Generative Ledgers as Decentralized State
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 watching him as he made his notations in the ledger, holding the book toward the fire for the light, and he asked him what was his purpose in all this.
The judge’s quill ceased its scratching. He looked at Toadvine. Then he continued to write again.
Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West
The tradition of the illegible teaches us that the state in which we live is not the only state. They were witches and journeymen: benandanti and beguines, gothic masons and shamans, ranters(opens in a new tab) and levelers, upended commoners, guerillas, fugitives. Their works were recorded in incidental reports, the rare testimony(opens PDF in separate tab), more often the records of enemies. Their rebel crafts, their ‘techniques of ecstasy’ and escape held open the door to other worlds, even as they were deprived of the power and voice to reproduce those worlds. Saidiya Hartman writes(opens PDF in separate tab), investigating the sparse archives of black women in the Atlantic slave trade, “We only know what can be extrapolated from an analysis of the ledger or borrowed from the world of her captors and masters and applied to her.” For those women, as for so many others, the archive was the wall of impossibility, the dread impasse — “a death sentence.”
There were those in later years who were energized by the intrigue, the fly-by-night danger and the eros of the hiding. The antisocial thesis of worldbuilding and justice — the mutinous underground, squatting in the warehouse district, drinks at Eve’s Hangout(opens in a new tab), anonymous dispatches in wheatpaste or graffiti. Glued locks on Black Friday — raves, mixtapes. Life during wartime. They managed to inject the Ledger with insurgent messages of difference from the greater cosmos. If those messages were in the end always blotted out, co-opted by the utter blanket of sameness, they could care less — their medium of consistency was refusal.
We owe our breath to their imaginative labors. But the era of refusal is over. At the end of a long season of sameness, we need to commit to the open realization of difference. Put out the candles, roll up the sleeping bags, bring it out to the light. Now, when a million dissenting worlds have been erased(opens in a new tab), and a million more are under threat, too much is at stake. Necessity has spoken. The fruit trees, the creeping things, will clap their hands(opens in a new tab) in the open day, or they won’t clap at all. It is no longer enough to be illegible.
Just because we’ve discerned the way out to the panorama, and we’ve heard the demon talks of trees and circuit boards, doesn’t mean we have to be supernatural about things. Leave it to the interior to wallow in ineffectual delusion (that is, after all, the very name of the interior). The path to the many worlds has always been guided by the material problem at hand, a heretic faith in the terrain. Our foes are between a rock and a hard place, the unreality of their vision like walls closing in on them, while before us is an open landscape of practical action. In the rough singularity of the object-at-hand is the great materialist insight: mechanics is perfectly compatible with the intuition of infinity(opens PDF in separate tab).
The nation-state is a kind of cybernetic organism, a “given umwelt”: it is simply in its nature to preserve itself. If it does so through coercion, if it enacts violence and brutality, if it props up the legibility of systems that cause homogenization, widespread complacency, disempowerment and species death, it is not a question of evil. Its actions shouldn’t be read through the lens of moral strife, or as if on the stage of some historical theater. These self-serious frameworks only restate the same compositional fallacies one began with. If the nation-state spreads violence and disempowerment, even depends on it, it is not out of evil, but simply a folly in design, a patching over of a compositional disharmony.
We avoid moralization and theater because that thinking distracts from the compositional issue at hand, the material techniques for joy and difference creation that are available to us, given an attitude of optimism, investigation & empiricism. If a bureaucratic machine maintains in compositional disharmony with its environment, even with the most persuasive facade of utility, maturity, gritty realism & necessity, we nonetheless know that it’s rooted in the most foolish, sentimental illusions, the unreality and melodrama of those who would kill their neighbor to avoid investigating themselves. There’s nothing profound, no grand drama in this willful ignorance. We must think about the world compositionally to see that the emperor wears no clothes.
The main reason so many of the institutions around us persist in this disharmony is the standardization (what James C. Scott calls the “synoptic legibility”) welded by the nation-state. The state seems to be committed to power concentration both strategically and metaphysically — that is, as a means as well as an end. Those institutions that are not aligned metaphysically will, by Overton’s coercive hand, become aligned strategically. This standard of legibility is insidious in that it is able to make invisible what it leaves out — namely, those techniques and practices that operate under logics of abundance(opens in a new tab). Mediated through the sterile lens of financial extraction, those practices lose their ability to reproduce, breeding the complacency the state needs to rule unchallenged. This process has traditionally been referred to as Enclosure — you could also call it interiorization.
