Mar 10, 2026
by exeunt
The term “Ethereum Localism” arose out of our efforts in the Portland community to engage the broader community of artists, organizers, hackers and makers on the affordances of the distributed ledger. The noxious reputation of the technology, which often mistook Ethereum for a corporate brand, presented problems. But the more damning problem was our missionary disposition; we hadn’t taken the time to understand, at a deep and principled level, the shared ground we were standing on, the ground from which a technological alliance and tool exchange might be deployed.
Far beyond a missionary campaign, what implementation of this technology would require was an ordeal of reciprocity. Ethereum localism was an attempt to name that ordeal, arguing for curiosity and cultural immersion into the broad range of technologies - not just digital or web based technologies - that share core values with Ethereum. (To paraphrase Portland’s own Ursula Leguin, the reduction of the term “technology” to the complexed and specialized technologies of the past few decades is not an acceptable use of the word).
One way to initiate this ordeal would be to construct the basic characteristics of Ethereum alignment. Vitalik’s Buterin’s post “Making ethereum alignment legible” would serve this purpose well. “Each person’s list will be different,” he notes, but “we already have some solid starting points”:
Who are the makers, technologists, protocolists that are following these values, even if they aren’t interacting with distributed ledgers or the web? In a call back to Sara Imari Walker’s Assembly Theory, we’ll call this the coalitionary possible.
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In our attempts to take this proposal seriously, to immerse ourselves in the coalitionary possible, our Open Protocol Research Group spent multiple years exploring how these values live and reproduce in the real world. In a world of walled gardens, what causes a social body to decentralize, to open protocolize? Having done so, how does it remain coherent and positive sum (“toward the broader world”)? This is how we discovered the protocol underground.
The protocol underground is a diverse spread of cultures that seem to originate in the furnace of various societal constraints of the nineteen twenties to fifties, and reach their maturity in the period of the seventies to the nineties. [1] In the earlier years, undergrounds protocolized because they were legally or culturally marginalized. Where storefronts were impossible, the only option was reproduction through free circulation. In the United States, this was most commonly seen with black culture, sexual subcultures, and drug culture.
Magic happens here: As those cultures begin to treat their alienation from institutions as a virtue and not a fault, the incentive becomes to circulate beyond capture. The archive shows a set of word of mouth subcultures (think hip hop, Detroit house, BDSM, LSD, psychonautica) converging upon tactics for maintaining their open endedness, their harnessing of stigmergy and scenius, their capacity to empirically engage the world beyond the myopia of institutions. As the long twentieth century carries on, open protocolization becomes ethics.
These tactics for preserving the free circulation of open protocols developed through so many variable trials, and yet were brought into a consistency which came to characterize the underground at large. In them, logistical strategies become ethical in the sense of what Felix Guattari called the “ethico-aesthetic paradigm” -- favorable conditions for the production of subjectivity, new eyes on the world. (Those undergrounds that lack these ethical codes are hardly undergrounds at all by our definition, to the extent that they recapitulate the structural violence and penchant for physical and cognitive bondage of the dominant institutions.)
Because they provide a scaffold in which other protocols can live and thrive, we call them meta-protocols.
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One can read the room and see that our institutions (at least in the United States) are going through a not-so-slow death. If Ethereum carries negative cultural associations to many, it’s a result of its complex embeddedness in this process, where those forces of elite collusion and aggressive capitalism that accelerate this death make use of our tech to play out their own suicidal excesses.
And yet the discourse, which in an Epstein world increasingly looks to open, public, institutionally disaffiliated values for some semblance of moral structure, shows no hint of recognition of how radical Ethereum as a protocol is. Against the rubric of these meta-protocols, Ethereum excels. Allowing for small speculative affordances around how the public might adopt it, it becomes a paradigmatic technology for them.
As a primarily non-technical crew, we don’t feel comfortable placing the blame on those builders who have had their noses to the grindstone (so to speak). But culturally, it must be said that this misunderstanding is our fault, and our responsibility.
