In the aftermath of the General Forum on Ethereum Localism, after taking a breath from our immersion in the web of new connections and entanglements, we’ve come to consider the event a wild success. A global community gathered to discuss (in makerspaces and warehouses, saunas and ecovillages, and never without a joint on the loading dock) the enigma of localism, the hydra of its possibility - PAMMS and commons, quadratic lands and mycelial credit networks, neighbourhoods and substrates. The air was jovial - on the final night, a verdict came in: “trust me, it’s not going to be this good next year. You only get this lucky once.”

The immanent stroke of luck appealed to us. A wild success: was it a sign? But to our anxious eyes, that noun edged toward action, from success to succession; all we could ask was “what’s next?” (Is it the general anxiety of our generation, whispers of a metacrisis, haunted feelings of not enough done? What do we have to be anxious about?)

Maybe it was a matter of chance, the date, Friday the 13th, so many slasher films ending with question marks, but in the solar eclipse of that conference’s Saturday and the hunter’s moons of its subsequent weeks, we saw the silhouette not of a solution but a problem: the audacity of the premise “Ethereum Localism,” and the doubled audacity of PDX DAO, a whole living city of intrigue and production of which we’d stolen the name.

If we were to be generous, we could call it (this audacious naming) a magical act, not a stealing but a planting of a staff, to summon the energies of the creaturely familiars and friends around us. But magical naming is the first step of capture, and we so wish the opposite. We wish to give the city instruments and infrastructure of lightness - a weightlessness, orbital freedom from the corrupt circles and the sinking scarcity spells of extractive and coercive institutions. How could we instill in our relationship to the name this light and raucous volition of the commons, this witch’s powers of flight?

Yes, this problem that haunted us provoked, with its elden etymology - the greek proballein, pro "forward" + ballein "to throw" - a ghostly invocation. In the leftover atmosphere of this Friday the 13th conference, with all our ideas staging lofty regenerative parabolas in the mid October sky, we were possessed with a call to jettison, to cast out, to rid ourselves of the demons of capture with a throw forward. Ahead of us, into the foggy, shadow-eclipsed future, a ghost of regenerative coordination that we couldn’t yet be, but that we might become.

After some reflection and slightly embattled consensus, the work group that had previously gone under the name PDX DAO has relinquished that title. It is not ours to own - we care too much for the city, know its multiplicity too well to think our rank of less than a dozen could adequately express it.

Instead, “PDX DAO” will be a placeholder to label our core future ambition, the accomplishment of our work: a DAO with more decentralized infrastructure, more radical permissionless character, more participatory integrity - a dream of a DAO, in a city where stateless tools of consensus building, coordination, and the greater technologies of noncoercion have taken root.

This slingshot affair, the DAO that dreams of a DAO, will continue under the name Ethereal Forest. It’s a legacy trope in our circle, and one that fits the overall tenor of our group - fertile hope and a faith that were we to build an adequate substrate of mutual security and agency, we could supplant the dark forest with (sorry for more poetry) the ethereal light - spontaneity, experimentation, loftiness … the playful liberty of the infinite game.

Finite games surround us, and they’re heavy with the burden of their artificial ends, so often staged by collusion, theology, or brute violence. When we redouble our vision of the world, look at it without control and without these alien ends, it becomes light again. We see tools that go for sustenance and simple freedom over control and escape. Open ended, integrated, we see permissionless protocols of abundance - p2p systems, spontaneous coordination, fortified when necessary by the hardness of blockchains that have brought our ability to design positive sum non-coercive systems to a new level. The new plural social economies are ethereal.

To our small circle, this vision is clear. But this clarity can’t be taken for granted, not if we want these tools to matter beyond technical or conceptual intrigue. Technologies of emancipation are meaningless without a public to make use of them. We continue to believe the urban complex is the optimal place to undergo that process of mattering. But our inquiries have shown us just how far the city of Portland is from having a public that is ready to make use of these tools of emancipation.

Whether it’s a result of structural inequities, lack of interest in internet literacy among those building some of the most interesting systems thinking technologies, negative and convoluted PR about the intentions of the crypto space, or the lack of success among web3 builders in developing tools for common use cases (probably all of the above), the onboarding problem is the greatest barrier to any principled aspirations of participatory design. These tools aren’t too complex, but the cultural shift required to present them as vehicles for pluralism is.

