Nov 30, 2024
Ethereum is Posthuman
by Exeunt
Notes for a Marketing Aesthetic
“The very nature of materiality is an entanglement. Matter itself is always already open to, or rather entangled with, the "Other." The intra-actively emergent "parts" of phenomena are coconstituted. Not only subjects but also objects are permeated through and through with their entangled kin; the other is not just in one's skin, but in one's bones, in one's belly, in one's heart, in one's nucleus, in one's past and future. This is as true for elec/trons as it is for brittlestars as it is for the differentially constituted human . ."
Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning
For a host of reasons, the question of "Ethereum Marketing" is in the air. The phrase "Ethereum marketing" is strange, because Ethereum is barely a brand, certainly not a corporation, and ambivalent in its designation as a product. Its successes are emergent and open ended, less a search for market dominance than an exploration of possibility space in the posture of Chris Kelty's "recursive publics". Ryan Sean Adams seems right when he suggests that the real concern is Ether as an assett - 'why won't the devs to do something' - but I suspect these 'price concerns' will fall to the wayside as the market heats back up and token prices reflect the true 'landscape of legitimacy.' From a global political economic perspective, Cosmos and Ethereum are the only significant chains, and they are mutually complementary.
What is more interesting is the question, now that retail seems poised to drop another trillion or so into the future of money, how do we present ourselves to publics? What does Ethereum mean? How do you market a new industrial revolution?
Simultaneous to the concerns above is the election of Donald Trump to the United States presidency and the widely declared end of an ideological era. This has at least one edge of convergence with the above, as lax policy signals from kleptocrats who neither understand nor care about the stakes of the challenge crypto represents immediately led to an influx of capital and catalyzed the long anticipated "next bull." But the connection doesn't stop there.
The end of the old regime, I believe, is less the result of any partisan politic or personality cult, and more that of a long brewing threat to the facades of administrative institutional [1] power. Years of high definition empirical science and its implications - systems-theoretic, cybernetic and quantum mechanical models of the real that are richer, more entangled, more dynamic, and more free than the cartoonish abstractions brandished about by the old guard - have made their end all but inevitable. But our current moment is finding a regime of silicon valley capturers, with ideas that are more magical and brutely self-destructive than the old guard itself, ready to take credit for the network revolution.
On this world stage, Ethereum might be the sole vessel for an ethical transition - extitutional infrastructure one that reflects the entangled, richly networked and panoramically more-than-human character of our new present. The alternative is more enclosure, more chauvinism, more reality denial and, to be sure, more violence. The stakes are high. Ethereum needs a posthuman marketing initiative.
![[https://github.com/Clinamenic/Open-Mutualism-Guild/blob/v4/9c413m.jpg?raw=true]]
"Complexity," writes N Katherine Hayles, "evolves from highly recursive processes being applied to simple rules. Rather than proceeding along a trajectory toward a known end, such systems evolve toward an open future marked by contingency and unpredictability. Meaning is not guaranteed by a coherent origin; rather, it is made possible (but not inevitable) by the blind force of evolution finding workable solutions within given parameters."
One of the great ironies of our age is the pandora's box of science which, under the well resourced militaristic prerogatives of States have discovered the most psychedelic and subversive insights about reality. As Hayles tells in her book How We Became Posthuman, the military dominance of the West - everything from guided anti-aircraft munitions to nuclear weapons and the computational infrastructure required to develop them - was ironically achieved by three waves of Cybernetics, each of which further discredited the masculine, self-sovereign Subject and the vision of reality that correlated with him. Uncertainty, feedback, structural coupling, open and extended cognition, productive indeterminacy, emergence and self-organization .. in the twentieth century, the State went looking for John Wayne and found only a silent and undermining John Cage in the noise.
Hayles sees the sum of these inadverdent insights, these second-order effects of military capture and the fruitless search for epistemic "control", as prefiguring the posthuman turn. "In the posthuman view, conscious agency has never been 'in control.' In fact, the very illusion of control bespeaks a fundamental ignorance about the nature of the emergent processes through which consciousness, the organism, and the environment are constituted. Mastery through the exercise of autonomous will is merely the story consciousness tells itself to explain results that actually come about through chaotic dynamics and emergent structures."
