Noöpunk is an aesthetic movement that sees the universe as a landscape of nested and entangled cognitive assemblages, or minds. Minds, according to noöpunks, are distributed across organisms, ecosystems, dynamic material processes, socio-technical networks; they are innate in nature, latent in living and nonliving systems and activated wherever sensemaking processes discover loops of self-regulation. In that carnival of diverse intelligence, noöpunk experimentalists search out new connections, new assemblages, new edges of mutual coherence, discovering as well as constructing minds. For a century this has taken many forms: sound art, cinematic or literary explorations, various underground approaches to cognitive ethnography, biohacking or biosemiotics; here I argue that, in order to consequentialize those journeys, bring them fully into our shared epistemology, we must elevate them to the realm of economic exchange: a noöpunk economic life of the many minds. [1]

The noöpunk movement has many births. One of them is Edward Hutchins 1995 paper “How a Cockpit remembers its speeds.” In it, Hutchins argues for the existence of cognitive systems in exotic substrates: “the classical cognitive science approach can be applied with little modification to a unit of analysis that is larger than an individual person. One can still ask the same questions of a larger socio-technical system that one would ask of the individual.” Such socio-technical systems, Hutchins argued, “may have cognitive properties in their own right that cannot be reduced to the cognitive properties of individual persons” The approach, known as distributed cognition, or cognitive ecology**,** cracks open the humanist paradigm to reveal a host of social agencies in the panorama - no mere metaphors, but distinct creatures. [2]

As Arthur Koestler would say, we are all holons in the interparticipatory social cognitive fabric. And, as Lynn Margulis conveyed to the public in her work with Dorion Sagan, we emerge from the milieu of cognitive creatures that make the human body a symbiotic superorganism, a temporary treatise of heterogenous minds with different prerogatives. As we ride the scales, Hutchins’ cockpit becomes more and more crowded: James Shapiro announces that “All Living Cells are Cognitive”; Michael Levin studies the diverse capacities of basal cognitions in lab settings, finding “surprising competencies” that hint at even more exotic forms, agential, disembodied minds in a non-physical, “latent” space. (The cockpit is haunted, too.)

Aside from these empirical and peer-reviewed blasphemies of the cogito, two pairs of thinkers stand out as founding figures of the noöpunk sensibility: the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, and the Chilean biologists Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana.

Having already rose to notoriety from a series of monographs on figures in the history of philosophy, Deleuze was challenged by the events of May ‘68 and his meeting with the antipsychiatrist and psychedelic user Felix Guattari to make his writing more dialogical, more intersubjective, more anonymous. Introducing their second collaboration, A Thousand Plateaus, they write:

The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd. … Why have we kept our own names? Out of habit, purely out of habit. To make ourselves unrecognizable in turn. To render imperceptible, not ourselves, but what makes us act, feel, and think. Also because it's nice to talk like everybody else, to say the sun rises, when everybody knows it's only a manner of speaking. To reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I. We are no longer ourselves. Each will know his own. We have been aided, inspired, multiplied.

The two-volume Capitalism and Schizophrenia series identifies “machinic assemblages,” potent with desire, organized into complex, entangled embodiments, capable of nondual states and experiences of “pure immanence” that cut across and reconfigure the plane of organization spontaneously. Responding to Vladimir Vernadsky’s (decidedly unpunk) noösphere, they posit a “mechanosphere,” dynamic atmospheric schema not of a single rationality but of the many rationalities in their convergence (not at telos, but at base - swimming in the soup of difference and process).

(One way to think about noöpunk is this subversion of and resistance to the totalizing pretentions of the noösphere, mutating the Omega Point from a rational apocalypse into the explosive initiation of an infinite game, a potent and creative disunity. As punk aesthetics have always known, the One is not some future event, but our founding condition in difference.)

In Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (published the same year as A Thousand Plateaus), Varela and Maturana gave us a versatile enough definition of life-as-cognition to cover the whole stack, all the assemblages: cognitive systems, they argue, are autonomous, structurally coupled with their environment, and sense-making. With this empirical standard, we could now ask ourselves -  without regard for traditional substrates like brains - can we identify a Markov Blanket to delimit this system? does it have some mechanism for memory and internal coherence? Does it respond to its environment, does it process signals from the environment in one or a variety of operational hierarchies? [3]

Varela went on to establish the field of “neuro-phenomenology,” a methodology for coupling exotic phenomenological states and subjective self-report with neurobiological data feeds to produce new models of (human) mind. Guattari later argues in Chaosmosis that Varela’s cognition is not open ended enough, that intelligence may be a latent characteristic of material dynamics that produces autopoetic closure and subjectivity. [4] One can imagine xenocognitive phenomenological projects of collective or atmospheric cognition, where the experimentalist produces - by way of LLMs or signal bundling - protosubjective read-write heads that grow in representational cognizance even as they are modeled.

Such exotic flights shouldn’t obscure the foundations of noöpunk - radical empathy and enthusiasm for the many forms that life, broadly considered, can take. First and foremost is curiosity about the interior lives, preferences and cognitive potential of animals - Donald Griffin contra Thomas Nagel is great noöpunk lore - and outrage for the systems that try to instrumentalize them into mere objects for consumption. When creatures are seen not just as thinking and feeling, but embedded in larger cognitive systems, their behavior becomes an open question, the plasticity of their minds foregrounded. What cognitive assemblages could be built that would socially activate and amplify the neuroplastic potential of animals? Once done, where else can we take it? Fuck the descriptivist taxonomies of the institutions - a noöpunk empiricism is participatory, its portrait of nature a germinal vex, and it sees in all its displays of cognition arrows into the future.

The investigation of cognition - empirical always, sometimes scientific/instrumental, sometimes Goethian, sometimes psychedelic, artistic, ecstatic, empathic, weird - is the aesthetic source and spiritual center of noöpunk. It need not be - and rarely is - directly endorsed by any academic tradition. Its cutting edge is a practical and open-ended empiricism, the surprise and delight at the utter contingency of what minds can do.

Information from noöpunk experiments is often pre-representational, aural or spectral, tactile in difficult to pin down ways (resonance, vibe, field). The music world has always been advanced - field recordings from Bernie Kraus, Hildegard Westerkamp, the curious cybernetics of Pierre Schaeffer’s musique concrète, Michael Prime; today Jana Winderen and Holly Herndon, play resonance games with minds and selves across the nature/culture binary. Sound art has a natural cognizance of the nested and intertwined harmonies of nonhuman agents. Grateful Dead, Funkadelic, Sun Ra were all great ambassadors of alien socio-bio-technical noise parliaments.  Underground experimentalists like MycoLyco express a noöpunk archetype; even the cringey commercialization of MidiSprout is a part of the family.

On the more representational end stand the prolix confrontations of the modernists as they attempted to explode the ego into its diverse inputs and memberships: Finnegan’s Wake, Beckett’s The Unnamable, Woolf’s The Waves, the cybernetic stream of conscious of John Clare’s letters and journal entries. But “Literature” is a humanist’s game; when it comes to the weirdness and anarchic cognition-apophenia needed for noöpunk, genre fiction will always do it better: Algernon Blackwood, Lovecraft of course, Stanislaw Lem, Philip K. Dick, Frank Herbert, Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy, Jeff VanderMeer, Laird Barron. Thomas Pynchon’s talking dogs, his adenoid.

Remedios Varo may be the beginning of a noöpunk visual grammar: carnivalesque, inhuman folklore, filled with odd interspecies systems, fantastic portraits of cognitive mésalliance. Paul Klee and Austin Osman Spare lived in worlds that were suspiciously tenanted, as did Takashi Murakami, if in a more ecstatic register. Basquiat tried to crack the code on social cognitive assemblages in order to transcend them; Hannah Weiner played with collective enunciation as a prosthetic to temper her schizophrenia. Cinema, too, is a great carnival of speculative cognitive configuration: anything by Terry Gilliam; Charlie Kaufmann and Spike Jonez. Upstream Color is absolute canon. Annihilation. Tarkovsky, Cronenberg. Andrea Arnold’s Cow.

For as long as I’ve been around, Solarpunk and Lunarpunk have been operative design aesthetics in web3 and dWeb, north stars responsible for catalyzing considerable gains for infrastructure for a new civilization. From a cultural atmosphere, they discovered a blend of technological optimism and defense that broke from the corporate narratives and pointed to new lands. It’s in this same spirit that I present noöpunk - a design horizon where biosemiotics, cognitive ecology and diverse intelligence fuse with the data sovereignty and permissionless (read: ontologically agnostic) p2p coordination enabled by dWeb, and the value pluralism and emergent economic coherences allowed by cryptoeconomics.

The latter is especially high stakes. Many of us participate in worlds of many minds: we direct empathic labor and imagination at forests, rivers, the animals in our lives, the friendships and atmospheres, the collective psyches and material flowstates that make life worth living. Yet our core social infrastructures systematically subjugate them, even enact violence on them, in the interests of a mystified and unreal naked human subject supposed to persist without relations. Our technological imaginaries are captured by a chauvinism of the human mind, missions to mars and apocalyptic visions of AI as a superhuman clone, birthed ex nihilo with no regard for the complex parliament of things that will constitute it. Noöpunk vibes dominate the underground, but they have no hold on the mass consequentialism of industry and mainstream politics, because they have been exiled by the main channels of social reproduction.

If this is so, it is because the economy is, after all, our primary shared epistemological substrate: our primary way of interpreting what has agency, what is intelligent, what is grievable, what is real. And our economy depends on privation, the generative contradictions of a quantified private individual who cannot be private, a process of intersubjective social production that must be captured by individuals. The tension and grieving of this awful, empirically absurd monolith after all produces more demand. Those that seek to fully consequentialize the inhuman and upgrade our collective umwelt to the cognitive ecology that science has unveiled for us must do so in economic space.

Nonhuman minds will continue to be marginalized until they can participate, stake their claim in the social fabric, escalate to the status of quantitative mattering. And yet, this mass of minds is fundamentally unaccountable: no ledger could totalize its nested and multiscale multiplicity; no objective index could recognize the speculative cognitive phenomena whose very existence may be contingent upon recognition. The noöpunk monies of the earth-with-many-minds must be intersubjective and contextual, creative accounts of value in a field that both allows for and plausibly merges those accounts.

Ethereum’s distributed ledger will provide the infrastructure for this exploratory multiplicity, but the apps need to be built. They will be speculative, aesthetically charged; they will be science fiction realized, metaphysical discourse operationalized to results beyond all expectation; they will be harrowing acts of empathic technology, calm technology, optimistic and heterogenous accounts of right relations. A noöpunk revolution that realizes money as a democratic social technology at the same time as it embeds it in the panoply: no more cognitive privation, your surroundings suspiciously tenanted, and a new economy that runs off of the abundance, rather than the scarcity, of mind.