Ethereal Forest - call it the EF, for short - has as its task the building out of a coalition that might generate a City DAO adequate to the name. A DAO, that is, with meaningful participatory input, no prefab group of crypto natives performing multivalence, but a (more) genuine pluralism that might at least approach the extreme multiplicity of the city while reflecting the wild pluralistic ambitions of the web3 project.

At this stage, the marriage of these two unwieldy projects - the multiplicitous city, and the plural web3 public - is near fantasy, a haunting piece of gothic science fiction. As we build and weave, this is the mantra of Ethereal Forest: there is no PDX DAO. Not until the ground is prepared, the public seeded, the coalition built. And only then, after these protopian DAOs - the federated labor coalitions and mutual credit clubs, the community library protocols and bonding curve-enabled mutual aid funds, the programmable CSAs and the self-bootstrapped open hardware campaigns - have clouded into an emergent notion of common cause, only then will the needed shared infrastructure come into relief, only then will the audacious vision of a "PDX DAO" be within reach.

It will require an honest campaign of communication that acknowledges the excesses of the crypto space, clarifies the bastardizations or mischaracterizations of its use case, and invites communities to take the tools into their own hands and find in whatever use they can their own case for coordination, regeneration, liberation. And most of all, it will learn from the radical, off-web protocols and technologies of decentralization and pluralism that fill the city as it pursues the same.

Portland’s EF will focus on four primary fronts in this campaign to generate a PDX DAO adequate to its name:

• Research: Investigating and identifying the greatest areas of potential for creative implementation of the blockchain, p2p, and open protocol toolkit for substantive benefit to the city, with an eye toward the thriving of extra-institutional p2p-style systems.

• Curating Tools: Developing in tangent with that community-oriented research a library of blockchain and p2p tools and implementation strategies that will aid non-coercive coordination institutions in the city. This means using our research experience to find specific implementation opportunities, and connecting with builders and protocols that want the benefit of practically oriented public trials to better understand and improve their own projects.

• Engaging Community: Further building our relationships and networks with the artists, makers, organizers, producers and builders who make up the city, producing and supporting an onboarding DAO to minimize the barrier to entry and enable the practicing of decentralized coordination tools; supporting the creation of DAOs with the eventual goal of scaling horizontally into many on-chain organizations that will take equal footing with Ethereal Forest in the participatory structure of PDX DAO.

• Interregional and Global Collaboration: Making available our research and processes to projects and protocols that may benefit from the strategic contingency of the local; developing institutions of ILLness (Intercity Localist Library) and OOPs (Observed Operating Protocols) in order to protocolize and share our knowledge sets.

These four campaigns are only guideposts along the way. The architecture of this future PDX DAO has taken provisional shape, but the process takes precedence over the end. That process centers the horizontal scaling of our work as we build partners and coalitions of city people who are enthusiastic about the decentralized web, sovereign and regenerative systems, and what emerges at the intersection of these projects.

“Finite speech ends with a silence of closure. Infinite speech ends with a disclosure of silence.” Above our heads is this specter, a haunting name not to be spoken - not yet. The ethereal forest squirms, unsettled with all of its mute futures. We aren’t sentimental. We don’t sit in wait, nostalgic for the future that never came. Inspired by the capable optimism of our friends in the city, we see with practical eyes. The ghost’s final invocation: fides ex techne auditus. You must build ears to hear the name.

The future is light. The present is potent with its silent call. There is no PDX DAO.

Ethereal Forest is seeking to expand our network. We’re looking for research partners, interregional collaborators, devs and designers who need a place to implement, and sponsors.

Build a relationship with Ethereal Forest and the PDX DAO Ecosystem.

Talk to us about testing your product with one of our communities.

Plan your visit to hang or hack with us 👻 (if you’re passing through Portland, we have room to host ghouls guests at our (future-haunted) house -- more on that next time).

Coordination. Decentralization. Regenerative local economies. Sustainable commons infrastructure. Proliferating protocols. Infinite community gardens. We circulate these dreams; we tell ourselves to keeping buidling, and to touch grass. But grass is static, homogenous, manicured. Beneath it lies a moving, plural flux: alkaline, mineral, rhizome … rootedness.

