Introduction to Ethereum Localism Book

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(opens in a new tab) .

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 challenge with no particular answer in mind, has led to an escalation of the question of application of the Ethereum network. This technology, we are confident, has utility not just for crypto nomads and libertarians, but for real communities in their embeddedness, mutuality, and increasing vulnerability before a globalized culture all too happy to embrace the fallacy that it is groundless.

The contemporary world has been utterly transformed by web infrastructure. Are the network effects and network power so crucial to this world a new phenomenon? Do they exist so that we can realize our place as unaffiliated sovereigns? The final naked individuals at the end of history, always on a plane to the next locale as those of lesser sovereignty stay back to clean our hotel rooms and take out our trash? Or is the network epoch, with its superficial air of silicon novelty, really a memory of a very old understanding of the world, common to shamanic lineages and agrarian cults of all cultures, that everything is - miraculously, urgently - connected? That power is relational, that individuality is rooted? Is the network technology of Ethereum an invitation to flee locale, or to rediscover ground?

This book poses the two cultural milieus - Ethereum x Localism - as network companions in a larger project of grounding, embedded within a shared set of values, [1] [2] values that are, ultimately, ecological. What does this grounding entail? After three conferences, several zines, one Local DAO Summer, all we can pose is an open-ended prompt, a speculative horizon of Ethereum Localism. Though it is by nature shifting, we think that horizon is shaped by the following assumptions:

That the Ethereum protocol is situated in a larger set of strategies, digital and analogue, for robust coordination outside of centralized institutions, and for the assertion of the local and the immediate as functionally superior[3] to the “distance” of elite capture;
That outside of the context of the decentralized web, which deals with open standards and contextual locales that embody them, there are open social protocols and geographical locales that execute, iterate and further expand them, and the two map onto each other suspiciously well;
That the communities that will most resonate with the Ethereum use case are those that already explore cosmo-local patterns of knowledge propagation and local iteration, those that share that isomorphism;
That, even as a global network, Ethereum’s operations are always local, that the virtual machine is materially embedded, and that its relationship to the bioregions and urban places that nurse and maintain its nodes is an ecological problem - digital networks within natural networks;
That the suite of experimental concepts that have become “strange attractors” for Ethereum culture - decentralization, protocolization, regeneration, participatory design, Ostrom Commons - have been playing out with great drama on the community level throughout the world for years;
That Ethereum will be most consequential when it is able to build patterns of sense and response with those local iterations, when it is able to develop an “appropriate”[4] relationship with them.

Finally, one could say that the phrase itself, “Ethereum Localism,” is redundant. Inasmuch as the positive way to say the word “decentralized” is local, the localist sensibility is an exemplar of Ethereum values (just as the Ethereum network powerfully embodies the project of localism).

This book is an attempt to explore the many senses of decentralization as an ethos - to think of it not in negative terms but in positive and creative terms as a lineage that we all (by definition) have access to and can participate in, permissionlessly. In this network that resists capture and the myopia of centralized power, there are many nodes, both analogue and digital.

In brief, Ethereum Localism:
strategically situates Ethereum
embodies Ethereum
ecologically embeds Ethereum
consequentializes Ethereum
fractally networks Ethereum

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Being a first Introduction to Ethereum Localism, this book followed at every turn the rule of contiguity over authority, making for an eclectic mix with representation from those who were, so to speak, most close to us. The breadth of this topic and those who could have represented it extends beyond our grasp, across bioregions and cultures in a truly global milieu. It bleeds into corridors of coordination animated by necessity before power - in some cases among those who, in authoritarian contexts, cannot speak of their work. Rather than a neat exposition of the topic at large, then, think of this volume as a snapshot of a situated scene - one in which our greatest hope is to be fragmented into a coming adventure of local coordination that will, eventually, obsolete this text.

The first piece, “The Cosmo-Local Plan for Our Next Civilization” by veteran theorist of p2p futures Michel Bauwens, establishes a framework for thinking about the interplay between the new network technologies and the old faculties of community, high trust organization, and village production. Ultimately, according to Bauwens, the fates of these two tendencies are entangled in a feedback loop with the power to pull us out of the multipolar standoff of late-form extractive capitalism.

Marcus Barrick, a crypto neophyte but long time thinker of the new economy, addresses the question of scale in his essay, “Does organizing at the Cosmo-local level require a profound shift in perspective?” What if the axiomatic shorthands of global economy are anathema to life on the community level? What if relationality and process-based thinking can enliven and transform the zombie flows of globalism?

Next, the Open Protocol Research Group summarizes their first year of work in The Inverted City: Speculative P2P and the Urban Protocol Underground. Starting off as an exploration into the potential of informal social protocols found in urban settings to inform the alternative economic aspirations of Ethereum, their investigations ended up in weirder and richer territory, where alternative communities ask not just how economy can be done differently, but how those ways of doing inform our very construction of economic agency in the first place.