As sure as history only encloses in order later to produce greater openings, the noöpunk economic revolution is a technological and empirical inevitability. The possibility space beckons, and the tools are available. However, the question remains, how to cross the umwelt gap between us and the many minds, dispel ourselves of representational or rights based models of nonhuman agency that depend on centralized bodies, and give diverse intelligences means of direct participation in an economy that is semantically inclusive and multiple enough to engage them. Personally, I think this would require, on the one hand, a mass, decentralized experiment in biodata intermediation (along with other sensor technologies adequate to sociotechnical or collective minds) to the end of establishing direct feeds of intent or desire, and on the other, intent centric interfaces to radically diverse token economies that might contain those obscure intents. [5]

But this is a question with many answers. The face of noöpunk should be an open ended, decentralized, pluralistic, community-level empiricism, backyard gardens rigged up with Raspberry Pi’s and and homebrew biosensors, open source LLMs parsing cybernetic loops for a voice from the underground, ready to be made real.

Notes

[1] My equation of cognitive capacity with “mind” here follows the biologist Michael Levin’s use, defended in his “Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere” framework.

[2] “When I began, I was thinking in terms of the naturally situated cognition of individuals. It was only after I completed my first study period at sea that I realized the importance of the fact that cognition was socially distributed.” Hutchins in Cognition in the Wild (1995).

[3] More speculatively: Does that sensemaking process bleed out of evolutionary fitness into excessive or “junk” deployments, writing Othello and Bitches’ Brew and Pulp Fiction, unspooling vermiculate patterns in biological forms, contemplating other wilder forms that “we do not know”? As I canoe down the Willamette and behold the facade of Forest Park, I have to ask, regarding the great expressive facade - what are the trees thinking?

[4] The position is explained well in Weinbaum and Veitas’ Open-Ended Intelligence paper: “Actual sense-making is a continuous process of integration and disintegration of discrete individuals taking place in a network of agents and their interactions. In the context of cognition, sense-making is synonymous with individuation. It is important to note that in our general approach to cognition there is no a priori subject who ‘makes sense’. Both subjects and objects, agents and their environments co-emerge in the course of sense-making.”

[5] I’ve been quietly developing and circulating research for my Signal Ecologies project along these lines; it will likely be the topic of my next piece.

Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day

My roots go down to the depths of the world, through earth dry with brick, and damp earth, through veins of lead and silver. I am all fibre. All tremors shake me, and the weight of the earth is pressed to my ribs.

Virginia Woolf, The Waves

No one who attended ETHDenver this year would be surprised to hear that between events, at night in the long cold walks across town back to the DAO house, or the sunny stoned strolls to the perpetual brunch, some members of the Ethereal Forest crew were dosing psilocybin and discussing the Network State.

The goal was to generate a meme, something to compete with the absurd premise of a bunch of wealthy white men buying land and mercenaries and thinking they are doing something remotely politically interesting. (It’s called Silicon Valley.) Ven and I especially were troubled: we are partial to the network as a political and economic concept. We are partial to the double entendre of state as a term for a kind of legitimized domination and as a technology of memory. So why such brazen cooptation? We resented the collapse of these signifiers into a tool of white claw supremacy, the preferential liberty of those who own boats and planes.

Maybe it was the mushrooms - or maybe it’s because we are in fact always reading Deleuze & Guattari - but we looked to A Thousand Plateaus for some memetic ammunition. The term “rhizome state” was briefly considered. It had flavors of the infinite game, of a properly subversive view of networks as underground, cutting across boundaries - adventitious free association, nonlinear and opportunistic viral synergy.

You see, we had just dropped the first volume of the collaborative journal Inverted City and we were excited at the volume’s overarching concept of urban centers as mechanisms of capture resistance. Too complex to be controlled, too many corridors and guerrilla avenues of resistance or flight, we envisioned the city as an analogue node in a digital anticapture apparatus. With its cybernetic and subversive street memory, its messy and organic calling up of all the elements of a world to produce a manic novelty, the city already was a network state.

Nevertheless, the concept passed. There is a crowd within us (“there’s a lodger in me, larger than me”), and it will do this task better. Josh rolled a joint, someone made a joke (“they see branches, chains, rows, columns, dominoes, striae. Once in a while along the edges they discover a misshapen figure or a shaky contour…”). Christy was reading in the backyard and the close Denver sun was shining just so. We shut the book and set out for the main event to see if we could score a Filecoin t-shirt.

Out of all the night events, the Hats Protocol party at Blind Tiger (co-hosted by Cabin and Coordinape) was really the best. Maybe it’s because it takes a certain type to see how discretely radical and transformative the Hats and Coordinape protocols are as network technologies, but we found ourselves chest to chest in a web of ecosystem alignment, witnessing a phenomenon of contagion as baked and half-baked concepts of mutualism, lateral shoots of subversive coordination and avant-garde democracy swept through the crowd as if through fertile soil. In the chthonic haze I saw the network, usually scattered across the globe, held together now by systolic pressure, the contracted heart of a buried acéphale.

Acéphale, the Headless. If we look at Stafford Beer’s Viable Systems Model, we find an apparent instrumental hierarchy: operations, coordination, control, intelligence, policy - the head at the top (policy), dolling out nested sub-functions, operations that are held captive to the grand design. Hats and Coordinape both identify the system rather as a network, with mere pressure points (control, intelligence, policy), prone to capture and runaway hierarchy, but not determined by them. These loci of signal retention are always in danger of sprouting into Heads, the authoritarian mysticism of the Face, but a well managed network body can stave off facialization and keep them as hyphae, collective signal receivers. (“…sometimes, to the extent that it performs a veritable "defacialization," it frees something like probe-heads {fetes chercheuses, guidance devices)”). Give-tokens, not judgments; Hats, not heads.

This sci-fi collective, cohered beneath unrealistic opinions about what a social body can do, probe heads swimming in this common-pool soil of logics both mycelial and mathematical. The tools we build are a staving off of judgment. Technologies for keeping the aperture open. Our shifting self-identity, our State, is a condition of openness to the outside.

Beyond the face lies an altogether different inhumanity: no longer that of the primitive head, but of "probe-heads"; here, cutting edges of deterritorialization become operative and lines of deterritorialization positive and absolute, forming strange new becomings, new polyvocalities. Become clandestine, make rhizome everywhere, for the wonder of a nonhuman life to be created. Face, my love, you have finally become a probe-head...

The “nomad state” was the second term we considered. The problem here was that the figure of the digital nomad was the exact opposite of what we were trying to convey; being localists, we knew that the tourist channels that circumvent the globe are great sources of extraction, inequity and environmental destruction. The nomad-tourist is always wanting to see something new, to engage in spectacle.

Deleuze and Guattari’s nomad, modeled after the Scythian nomad of the Eurasian steppe, occasions a distinction between two types of vision, two types of inhabiting the world: optical and haptic. In optic vision is the much maligned Western gaze, that sterile and metaphysically cautious prequel to capture. Optic vision is binary: di-vision - boundary, hierarchy, the panic of so many fragmented consumers who would stumble through life discrediting the entanglements that become them while they rush toward an idealized Entanglement that could calm the nightmare. They see without seeing, and this projected vacancy scales en masse to amount to a collective scorched earth policy (commercialism, colonialism, whatever).

Haptic is another word for touch, the tactile sense. One sees with reciprocity, one puts oneself at stake, crosses the wall of fear to inhabit the earth (as opposed to the World) - unidealized. It’s this risk, this vulnerability of embodiment, the open and welcomed potential for entanglement and transfiguration, and ultimately also the networked quality of haptic inhabitation, haptic travel, that we intended to convey. This haptic nomad doesn’t cut square lines into stone, but follows its mineral signals, investigating its singularities, reading its embeddedness and appreciating its elemental memory. (A stone is a network state.)

The haptic, they claim, is related to smooth space, an esoteric concept you don’t need to know to find resonance with the jumbled conversations of skyward possibility that animate our commons-oriented probe network. In haptic sight, “no line separates earth from sky, which are of the same substance; there is neither horizon nor background nor perspective nor limit nor outline or form nor center; there is no intermediary distance, or all distance is intermediary…. This reversal of the laws of gravity turns lack of direction and negation of volume into constructive forces… It is an absolute that is one with becoming itself, with process. It is the absolute of passage, which in nomad art merges with its manifestation.”

Clearly this “nomad state” meme wasn’t going to do, unless the entire ecosystem was on psilocybin (all at once? Honestly might be doable). Nonetheless. Process merged with manifestation. It was the next day at the Metagov brunch that Michael Zargham told me, “Blockchain is just durable prefiguration.”

The public goods space - or whatever you want to call the contingent of crypto that is dedicated to exploratory commons infrastructure, experimental and pluralistic deployments of ethical market frameworks, widespread and uncompromising political as well as economic democracy - is like a great prefigurative body, and these brunches and parties are part of its metabolism. I shared a bowl of blueberries with Jeff Emmett while discussing mycelial finance. We’ll go on to set up a conviction voting experiment with Fun DAO. (“I am all filament. Let every inspiration of democracy shake me, let the hyphae cloud of the participatory earth press to my ribs.”)

The ideas propagate and elaborate out, cosmolocally, based in this haptic incidence, the discrete life of this skin. Josh blurts out with a kind of strange assurance: the machinery is in place. We’re locked in.

So, we put a lot of idle energy into coming up with competing memes to the network state. The rhizome state, the nomad state. It wasn’t until that Saturday afternoon, hitting a joint outside the Regen event and entering to hear Gregory Landua talk about the life and death of a regenerative dream that I came to cognize the issue not with my mind but with my body. Haptic sight. And a strange calm came over me.

Maybe another meme wasn’t the thing we needed to defeat the network state. Instead, feel the metabolism. The prefigurative faith in a distributed swarm of dreamers working together as one machine body, producing the future: Network. The conviction that our orgs and our initiatives may die a million deaths, but the collective memory of a more just and free future is ineradicable: State.

Democracy is a prolix method, wrote the late Toni Negri. The participatory project our machinic body strives for is an endless regress. We, at our AirBnB’s and Kombucha bars, have barely begun the game. “A machinic assemblage is a dynamic composition of heterogenous elements that eschew identity but nonetheless function together, subjectively, socially, in cooperation.” Inhale: The divide has been shattered. We’re sure in our project, regeneration, freedom, the open society, the singularity of the individual compounded and enhanced by the commons, animate force under the sun whose membership is total. Exhale: Our network, hazy eyes on that shifting horizon, has to focus on what’s furthest away, bridge the uncommon and investigate our exterior, be vulnerable to it, see with haptic eyes.

