Mar 4, 2026
by Open Machine
Like animal neuropathways mirrored in the game-trail lichen paths of a mountain valley, structures gestate from unplanned reciprocity in unruled substrates and emerge, irreducible and new. In this way, the period of cultural development in America and Europe from the 70’s1 to the 90’s saw a rich reserve of open protocols for engaging and sustaining exploratory and experimental lifestyles. Legally or culturally marginalized, communities were forced to coordinate beyond the walls of institutional sanction. Instead of legitimate storefronts, they built distributed networks grounded in clandestine viral knowledge.
Soon, remaining free beyond institutional walls became an end in itself; clever structural traps2 were designed to stop every enclosure at the door. (If this sounds like a koan, you are on the right track.) Moreover, these structures were able to coalesce into a set of core principles — meta-protocols — crystallized through trials of stigmergy and chance discovery, techniques for preserving the openness, the radical empiricism, the not-institutional-thing. (Consider how the gay leather/BDSM scene incubated protocols of explicit consent for years if not decades before those protocols became a key element of the underground at large.) These codes came to animate the whole distributed scene of cultural upheaval in the open ethical process we can now call the [[EXEUNT MIND/glossary/Protocol Underground|protocol underground]].3
These meta-protocols came to exist, brought to bear out of some obscure and widespanning scenius whose nature is an open mystery, as scaffolding or a canopy-like foundation to the broader range of underground protocols which need an atmosphere of openness to thrive. They can be thought of as vibe preservers, social technologies for ensuring an open atmosphere and staving off those affective or epistemic structures - authoritarian structures - that are a death sentence to experimentalism. From a dynamical systems perspective, they might be thought of as a constraint manifold that channels collectives to free exploration of phase space while evading low-dimensional attractor basins4
The meta-protocols (or simply the open values) of the underground are as follows:
distributed agency rather than dependence on passivity, complacency or obedience
aesthetic co-creation rather than expecting spectatorship
actively affirmed consent against coercion
processuality engaged against binary thinking
documentation and open protocolization of practical insights against enclosure and capture
But why this subterranean archeology, and why explored by a research community traditionally associated with the Ethereum space?5 It’s worth noting that the cypherpunk and free software movements are properly native to the underground as we conceive it, and although the practice of open protocolization far predated computer technologies, the naming and lineage building we are undertaking was occasioned by analyses out of the free software movement.6
And yet it’s less these cultural associations than an image of technology itself that propels us on our current trajectory. Our deep dive into open protocols of the social realm (as the Open Protocol Research Group 2023-2024) made ever more clear that whether its silicon or shovels, computer networks or neurons, the real stakes of technology are political. Not in any facile sense of left or right (makers, artists or engineers rarely fall into that trap), but in the sense of both practical and metaphysical openness itself, a promiscuous empiricism that demands diverse access to what one philosopher has called “[[Giorgio Agamben - Form of Life|forms-of-life]]” - posed against enclosure and ideological capture.
We bring underground values as a critical toolkit in navigating the divide between open technologies and control technologies, empirical technologies situated within an ethos of autonomy and free exploration, against those corporate or state artifices of capture and discipline that use psychic and physical mechanisms to replace empiricism with blind compliance. The distinction is, at root, between immanent and transcendent organizational logics — technologies that participate in open-ended relational fields versus those that impose external command. This is all the more insidious when those mechanisms become algorithmic, opaquely embedded within the ostensible new degrees of freedom and new network capacity offered by social media, large language models, augmented/virtual reality, etcetera. Indeed, with the emerging technologies we face, the political stakes of technology can be largely reduced to the question of [[Cognitive Liberty Norway - Cognitive Sovereignty|cognitive sovereignty]] - so long as we include as sovereigns the collective and open ended cognitive processes that so often subsume and animate us as individual humans.
So far I think the reader should have a sense of what we’re up to: applying practical open values to emerging technologies in order to help nudge them in the direction of radical empiricism, freedom, individual and collective cognitive sovereignty.
But there’s a destabilizing force at the ground of this inquiry that must be named, a tension that keeps it in flux. In fact these are where the meta-protocols are most needed, acting as touchstones or cairns in psychedelic landscapes, the nonlinear patterns and russian doll paradoxes of deep experimentalism, altered states, and more and more, silicon technologies (it is called “high technology” for a reason).