Giulio Quarta, whose work at the Crypto Commons Association has helped circulate and sustain conversation around crucial aspects of the crypto localist thesis, reviews the work of the remarkable Commons Economy Roadmap in his Semiotic Bridging: A Practice for Ethereum Localism and the Commons Economy. In the course of their efforts, the CCA develop the tactic of semiotic bridging, a model for weaving together the many different fragmented languages for our common efforts in developing, in their words, “global, distributed, open-source economic infrastructure.”

Presented in both Portuguese and English, AgroforestDAO’s Rooted Society Manifesto is a collectively articulated vision for the integration of the urban and the rural into an agro-ecological complex. In the world they see, inhabitants of both spheres regenerate depleted soils through agroforestry strategies while making use of digital stigmergy through blockchain to do so at scale. Some of the most advanced technologies only require shovels and hands.

The Open Civics Thesis paper (available on their website, opencivics.co) holds some of the most ambitious and wide ranging strategic reflections of the cosmolocal thesis on the web. This excerpt, On Open Civic Systems, lays out the case for the stigmergically animated and polycentric civic forms that most lend themselves to advancement by the blockchain and broader p2p web toolkit.

Patrick Rawson & Louise Borreani have been thinking about green applications of blockchain since before it was cool, and their Walkthrough of The Green Crypto Handbook gives us a peak into some of the wisdom gained in that journey. Key to the piece is the six layer Environmental Finance stack that models how to square market activity at the top end with real material impact on the bottom.

Researcher Andrea Farias bookends her contribution, Bioregional Organization Networks, with reference to the real and ongoing water crisis in Barcelona, Spain. The piece takes this as starting ground for an exploration of networked responses to the ecological crisis, grounded in an eco-consciousness that is process-centric, fractal and plural - a transformative ethos that reflects, as many of these essays have, the need for an inversion of worldview to complement the structural benefits of decentralization.

Emaline Friedman is a contributor at Neighbourhoods, a local (and locally hosted) coordination app built on Holochain. Her piece, Neighbourhoods: Web3 Technologies and Progressive Alter-globalism, compelling situates the stakes of data sovereignty and web3 decentralization within the larger story of the Alterglobalism movement, where centralized extraction and systematic homogenization are opposed in favor of community power and the affirmation of difference as an end in itself.

At a moment where ideologies of public austerity are ascendant, Nate Suits’ piece on decentralized public administration networks, dPAN’s: Reimagining Collective Action is a dose of imaginative localism that illustrates, beyond all the theory, what locally applied blockchain solutions could offer to real infrastructural problems. The piece powerfully shows the potential for a mutualistic third path from the private and public sector binary that has captured the dominant conversation.

If we are looking to situate Ethereum’s capacities against the metric of community value, Crystal Street’s piece Rebuilding Community News to Protect Democracy is an excellent place to start. With shades of d/acc’s info defense, the piece lays out the JournoDAO case for information network resiliency through a blockchain-emboldened local journalism.

Alternative currency Jedi master Scott Morris offers a glimpse into the avant garde of MycoFi with his contribution, Emergency Finance & MycoFi. Web3 can win, the piece argues, not by virtue of its technical novelty, but rather because of the windows of adequacy it opens up for those in moments of crisis. Historically, alternative economics has most thrived in times where necessity dictates its adoption. Blockchain can superdrive that process.

As mentioned above, the 2023 GFEL conference took place at a community warehouse space in Portland that may have been one of the inspirations for the ambitious Regen Hub protocol outlined in Benjamin Life and Kevin Owocki’s RegenHub Franchise Guide. An appropriate bookend, the step by step guide is informed throughout by the collective experiential knowledge that is crucial to filling in and elaborating the work this volume lays out. Note that the piece uses the word “friend” twelve times.

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Visit ethereumlocalism.xyz to find insights from and documentation of Ethereum Localism events, more essays in the vein of this book, and a space to contribute if you have perspective to add to this conversation.

[1] Vitalik Buterin, “Making Ethereum alignment legible,” September 2024, https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/09/28/alignment.html(opens in a new tab).

[2] “The 12 Permaculture Design Principles” https://permacultureprinciples.com/permaculture-principles/?srsltid=AfmBOooz_ZdW7lRn4lJE9j-SUWk7mqFhHmy_WunWDylXvjMQ-XfHmk4-(opens in a new tab)

[3] For some interesting reflections on the functional adequacy of decentralization in the context of Stafford Beer’s Viable Systems Model, see Thomas Swann, “Anarchist Cybernetics,” Anarchist Studies, https://anarchiststudies.org/acybernetics/(opens in a new tab)

[4] See “Appropriate Technology,” Appropedia, https://www.appropedia.org/Appropriate_technology#cite_note-nytimes08-1(opens in a new tab)