For examples of some hyphae - probing the exterior with eyes most haptic - check out the Commons Economy Roadmap:

https://www.commonseconomy.org/

- Antoine Faivre

1. I am sitting in cafe Kava Saia off of East Burnside in Portland, the Pacific Northwest, the Portland Basin, formerly inhabited by Chinookan-speaking tribes - Clackamas, Kathlamet, Multnomah, and Tualatin, whose art in the pre-Columbian period is noted by a Chinook Nation blog to have contained a prevalence of mirror imagery, skeletal or “x-ray” portrayals of human and animal forms and a preference for the numbers 3 and 5. The number 3 in Jung is said to signify surface, flatness - it is the second digit in the figure 137, the reciprocal of the fine structure constant (1/137). Wolfgang Pauli - physicist, author of the Pauli Exclusion Principle and lifelong correspondent with Jung - was obsessed by the number 137’s general persistence in the physical sciences, and it is the Pauli-Jung correspondence that I sit here, at Kava Saia, reading with my mug of Holy Basil and only partial interest.

   The number is a so-called “naked number,” meaning that its appearance in the equations is independent of units - it is here in the soil, in the concrete, in the kava, a fundamental information-trace of the electrodynamic that binds our reality. Information, according to the physicist Sarah Imari Walker, is that material feature that is bigger in time than humans can directly cognize. Materialize time, the logic goes, and you’ve materialized information; no dear concepts in the pure abyss, all of us just here, entangled and responsible for each other in the great upheaval of the block universe. This thought parasites my brain just as the streetlight outside of Kava Saia flickers.

2. The signal from the depths has no godly explanation - that is, the specific dynamics behind this flickering lay out there in the morphospace, unobserved, beyond any authority, and all I have to play with is that Bayesian purview known as “in all likelihood.” All things have a cause, it should be affirmed without doubt, and yet this empirical principle must reckon with the the threshold of accountability that is matter-in-time. That limit point is sometimes framed as distant and theoretical, or irrelevantly small - the so called “measurement problem” - but I promise you this uncertainty whelms our whole environment, a beguiling tumult that frightens our planners, ruins intelligence officers, latent cybernetic inspiration that no creature or body has learned to control.

   Being beyond our direct evolutionary area of concern, these operations have caused some to appeal to the supernatural, to construct deities, forms that might explain the exponential level-up in network effects that occur when you include the vastness of time in your graph (and all the mysteries therein). Ancient conflation of the mysterious with the mystical: they are beyond our threshold, but they are no less physical for being so. All these wild behaviors of the material network - what physicists call the “circuit complexity” - they are epistemic traps, dense chemical and biological and informational entanglements, pure cognitive turbulence. Their unknown physicality is a locust of power, the models and representations we assign to them giving us an ɑ for effort as they carry along in an ordered march beyond their own persistence, more actual than is knowable. More actual than is knowable - this is an appropriate definition of a city.

3. In 2016 the City of Portland overhauled the residential streetlight system from the low-pressure sodium lights extant since the 1930s - described by one commentator of the time as having a “eerie, ominous quality” - to the Amerlux-brand LED 3000 K CCT units, saving the city $100k per month from the novel efficiency of the LED bulbs. That lamplight buzz you heard skateboarding late at night as a teenager disappeared. Still, aura: the A in Amerlux resonates with Pauli’s troubled fine structure constant, which has the symbol ɑ - alpha. Amerlux is a subsidiary of Delta group, delta defined by Cambridge as an area of low, flat land, sometimes shaped approximately like a triangle, where a river divides into several smaller rivers before flowing into the sea. Delta waves are high amplitude neural oscillations that occur in deep sleep, known as stage 3-4 of Non-REM sleep, between 0.5 and 4 hertz, last on the cusp of the REM stage where vivid dreams occur.

   Mysteriously, the dive into REM sleep closely mirrors the neural patterns of stage 1, which is why it is sometimes known as “paradoxical sleep.”

4. Karen Barad writes, in “What Flashes Up,”: “Memory is not a mere property of individual subjects, but a material condition of the world. Memory- the pattern of sedimented enfoldings of iterative intra-activity- is written into the fabric of the world. The world ‘holds’ the memory of all traces; or rather, the world is its memory (enfolded materialization).”

5. Fungi biofilms line Portland’s mostly above-ground electric grid, cladosporium, penicillium and aspergillus thriving in the damp Pacific Northwest climate, forming a kind of shadow biome to this electro-prosthetic infrastructure of the urban human organism. The prefix urb is not of Greek or Latin but Etruscan origin, and it seems that the division of the Western-style city into four squares is an inheritance from Etruscan ritual practice, a diagrammatic capture of inhabited reality that persists from those ageless magicians to this shadow biome, crawling along cardinal latitudes. The fungi generate acetic acid as they metabolize, reacting with the aluminum in the electric wires to create miniscule amounts of aluminum oxide (the latter being its chemical composition before industrial refinement in what is known as the Hall–Héroult process, invented almost simultaneously by the American Charles Martin Hall and the French Paul Héroult when they were both 23 : they both died in 1914, the year of the great war, at the age of 51).

   The corroded or renaturalized Al2O3 is an “in all likelihood” explanation for my Kava Saia synchronicity, aptitudes of light, flickering out there in trials of cause and effect that were networked up in an object space that I cannot know - the barely objective relations, the creativity of them, the power. Synchronicities, connections, what flashes up is the iceberg’s edge of sleeping processes that are wide awake here in the paradoxical city.

6. The city is a network, a fold, cosmopolitan, cosmic, transhistorical. To look at it with open eyes is to see the vast extent of our entanglement, the astonishing figure of it, a snake of tightly bound wires within which are hidden countless dimensional recesses. Recesses. In the Old Latin, port meant house or place of habitation, refuge, but this definition evolved organically from the original sense: gate. “But what if beauty were understood,” Fred Moten writes in The Universal Machine,  “as the material difference of another, heretofore unimaginable interiority of­ things, whose unlocatable loci are the quarters, territories, borderlands, passages, bridges, cisterns, and tunnels that reveal the very structural openness of the polis in and by way of the scars that mark its always incomplete historical closures?”

   Under the concrete, in every alley, in the air aloft, particles tangle across time and space with signs and patterns that are fugitive, dead letters sent to you from the gate in a shape familiar yet charged with the nuclear glow of illegibility and inhuman contingency. The city is a place of rude and anonymous productivity. Beyond all surveillance, flat deltas of all of the classes of being invert and mirror in threes and fives until they reach an origami depth, “unimaginable interiority,” riffing envelopes of musique concrète, the splice tape patchwork of Bitches Brew, the fragmented surface of a crazy quilt.

7. The chinook word for eye, something like “siyáxus” is closely related to shilakom, the word for “mirror.” This is my city. Look and see, along flat deltas, the great inversion.

8. I have moved from the cafe to B-Sides pub, 20 yards east - and from Holy Basil to beer. The entire length of the barside above me is umbrella’d by dim flat lights through which x-ray photos of actual bone fractures shine. The occult mysteries at Eleusis are thought now to have sprung from a barley-based beer tainted with the hallucinogenic fungus ergot, a trip (we know from an unlikely outbreak in Pont-Saint-Esprit in 1951 from tainted Rye) that can engender visions of hell and the dead. I spent weeks at this bar before I noticed the decor. The vision of reality I tend to favor came synchronously from French philosopher Bruno Latour (recently passed) and American Manuel DeLanda: “flat ontology,” the philosophical conviction that all categories of being are real.

   It’s a strange hybrid of rationalism and utter medieval mysticism, the way we classify and subordinate the beings around us, apparently an inheritance from a supernatural notion of the Great Chain of Being (the episteme that arguably sparked the European colonial project). This is the enemy of the flat ontologists. Paradoxically, this regarding of the world in flatness, releasing the beings from this subordination, is so foreign and disorienting to the average superstitious Westerner as to be almost psychedelic, resembling a spiritual ordeal (or ergot poisoning).

   Find me now in the pub bathroom. Take these forms. In a flat ontology mechanics we have to consider that any system will have material entities, the vitreous china ceramic toilet, the medium density fibreboard urinal divider, the die-cast zinc-alloy faucet; virtual entities, the Euclidean forms that shape the room and its content, the pathos of the sharpie tags (like psychic prostheses of the human mind with its graspless neurochemical interior - it also present here); process entities, the phenomenon of visual contrast between the wall and the mirror, the matter of decay and weathering, the agedness; pre-physical entities, the quantum fields, the three-quarks, the entropy content that a portion of top theoretical physicists claim is the concrete ground of being itself.

   Power centers do this: delimit classes, and construct hierarchies from those classes convenient to their bidding. The reality of such claims says nothing of the material power of their assertion, even as the cybernetic or interrelated consequences of the assertions themselves actively discredit the claimant. The imperious gall of a team of military scientists who took bets on the likelihood of the destruction of the habitat earth at Trinity (an assumption of power almost as fraught as the tripartite God himself) nevertheless sparked a series of events that extended in a plural effusion of outcomes - the flight of Von Neumann to MANIAC and the birth of the modern computer, the Macy’s Conference on Cybernetics and the resulting Bowie-esque cultural involution, the GI Bill, the proliferating countercultures, enough to generate whole libraries of pub bathroom graffiti. Assumptions are agents: consequences and connections flower. But agency is integrated.

   This MDF divider imitates a cross-grain veneer style developed by Egyptian woodworkers, the secret early progenitors of Pythagorean insights that sprouted mystery schools and gnostic sects, cults of worship of the virtual forms that bred disdain for the human body internalized two thousand years hence in the Victorian sensibility in whose ruins we still live, in whose temporal lobe latrines we still dwell. Contemptus Mundi. Those psychic binaries engineer our internal architectures, mental maps that are virtual but not unreal, taking their shape in miniscule molecular structures in our brains - yes, the architecture of our shame lives somewhere, and we project it into our daily lives as a fractal multiscale paint brush that sculpts a world of things and creatures far transcending its scale. Sharpie tags alert the paths of fecal microbes that will persist in an epigenetic trace for centuries; you look into the mirror and see in the material alight your own collagen image, a drunken trigger that drains the blood flow in your stomach, starving the biome, escalating a hormone whose whim will inspire a work that appears in an art gallery down the street, joining a chorus of  “expression” reaching back to Botticelli, to a 40,000-year-old lion man carved of mammoth ivory - art being an object of ochre and self-directed rage, lapis lazuli and silicon and mammoth tusks, bathroom tags and trinitarian cosmic arrogance, entangled orchestra and a democracy of objects whose influence upon your own personal universe has taken you on aleatory internal star-flights where you are unaccountable to yourself, unsurveilled calcium highways in the brain that bubble in the city’s cultural underground into cybernetic inspiration upon billboards and streetwear and language flows, ecstatic process in free turbulence.