If the collective dreams of the ethersphere are to take root, we must engage in the organically situated, messy work of digging and cultivating the soil. Somewhere in those rich mineral folds are the mysterious consistencies of the commons, the generative witch’s brew that can sustain and nurture difference and sameness in the same breath. We believe the time is right for the adoption of an Ethereum localism - grounded in the earth, reciprocated across the globe, generative on both fronts.

If you’re experimenting with on-chain localism, using DAOs or DisCos to develop your community, city or bioregional infrastructure, or simply building onboarding mechanisms to bring the ownership economy to your neighborhood, this forum is for you. Note: While there are other rad events on other very pressing aspects of localism, this event is targeted to crypto-natives, and will broadly focus on the question of localism and web3.

Ethereum Localism

We believe the Ethereum machine is untapped until its creations are touching soil on the level of the local, just as our cities and communities are squandering their singular gifts if they aren’t contributing to the global conversation. The urban center especially, with its dense entanglement of networks, its magical collision of artificial and organic, is a radical testing ground for any technology, and these same entanglements announce loudly the need for coordination tools and positive sum games. There is still so much discovery to be done, so many answers to the question: “what can a blockchain do?”

Our intention for this convening is to create a container where the Ethereum community can elaborate for itself, in a plurality of directions, what an experimentalism of the city can mean and look like for web3. While we know the cultural imagination will outdo us, some examples might include:

• DAOs as a tool of the urban commons – economic solidarity blocs for individuals (housing protection, unions, grassroots campaigns) and businesses (as mutual safety nets to protect against extractive megacorps), issue-specific grassroots fundraising sprints, and commons infrastructure management.

• Ethereum-enabled monetary localism – mutual credit networks, community tokens, circular economies, and other exotic programmable solutions to the problem of extra-local economic extraction.

• The premise that local food and material production systems are aligned with the Ethereum ethos of decentralization, security through redundancy, economic autonomy, and applied systems thinking, and should be supported as our natural allies.

Adoption

It seems much of the web3 world is waiting for some nebulous global catalyst to deliver blockchain to the masses. Many seem to think speculation will save us - the return of the bull. This not only violates the natural processes by which technology sees adoption, but it is antithetical to the bottom-up nature of decentralization. Bull or bear market, the work has always been done by passionate technologist anons experimenting without sanction or promise of financial gain.

Disruptive technological adoption is driven by practical material solutions – technologies aren’t real until they matter. This mattering means, above all, foregrounding simplicity and backgrounding complexity, a task that can be as difficult as developing the tech itself. It’s why adoption occurs long after a proof-of-concept exists. It’s also the window when the battles of capture and decentralization are fought; too often, the generative work happens at the grassroots level, the fruits of its labor then captured by centralized entities.

By design, web3 is inoculated from that threat - or so the story goes. We are here to say that this immunity can’t be assumed, but must be assured through practice. We know from history that the kind of technological simplicity that precedes real adoption requires local application, in all its experimental plurality. If this is so, then every site of novel local use is a potential inoculation site, a defense against capture. If the logic of protocols is a first breath of resilience, community use is its conclusion. Localism is an anticapture technology.

This is why PDX DAO is embracing a grassroots approach by using Ethereum tools for solving existing problems at the local level - that is, for mattering. We want to connect and merge tomorrow's end-users with today's tool-builders to begin iterating now on technology solutions that solve practical problems for communities while inventing new use cases for the globe. In this infinite garden of feedback, localism is globalism, and this conference hopes to underline that break in the binary.

Why Portland

Portland in particular is a notable example of cosmo-localism - that is, the optimistic, technology-positive worldview that sees the globalization of knowledge and communication as a means to supercharge autonomy, freedom and creativity at the local level. Portlanders who showed up at the famous “anti-globalization” protests in Seattle in ‘99 brought a taste for Open Source, OSAT, the Whole Earth Catalog, speculative genre fiction–dynamic technologies that made use of knowledge-share across the global community to imagine new ways to value the local.

Portland didn’t develop this way by chance - environmental and social conditions led this town and region to design decisions that produced the vibrant economy and attractive lifestyle conditions that led to the area being dubbed the “Silicon Forest”. Abundant natural resources, a confluence of transportation networks, and a history of defiance, autonomy, and optimism, supported by highly permissive and plastic local governance with high participation rates have created an environment ripe for creatives, builders, and disruption.

