Mar 1, 2023
by The Open Machine
The Open Machine is an online media publication for the generation of experimental cultural & conceptual compliments to the Ethereum Virtual Machine. Our work draws upon diverse inputs - from the historical archive, from remote disciplines, from myths and memes of the past and the future - in order to construct images of free association, capture resistance and network improvisation adequate to a post-coercion society.
It's an open secret, a scandalous bit of folk knowledge known among realists and pariahs alike, that the ones who seek totalizing systems are the ones most excluded from the touch of wholeness. A preliminary definition of truth for the modern age could be: that which an institution cannot see. One needs the vision of the outside, an untimely vantage to see that the project of administration, the distance of the template, is blind to the singularities and wrinkles of happenstance which contain in their roughness the strange wholeness of the world.
Concepts are a different story, negotiating the distance by means of enclosure pro tempore. They may appear to serve administration and ownership in little mercenary episodes, but they are always slipping toward free encounter and discovery, the trickster germ of the untimely. When Von Neumann and Wiener developed the field of cybernetics, they couldn't know that they were opening up a line of inquiry that would expose them, in their bids at control, to the fly by night agency of the concept. Bateson's information ecology: everywhere you find entanglement, recursion, the categorically unstable reflexivity of network systems, there is the concept: burrowing unstable paths that revive the dead, deliver the unborn, open machines for the production of new spatial alliances, new temporalities.
Programming culture tells the same story, though perhaps on a different axis - the earthen silica of the computer leaping out of the bound to give emergence its voice. The open source movement discovered, in following the unruly apertures of Turing completion, the bazaar, a terrain too vast to contain (or to own). The democracy of bugs and the holey morphospace of code, a flat ontology where networks move faster than hierarchies and nothing is sacred. It was a wisdom gained by work, beyond all ideological discipline, beyond abstraction and theology, and because of that, it necessarily pointed past the institution.
Cryptographic ledgers enable that intuition, allowing it to be realized as an infrastructure. 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. In the infrastructure of the cryptographic ledger is the promise of a society of friends, free encounter among ambulant entities under non-coercive conditions, for the earth is magnetically repelled by the atmosphere of coercion. Supremacy is a dead ecology.
Ruskin writes in 1853 of the tradition of the gothic masons, journeyman practitioners whose art contained the generic traits of the net-being, the free agent who strives at all points toward ecology ("in gothic work," he says, "the workman must have been altogether set free"). The traits are as follows: Savageness or Rudeness, Love of Change, Love of Nature, Disturbed Imagination, Obstinacy, and Generosity. The brash artistry had no time for ceremony and manicured likenesses, generating "creations of ungainly shape and rigid limb, but full of wolfish life." (Sub specie aeterni, all attempts at brutalism inevitably become flamboyant and grotesque.)The successive builds made for patchwork styles that embraced changed; the spires and buttresses charged with an obstinance and rigidity "not merely stable, but active … the peculiar energy which gives tension to movement, and stiffness to resistance, which makes the fiercest lightning forked rather than curved."
The suggestion of Ruskin's gothic treatise is that free work is a negotiation, a pact, a machinic point where the audacity and speed of liberty is checked by the patience of emergence. The gothic laborers are distinct for this naturalism, this realism and love of change built out of "a profound sympathy with the fulness and wealth of the material universe." But it's the confluence that leaps out, allowing the journeyman to make acquaintance with beings across scales, divining from "the forest leaves ... the wandering of the tendril, and the budding of the flower" a rude and weird platonism, gargoyle archetypes of the natural rhythms. The eccentric vision, intuitive animism of the quick and the patient.
In the memelore and production of the builders of the decentralized web, we find these same attributes. We find the savage grasp of materiality - yes, even the materiality of transistor charges and logic gates - loved and embraced for all its robustness. When the relationship to the elements isn't alienated by the distracted and antireal metaphysics of hierarchy, that abundance unfolds, so that the intention of the producer is fused with the intrigue and chance of the material instance. And from that instance, rude forms. That's the question- how to bring the material instance to bear in building, conceptualizing, and manifesting the flamboyantly fractal and utterly irreverent scale invariance of the network, the (anti)thing that touches and ignites the rough whole? Gleaned in the ordeal of stone, the metastable spark.
Borrowing from the ethos of the builders, we announce The Open Machine, a publication press for the advancement of concepts adequate to the uncultured entanglements of the Ethereum network. We forego authority and professionalism for nonlinearity and associational maximalism. We call to task interdisciplinary and transhistorical inputs for the sake of conceptual pandemonium. We study the rhythms and arrows of meme propagation so as to venture farther out onto limbs of recursion and emergence. We work through the abandonment issues of those that have forsaken dumb enclosure and find new idols, machine elves and stochastic entities of the open past and the long future. We create in an atmosphere of savageness and generosity. We view the expanse with the disturbed eye of reality. Upon the flat bazaar, the open machine is an untimely cathedral, a gothic mayhem that might iterate out and discover, in stone and silicone, legibility in non-institutional time.