What to do? Our conclusion: the Ethereum community can increase its legitimacy and find users by taking a ridiculously imaginative and inclusive lens on alignment. This need not be wishy-washy: reading between the lines on the unspoken protocols of those who have shunned institutions, we find clear outlines of the coalitionary possible. We can show up to those communities with new technology that will embolden them as we undergo the rise of AI and the collapse of fiat. More importantly, we can show up to learn from them, with the recognition that in the ancient breadth of social evolutionary history, in comparison to these ancient and open subversions, we are a mere blink on the timeline.
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It’s worth addressing the stakes of this coalition and its struggles. (Be forewarned, it gets weird). If Ethereum can contribute to a broader strategic project of polycentrism, consent and process-attunement beyond the centralization, bondage and unimaginative binaries of the institutions, what are the higher order benefits? What world is this strategic suite inviting?
All disciplines have their underground. In the famously predatory and guru filled history of magic, a counterlineage arose which inverted all of those terms. Born in the twenties, reaching its peak in the eighties, Chaos Magick cultivated a sense of empirical freedom beyond state ritual and guru-ship, dispensing of the robes and pageantry and delving into quantum physics and cognitive science (and liberal amounts of psychedelics) to get to the root of the real project of the magical tradition. In its open ended progress, this community developed what Portland’s own Antero Alli called the Eight Circuit Brain. [2]
Institutions, it’s fair to say, inhabit specific plateaus for interfacing with the world (in this rendering, they are generally thought to be circuit 1-4). [3] Operating fundamentally as “walled-gardens” - contrary to the refined and trialed openness of the protocol underground - institutional life seems to embed these circuits into closed, self-reinforcing behavioral loops. (It’s not in the habit of the chaos magician to speak of higher or lower circuits; the issue is not in the circuit itself, but the paradigm which keeps the other circuits foreclosed.)
Suffice to say, there are social possibles far beyond what our current institutions optimize for. They are where the underground lives. They are sexual, psychedelic, spiritual, aesthetic, mythological – or they exist in modes we don’t have names for yet. Ethereum, like many other open technologies, allows the powers of social reproduction to be put in the hands of these imaginative fronts, these ‘spontaneous orders’ of those that stake out interfaces with reality on the wider circuits, the cutting edge.
Our work has persuaded us that the convergence of the underground toward these behavioral meta-protocols was technologically inevitable, a matter of computational efficiency. The optimal way to scale and reproduce socialized probing of new spaces of reality is through open protocol values, the kind of horizontal, swarm like space exploration proper to this coalition. Even as algorithmic technologies develop cognitive capture within the lower four circuits into a frightening new science, the path to the wider circuits, and to the generalized cognitive sovereignty to explore them, has never been more available. By equipping the protocol underground with the state-level persistence Josh Stark [4] calls “hardness,” we believe Ethereum can formalize those paths into enduring, civilization-scale architecture.
Ethereum can be core infrastructure for collectively exploring latent space - the higher order interfaces of the human brain, the diverse problem spaces of individual and collective consciousness. But it can’t do it alone. The broader empirical mastery of the protocol underground - won by decades of struggle, repression, and clandestine yet ethical creativity - can actualize our technology into being a civilizational force.
[1] Note that this research was restricted to the West, and in particular the U.S. - though a new inquiry is in the works on a notion of “the cosmopolitan weird.”
[2] This might be better attributed to Timothy Leary, Robert Anton Wilson, Aleister Crowley or the Sufi tradition before them. As it turns out, Timothy Leary was probably CIA, and we’re pretty sure personal attribution itself is a psy-op, so let’s go with the Portland dude.
[3] They are comparable to the latent problem spaces of the biologist Michael Levin’s Diverse Intelligence paradigm; see Levin’s “Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere” (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8988303/).
[4] Josh Stark, “Atoms, Institutions, Blockchains.” https://paragraph.com/@josh-stark/atoms-institutions-blockchains