum is a strange beast: as a kind of local maxima of the more expansive open source culture that has, as a result of sheer practical necessity, inverted corporate production logic entirely, it follows structural patterns that have enormous political economic consequence without a monolithic politics. This pluralism works because its political economic interventions are practical - empirical. Cryptocurrencies don’t endorse any single form of currency, but rather a financial pluralism, an open exploration of the faculties of money; DAOs don’t recommend any particular organizational form, but rather a structure that can be programmed to experimental ends, most concerned with cutting bureaucratic or administrative overhead that would burden the experiment.

Silicon Valley pretended to be a manic exploration of the new while only recapitulating or escalating old forms of domination, control, surveillance, extraction, ideological polarization. For all its technological ingenuity, it rejected what the call to the new truly demands: self-critique, self-transformation, the unsettling of boundaries, the historicizing of received ideas - especially those that benefit or valorize one's own tribe. The injunction is to try. new. things. But the engineer’s lens, the raw metaphysics of the maker(opens in a new tab) that best suits the new, is flat. It sees all tools on an equal plane of the possible. When Silicon Valley looked outside of its tribe, it saw only subjects - NPCs, philosophical zombies to be instrumentalized and exploited. The oldest. fucking. story.

To us, this gross and - against all their white-polycarbonate assumptions of the new - totally archaic dehumanization, was related to a myopic, self-serving definition of what technology is. Partially a response to the resource needs of the time, claiming the techne as “computerized type stuff” was a story of exception, a cynical marketing tale that would have been fine if not absurdly internalized by the very cynics that generated it. Perhaps the most consequential marketing fallacy ever told was the idea that “technology” should be identified by empty, commercial logics of silicon novelty rather than the old law of material adequacy. A shovel is a shovel. The supposedly advanced artifacts we encounter in the retail space, to the extent that they are built around logics of planned obsolescence, are literally anti-technological.

What is Ethereum localism? It’s one of the key dimensions of rejecting this trap. What could we do that would put us more in danger of this ancient myopia than to hack away in cities across the world, but neglect the consonant technologies that inhabit them? If in the Ethereum space we share a hacker sensibility, that sensibility must be generous and expansive to the other cultures around us that are similarly hacking away. We must reject the rigid and self-serving binaries of “low tech” and “high tech” and work in a mutual, embedded culture of adequate technology versus extractive technology.

If the “anti-technological” modes appear dominant, standardized, favored by a kind of international conspiracy of lowest-common-denominator impulses, the nihilism of hollow states(opens in a new tab) and zombie corporate bureaucracies, it has less to do with the actual physical dominance of them than their legibility before captive eyes. In the underworld, renegade technologists continue to explore. Makers in North Portland weld frankenstein cargo bikes with recycled batteries, musicians gather in a pizza shop in Chicago with generation-old brass instruments to continue a weekly jam session extant since the seventies. A psychonaut sweats in a Kentucky basement, subjecting their body to an altered state not known for a century this side of the Himalayas.

Berlin anarchists sit cross legged in Görlitzer Park, tweaking new self-governance rhythms, microtubule alchemy to jointly collapse the wave. S&M is a technology. Permaculture. Protest strategies in Taiwan. Agroforestry in Mexico, community credit circles in Kenya, hybrid cuisines in Kiev, free creation to spite the war. Dōjinshi genre-forks in Tokyo, breathing techniques in Cassadaga. Everyone, everywhere is experimenting all the time, a massive open calculus, a stubborn material creativity. Ideologies rise, capture, go down in flames. The tools always remain in the rubble.

In looking at this productive landscape, this undertold but always churning global creative commons, we couldn’t help but notice the structural resonances between the open source protocols of web3 and the informal, ever disowned protocols of the underworld. There are permissive substrates in the form of knowledge sets and technical protocols. There are vectors of empirical inspiration. And there are social and cultural protocols intended to preserve the openness of the game. A prolix culture, grounded in a material craft, armed with social conventions meant to maintain the prolix attitude of the culture: these are open protocols(opens in a new tab).

Our frame on Ethereum Localism isn’t simply that we identify these kin, that we construct a passive analogy for academic interest - but that we encounter them, that we change them and are changed by them. As the reciprocal claim already suggests, this certainly doesn’t mean shaping the local substrates to our liking. It doesn’t mean offering tokenized mirrors of existing infrastructure, and it doesn’t mean building platforms that would just solve everything if they only had the network effects. The greatest gifts the Ethereum community can offer to the open protocol underground are low overhead organizations, scale agnostic organization models, revenue evil(opens in a new tab) hacks, and a structural framework for a protocolized coup of a proprietary knowledge-sector.

Ethereum localism, in summary - (in this account which is necessarily only one) - is a strategy of reciprocal mimesis between open, protocol-based cultures of the internet and the open pragmatist cultures of cities and bioregions. They are entangled by shared attitudes of immediacy(opens in a new tab), a pirate empiricism, a dread of coercive authority and a cutting sense of adequate technology. They self-identify not around what they are but what they can do, and they judge structures against the mysterious pragmatism of the terrain, whether virtual or material. Mysterious because there is no prescribing what you are - individual, alter, people, swarm - and there is no prescribing what you can or should do. It has to be built.

That possibility space is our Ether.