As a hub of technology, ecology, and localism, Portland has scoured the possibility space, in an experimental practice ranging from protest (some of our members attended the famously innovative 100 days of action in 2020) to mutual aid to alternative food security and permaculture (backyard chicken coops have reached the level of cliche in this town); from the adequate technology and open source movements, to the LETS and time based currencies that lay between the two, Portland is a breeding ground for decentralization and cybernetic freedom. Paul Stamets, Viviane Barnett, Linus Torvalds, Ursula Le Guin, Toby Hemenway have all called this city home, their visions sending ripples across the globe. The language and ethos of decentralization has a natural place here.

Ethereum may well be the best new innovation in the tradition of technological optimism and decentralization, though so much of its value as a cosmolocalist technology remains in potentia, untested and waiting to be activated. To honor the forebears from our streets, and the future generations that will inhabit them, we’re ready to light a spark of action, and start a new chapter in our own town.

Come get some dirt under your fingernails. It’s time to sow.

Conference Details

Format: As localists and blockchain advocates, the ethos of distribution and decentralization runs deep with PDXDAO. Several of us have participated in unconferences in the past, and we aim to bring some of that (un)structure to this event.

This conference will have time for speakers (centralized), unconference breakouts (distributed), and open periods (decentralized) to allow for the maximum amount of ideas to flow. Unconference breakouts will be led by attendees on any relevant topic of their choosing. These can range from ultra-specific talks, group conversations, mind and body activities, focused hacking time, and anything else the participants decide to put together in the heat of the moment.

Venue: BridgeSpace Commons, SE Portland

PDX DAO has its operation quarters at Bridgespace Commons, a warehouse community space in inner SE Portland. In its 6 months of operation, the space has acted as a schelling point for permaculture groups, seed collectives, mutual aid groups, racial justice nonprofits, art collectives, dance crews, and more. In a former life the site was host to underground raves and psilocybin parties. In other words, the vibes are immaculate. Bridgespace is the main venue for the conference.

The relationships we have with a variety of projects and places that embody the spirit of decentralization and community autonomy means we’ll have a great selection of pre-conference tours and micro-events for those who wish to attend early and get to know Portland a little better. These include urban farms and intentional communities like Kailash Ecovillage, Tryon Community Farm, Topaz Farm, as well as makerspaces and art collective spaces like Past Lives, Green Anchors, and Hedron Hackerspace. Pre-conference events are planned for the two days prior to the main conference.

Admission: Short application process; payment on a sliding scale (pay what you want, no questions asked). Bridgespace has an upward capacity of 150 people.

Lodging: We recommend the NW Portland Hostel, and the slightly more upscale The Society Hotel as great options for cost-efficient shared rooms or affordable single rooms. For a more traditional hotel with a rad style, go for The Jupiter Hotel in Central Eastside. Each of these is locally owned.

Dates/Schedule: Pre-conference: Wednesday October 11th - Thursday October 12th; Conference: Friday October 13th - Sunday October 15th; Post-conference: Monday October 16th; Daily Schedule – To be announced

Call for Speakers: If you’re interested in sharing your relevant knowledge, experience and skills we’d love to connect. Please reach out to us at pdxdao@gmail.com or on twitter @PDXDAO.

It’s up to us to do the locally integrated work to bring these tools to ground level, where communities can implement, experiment, and iterate to their own sovereign ends. When cityDAOs across the world coordinate and experiment with these tools, we’ll be able to come together, compare results, and cross-pollinate to create the exponential utility only participatory design can make. A network of shared values and love for difference, among nodes that reinforce each other even as they flower out.

On Friday the 13th, protocol touches grass, and grass touches soil. Will you join us?

As an organization we have three points of focus, representing three perspectives on localism we hope to see proliferated as Ethereum adoption expands. They are:

1. creating a vehicle to seed and support local experiments in Ethereum and web3 technology, especially for the public good, with an emphasis on monetary localism, the ownership economy, and novel cooperative enterprises,

2. initiating onboarding games to bring diverse communities of artists, makers, planners and designers into the crypto fold, along with their perspectives and knowledge-sets,

3. generating an opportunity for local Ethereans to build experience and dip their toes into the new economy by contributing to and participating in DAO work and governance.