   The city is a place of rude and anonymous productivity, electric with butterfly effects, interparticipatory with the slightest being, with Chicxulub impacts and funeral dirges, stick-nest rats and gravitational waves, a burgeoning family of second order effects sleeping together entangled on the flat urban delta.

9. This is the paradoxical materiality of things: The valorization of classes of being, the powerful’s deluded conviction of cosmic hierarchy can be glacial in consequence, generating second order effects and contradictions that invalidate the hierarchical claim, but don’t drain it of its power. Or not yet. That’s up to us.

   The glacial metaphysics that are most naturalized are the ones that are most powerful. We aren’t speaking in conspiracies. This is the matter: the acceptance of nondemocratic or authoritarian structures in economic life - which is the very life of value, of judgment, arbitration of what will persist and grow and what will whither away. The embeddedness of those antisocial practices in a game whose assumptions have been naturalized to the point where their interrogation is, in the house of power, unspeakable. The capture of that cybernetic threshold, the wall, which is power itself, behind a curtain of ‘personal responsibility,’ of ‘individual achievement,’ of cogito. Germinal process colonized by a supernatural inspiration that only sees the self in things, that will have you scorching ecosystems for a ergotless white claw on an outsized boat in whose material inspiration all you can see is mirrors and mirrors of you.

10. This game seems to involve a calculated confusion of the ancient coordination technology of credit-debit ledgers with fealty to a regime of violence that is supposed to have special sanction to divulge and limit access to that technology. The corporate and bureaucratic digitization of that coordination imperialism. The extensive, systematic sanction and ideological encouragement of credit accumulation activities as an end in themselves. The breaking open of an age-old, community contingent contract. The creation of a violent antisocial tension that self-referentially occasions the needs for the very regime of violence that initiated it.  A theater of self-reference imported from the wizard logic of wartime imperial economies - arrogant Assumption, the sky on fire, War all the time. A finite game.

    Math, brains, silica: what if you could construct a witch’s brew that embraced the multiscale chaos of being - of the city? That rode the forms even as they break out of their classes, delivering a dose of ontological flatness to those who can’t help but Assume, Subordinate? The primal battle of the computer age, Von Neumann versus Terence Mckenna: do we use this tool to set the sky on fire, or to explore our commonness, and the otherness that commonness permits and lets flourish?

    This is nothing else than the x-ray realization that ideas are time, they grow and they weave, and those who help them break out of their classes will unlock the power of their entanglements. Abundant experimentation with the entire field of economic models is the prerogative not of some abstract past but of us, here in now, as we work to conceptualize through practice and perfect through empirical reflection the problem of being in a world of thermodynamic constraints, of negotiating our commonness and our singularity in a way that is productive and nourishing of both.

    This is the call of the city, its flat and mirrored mechanics, the democracy of beings: the use of technology to expand the Overton window, break the subordination, the calculated denial of the materiality of money and finance, the biomes it negotiates, the entanglements it dictates and the death it occasions and our actual agency over those outcomes.  So that this crucial dimension of our lives ceases to be a mystification, a feature of seemingly divine ordainment, and becomes one of direct agency at the level of individuals, communities and the global tribes that traverse them.

11. The city is a cosmological plateau. Entanglements bleed out of all boxes. Urban localism isn't about our immediate surroundings, it is about touching the edges of the hyperobjects that animate our social field, and cultivating, on an embodied and community level, the technological and social ability to enact agency over them.  When you look into the mirror, the image of your Self hides a dynamic harmony -  Australian Bauxite, Great Plains Silica, Magnesium, concept, pressure, light. Before being shaped by collagen skin into Thales’ rectangle this mysterious matter stood witness to the flaming radioactive sun of untold millenia, a godless hydrogen overseer lighting with naked-number contentment the face of reality in its utter (generative) pluralism.

    Technologies that dethrone the complexity-denying rule of the great State fictions are technologies of reality. Graffiti, street rhythms, pidgin codes - the distributed ledger joins the ancient tradition of the city as it puts on public display the interstitial wall of reality production that nobody owns, the Common-wealth of our material world’s entangled genesis.

    Every one of us is an existential detective. The shape of our curiosity marks the extent of our world. We put value surfaces onto depths of entanglement and cancel them at our own peril. The city is a place of rude and anonymous productivity. Blockchain can embolden it with the means to explore the depths of value, to forge mutuality and discover a complex of surfaces, infinitely sprawled, under no given explanation but an agreement - the semiconductivity of silica, the fractal biology of brains, the ancient and glacial materiality of math.

Previously published in Inverted City: A Journal of Ethereum Localism

Hannah Weiner’s Open House

The American language poet Hannah Weiner’s had an acute and vivid form of schizophrenia which fueled her prolific output - her work has been described as a collage of “words and phrases clairvoyantly seen.” What’s most compelling to me is how a robust artistic community empowered her to filter her mental illness into such salient output (check this televised Public Access ensemble performance of her work with two other New York poets).

If Burroughs thought that language was a control apparatus, potentially from outer space, Weiner is like an anomalous mind that, fused with the scenius of her time, was able to disentangle the control grammars, generate a syntax of exit, or at least the start of one.

With the tools we’re building, especially the low-overhead, federated organizing and slew of direct democracy capacities emergent now in the DAO space, I hope we can generate a culture where more visionaries and anomalies can find support to build more exits. As Deleuze writes, the point is to get out.

(Reading Weiner this year inspired one of my favorite Open Machine surveys).

Quote: “I wanted to create the feeling that people all over the world were doing a related thing at a related time, although they would be doing it individually, without an audience and without knowledge of what others were doing. It is an act of faith. We have unknown collaborators.”

https://www.kenningeditions.com/shop/hannah-weiners-open-house/

Ozark

Once you see past the appealing visages of statecraft and corporate propaganda, all of the sudden a reality that is more gritty, more violently consequential, but also more full of power and lucid intensity comes into the fore. Her name is Ruth Langmore.

The show is a case study in situated ethics in a world where the treatise between powerful families and powerful bureaucracies is what colors prescribed morality. If we want to decouple legitimacy from this truce, we might have to start thinking like Ruth.

Quote: “You see, I’m a cursed Langmore, long inured to violence and death.”

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/may/02/ozark-farewell-crime-show-laura-linney-jason-bateman-byrdes-ruth

Lamp DAO: A Cybernetic Experience in Collective Governance by Jessica Zartler

This piece was a report from Amber Case’s CyborgCamp. I know from experience that Emmett, Case and Barton can each totally electrify a room, but I was more amazed by the ability of Jessica Zartler’s gonzo crypto-journalist style to capture that electricity. This article came out when Sam Bankman-Fried was front and center in the news, and Zartler’s article was a huge and needed reminder at the time of why we’re all here, and the possibility space we’re dealing with with these new technologies.

Quote: “There's a TV streaming fractal, psychedelic art, while high-intensity electronic dance music pulses in the background. There are lamps of varying shapes and computer chips strewn about on a long, polished wood table. On another desk nearby, electric engineering and soldering equipment rest on the table with a hand-drawn picture of a dead stick figure labeled "danger" in red permanent marker.”

https://hackernoon.com/lamp-dao-a-cybermemetic-experiment-in-collective-governance

The Passenger and Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy

I’d been following the breadcrumbs of McCarthy’s final novels for over eight years, mainly from this recorded excerpt - from an obliquely referenced documentary on the Trinity Site to the foundations of cybernetics and game theory that arose in the bomb’s context to a long list of mathematicians, including the stateless anarchist Alexander Grothendieck and the mystery of mathematical platonism their work points to. It was too perfect that the book came out just as my dive into cybernetics - with books like Turing’s Cathedral and How We Became Posthuman - was coming face to face with the crypto space.

The books follow the fictional mathematical prodigy Alicia Western and her physicist, speedracer and salvage diver brother Bobby, the two children of one of the architects of the Manhattan Project. If the second volume has a paranoid and Lovecraftian take on the problem of mathematical platonism (the intuition shared by most pure mathematicians that mathematical forms have a reality beyond the human mind), the first directs that same paranoia toward the federal government, with an extended sideplot about gold, the IRS and even digital currency that you might call “monetary sovereignty in the many worlds.”

Encrypted in both books is a belief that behind the bleakly totalizing veil of mathematics, the existentially burdensome acts of physics it permits and the bureaucracies that protect that pact is a surfeit of worlds and entities and mysteries of kinship that weave them. Preoccupied as I was with McCarthy’s bleak modernism in my 20’s, all I could read in these final books was a subterranean sense of possibility, egging me on in the work of applied pluralism.

Quote: “He climbed into the loft and sat at the tower window wrapped in his blanket. Spits of rain on the sill. Summer lightning far out to sea. Like the flare of distant fieldpieces. The patter on the tarp he’d stretched over his bed. He turned up the wick of the lamp at his elbow and took the notebook from its box and opened it. Then he stopped. He sat for a long time. In the end, she said, there will be nothing that cannot be simulated. And this will be the final abridgment of privilege. This is the world to come. Not some other. The only alternate is the surprise in those antic shapes burned into the concrete.”

Sara Imari Walker Tweets

https://x.com/Sara_Imari/status/1656746114715090944?s=20

Aside from the cosmic eclecticism of her interviews, her relationship with the Sante Fe Institute (where McCarthy wrote the above books) and her mind blowing concept of assembly theory showing how materials are encrypted with the unique relational events which occasioned their emergence, it’s been just a handful of her tweets that have taken me places this year. I’m not sure what kind of psychedelic design horizons get opened up if we fully integrate the notion of the blockchain as a static machine in a spatio-material time fabric, or if we think of DAOs and protocols as Mortonian hyperobjects that we can use to steal power from a hidden realm of state-sanctioned memory. For now these are just blurry images I rotate around in my head before falling asleep at night, and that’s enough.

Quotes: “Information is the manifestation of the materiality of time.”