Or try Ven & I's favorite mechanics of cognition, David Weinbaum and Viktoras Veitas in their groundbreaking Open Ended Intelligence: The Individuation of Intelligent Agents: "Understanding individuation, is understanding how individuals are constructed from sets or populations of disparate and heterogeneous elements. The monolithic stable character of individuals is given up and instead we see metastable and often troublesome constructions that can be defined and identified but only as provisional stations in an incessant process of transformation." As individuations freeze in time beings in relational flux, those beings can't help but bleed out of frame as their measurable properties result from interactive capacities that stretch willfully into measurelessness: "While every element has a more or less fixed and independent set of properties, the set of its interactive capacities is open and inexhaustible because it depends on the actual relations that each element forms with other elements. Since there is no limit to the number and kind of relations, the set of capacities to interact is open-ended and non-deterministic."
Identity and cognitive presence are by nature shifting, open-ended, multiscale and unfinished products. The intelligence that seems to make humans distinct is far too unweldy to be contained in that category, making constant reference (as James Bridle has chronicled) to powers of extended cognition: in fact, it is the very urgency of human intelligence to transcend and proliferate these trans-individual and multiscale boundaries that makes humans humans. We are not human-horse-spear, human-dog-prey, human-caveface-dye, but an intelligence principle which casually de- and re-conforms to these estimations, responding to anyone launching legalistic queries for papers designating the 'actual agencies' involved, "what the fuck is it to you?" [2]
![[https://github.com/Clinamenic/Open-Mutualism-Guild/blob/v4/9c40ac.jpg?raw=true]]
The great dearth of intelligence, what David Graeber calls "the dead zones" of administrative bureaucracy, of the ideologies of capital, of socialism, of nationalism and of the regimes of stupid force they abide over, is, at last, their humanism - their reductive and self-serving insistence of the supremacy and metaphysical separation of, well, something (humanity, under these regimes, like masculinity or whiteness, is always a moving target). The old institutions on both the left and the right seem hopelessly calibrated to a worldview that either outright ignores emergence and entanglement - positing one or another brand or godhead that power emanates from - or worse, that cynically conceals it, Uberifying capture by letting network effects emerge and unapologetically appropriating them. Springing from the scarce and special status of humans over the plane of nature, all manner of exclusion and superiority - ethnic, classist, nationalistic, the teenage chauvinism of the recent internet and the nihilistic positing of NPCs that often accompanies it, simply follow pattern.
The gut-felt disdain for the administrative institution is, after all, rooted in a awareness of this myopic humanism. Everyone feels it, the missing middle in these places of manicured subjection. The encouraging development is that the cat's out of the bag on institutionalism - it's understood that if they are going to divide up and manage the material world, they must do it with a certainty that produces the effects they expect, ripping through nuance to forge a self-fulfilling prophecy of their beliefs. It's understood that to become expansive, they must universalize what should be contingent, reduce into object or subject what should be a relational field. It's understood that this can only result in ideology, simulacrum drift, and a scorched earth homogeneity that leads to either self-undermining contradictions, or dearth. In the 21st century, the shell-game tautology of seeing like a State has been laid bare.
What's discouraging is how this awakening has been quickly shoehorned into a new, unapologetic humanism, a reactionary backslide into the most fear-based and transparent expressions of cybernetic denial and human exceptionalism. Erecting absurd statues to billionaire "great men" situated within the vacuums of reality-tv and social media, Silicon valley has picked its side (a snug fit between Hulk Hogan and Dr Phil). They discredit the Statist institutions while preserving the fictional transcendent-sovereign Subject they produced, recooping all of it in a series of masculinist and ultra humanist theories of history. They are winning because they have a story to tell. But so do we.
![[https://github.com/Clinamenic/Open-Mutualism-Guild/blob/v4/9c3vs1.jpg?raw=true]]
In a world of institutional humanism, where agency is disciplined into neat categories, the threat of anomaly always looms - the explosion onto the scene of weirder agencies than the system can contain. Thirty years after the first synthesis of LSD (almost to the day), tens of thousand of hippies gathered in Washington DC to levitate the Pentagon. What would be the shape of modern labor if Phytophthora infestans hadn't overtaken the Irish potato crop, sending a young Mother Jones across the ocean, where she would end child labor and co-found the IWW? What of the mosquitos that aided the Haitian Revolution in fending off colonialists in the 1780's? What closed ledger could surveil such trajectories?