Why Portland?

Portland is a unique place. Our penchant for experimental industry, alternative economics and our ethos of community autonomy is virtually a stereotype at this point. (We’re green, we’re anti-corporate, we’re into open source, everyone knows it!). All of this makes it a robust place to experiment with blockchain use cases. This is especially true now, as crypto flowers out from its decentralized finance period to one in which it might enable new forms of economic organization that can make our cities more democratic, fair and free. Craft breweries and backyard chicken coops may be a punchline, but trends like them began when skill sets shared online bred a multitude of on-the-ground experiments that showed a desire to learn and own skills of economic reproduction. Ethereum can foster and develop this energy.

We intend to build connections between local crypto natives, eager neophytes, and the host of urban farmers, local manufacturers, artists, organizers and designers in the Portland area currently practicing web3 values without even knowing it. Our bet is that by welcoming these kindred spirits into the crypto fold, we can change the culture for the better. This is why we’ve taken onboarding up as a core cause. If Ethereum in particular has been host to the kind of technology positive, democratic entrepreneurship that we think represents the best of the ecosystem - a practical pluralism adequate to our city’s creativity - we believe that the network can only benefit from bringing a diversity of outsiders in.

Many have been brought into the crypto world by way of an investment hypothesis, or the promise of an unregulated “wild west” of financial machinations - but there is nothing particularly local about either of these avenues. We hope to seed new paths to adoption that bypass the degen pipeline, looking to the many subcultures and micro-industries that share an affinity for things like decentralization, alternative economics, open sources values, and cosmolocalism. By connecting these communities to web3 tools that exemplify their existing values, we can discover a landscape of new use cases and practical insights that will riff on and expand the core ethos of Ethereum, to help decentralization and economic democracy go viral from the ground up.

Our Story

The seed of PDX DAO was planted when members of a local regenerative economy initiative—PDX Commons Technology Project (@exeunt, @joshspector, @macks)—brushed shoulders with organizers of Portland’s local Ethereum meetup group, EthPDX (@christypdx, @vengist, @wackerow, @mike). PCTP was agnostic to blockchain and concerned with mutual credit, homebrew production tech, mutual aid and all things localism, while the EthPDX crew was passionate about the hypothesis of the infinite machine and interested in local application.

After a series of open conversations discussing everything from CNC technology to Layer-0 security, permaculture to pre-internet protocols, a joint vision was established. It was an instance that is archetypal in the life of pluralist orgs - when a diversity of thought finds, in a moment, a consensus vision. Our thesis: the Ethereum ecosystem contains all the formal infrastructure we need to build a regenerative local economy, so long as we can win the local talent to accomplish the task.

The summoning of the DAO went down at BridgeSpace Commons, a community warehouse space in SE Portland where PDX DAO holds our IRL meetings, often alongside groups of permaculturalists and seed experts, student climate activists, mutual aid projects and psychedelic enthusiasts, art collectives and dance crews. (The building itself and the network it contains is an important part of our multi-capital resource pool. But more on that below.) Since then, we’ve been having more discussions, building out our infrastructure, and making plans. Lots of plans.

Our Purpose

PDX DAO operates on the beliefs that (1) blockchain coordination mechanisms can provide rails for more egalitarian and democratic social and economic systems, and (2) this will happen at scale only after arising many times, independently, at the local scale. This local scale disruption is already having a renaissance of sorts in many parts of the world, but we seem to be lagging behind here in the states (with a few very notable exceptions). We see the city of Portland as a perfect place to stage the next chapter of the coordination metagame.

The kind of organic exchange of values described in our origin story is exactly what we hope to reproduce with PDX DAO, using outreach, education, and problem solving through participatory design. The last point is crucial. While the degen to regen pipeline has been a great source of value and talent for the Ethereum network, the culture will be under threat if it’s the only source. There is a rich alternative offered by the host of communities and subcultures that, with their affinity for distributed systems thinking and new economy experiments, are simply waiting to be onboarded (trust us, we know them) - given a thoughtful and good faith introduction, offered in a language they are ready to hear.