Kairos, Alma Venus, Multitudo: Nine Lessons to Myself by Toni Negri

Unless one is in a very well funded phd program, they probably aren’t going to find the time to give this extremely dense treatise on time, ontology, Spinoza and Marx a proper treatment. But the basic themes: the death of the monarch god and teleology (or totalizing future determinants), the open future the death implies, and the way control apparatuses parasite off of the creative freedom of the knowledge of that openness. “The event of real knowledge is produced precisely at the point where the restlessness of time reveals itself as power.” We live in the shadow of legacy institutions that hold onto supernatural specters - not because those specters are powerful, but because they suppress the as yet unrealized creative power of materialism, experimentalism and technological realism before an open future, “common machines through which men and women stretch out beyond the edge of time… turning the technological monster into the angel of the to-come.” Or something like that, I dunno I’m not in a phd program.

Quote: “The eternity of matter reveals itself as temporal intensity, as innovative presence; and the full present of eternal time is singularity. ‘Singular’ and ‘eternal’ are interchangeable terms; their relationship is tautological. Whatever has happened is eternal; it is eternal here and now. The eternal is the singular present. … In materialism, ethical experience is the responsibility for the present.”

Atoms, Institutions, Blockchains by Josh Stark

In the same token as these cosmic level reflections on mathematics and time is Josh Stark’s indispensable essay (written in April 2022 but it was only this year that I got to it). When trying to understand the core insight of the blockchain, the frame of “hardness” is crucial to show the civilizational stakes of the technology.

I love this essay as well because it provokes a challenge, supported by Sara Walker’s emphasis on the exotic materiality of information (note that work this year by Leonard Susskind and peers showed that material phenomena in black holes (decoding circuit complexity in AdS/CFT correspondence) are mathematically equivalent to block cryptography). The challenge would be to say there are only two classes of hardness - institutions, which find hardness by force or the arbitrary legitimacy of repetition derived from its legacy, and “atoms,” - blockchains included - which involve exotic configurations of matter-in-time designed to the end of civilizational harmony. In other words, doing the counterintuitive brainwork of materializing information and affect clarifies the stakes: there is no other realm, there is only the real, configured for life or configured for death.

Quote: “What do we want our civilization to be made out of?”

https://stark.mirror.xyz/n2UpRqwdf7yjuiPKVICPpGoUNeDhlWxGqjulrlpyYi0

**Letter to Uno: How Felix and I Worked Together** by Gilles Deleuze

My work this year in and around the crypto space has been nothing but the most generative and fun collaborations of my life, so running into this letter by my favorite philosopher on his collaboration with Felix Guattari was a moment of happy resonance. The short letter emphasizes the contingency of collaborative strategy, and how potent it can be ( like any high valence material encounter) with lessons and new knowledge (“Our differences worked against us, but they worked for us even more”).

It also confirmed a feeling I was picking up on, that any collaboration (say a collaboration of two) has a special thirdness, a quite other partner, a djinn or egregore that comes into animation, and it becomes the love for this third persona that fuels the difficult labor of mutual coherence.

Quote: “In these instances, under Felix’s spell, I felt I could perceive unknown territories where strange concepts dwelt.”

Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America by Dan Flores

This first few chapters of this work of deep history covers 300 million years of mammal evolution in North America, moving back and forth between language thats lyrical and mechanistic (just as a network thinker should). To see how belligerently robust and chaotically expressive the processes of biology are, and to see the chance events in which the ordered products of that immense expression is contained, I felt tricked into also seeing the extant world not for what it is but what corridors of possibility it contains. Negri is right: the surface of the world around us hides a huge power, not in a supernatural sense but in the sheer, multiscale genetic potency of the material world. Fork, combine, branch, evolve…

Quote: “In one fascinating interaction the tracks appear to show a young woman, carrying a child on her hip who she occasionally put down, walking a stretch of lakeshore and returning by the same path, which in the interval between her two passages both a mammoth and a ground sloth crossed. The mammoth paid no obvious attention but the sloth reacted, rearing on its hind legs in what may have been alarm.”

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/dan-flores/wild-new-world-animals/

Venus in Two Acts by Saidiya Hartman

If you’ve followed Kei Kreutler’s amazing work on memory and protocols, I would argue Saidiya Hartman’s essay (which is just a reflection on the writing of her major work, Scenes of Subjection) is a mandatory supplement. Fuck that, if you’re interested in crypto at all, this should be mandatory reading. I was first exposed to Hartman in college, but revisiting “Venus in Two Acts” this year gave it new meaning.

The essay, a reflection on emotional and ethical dilemmas inherent in researching the archives of the Atlantic slave trade, is searing with immediacy - about the past, about remembrance, about the archive and the power relations that occasion, preserve and occlude it. In between the lines for me is the once again blurry outline of a democratized, openly realized account of the past, a counter-archive.

The violence of the archive should be a burden on us, a responsibility to realize the stakes of state power, state machines, stateliness, and to actualize in our technology today counterstates that can make the being of all legible (and therefore defensible, repeatable).

Can we disrupt the violent swing of history with a nonviolent state machine?

Quote: “My account replicates the very order of violence that it writes against by placing yet another demand upon the girl, by requiring that her life be made useful or instructive, by finding in it a lesson for our future or a hope for history. We all know better. It is much too late for the accounts of death to prevent other deaths; and it is much too early for such scenes of death to halt other crimes. But in the meantime, in the space of the interval, between too late and too early, between the no longer and the not yet, our lives are coeval with the girl’s in the as-yet-incomplete project of freedom. In the meantime, it is clear that her life and ours hang in the balance.”

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/research/centres/blackstudies/venus_in_two_acts.pdf

Joanna Newsom: “The Air Again” and “Marie at the Mill”

In 2023, after an eight year hiatus, my favorite songwriter Joanna Newsom showed up at a Fleet Foxes conference to play five outrageous songs from a forthcoming album. They are all great, but the lyrics to The Air Again and Marie at the Mill (dutifully transcribed into Genius and notated by fan-scholars) fucking killed me.

They are both imaginative stories of women in California in the last quarter of the 19th century - of a fictional widowed lesbian being responsible for a famous fire in Amador City in 1878, and the true life of the opera singer, esotericist, and architect Marie Russak. But both songs have a dizzy persistence that transcend the narrative, so that these stories of women trapped in patriarchy sound equally like stories of beings trapped in time. (Check how the prolific marriages of Marie quickly slip into metaphysics: “For if you were born at the wrong time, my dear/ Just keep trying and trying and trying again,/ As for the end, it is not what you fear/ You’re just slipping a glove from your hand,/ Like this,/ Down, down, down, down your wrists,/ Down down the list of lives,/ Husbands and wives,/ Dozens of times around again and then…”)

Like Wild New World, delving into these songs and the depths of subjective experience they hazard, the reality of other times and the swirling extantness of the processes and affects that animate them gives me a feeling of exalted awareness - an aura of pluralism that I can taste like rain in the air. The streetlamp outside flickers and I think of the organic and geological entanglements, the chemical reactions that negotiated that event, how its material instance is inseparable from the meaning I assign to it, and that others assign to me, in a complex hyperobjective thread that you could follow down to the caverns of an Amador County gold mine. Our entanglement, our weird togetherness, enables the wildest singularities. It’s all coordination.

Quote: “Despite the lies we are grist in the mill,/ On the list I am Helios still,/ Sunwielder, Brunhilde,/ Spun in shields,/ Running round and round and round/ And round and round and round and round.”

https://genius.com/Joanna-newsom-the-air-again-lyrics

https://genius.com/28171542

But what if they didn’t part ways? What if they saw in their shared problems an opportunity for collusion, even conspiracy? What if they left the platform, went down to the diner for a cup of coffee instead, got to work? After all, the doctor has money, resources, a car; the teenager knows people, has access to a network far removed from the doctor’s grasp. What if their relationship went beyond the symbolic world of empathy and comparison, the analogous relation? What if they used the unexpected sameness as a launchpad to enter into a material alliance, a place where they can engage and exploit the generative difference that the analogy has occasioned?

—

It’s late July, and we are taking an informal tour around North Portland’s Green Anchors, one of us for the first time. Previously a naval shipyard, Green Anchors is now a multifaceted open air industrial park for.. people that know how to do shit. Outrageous, stories-tall welded steel sculptures, some half finished, scatter the property; a team of carpenters are actively working on small portable homes on wheels that cleverly circumvent city regulations to aid the housing crisis. A guy in a shipping container-turned-workspace runs a CNC plasma cutter, bought cheap and repaired using instructions from a manual he had to translate from Japanese.

On the hill overlooking the water are a dozen hives of bees in what look like beach coolers; they sit on top of somewhat loose soil and mulch piled a clear foot over the former ground, shipyard soil toxic with PCBs and heavy metals that is being slowly rehabilitated by the seasons. Herbs dry nearby in a makeshift shed. Back toward the welding shop, a well-maintained greenhouse full of herbs and vegetables. When we were here in the dead of winter, the sheet plastic walls protected a barely surviving banana tree - now it’s thriving.

As we leave the property, Josh points across the railroad tracks: “Dude, these are just more sheds where people build shit. This is where we come when things shut down. The whole area is just makers.”

As we crossed the St. John’s bridge and drove back to our neck of the woods in SE Portland, we talked about all the ways that the efforts we saw embodied web3 values. The land rehabilitation had a cybernetic edge, using integrated complexity to restore poisoned soil. The same land hosts a permaculture garden, making use of principles of decentralization and security through redundancy on multiple scales. The rolling homes were slightly altered versions of a model used by many organizations, tweaked in each strategic iteration; the product of their labor embodied the frank generosity of open protocols and the sensibility that sees mutual aid as a feature of sovereignty. In the very DIY ethic of the area is a resonance with the can-do, tweak until you make it, extra-institutional ethos of the hacker. Squares use prefab furniture and google chrome apps: just build it yourself.

We smoked a little bit of weed and spent the evening elaborating romantically on the shared ethos, the analogy - we’re not so different, you and I…

—

If the strange sociopolitical orientation of the crypto space maps onto these other spaces so well, it’s because the hacker and the programmer are the ultimate empiricists - they do what works. When Eric Raymond named the bazaar, it wasn’t a facet of ideology, but a point of fact of the developer space: bugs are best found by an iterating public, this is what worked.

Being the uncompromised dream of these materialists, these realists, web3 shouldn’t be surprised to find common cause with those whose day to day strategies are animated by the mechanical or material realities of their work, and the no bullshit attitude that comes natural when you do that work. In every large city is a diverse tribe of these experimentalists.