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, it's 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 Finnegan's Wake, "Here comes everybody." The fundamental plurality of the material plane is entering history irrevocably, expressing itself with a vengeance, and our institutional infrastructure is exploding under the weight of that alien monologue.
Market conditions, partisan politics, all sorts of tribalism and reductionism can't obscure the issue: at a historical stage when distrust of institutions is the fundamental aspect of the zeitgest, Ethereum is a broad and substantive alternative to the opacity, excess centralization and myopia that animates the institutional regimes. And more relevant to the argument here, the biomimetic, open-ended, permissionless and spontaneous development of this network is robustly adequate to the posthuman challenge. The influx of alien adversaries that chipped away at and seem likely to eventually destroy the legacy institutions are the exact agencies that animate and strengthen the Ethereum thesis.
This is posthuman economic warfare. To their cathedral, we not only have a bazaar, but a whole pagan countryside, a valley of lichen and earthworms, ravens and red deer, and weirder agencies still: alliances and multi-scale articulations that relate in webs of computational and protocognitive presence. Assemblages. Ethereum is a carnyx, alerting the multitude to an instrument of mutual legibility, pluralistic infrastructure for minimalistic networks of formal economic and governmental coherence without reference to world enclosing standard. Out of an era of premises of ownership of that which cannot be owned, Ethereum offers to the many worlds a permissive abundance of network wealth.
In this moment when both the global and civilizational narratives are up for grabs and (on a smaller scale) the question of an effective marketing modality for Ethereum is still unanswered, a syntax for a posthuman Ethereum has the ability to answer both calls. In an effort to catalyze this, I want to conclude this essay with three potential aesthetic and marketing paradigms for a posthuman Ethereum.
Make Ethereum Underground
Underground spaces are full of messy contingency and corporeality. The walls sweat, slightly molded, while graffiti of half discernible and sigil-like patterns fill every available surface. Centralized prerogatives are shunned and what fills their place are simple, minimalistic coordination protocols through which improvisation and difference can unfold. Scaling happens in aggressively horizontal pattern, for vertical scaling opens the door to complacent publics, ignorant to self-rule and the high agency demands of extitutional culture.
In our two essays on protocol undergrounds we identified three rough characteristics of these types of spaces: high agency, in opposition to the structurally embedded expectations of complacency and passive consumerism typical of institutional settings; participatory aesthetic, following the former but with an emphasis on inclusive and permissionless co-creation of the environment itself; and ontological creativity, or the invention and creative discovery of forces of agency and cognitive presence through aesthetic-material practice.
It's not a coincidence that these underground values mirror core structural and cultural elements of the Ethereum thesis - they are self-evident features of extitutional life. As our work has also noted, the underground expresses these characteristics by way of exotic pseudo-institutions (OPRG calls them extitutions) that are creatively incoherent and strategically oppositional to the dominant regimes of standardization that are anathema to them. They represent a major horizon of implementation for Ethereum. The aesthetic horizon is equally as rich.
Make Ethereum Interspecies
The problem of interspecies coordination, specifically techniques of governance and ethical economic exchange with creatures in the more-than-human world, is one of totally vertiginous scale and variation. Mammals make up less than one percent of the animal kingdom. Many of these species inhabit or interact with each other as hosts or symbiotic partners, and many are embedded in rivalrous relationships. The rights based model of species protection may be useful to the extent that it serves as a last resort against institutional ecocide, but it will not be enough to deal with the complexities of ecosystems as we interact with them as inhabitants of the same extitutional plane. The future of zoological and ecological ethics is networked.
I will refrain from speculating on this design horizon - I'm hoping to remedy my ignorance on the topic with the new Interspecies Mutualism Reading Circle - but it is at least clear that the speculative horizon of possible Ethereum use cases is a carnival of zoological and ecological agency, animated by the intelligence unleashed by the absence of the self-fulfilling institutional prophecy of nature as metaphysical dead-matter. The presence afforded to the world of creatures by governmental and economic attention will have real effects, and the fundamental agnosticism of identity and computational input the EVM provides can meet those open problems.