Most importantly, these diverse communities have an overall sense of experimentalism and systems design which we think mirrors the core spirit of Ethereum. If we invest in these communities, many of whom have already put decades of sweat equity into their own closely-aligned missions, the network will be rewarded tenfold by their breadth of knowledge and the practical value of their use-cases. This is how we touch grass.

Our Projects

Because of PDX DAO’s grounding in the community, our projects benefit from (and are designed around) a wealth of multi-capital resources that will increase the weight of any dollars we throw at them. Not least of these is BridgeSpace Commons, our home base and the network center for the kind of diverse local causes described above. While we share a responsibility to maintain funding for the warehouse, its core purpose is to provide cheap gathering space for orgs like ours that are working to further the local public good.

Local Rounds is a quarterly fundraising drive and buidl sprint for commons infrastructure in Portland Oregon. Each quarterly round will take a different sector of the urban commons as its object in a month-long cycle of awareness, inter-education (between builders and designers and the communities we’re engaging), participatory solutions design, and fundraising, ending in a hackathon. Protocols will build relationships with communities. Portlanders will be onboarded to web3. Crypto-natives will learn mind-bending things from communities. Participants will be rewarded with POAPs.

Round cycle (as currently envisioned) Round 1: Urban Farms and Community Gardens| Round 2: Makerspaces, Hackerspaces, Art Collectives Round 3: Worker Coopertives, Platform Cooperatives & Experimental Enterprises Round 4: TBD

In each case, the community will be brought to bear for small events, teach-ins, tours and work parties on locations (local urban farms and gardens, for ex.) while community members will be invited to small talks and onboarding events put on by PDX DAO and any web3 volunteers. The structure is designed so that the hackathon occurs only after builders have had time to be immersed in and hang out with the communities they’re building for. Products of the hackathon are, of course, only provocations meant to create a relationship and design path that can live on, in different cities and future projects.

A General Forum on Ethereum Localism. Alongside this (ideally, but not necessarily, after a “trial round” of the Local Rounds project) we have proposed the General Forum on Ethereum Localism, for the benefit of crypto-natives from all over who are thinking about and building local, value-aligned applications utilizing the Ethereum Virtual Machine. Our intention for this convening is to create a container where the Ethereum community can elaborate for itself, in a plurality of directions, what Ethereum localism can mean and look like. While we know the cultural imagination will outdo us, some examples might include:

• Ethereum-enabled monetary localism – mutual credit networks, community tokens, circular economies, and other exotic programmable solutions to the problem of extra-local economic extraction.

• DAOs as a tool of the urban commons - economic solidarity blocs for individuals (housing protection, unions, grassroots campaigns) and businesses (as mutual safety nets to protect against extractive megacorps), issue-specific grassroots fundraising sprints, and commons infrastructure management.

• The premise that local food and material production systems are aligned with the Ethereum ethos of decentralization, security through redundancy, economic autonomy, and applied systems thinking.

This event is targeted to crypto-natives, and will broadly focus on the question of localism and web3. (The question of specific project applications and grassroots causes in the city of Portland will be left to Local Rounds as this forum’s compliment). A series of small tours and work parties will be hosted in the days leading up to the event to expose the community to some of the local projects in our orbit.

Open Salons and Technical Forums + Web3 Reading Group. On a smaller and more regular basis, we are laying out a series of meetups meant for EthPDX/any other web3 locals to cover both the theory and technical sides of the Ethereum project. The first open salon, led by @wackerow, took place at the end of March, with about a dozen ETH folks talking blockchain fundamentals, the mechanics of staking, running a node, various security protocols, and more. A technical forum is in the works with a planned talk and discussion delving further into the topic of security.

Meanwhile, @exeunt has put together an open syllabus for a web3 reading group covering theory elements, from the early cybernetic period through to cypherpunk, the financial crisis, solarpunk/lunarpunk and conversations about the future.

The city has always been a factory for experiments in democracy, pluralism, and economic freedom. The metacrisis requires that we bring all of those powers to bear. When we do so in reciprocal exchange with the decentralized web toolkits we have at our disposal, we’ll bring the distributed power of the broader world to each of our challenges. Local strategies inspiring global protocols that lay the ground for new strategic improvisation. This is the supercycle we’ve been waiting for.

For more info, and if you want to get involved, visit our website and join the EthPDX Discord. Projects and operations are public on wonderverse.xyz.