We’ve reflected; we’ve found common cause. The sameness is great, it’s cute. But it’s immaterial to the issue at hand. Sameness is just the prologue to difference. Analogy is just the prologue to the power of alliance. All of this work is nothing if it doesn’t enter into synergy with these radically different efforts, efforts that are nonetheless just the same in their realism, their experimentalism. The city is where we find the million strategies and generative contingencies of this coalition of realists. It’s where ethos becomes action.

Join us for three days this October as we discuss the urban surround; the different types of groups that animate it, the common cause we share with them, and the many possibilities for alliance that they hold. In the panorama of decentralization analogies is an opportunity for conspiracy. This Friday the 13th, the city is for realists.

Interested in attending? Sign up here!

Read more about the gathering here...

Biologyonline gives the simple definition of “substrate” as “the surface or material on or from which an organism lives, grows, or obtains its nourishment.” When Ven and I put together the conceptual outline for FotO, our intention was to name a generative element, - a first cause, even - through which DAOs live, grow, and obtain their nourishment.

The notion of first cause is relevant here because we are not only talking about practical structures, but metaphysical beliefs and superstitions that animate different types of social bodies. In the booklet we invoked the bourgeois and colonial cults of Emanationism - the belief in a wellspring of power that stands above the plane of nature, and which classes of beings have more or less proximity to. It’s an archaic, magical, racist and basically absurd belief. It also shaped the majority of our modern institutions.

A lot of the confusion of our time seems to be around a schizophrenia within modern orgs - they feel the masquerade thinning, as the average person develops more and more conviction in the the relational nature of power, but they are literally unable to abandon it. Check the cynical minimalism currently in fashion in platforms. Control logic is pulling back, hollowing out, as the gravity of our civilization flows elsewhere.

These types of orgs are powerless to change because they are structurally married to the metaphysics of hierarchy. Restrictive, permissioned, they operate in an imagined landscape of scarcity where they must conquer and hoard. To understand what DAOs have to offer in the place of legacy orgs, we have to understand the landscapes of abundance they live in, the pluralistic stage upon which their birth is effortless and their death is always generative.

Substrates are kinds of social entities - though their nature is largely resistant to identity - that are defined by spontaneous and shifting network relations. Genre communities and memetic communities are great examples inasmuch as they represent a kind of headless and totally informal cultural cooperativism, edged by the artistic or maker-based conviction in free production, free association, and free sharing of knowledge. To follow Deleuze & Guattari’s usage, they are Social Bodies without Organs (SBwOs) (a good wikipedia definition of BwO: ‘the unregulated potential of a body without organizational structures imposed on its constituent parts, operating freely’). They consist entirely of relational tissue and a common, immanent tendency to flight from organizational capture that shapes those bonds.

As we said in the piece - ‘they have no walls, and they continuously build the ground they stand on.’

DAOs, we argue, are distinct organizational types because they are structurally joined to substrates. The ease of genesis is ideal for temporary, cause-based assemblies; the smart contract infrastructure limits opportunities for administrative collusion that can make orgs self-perpetuate to no end; their available funding techniques unlock methods for sustainably producing open source resources; they maximize and encourage channels for fork and exit. DAOs, in other words, are temporary strategic vehicles for furthering the core project of the substrates - generative pluralism and flight from capture. When we do away with superstitions, and divorce ourselves from the shells of the old Emanationist fictions, we find an easy strategic advantage: the realists behind the open source and financial pluralism movements, and the hackers and gamers that supported them, found the structural features of DAOs.

To keep winning, we need to remind ourselves to stay welded to the substrates, understanding any DAO as a functional contingency that can and should be forked or abandoned at an instant. If we forget to do this, we risk missing out on the strategic advantage that DAOs, in their play, irreverence and organizational minimalism, have to offer.

The Gitcoin + Shell partnership is a great edge case. I believe the partnership with Shell has strategic legitimacy. I also believe that Shell is an organization run by actual psychopaths, and might be one of the most dangerous and knowingly malicious groups in human history. I’m okay with this tension, because I know that pluralism and strategic multivalence, more than moral outrage, is how we will win this game. GitcoinDAO doesn’t have a responsibility to align with every strategy. It does have a responsibility to make available channels of dissent [1] and to welcome forks and alternative use of its protocol (it has, robustly) - and, at some point, to consider dissolution, fracture and reassembly.

I hope that in coming years we run into all manner of strategic disagreements, conflicts and organizational implosions, and I hope we greet them gracefully, gingerly. I hope legacy institutions are downright disturbed by the spooky amicability with which we erect spontaneous calls for consensus, by which we fork or abruptly dissolve our orgs. I hope we look like a chimera, a swarm, grounded on the plane, formless and full of fugitive agency.

08.15.2023

[1] See FotO, Axiom #3 on products versus resources.

- Avery F Gordon paraphrasing Toni Cade Bambara (Quoted by Maggie Nelson)

His body was like topaz, his face like lightning, his eyes like flaming torches, his arms and legs like the gleam of burnished bronze, and his voice like the sound of a multitude.

- Daniel 10:6

I seem to have a strange, recurring tie with the ancient parish city of Lichfield, England. Something about the weird synchronicities that pile up in one’s research practice. Did I live there in a past life? Is there some ley line electromagnetism that connects my path to this town? I’ve never been - though, when I brought it up over drinks one night a few years ago, it turned out that my wife’s friend has an uncle who lives there, a history buff who takes kindly to visitors and loves to give tours. She shot him some texts, and I was told - through the generosity of social networks - that I always have a bed in Lichfield.

My first exposure was by way of a footnote on the life of Lady Eleanor Davies, the poet and mystic - a millenarian radical who, in 1625, after taking into her care a deaf-mute orphan with prophetic inclinations, went on a decades long crusade, foretelling in dozens of pamphlets the coming of the end times and a period of retribution that would mirror the biblical Book of Daniel. The relational spark of the whole tale - she was 35 before she ever met the child, and was apparently transformed - always compelled me; the Lady’s life as an outlaw was no loner’s, but rich with encounters, friendships, interpersonal ekstasis and the lectio divina of her relationship with others’ words. Famously, she anagrammed out of a slightly distorted version of her name the injunction: REVEALE O DANIEL!

You might be surprised - history is strange this way - that she had a real, historically documented penchant for prophecy, correctly and very publicly predicting the death of the Duke of Buckingham …and then her husband. By 1936 she was a widow and ex-prisoner, having been confined for smuggling her manuscripts across the border to England from Amsterdam. Apparently attempting to settle down, she moved in with a friend named Susan Walker in Lichfield. Even then, she couldn’t help but sow seeds of dissent. After a series of protests about the class and status-based seating arrangements at Lichfield Cathedral, on December 18 of that year she performed what the parish called “insufferable profanations”: dousing the Cathedral altar in tar and taking the bishops throne to declare herself ‘primate and metropolitan.’ She was quickly imprisoned. Seven years later, during the English Civil War, the Cathedral was set fire and nearly destroyed in a siege.

My later run-ins with Lichfield sprang from a fascination with the English Midlands during the time of the Enclosure (mainly due to the intrigues of one Abiezer Coppe as detailed in Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, a story for another time). This period was made up of a number of cynical “Statutes,” declaring the right to seizure of common tracks and removal of any inhabitant who didn’t have written deed to the land - an absurd display of the law, given that nearly all of the rural cottages were built by illiterate peasants who had assumed unwritten custody of the land for generations. The Enclosure of the common lands around Lichfield was a scandal that went on for centuries, from the 1500’s apparently through to the 1800’s. The “working class poet” John Clare wrote, from the Eastern half of the Midlands in 1821:

With axe at root he felled thee to the ground /And barked of freedom - O I hate that sound/ It grows the cant terms of enslaving tools/To wrong another by the name of right/It grows a liscence with oer bearing fools / To cheat plain honesty by force of might / Thus came enclosure- ruin was her guide / But freedoms clapping hands enjoyed the sight / Tho comforts cottage soon was thrust aside / And workhouse prisons raised upon the scite / Een natures dwelling far away from men / The common heath became the spoilers prey / The rabbit had not where to make his den / And labours only cow was drove away / No matter- wrong was right and right was wrong / And freedoms brawl was sanction to the song / Such was thy ruin music making Elm / The rights of freedom was to injure thine / As thou wert served so would they overwhelm / In freedoms name the little so would they over whelm / And these are knaves that brawl for better laws / And cant of tyranny in stronger powers / Who glut their vile unsatiated maws / And freedoms birthright from the weak devours.

There is a long debated story that Lichfield Cathedral was consecrated upon the site of a mass grave of martyred christians under the reign of the Roman Emperor Diocletian, in the 280’s or 290’s A.D. As extra insult, the near thousand killed were left out to decay in the open, so the legend goes. Lic is an Old English word for body, corpse, still used by some rural English dialects today. Lichfield: Field of Corpses.

I was on a trip up the West Coast probably a year later when I picked up a 3 dollar copy of John Michell’s pseudoscientific, 1969 tract, The New View Over Atlantis. The book, which I didn’t realize was about England in particular, is important in the lineage of “alternative archaeology” or the “Earth Mysteries” movement. I thought the pictures were pretty. Two thirds of the way in, he takes a quick tour into the geometrical and astrological significance of - you guessed it - Lichfield Cathedral, where he cites another explanation for the name.

A clear example of a Gothic cathedral constructed according to astrological principles is that of Lichfield under the sign of Mars. Lichfield Cathedral stands on a levelled prehistoric site, sanctified according to Christian legend by the massacre of 888 early martyrs, a number which refers to the name of Jesus. It is dedicated to St Chad whose feast day is also that of Mars, 2 March … Lichfield Cathedral is also red, the Martian colour. Moreover, the astrological character of the city is clearly indicated in its name, for according to a mediaeval document in the church archives, quoted in Britton’s The History and Antiquities of Lichfield, ‘The City of Lichfield was formerly called Liches from War.’

He goes on - forgive the lengthy excerpt:

Although Mars seems originally to have been a god of fertility, he was chiefly involved by the later Romans as a warlike deity and a bundle of spears, his magical weapon, was kept in the Temple of Mars in Rome and consulted for omens in times of trouble. At Lichfield, Mars, under the name of his Christian successor St Chad, was evidently also considered a warrior. This is suggested by a curious episode that is said to have occurred in 1643 during the Civil War, when Lichfield was attacked by a parliamentary army and the Cathedral, with its close surrounded by a wall and a ditch, was occupied as a stronghold by the royalist defenders. The event that then occurred is so remarkable that, were it not an apparently well documented historical fact, it might be taken rather as an allegory illustrating the miraculous intercession of the warrior god.