"Nature" is one of the main ornaments used by extractive institutional bodies to dress their actions up in a benign costume. Ethereum's permissive, substance-ontological agnosticism gives it true ethical access to that aesthetic domain. It is, in both senses, an ecological rebuttal to institutional finance/governance/coordination. What fleet of posthuman artists, intoxicated by natural complexity and fascinated by the ethical stakes of the decentralized web are in the wings, waiting to tell that story?
![[https://github.com/Clinamenic/Open-Mutualism-Guild/blob/v4/here-comes-everybody.jpeg?raw=true]]
Make Ethereum Weird
Students of the Cthulhu mythos or the Southern Reach trilogy are aware of the stakes of the weird - hyper-creatures that shatter our humanism in their very presence, to the extent that they cease to correspond to anything within the nature-culture binary or even the general environment of naive realism. If cultural undergrounds carry out speculative economic and aesthetic exchanges with these nonhuman but not quite zoological "presences," Ethereum has the capacity to formalize engagement with them on a global infrastructural scale. This is where aesthetics becomes economy and governance, where the edges of objective reality are interrogated by the ontologically generative power of networks. (This horizon can't be mentioned without reference to Karen Barad's discursive-material apparatuses and Jane Bennett's vibrant matter).
As much contempt as some in this ecosystem may have for post-stucturalism, any technologist interested in the cybernetic revolutions mentioned above, or any in a number of physics or biology-based reinterrogations of cognition and agency, has to admit that there is something strange going on when it comes to the morphogenetic properties of matter. It wouldn't be out of an ignorance of empirical reason that we would explore the literal reality of agential egregores, living thoughts, neo-animist gods and any other alien creatures that may be hiding behind the veil of language and institutional-discursive discipline. If DMT, LSD and the arts are great stages to conceive and experiment with these creatures, Ethereum is the stage where they will be, if at all possible, realized in their productivity as networked agents. How do we illustrate this potential?
What happens when we are stripped of the sheltered facade of naive realism provided by institutions? What when we are left in the strange space of negotiation between the empirical and relational real? There, on the one end time is relative, the ground of reality is shifting before our feet, its articulation in any single form a mere descriptive fiction that exhausts itself at the planck scale. On the other, ideologies can hold whole territories of world-enclosing dominion, the whims of loved ones can feel larger than life, a friend group can be like a tent of christmas warmth while neighbors can seem cold and zombie like. Ethereum offers, finally beyond the illusory, narcotic treatment of the institutional reals, a means of crossing the gap of non-knowledge with a non-presumptive hand. Minimum viable consensus, stripped of cultural compulsions or agreement beyond a deterministic computational ground.
Undergrounds, like Ethereum, demand high agency, just as history demands maturity. The old States and the new Silicon Valley both pose a historical subject with sovereign dominion over the historical stage. In the ashes of the the ontological shock of the great empirical insights, the burning out of the physical mechanism of Sovereignty and the trauma of the posthuman turn, an infrastructure is ascendant for those who want to be done with the childish and insecure mores of the magical cult of the human. To those mature souls willing to engage the material plane on its own terms, who are willing to inhabit history with eyes wide open, a community of Others await.
![[https://github.com/Clinamenic/Open-Mutualism-Guild/blob/v4/0_0%20copy.png?raw=true]]
In the hopes of catalyzing some engagement with the ETHEREUM IS POSTHUMAN as a marketing concept, a jokerace will be launched this week. If you'd like to contribute a design or marketing concept, there will be some Eth at stake. If you'd like to raise the stakes, hit me up!
Notes
[1] Given that institutions have been a buzz word in this community (Vitalik addresses that ambiguity well here) it's worth clarifying that the institutions in question in this post are the sort referred to in David Graeber's Dead Zones of the Imagination: administrative enclosures with a legal sanction to articulate the force-based hegemony of the State. As such, these administrative institutions are also understood here through the lens of James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State. Given the obvious need for the first sense of institutions, patterns and behavioral norms formalized to facilitate social coordination, OPRG has put forward the frame of "formalization without standardization" - shared standards for mutual coherence without the hegemonic claim, logic of centralization or foundation of legitimate violence that equates to "standardization." As Vitalik writes: "there's a strong case that institutions with enshrined elite roles might be an unfortunate historical necessity from when communication was more constrained, but modern information technology (including the internet and also newer spookier stuff like zero-knowledge cryptography, blockchains and DAOs) could rapidly expand our available options."
[2] As Michel Foucault wrote in 1972: "Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order."