Mar 26, 2024
Haptic Vision & Network State at ETH Denver
by Exeunt
As the ordeal went on, it became clear to certain of these balloonists, observing from above and poised ever upon a cusp of mortal danger, how much the modern State depended for its survival on maintaining a condition of permanent siege—through the systematic encirclement of populations, the starvation of bodies and spirits, the relentless degradation of civility until citizen was turned against citizen, even to the point of committing atrocities… When the sieges ended, the balloonists chose to fly on, free now of the political delusions that reigned more than ever on the ground, pledged solemnly only to one another, proceeding as if under a world-wide, never-ending state of siege.
Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day
My roots go down to the depths of the world, through earth dry with brick, and damp earth, through veins of lead and silver. I am all fibre. All tremors shake me, and the weight of the earth is pressed to my ribs.
Virginia Woolf, The Waves
No one who attended ETHDenver this year would be surprised to hear that between events, at night in the long cold walks across town back to the DAO house, or the sunny stoned strolls to the perpetual brunch, some members of the Ethereal Forest crew were dosing psilocybin and discussing the Network State.
The goal was to generate a meme, something to compete with the absurd premise of a bunch of wealthy white men buying land and mercenaries and thinking they are doing something remotely politically interesting. (It’s called Silicon Valley.) Ven and I especially were troubled: we are partial to the network as a political and economic concept. We are partial to the double entendre of state as a term for a kind of legitimized domination and as a technology of memory. So why such brazen cooptation? We resented the collapse of these signifiers into a tool of white claw supremacy, the preferential liberty of those who own boats and planes.
Maybe it was the mushrooms - or maybe it’s because we are in fact always reading Deleuze & Guattari - but we looked to A Thousand Plateaus for some memetic ammunition. The term “rhizome state” was briefly considered. It had flavors of the infinite game, of a properly subversive view of networks as underground, cutting across boundaries - adventitious free association, nonlinear and opportunistic viral synergy.
You see, we had just dropped the first volume of the collaborative journal Inverted City and we were excited at the volume’s overarching concept of urban centers as mechanisms of capture resistance. Too complex to be controlled, too many corridors and guerrilla avenues of resistance or flight, we envisioned the city as an analogue node in a digital anticapture apparatus. With its cybernetic and subversive street memory, its messy and organic calling up of all the elements of a world to produce a manic novelty, the city already was a network state.
Nevertheless, the concept passed. There is a crowd within us (“there’s a lodger in me, larger than me”), and it will do this task better. Josh rolled a joint, someone made a joke (“they see branches, chains, rows, columns, dominoes, striae. Once in a while along the edges they discover a misshapen figure or a shaky contour…”). Christy was reading in the backyard and the close Denver sun was shining just so. We shut the book and set out for the main event to see if we could score a Filecoin t-shirt.
Out of all the night events, the Hats Protocol party at Blind Tiger (co-hosted by Cabin and Coordinape) was really the best. Maybe it’s because it takes a certain type to see how discretely radical and transformative the Hats and Coordinape protocols are as network technologies, but we found ourselves chest to chest in a web of ecosystem alignment, witnessing a phenomenon of contagion as baked and half-baked concepts of mutualism, lateral shoots of subversive coordination and avant-garde democracy swept through the crowd as if through fertile soil. In the chthonic haze I saw the network, usually scattered across the globe, held together now by systolic pressure, the contracted heart of a buried acéphale.
Acéphale, the Headless. If we look at Stafford Beer’s Viable Systems Model, we find an apparent instrumental hierarchy: operations, coordination, control, intelligence, policy - the head at the top (policy), dolling out nested sub-functions, operations that are held captive to the grand design. Hats and Coordinape both identify the system rather as a network, with mere pressure points (control, intelligence, policy), prone to capture and runaway hierarchy, but not determined by them. These loci of signal retention are always in danger of sprouting into Heads, the authoritarian mysticism of the Face, but a well managed network body can stave off facialization and keep them as hyphae, collective signal receivers. (“…sometimes, to the extent that it performs a veritable "defacialization," it frees something like probe-heads {fetes chercheuses, guidance devices)”). Give-tokens, not judgments; Hats, not heads.
This sci-fi collective, cohered beneath unrealistic opinions about what a social body can do, probe heads swimming in this common-pool soil of logics both mycelial and mathematical. The tools we build are a staving off of judgment. Technologies for keeping the aperture open. Our shifting self-identity, our State, is a condition of openness to the outside.
