What we do
The Open Machine is a cultural research studio that invokes unlikely alliances across technology and culture to advance ethical, open forms of coordination. We conduct research to produce media, events, and frameworks that capture and project the patterns that emerge.
Our work draws on the concept of immanence -- the inherent creative capacity of fields or relational systems to generate structure and novelty without central command -- in order to understand and navigate the emerging technology landscape. We study immanent social technologies (open-source practices, distributed coordination, and consent-based collaboration) alongside digital technologies, seeking out technical strategies in both that harmonize and expand rather than enclose and capture the creative capacities of nature.
As a cultural research studio, our goal is to strategically intervene in tech culture in order to incite new networks and coalitions that share immanent values. This means instigating dialogue and cross-pollination between a diverse range of technologists, theorists, artists - from permaculturalists to programmers to community organizers - in order to broaden our definition of technology and rediscover an integrated sense of its most ethical form.
View and Support our 2026 Programme →
Media
Open Machine media takes the form of zines, books, posters, and other web content. All work is licensed Creative Commons. In some cases, our work is commissioned by aligned actors in technology or the academic space.
Events
Open Machine plays an interstitial role in the emerging technology space, organizing discourse and cultural production around provocative hybrids. We do so in order to build broad coalitions that reflect the diverse embodiments of immanent social strategies. We pay special attention to discourse and cultural schelling points that extend across traditional domains.
Gathering - Open Protocols Convene, Boulder, Colorado 2025
Salon - Open Protocols Social, Portland, Oregon 2025
Workshop - Polycentric Equity Swap Game, Devconnect Buenos Aires, Argentina 2025
Workshop - Assembly in Ethereum, Schelling Point Devconnect Buenos Aires, Argentina 2025
Gathering - GFEL II, Boulder, Colorado 2025
Workshop - Institutions, Extitutions and the Body without Organs - Huy, Belgium 2024
Salon - OSS: Open Salon Series, Portland, Oregon 2024
Lecture Series - Local DAO Summer, cyberspace 2024
Salon - Imagination Circle - Portland, Oregon 2024
Gathering - General Forum on Ethereum Localism, Portland, Oregon 2024
Salon - Cybernetics and Public Goods, MCON 3 - Detroit, Michigan 2023
Salon - Decentralized Independent Publishing as Protocol, Devcon - Istanbul, Turkey 2023
Salon - Crypto's Philosophical Underground - Barcelona 2023
Salon - Who weaves the weavers?, SeoulBound, Seoul, Korea, 2023
Research
To the end of tracing out the lineage and current frontiers of immanent social organization, Open Machine applies philosophical foundations to cultural history in order to bring insight and ethical clarity to the emerging technology space. We identify diverse parties, including individuals and collective and networked entities, and show how they exert agency and display intelligence in contexts that surpass institutional legibility. Whether it's in the distributed yet concerted intelligence of cultural undergrounds, the avant garde financial assemblages of DAOs, the anonymous intentionality of LLMs, or the crowd-consciousness of cultural archetypes and memes, sensitivity to these actors yields insights about emerging technologies and the intelligence they harness that will cause sea change in the coming years.
Research Topics
Diverse Intelligence Lens
An extension of ethnographic inquiry inspired by the Templeton Foundation's Diverse Intelligence program. Takes analytical frames from new currents in biology to study collective and distributed forms of cognition across organisms and systems, with special attention to the latent spaces they navigate and the coordination patterns they sustain.
Technedelics: Interfaces as Exploratory Media
The use of AR, VR, game engines, and hybrid interfaces as perceptual instruments for exploring new environments and generating new subjectivities, inspired by Michael Levin's work on "latent spaces" and Felix Guattari's "ethico-aesthetic paradigm".
Imaginal & Inversional Technology Studies
An analytic–speculative practice that reimagines existing technologies from within, asking what alternative forms of coordination and agency are already latent inside dominant systems. For example: what would an immanent inversion of Facebook or Palantir look like?
Immanent Pairings & Productive Adjacencies
The exploratory side that more often than not occasions media and events involves identifying potential pairings of immanent technological forms into new discourse communities that can explore the potential for reciprocity and discovery, while giving definition to the broader program of immanent technology itself. The most resonant past example of this is "Ethereum Localism", which took two social paradigms aligned with the immanent technology thesis and asked questions about how they could be woven together to generate a new space of inquiry. (See the Ethereum Localism book, published by Open Machine in collaboration with Gitcoin and Allo Capital).
Past Research
Specific research vectors we have undertaken in the recent past include:
Ethnographic Study of the Protocol Underground
Fieldwork and engagement with the archive and living communities on underground formations, their meta-protocols, and the strategies through which they maintain coherence without institutional capture.
Outputs: (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (Ethnographic interview with Mark Lakeman)
The Modern Guild
Guild Guild is a community of practice that studies the modern guild form (ala Protocol Guild) and distributes reference architecture so others can freely replicate the form as a model for commons infrastructure development and maintenance.
Process
Immanence
The Open Machine has identified core characteristics of immanent, open technologies.
These technologies
distribute agency rather than depending on passivity, complacency or obedience
allow aesthetic co-creation rather than expecting spectatorship
actively affirm consent against coercion
provoke and engage processuality against binary thinking
document and open protocolize their practical insights against enclosure and capture
Instances of any of these are of value, but together they activate into a powerful ensemble of techniques for avoiding the traps and insufficiencies of the old institutional forms and harnessing the creative powers of immanence. Moreover, when technologies or technical communities display these forms, it shows us they are ripe for generative engagement with other nodes.
Collision
In order to lean into the chaos and unpredictability of cultural and technical cross-pollination, we construct what we refer to as collision events, provocative research paradigms and gatherings of parties from diverse technical cultures and discourse communities, grounded only against our working rubric of immanent technology. Because our definition of technology is broad, these collision events become rich sites of inquiry and cultural production; i.e. What does Open Source Software have to do with BDSM? What do meditation techniques have to do with organization theory?
Modulation/Composition
In the aftermath of these encounters, we (and the community we've instigated) undergo a process of synthesis, modulating inputs in order to generate a new equilibrium. This isn't to distill into any new terminal narrative, but rather to produce the dynamic and pluralistic ground that genuinely new cultural spaces entail. A past example is the Ethereum Localism book, which attempted to render the productive chaos of the first two Ethereum Localism forums into a metastable coherence.
Service
In order to maintain sustainability, we offer services when and where mission alignment is evident, in the form of:
Frameworks and workshops
Media production
Community expansion and discovery
Support Our 2026 Programme
Help us achieve our programme goals for the year by donating now to our shared treasury. All funds go directly into producing research, media, and events. For more information on our plan for sustainability and how funds are used, send us an email at theopenmachine@protonmail.com
To donate, please send ETH or any ERC-20 to:
openmachine.eth
Note: All transactions are transparent on-chain and addresses that support us can look to receive special rights and benefits in the near future, as we setup our infrastructure further.
Full Address:
0x814015957246ac2725A1a21e09211EeFF63a8e3f
Accepted chains: Mainnet, Arbitrum, Base, Optimism, Celo.
*Our address is a Safe Multisig, so ONLY send assets on these accepted chains.*
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Built from the underground