The protocol underground has been able to rally great powers of human organization to the end of vibes, atmospheres, becomings, collective ego-deaths. Paradoxically, if this distributed network has a telos or an end, it is the [[EXEUNT MIND/glossary/Undualing|nondual]] - the collision or collapse of means and ends into a state of pure experience. Inasmuch as the avant garde of the protocol underground is its process orientation, any attempts to stabilize or determine it have to be resisted for an openness to totally alternative orders of experience and the different regimes of analysis they afford.7
To give a goal orientation to the underground amounts to discussing it as an organism, in which case the values we delineate could be imagined as muscular reflexes of some monstrous, nonconscious beast, navigating a forest in which self and other are suspended in unthought. This places the underground in eerie convergence with that most controversial of emerging technologies, artificial intelligence: for while (in N. Katherine Hayles assessment, which we believe is correct) artificial intelligence of the kind found in advanced LLMs are certainly cognitive organisms - just as the anonymous stigmergy of the protocol underground seems to think for itself - they are not conscious creatures.8
This might be the final aspiration of the Open Machine, and what allows us (we think) to call ourselves an [[EXEUNT MIND/glossary/Extitution|extitutional]] enterprise, rather than merely an institutional programme parasiting insights from the underground: to understand how to think with and give ethical weight to nonconscious intelligence (in collective, machine or hybrid forms), which ultimately means reckoning with the [[EXEUNT MIND/glossary/Undualing|nondual]] as a valid form-of-life.9 The open-ended process of the underground has been long approaching this empathic task, and through our reflexive lens on that process, we intend to join it.
If the Open Machine has a goal, it’s the triumph of a real epistemic pluralism through the medium of open protocols, a pirate and heterogeneous landscape where the cognitive sovereigns will find all the many modes available to them: castles of rationality, psychedelic funhouses, ecstatic borg minds and blank deserts of oneness. The goal will, of course, remain unattainable, but on its horizon is a wild front of innovation, the potential for [[Brian Massumi - 99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value|process-economies]], [[Robin Arnott - The Technodelic Manifesto|technodelic]] interfaces, [[Weinbaum and Veitas - Open-Ended Intelligence|diverse synthetic intelligences]], arbitrary expansion and bridging of the previously un-fordable walls of [[EXEUNT MIND/glossary/Umwelt|umwelten]], and much more.
1 Why this anchor point? As one scholar we follow is fond of saying, “1966 was 100 years ago, 1973 was yesterday.” The 20’s to the 60’s were a rich epoch of underground strategy and development, but it wasn’t until the early 70’s that the models most relevant today achieved coherence and cultural velocity (as just one example, the counterculture currents of the sixties are known to have been rife with misogyny and sexual violence, meta-protocols around consent not yet present).
2 One of the most vivid examples is out of the UK free party scene of the nineties, wherein access to the party was often an hours-long ordeal, a trial of obscurity to make sure that all who attended the party attended with their full heart & soul. See [[Rave to the Grave - Episode 22 Seana Gavin on Spiral Tribe|Rave to the Grave podcast ep. 22: Seana Gavin on Spiral Tribe, Cyberpunk Soundsystems, and Adventures in Tekno]].
3 Looking to examples of “undergrounds” as we’re describing here, it’s useful to start with artistic subcultures - despite the many places where the arts have been institutionalized, those institutions are in nearly all cases parasitic off of larger, extitutional communities of practice that accord with the features we’ve mentioned. Outside of the arts, hallmark examples include psychedelic & psychonautic cultures, chaos magick, rave and free party cultures, bdsm and kink, free software, maker & hacker cultures, protest, mutual aid and squatter cultures, alternative economics and mutual credit design communities, permaculture, foraging, guerilla gardening cultures, to name a few. (Needless to say that there are many standouts within artistic communities of practice, hip hop and anti-art come through as strong examples).
4 In this evasion, the question arises: who is the pilot (otherwise called the “virtual governor”)? The effectiveness or “[[Michael Levin - Ingressing Minds|surprising competency]]” of an apparently blind process gestures toward (alternatively): ingressing [[Michael Levin - Ingressing Minds|patterns]] or archetypal forms, like Greek gods of cultural freedom; a [[EXEUNT MIND/glossary/Transcendental Object at the End of Time]] that pulls free behavior into certain patterns; or, more likely, the coordinated evasion-capacity of [[David Weinbaum - Abstraction Layers in Open-Ended Intelligence|abstraction layers]] discovered in the process of an [[EXEUNT MIND/glossary/Open-Ended Intelligence|open ended intelligence]] inherent to nature itself. (That is to say, the God is in the Machine).
5 A good point to note that we are grateful to Gitcoin, Allo Capital, the Regen Foundation and the Arbitrum Foundation among others for subsidizing in one form or another the foundations of this work.
6 As theorized in particular by the cultural anthropologist [[Chris Kelty - Two Bits|Chris Kelty]].
7 [[Varela, Thompson, and Rosch - The Embodied Mind|Francisco Varela]]’s neurophenomenology and the carrying on of its spirit by [[James H. Austin - Zen and the Brain|James H Austin]], [[Evan Thompson - Mind in Life|Evan Thompson]] have taken this dictum to great ends in STEM, while more recent work by Andrés Gómez-Emilsson and the [[Andrés Gómez-Emilsson - Qualia Research Institute|Qualia Research Institute]]promise to continue that project.
8 Hayles introduces and explores her concept of nonconscious cognition in her book [[N. Katherine Hayles - Unthought|Unthought]].
9 Our mainstream culture imagines non-conscious humanity as akin to zombies, even as we recognize the great vitality and power of forests and lichen and the mycelial underground that explores reality in rhizomatic unthought.