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. Become clandestine, make rhizome everywhere, for the wonder of a nonhuman life to be created. Face, my love, you have finally become a probe-head...
The “nomad state” was the second term we considered. The problem here was that the figure of the digital nomad was the exact opposite of what we were trying to convey; being localists, we knew that the tourist channels that circumvent the globe are great sources of extraction, inequity and environmental destruction. The nomad-tourist is always wanting to see something new, to engage in spectacle.
Deleuze and Guattari’s nomad, modeled after the Scythian nomad of the Eurasian steppe, occasions a distinction between two types of vision, two types of inhabiting the world: optical_and _haptic. In optic vision is the much maligned Western gaze, that sterile and metaphysically cautious prequel to capture. Optic vision is binary: di-vision - boundary, hierarchy, the panic of so many fragmented consumers who would stumble through life discrediting the entanglements that become them while they rush toward an idealized Entanglement that could calm the nightmare. They see without seeing, and this projected vacancy scales en masse to amount to a collective scorched earth policy (commercialism, colonialism, whatever).
Haptic is another word for touch, the tactile sense. One sees with reciprocity, one puts oneself at stake, crosses the wall of fear to inhabit the earth (as opposed to the World) - unidealized. It’s this risk, this vulnerability of embodiment, the open and welcomed potential for entanglement and transfiguration, and ultimately also the networked quality of haptic inhabitation, haptic travel, that we intended to convey. This haptic nomad doesn’t cut square lines into stone, but follows its mineral signals, investigating its singularities, reading its embeddedness and appreciating its elemental memory. (A stone is a network state.)
The haptic, they claim, is related to smooth space, an esoteric concept you don’t need to know to find resonance with the jumbled conversations of skyward possibility that animate our commons-oriented probe network. In haptic sight, “no line separates earth from sky, which are of the same substance; there is neither horizon nor background nor perspective nor limit nor outline or form nor center; there is no intermediary distance, or all distance is intermediary…. This reversal of the laws of gravity turns lack of direction and negation of volume into constructive forces… It is an absolute that is one with becoming itself, with process. It is the absolute of passage, which in nomad art merges with its manifestation.”
Clearly this “nomad state” meme wasn’t going to do, unless the entire ecosystem was on psilocybin (all at once? Honestly might be doable). Nonetheless. Process merged with manifestation. It was the next day at the Metagov brunch that Michael Zargham told me, “Blockchain is just durable prefiguration.”
The public goods space - or whatever you want to call the contingent of crypto that is dedicated to exploratory commons infrastructure, experimental and pluralistic deployments of ethical market frameworks, widespread and uncompromising political _as well as economic_democracy - is like a great prefigurative body, and these brunches and parties are part of its metabolism. I shared a bowl of blueberries with Jeff Emmett while discussing mycelial finance. We’ll go on to set up a conviction voting experiment with Fun DAO. (“I am all filament. Let every inspiration of democracy shake me, let the hyphae cloud of the participatory earth press to my ribs.”)
The ideas propagate and elaborate out, cosmolocally, based in this haptic incidence, the discrete life of this skin. Josh blurts out with a kind of strange assurance: the machinery is in place. We’re locked in.
So, we put a lot of idle energy into coming up with competing memes to the network state. The rhizome state, the nomad state. It wasn’t until that Saturday afternoon, hitting a joint outside the Regen event and entering to hear Gregory Landua talk about the life and death of a regenerative dream that I came to cognize the issue not with my mind but with my body. Haptic sight. And a strange calm came over me.
Maybe another meme wasn’t the thing we needed to defeat the network state. Instead, feel the metabolism. The prefigurative faith in a distributed swarm of dreamers working together as one machine body, producing the future: Network. The conviction that our orgs and our initiatives may die a million deaths, but the collective memory of a more just and free future is ineradicable: State.
Democracy is a prolix method, wrote the late Toni Negri. The participatory project our machinic body strives for is an endless regress. We, at our AirBnB’s and Kombucha bars, have barely begun the game. “A machinic assemblage is a dynamic composition of heterogenous elements that eschew identity but nonetheless function together, subjectively, socially, in cooperation.” Inhale: The divide has been shattered. We’re sure in our project, regeneration, freedom, the open society, the singularity of the individual compounded and enhanced by the commons, animate force under the sun whose membership is total. Exhale: Our network, hazy eyes on that shifting horizon, has to focus on what’s furthest away, bridge the uncommon and investigate our exterior, be vulnerable to it, see with haptic eyes.