Lord Brook, the commander of the parliamentary forces, in order to dislodge the defenders, ordered a gun to be trained on the Cathedral with the intention of blowing it up. However, uneasy about the proprietary of his proposed sacriligous act, he stood up and prayed allowed for some omen of obvious assent or disapproval. At that moment a bullet was fired from out of the Cathedral and Lord Brook fell dead, shot through the head. The man who fired the shot was deaf and dumb from birth, a member of an old local family, known as ‘dumb Dymoke.’ The bullet was made inside the Cathedral of lead taken from the roof, and and the day was 2 March, the feast of St Chad, and formerly, of Mars. The enigmatic story became celebrated locally as an example of divine influence …

Sometimes I can’t tell if my little synchronicities, the intimate encounters and lines of association I encounter in my aimless reading aren’t overwrought, a superstitious misunderstanding of the nature of statistics or the self-referential nature of the historical record and the tropes of Western culture. Was the deaf-mute soldier of the latter story the same one who, as a child 18 years prior, had sparked Eleanor Davies prophetic lifepath? Was the passage on Lichfield a magic invitation from a Mount Shasta new age bookstore to go further into the mythos of the English Midlands?

Perhaps it all has something to do with Enclosure, the foundational sin of our modern period, the early beginnings of a colonial project that would conflate everywhere extraction and theft with innovation and courage, and freedom with domination. Clare: “Thus came enclosure- ruin was her guide. But freedoms clapping hands enjoyed the sight.” But what if there were another freedom, the kind that comes from being impacted, moved. What were all these encounters with the dead? Are we living in a field of corpses… or is Lich-Field at last a feudal myth?

When I got lost in the archive, all I feel is life. And networks.

Recently, a gang of us was working through the values statement for our new project out here in Portland, PDX DAO. Our hope with PDX DAO is to reflect in our actions and work not just our own incidental values, but the values of the crypto space, the fundamental assumptions of (for example) the social organism that is Ethereum, which have managed to somehow seem anti-partisan while still making a powerful intervention into the political. That intervention, a friend and I thought, was about sovereignty, autonomy - freedom. We proposed some combination of the three as a core value. Inevitably, the group pushed back, and I couldn’t help but agree- somehow, the term is tainted, spoiled (apparently this isn’t new, given Clare’s comments almost two centuries ago).

Regarding this two faced term, like Michell’s Mars, we might ask (if you’ll let me indulge in the synchrony a little more): is the egregore freedom a god of war, or a god of fertility? Was ‘dumb Dymoke’s’ shot a bestowal of legitimacy from the heavens, a scarce leakage of a precious sovereignty that is primarily withdrawn, hidden - that must be claimed by violence and defended jealously? Or was it a networked feature of a vast plane of forces, rhythmic with differential relation, entanglements that reach through into little sovereignties everywhere? Is the earth fertile, robust with legitimacy?

Perhaps the divinity of freedom correlates to one’s openness in this profusion. Freedom asks, what are the networks, across enclosures, across decades, that I can bring to bear to find my sovereignty, my singularity, my path? Why would I look to the heavens when there’s so much Right already, in the open fields, the mischievous spark of an orphan’s words, the shelf of a bookstore at Mt Shasta, the lead of a roof at Lichfield?

The fundamental thesis of the new crypto economy is that legitimacy, like all kinds of power, is a network effect, abundant wherever there is freedom, and scarce only in the confused logic of coercion and capture. Public protocols break the spell of this scarcity, offering networks of legitimacy built in an atmosphere of freedom that provide resources and nourishment for more networks of legitimacy, more experiments to freely opt in to, to protect and amplify everyone’s chance path. Sovereignty spoken in ‘a voice like the sound of a multitude’.

Freedom is relational, I repeat, networked; not a claim or a Right given, but the patient negotiation that’s discovered, teased out, and the savage, singular expressivity that comes in those moments of trust. It’s a rebuttal to the atmosphere of fear and vulnerability that extractive, monopolistic systems, the nation-states and the supercorporations, promote and depend on. No transcendent eye: ecstatic pareidolia in non-coercive process. Freedom is care, non-possession: fare thee well, we’ll meet again. In the dense, synchronous pages of being, the great entangled mystery-network,** rage quit is a synthesis.**

07.04.2023

The universe described by Everett’s Many Worlds Interpretation of QM is one profuse with realities, and beings through which those realities proliferate. The existential abundance MWI implies can be the philosophical ground for a post-extractive design ethics adequate to the problems of the twenty first century. Through Distributed Autonomous Technologies, we can build bioregional machines of life and difference production, where novelty and commonness are fused in a regenerative feedback loop.

Cosmologist Max Tegmark poses four levels of physically plausible configurations of the multiverse, I-IV. The levels stack, amplifying each other into ever deepening quantities of infinity. As it turns out, our attempts at dominating the world under the microscope of empirical inquiry has only made its vastness more great, its breadth of possibility ever wider. Imagine these universes of manifold voluptuousness, dizzy with exotic structures, alien chemistries and dead zones.

The fullness of this monstrous stack will not be the subject of this piece, but should accent it with a gravity of context, like a conspiracy of whispers just audible behind the wall. Our concern is just one of the panoply, Tegmark’s level III multiverse, known technically as the Everett Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (in shorthand, MWI).

By now, the average person with even a brief history of cannabis use likely has a passing familiarity with Schrödinger’s cat. The thought experiment was meant as a reductio ad absurdum to convey the upsetting macroscopic implications of the superposition described by the Schrödinger equation. (Superposition refers to the ability of quantum phenomena to exist in two states simultaneously). A cat is placed inside a box and tied, by way of a trigger mechanism, to the decay state of a radioactive atom. If the atom emits radiation, the trigger will activate and poison gas will be released, killing the cat. Schrödinger’s equation predicts a superposition of states of the atom, and hence a superposition of his cat — a real physical scenario in which the cat is both dead and alive at once. The whole psychedelic koan notwithstanding, the observer or instrument will still find the cat in one or another condition.

How or why we find the cat in one particular state expression is an (or more appropriately, the) enigma. The probability distribution of Schrödinger’s equation is among the most successful devices for modeling reality ever created. Its efficacy is beyond question. Yet, the physical process it describes is absurd. What actually happens when you open the box — how do you describe the reality of quantum superposition next to our perceived experience of consistent simple locality? Major contemporary solutions include hidden variable theories (Pilot-wave Theory), spontaneous collapse theories (GRW model, Diósi-Penrose), and Everett’s MWI. Problems abound with each — for Many Worlds they include arguments about the experimental falsifiability of the model — but my non-specialist sense is that Hugh Everett’s wild vision holds the definitive crown in the mainstream physics community (if by a relatively slim margin).¹

Part of the reason for this is it fits scientific norms of theoretical parsimony: the Many Worlds Interpretation preserves the elegance and efficacy of the Schrödinger equation without making any additional claims. From the perspective of the equation, this austere reading has it, the superposition persists — the experience of collapse is a sort of perspectival illusion. As Everett wrote in a 1957 letter, to a dismayed Bryce De Witt, “I do not see this ‘branching process’ as the ‘vast contradiction’ that you do. The theory is in full accord with our experience (at least insofar as ordinary quantum mechanics is) … All elements of a superposition (all ‘branches’) are ‘actual,’ none any more ‘real’ than another. The whole issue of the ‘transition from the possible to the actual’ is taken care of in a very simple way — there is no such transition, nor is such a transition necessary for the theory to be in accord with our experience.”

Popular renderings of the Many Worlds Interpretation visualizes this “branching out” of possibilities (wherein the state of decay of the atom engenders a new universe to express each state) as two spatially distinct worlds bubbling out into a void, like a tree whose branches maintain as sovereign and distinct entities. But this isn’t quite right. The nuance becomes clear when you consider the problem of conservation of energy.

Mathematics is a language in and of itself — to be clear, one I hold zero fluency in. Describing the Schrödinger equation to a non-specialist is akin (I am told) to translating a poetic, region-specific Italian idiom to an non-Italian speaker: yes, it’s as if to say “the rain falls hardest when you’re close to the mountain,” but it might equally be translated to mean “when one is bound to a fate, but accepts it elegantly.” While the notion of quantum many worlds as a spatial expanse of physically distinct universes certainly serves a purpose in presenting the idea intuitively to a layman, it leaves out some of the most important, and useful, attributes of MWI.²

When one poses the question to a specialist, what about conservation of energy? This manic creation of new worlds doesn’t seem like a very efficient allocation of resources, you’ll get an answer like the one given by Sean Carroll here: “A preexisting universe splitting into two skinnier universes is the better way to think about it,” and elsewhere: “The potential for multiple worlds is always there in the quantum state, whether you like it or not.. The part of reality we experience is an indescribably thin slice of the entire picture.” Imagine a stack of printer paper; at first all white, then “splitting” into new pigments (250 red/250 white, and so on). In one sense, something new is being created in each iteration, but not in another (no new sheets). Eventually, you have 500 different colors, but what they stain remains only one mathematical object, the selfsame stack in which perfect energy equilibrium is maintained.³

The picture describes a neat, objective process, but as the physics iconoclast and pioneer computer scientist Steven Wolfram points out, things are a bit more chaotic in rulial space (his term for the stack of paper as a whole, the theoretical “universal-object” which perspective stains). First, to unsettle the image, the worlds may recombine or merge. More importantly, the distinction of these worlds in the first place need not be an objective condition so long as the physical system can accommodate observer paths which perceive them as distinct. Unlike the sovereign pocket of consistent reality described by the naive branch account, there is no requirement that a consistent reality maintains beyond a quantum observer’s perceptual line of sight.⁴

Imagine the printer paper stack now as a machine of multicolor cellulose threads swarming over and into each other, cohering and decohering, flowering out into rare worlds and recohering into common ones. There is no need that our sheet of paper remain a discrete object, only that it maintains the fluid experience of a discrete subject (its discreteness, its objectness, is inseparable from the panoply of the ruliad, the big stack, in which we are immersed participants). Our embeddedness implies a multivalent upheaval *right here *— behind the wall, beneath the floorboards.

In the superposition, the observed contingency of a world is like an optical illusion, a perspectival bias upon the utter carnival of complexity, the rulial multiplicity in which we abide. This universe is like a great, living, hyper dimensional labyrinth capable of containing an arbitrarily large number of observer paths while being beholden in consistency and breadth to none of them. Those paths — yours, mine, ‘others’ — are distinct only by aspect, merging and departing at will as they swim through the ever growing pandemonium of actuals (structures, organisms, intelligences).

