Within the administrative frame, these anomalies are always adversaries - crises in legibility, a threat to the capacity to manage, process, and control. If the old institutional regimes are in general crisis, its because the occasional onstaging of anomalous agencies has been accelerated by technology and globalization to a perpetual arrival, a type of singularity anticipated by Terence McKenna as he announced, quoting Finnegans Wake, "Here comes everybody."

What becomes clear from the investigation into the underground, the realm of open protocols, is that it is the very process of relating to the virtual that makes the open protocol thesis work. Recall the definition: open protocols are “social and technical protocols woven together into a compound cultural protocol of improvisational, empirical imagination...

Here at the Open Protocol Research Group, we are most interested in how these zones of defiance, these undergrounds, have emergently protocolized, both as a response to legal or extreme cultural prohibition and as a strategy of avoiding institutionalization, with its tendency to dampen or outright restrict the aesthetic autonomy of its participants...

Beyond the face lies an altogether different inhumanity: no longer that of the primitive head, but of "probe-heads"; here, cutting edges of deterritorialization become operative and lines of deterritorialization positive and absolute, forming strange new becomings, new polyvocalities...

Math, brains, silica: what if you could construct a witch’s brew that embraced the multiscale chaos of being - of the city? That rode the forms even as they break out of their classes, delivering a dose of ontological flatness to those who can’t help but Assume, Subordinate? The primal battle of the computer age, Von Neumann versus Terence Mckenna...

One day I was laying in the grass with a book and listening to psychedelic pop songs, as one does on an improbably sunny spring day in the Pacific North West. A song came on that I had heard many times before, each time imagining these hidden feelings between individuals, prospective lovers. Certainly because I was reading The Evolution of Cooperation (Axelrod, 1984) and daydreaming about Great Filters at the time, I imagined this unseen love existing between all individuals, a love lost across the entire human population, turning a sad song into an epic tragedy of societal discoordination.

The history books tell us that, sometime between the English Civil War and the French Revolution, the tradition of the Royal court jester fell out of favor. Exactly when is unclear, but the Facebook post from whoever runs the account of Berkeley Castle (the site of many intrigues and conspiracies of British Royal History) tells the story of an unlucky character that they claim won the mantle, there at the dawn of Modernity, as the last jester.

{Freedom} is certainly not the right to own the economic, social, political, or cultural capital in order to dominate others and trade their happiness in a monopolistic market. Freedom is the process by which you develop a practice for being unavailable for servitude. – Avery F Gordon paraphrasing Toni Cade Bambara (Quoted by Maggie Nelson)

There is a mark of flamboyance on the horizon. That is all we know. Rumors of what the news called sentient stage, what technologists called FOOM. This is the day we’ve all been waiting for, even if we didn’t know it. 

To all those who would seek to build, enshrine, and defend moats in our shared virtual machine, to build systems incapable of composition, incapable of componentization, incapable of being permissionlessly replaced by some alternative: We say this is a pattern of the past, an antipattern in web3. It's a pattern enabled by permissioned access to, and control of, data. This pattern will be made redundant in our version of the internet, made redundant by our shared virtual machine. –Auryn Macmillan & Kevin Owocki, 'Practical Pluralism'

What are the local minima of institutional constructs? What anarchistic stop-gaps across time and space might nonetheless enable legibility in what Moten and Turing both called "The Universal Machine"? The builders of web3 are a recursive public: the product of their work embodies the protocols of their own development. They build in nomadic guilds of free association, an ethic of encounter developed solely to expose each node to the machine - the non-institutional charge, emergence, the rough wholeness..

Exeunt is an underground researcher and design theorist. Their work uses archival research, field investigation and applied philosophy to explore the economic and organizational patterns of extitutional spaces, both in urban and digital settings.

The universe described by Everett’s Many Worlds Interpretation of QM is one profuse with realities, and beings through which those realities proliferate. The existential abundance MWI implies can be the philosophical ground for a post-extractive design ethics adequate to the problems of the twenty first century. Through Distributed Autonomous Technologies, we can build bioregional machines of life and difference production, where novelty and commonness are fused in a regenerative feedback loop.