When we share knowledge, its power is reproduced, same as with friendship. Intellectual capital and social capital don’t easily lend themselves to control and cartelization, as the more they are used and shared, the more abundant they become. When power concentration is the goal, this capacity for reproduction represents a threat to be neutralized. Re-presented through the synoptic legibility of the finance state, these assets can be manipulated and hoarded, their power defanged. Conveniently, the insecurity left in the wake of their scarcity can be used to justify statist interventions. If an institution wants to participate in dominant networks of material and informational exchange, it must speak this impoverished language, and police its own countervoices (the life of the state apparatus depends on it).
The Ledger is like a massive bureaucratic complex, encompassing a variety of institutions through which the world, with its panoply of values, is mediated and made sterile. Still, it would be wrong to say (as some have) that we are living under a “full subsumption of capital.” The commons remains(opens in a new tab), with its corridors of fugitive value, its secret networks. Everywhere we see its little intimacies, affections, experiments in worldbuilding — the joys and alchemical designs of the innocent & the unsuperstitious. But these joys have too often been amnesiac. Without legibility, the infrastructure necessary for these movements to persist, to repeat and create real change is unavailable to them — they’re like water droplets, evaporating into air before they can form a flow. If the degradation of the commons under the extractive rule of financial capital is the single goal of the Ledger and its instruments, what is needed to counteract that power is distributed system of generative ledgers.
Those in possession of state have the enormous power of regularizing practices and strategies, and in turn deciding which practices and strategies might be excluded or marginalized from social reproduction. The network memory allowed by ledgers is a requirement to harness the mysterious, emergent power of systems over time, to bridge the gap from anomaly to world-building coherence. So long as access to this state of emergence is restricted to the meta-cult of scarcity and superstition, worlds are choked off from the oxygen they need to actualize. The cryptographic technology that we call blockchain, or the distributed ledger, has the potential to be a reclamation of statefulness, an instance of countermemory. Its role thus far has mainly been one of transvestment(opens in a new tab), the subtle stealing away of financial value from the nation-state (and its market counterparts) to an economic sphere of non-coercive consensus. The Ledger’s lack of imagination made it an easy heist, as their most grotesque mascots(opens in a new tab) fell over each other to enter what they saw as a new frontier of accumulation. The joke is on them. Future generations will remember 2021 as the demasking of the scarcity model, May 8(opens in a new tab) being the pinnacle of what Judith Butler once called (in a different context) “a de-formity, or a parodic repetition that exposes the phantasmatic effect of abiding [value] as a politically tenuous construction.”
On its claims of universality, the Ledger has failed, its death-knell the undignified parody of an internet dog meme. But parody isn’t practice. We might even allow for a decade or two poking around with the corpse of the financial state, making the skeleton dance, a speechless parade for the still bitter armies of the illegible, were the hour not so late. But too much is at stake. Distributed ledger technologies will remain within the sterile prison of imitation until they are complimented by material infrastructure and practices — strategies that will uncover and make actual the economies of abundance the Ledger has kept foreclosed.
This means placing an emphasis on Basic Affordances, the material security and expressive latitude organisms need to creatively thrive(opens in a new tab). Although our local governments and public health institutions may be surprised, it’s no coincidence that the proliferation of strategies for survival and material autonomy, as prerequisite groundpaths to world creation, are also the best means for mobilizing against the ongoing climate crisis. The analysis of the problem and the development of the solution are fused on a horizon of practical action. Pluralism is security.
Our next post will attempt to sketch some basic guidelines for these infrastructure-oriented generative ledgers. Many of them have existed for decades, and the nuance of their knowledge surely surpasses ours in all cases. We merely wish to provoke a thought of resemblance. It’s our hope that some of the minds in the cryptocurrency and regenerative economics space can develop an image of their material counterparts, that we might finally design the capacities for state that are needed for counter-memories to reach a genuine flywheel of social reproduction.