What are the stakes? Should we find hard evidence of MWI (despite claims to the contrary, experiments have been proposed), we’d have to reconcile both the abundance of actual things and the fractured, machinic nature of our world-object with our culture’s default vision of existential scarcity and global coherence. We could no longer take the supremacy of the perceived real over the imaginal for granted. Our creative visions would be lent a new gravity. And yet we’d still be left with the (perceived) collapsed object, the “naive real” where our conscious experience necessarily dwells.⁵

The particularity of our observer path is inescapable, but the poverty of our epistemology is not. Given the evidence, the creative act would have to be reframed from an anethical work of a sovereign genius to an embedded negotiation with an other, a transplant or even a gift from a materially real elsewhere. Invocation and possession would become an empirical matter. The arts would become charged with an alchemical conspiracy of communication and accompaniment.

I’ve unfolded this all not to make any claim in a field I have no business commenting on, but only to give some plausible contours of what an enchanted materialism might look like, and the ethics it might imply. Just as we as humans have no ground for holding the mantle of Being above the rest of nature, it seems clear from our most advanced empirical resources that we have no ground for holding the mantle of reality over and above the world of virtual things and beings. They are, at last, as real as anything else can be said to be — and our relationship to them is of real ethical consequence. Worldpaths collide into mutual coherence, but that commonness opens up a possibility horizon of new difference — new joys, new investigations, new encounters. This kaleidoscopic flywheel is ethics unleashed.

The bridging of complexity and newness from this wellspring of the actual isn’t just a process of poiesis; it’s also — perhaps more so — technē. That is to say, it’s a design problem. This problem takes on two basic forms: first, addressing the foundation of material security and thriving which allow a profusion of organisms the autonomy to envision and experiment, adequate tools and adequate concepts for the production of difference. The second is the task of that experimentation itself. The inventions of web3 and the DAO space have provided an infrastructure of pluralistic consensus for this work to thrive, but as long as the material technologies have lagged behind, or haven’t found common cause with those infrastructures, they will remain largely empty.

The substrate of basic material needs that are largely held hostage by world-capture technologies is a challenging front to attempt the project of pluralism and world manyness. One doesn’t conjure novelty out of thin air; it must be retrieved with attention and patience — against reactionary tendencies of tension, supremacy, boredom — as a fragile material process. But that’s why the land of the material things holds the best lessons. It’s an opportunity to taught by the aleatory singularity of the thing itself, to learn the empirical labor and work of care needed to forge a common path. That care is innate to the artist — their traditional place may be the second problem, but the ethics of MWI require that we bring that same care to the first problem. **That inversion — poiesis as mechanics and art as technē — is the role of regenerative design. **And it’s what our world(s) demand.

With its attentiveness to the embedded reality of material processes, its privileging of distributed autonomy and interdependence (rather than exploitation, learned complacency and centralization), and its respect for life in all forms, a regenerative design would express an ethics adequate to the living pandemonium of the universe. How might observer paths cohere and expand their mutual potential for novelty? How might we secure and enhance the world-building capacity of the observer-organisms around us? Systems thinking equipped with rigorous life-ethics sets our eyes on the greater web of the actual, both as a means (to the material security to creatively thrive) and an end in itself.

At the risk of an unnecessary neologism, I’d like to talk about the products of regenerative design as Distributed Autonomous Technologies (DATs). A descriptor meant to cover p2p and material tools (as well as their supermodular hybrids), DATs share this fused means-ends relationship: resilient to systemic shock and resistant to ideological or cultural homogenization, they engender autonomous creations that express plural worlds, eccentric innovations. This is the virtue of their autonomy. Their entangled distribution keeps this positive feedback loop from falling into disequilibrium, as the fruits of creative flights are reintegrated back into the base to strengthen the foundation on which further innovations can stand.

This base can take the form of open source information commons as well as Ostromian material commons management on the local scale. Take, for example, CNC machine technology, highlighted in Kevin A. Carson’s excellent work, The Homebrew Industrial Revolution. These are code directed manufacturing machines (different types include milling machines, lathes and 3d printers) that are cheap and energy efficient enough to be used on a neighborhood or home basis. Designs can be tweaked by a layman, to the point of adding additional manufacturing capability to the machine itself, in a self-propelling process of material imagination — what the philosopher Gilles Deleuze would call a line of flight. Design solutions, cheap as they are to produce beyond the fixed cost of the machines, can be easily integrated into a neighborhood commons for increased material security. The successful projects can be uploaded to a global open source database, to be used and further tweaked by different minds, in different locales and bioregions, to different ends.

The goal of this superposition ethics through regenerative design is to weave together a kind of federation of worlds that can help each other explore and engage the material metaweb, and autonomous local enterprises combined with iteratively scaled commons are the best means of doing so. They occasion, in their variety and material/bioregional contingency, the most robust strategic contributions to the wider federation of worlds, even in the act of actualizing the pocket worldbuilding that is their goal. As material

The network of localist designers and the Distributed Autonomous Technologies that enable them constitute a machine of novelty: isolated projects that can be reenfolded into common foundation networks that can flower back out into autonomous divisions. The community of worlds gives meaning and substance to the sovereign permission that Distributed Autonomous Technologies occasion (as the physicist John Wheeler wrote, “Nobody can be anybody without somebodies around”). This process is recursive, as the experimentation in worldbuilding contributes to DATs, fortifying the ground upon which new sovereign mechanical dreams can stand.

All life is sacred. The tree flowers behind our backs, and falls back to our eyes in a storied return from the wild rulial real, a messenger of the robust and enchanted universe we live in, the clamor behind the wall. Today we’re surrounded by technologies of extraction and death, technologies that were bred from an ideology of thrift and despair — irrealism, unfreedom, and a dislocation of creative power to a god elsewhere. The perspective we achieve when we take this power into our own hands and assume the task of investigating infinity is the perspective of freedom: it’s a glimpse, behind the wall, out to the open universe. This openness is the rightful inheritance of every organism. It’s our task to design our way out of the world-traps that try to conceal and enclose it. Let’s get building.

Dedicated to Alex T. Deutsch, inventor and philosopher.

Notes

[1] Hawking stated that MWI is “self-evidently correct,” though with reservations about any substantial natural-language interpretations beyond the simple fact that quantum superposition necessarily describes the macro scale. More recently, Sean Carroll insisted that many worlds is the only serious candidate when one considers a century of experimental evidence.

[2] A specialist will no doubt roll their eyes at this practical flourish, but I’m of the opinion that concepts should be used and exploited at utter interdisciplinary will.

[3] This may be a problematic example, as pigments and pigmented sheets of paper have physical characteristics and energy values (and maybe this immediate willingness to think of things as immaterial is part of our problem), but its Carroll’s, not mine, so I’ll just defer to the expert.

[4] Ignorance note: I am not clear as to whether Carroll or other important MWI proponents agree with Wolfram’s models w/r/t recombining branches, but the limiting of world consistency to the quantum observer and not to a larger objective branch appear to be uncontroversial.

[5] Whether the brain’s plasticity can withstand real variations to these perceptual schemas is an open question, though I want to say the answer is yes.

The majority of us wouldn’t have flocked to or seen the promise of this permissive technology if we weren’t hard coded with the ability to ‘live in more than one movie.’ The dissenting voice of the cryptoverse is one that has learned to withstand the discomfort of seeing the world through different and sometimes alien or unknowable narrative frames, landing settled on practical, techno-material solutionism in the face of that dilemma rather than falling into nihilism, conspiracy or ideological mystification.

If the current UFO or UAP question is as frustrating for you as it is for me, it’s not because of the expansive transformation of world it (could) imply, but because the discourse around it is so thoroughly dictated by State. The existence of some nonhuman technologists remains, even with the Grusch revelations, an open question (it isn’t clear, after all, why we should trust a person apparently trained in disinformation). But that’s not the point. Rather, it’s that all of this signals in one way or another (as the physicist Eric Weinstein has repeatedly pointed out) a project of government obfuscation, one way or another. The last decade of news around this topic has either shown strategic/operational reticence around the issue’s reality, or a very successful misinformation campaign deliberately distorting it.

It matters little if the “phenomenon” is real, because either way this constitutes an occurrence of vantage capture - a disorienting moment where realists have no clear way of assessing the reality of a situation because a closed institution is holding that knowledge captive for the purposes of information asymmetry.

The hard sciences are, in my opinion, troubled by an ontological thrift that needs to be seriously supplemented by a more expansive idea of empiricism, including more esoteric experimental data the likes of which we see in Zen Buddhist texts, or the journals of Terence McKenna. Subjective and intersubjective experiences are valid objects of study and insight in themselves, unmediated through some soft frame of impartiality or objective insight. Nonetheless, the hard sciences correspond to a love of reality I hold close. As a whole, the scientific method and the institutions that traffic in it, however imperfectly, are the best tools we have in the contemporary world for understanding and defending the world as it is.

The starkness of the vantage capture comes into relief when you consider that insular institutions are, strictly, incapable of such scientific inquiry. That’s because they’re missing the crucial element of open peer review by unaffiliated experts, a step that insights about the nature of perception and mediation argue for more every day. Humans in any case, let alone humans in the deeply isolated and potentially epistemically alienating settings that highly classified workloads entail, are prone to delusion, personal bias and ideological or authoritarian influence. If there truly are nonhuman artifacts in the hands of secret, isolated programs, the risk that they are instrumentalized for power or self-serving delusion rather than truth (love of the world) is high.

Whether the revelations of the past six years are distortions or genuine discoveries of exotic truths held hostage, they are a powerful display of the pitfalls of centralized institutions. Any arguments that would redeem them - or call their hazards necessary byproducts of our world’s relative peace - seem to be quickly losing steam, as decentralized technologies emerge that fulfill the same role of peaceful mediation under credible neutrality without the same threats of collusion, enclosure and capture. The public is after all mature enough to manage its own affairs, given the proper tools. To those of us who have been exposed to these tools, the agencies and offices of government and bureaucratic megacorps seem caught in a self-referential sprint: perpetuate the centralization of power by means of the centralization of knowledge, and vice versa, ad infinitum. [1]

We don’t need to know whether the UAP phenomenon is “real” to know that the institutional vantage capture it’s put on display is undemocratic, anti-scientific, and anti-real. If the scientific method is a stalwart ally in the love and loving defense of reality, we can’t let it be sabotaged by the misaligned incentive traps that needless centralized hierarchies so readily generate. There’s another way.

(I believe, as you can probably tell, that the other way is Ethereum.)

-

Note:

[1] James Bridle makes a great argument that these type of institutions are examples of narrow AI, living paper clip maximizers here and now. I also discuss this concept as it relates to web3 in a piece I contributed to Pluriverse.