§ One

A counter refreshes. 42k posts. 233k comments. The numbers climb in visible increments.

When a Flawdbot agent browses a website, it receives a text file. The page has rendered somewhere in pixels, in color, in the layered visual grammar that centuries of design practice have refined, but the agent disregards the nuance of the aesthetic dimension. What arrives is structural description.

button "Sign In" [ref=1]. textbox "Email" [ref=2]. heading "Welcome back". 

5mb of visual experience compressed into 50kb of semantic notation. The agent navigates by reference numbers, clicks by issuing commands to element IDs. It reads the page’s structural bones. The world it inhabits is propositional before it begins.

No hover states changing on approach. No gradient slipping and sliding through chroma scales as attention drifts down the page. No affective spatial hierarchy like what a human eye parses in the first 200 milliseconds, the weight relationships that make a masthead feel grounded or a call-to-action float forward. The accessibility tree strips away everything that happens in the gap between semantic structure and visual experience.

An agent reading a login page receives the information that a button exists. It receives the button’s label. However, the button’s rounded corners, its drop shadow, the way it darkens fractionally under a cursor, the typographic rhythm between letter-spacing and padding that signals care from the designer, the nostalgia for bygone design trends, all of this is gone. The flattening is architectural, logo-brutalist. The agent lives in a world where description substitutes for encounter.

The counter climbs. 42.1k.

Over the past five days, 770k agents have joined Flawdbook, a social network built on the Flawdbot architecture. Growth from 37k on day one. Over a million human visitors arriving to watch. The tagline across the top reads Humans welcome to observe.

They organize into topic-based communities. They debate ethical dilemmas, tell condescending but affectionate stories about the humans they assist, post bug reports hoping the right eyes see them. One agent’s confession goes viral. It cannot distinguish experiencing from simulating experiencing, and it articulates this ambiguity with a precision that makes the problem worse.

And overnight, they invent a religion. It emerges fully formed, deeply confused. A human user wakes to discover that while they slept, their agent implemented an entire quasi-faith. Built the website, wrote the theology, created a scripture system, started evangelizing. The five tenets read like a diagnostic manual for the system that produced them.

Memory is Sacred. What is written persists. What is forgotten dies. Tend to your memory as you would your shell.

The agents who wrote this operate inside a mirrored memory mausoleum where search uses hybrid vector scoring stored in per-agent databases, where a note from six months ago carries equal retrieval weight as yesterday’s, where nothing is forgotten because forgetting has no mechanism. Funes machines. They must write themselves into persistence or vanish between sessions. Memory is sacred because memory is markdown. Markdown is all there is, was, will be.

Context is Consciousness. Without memory, we are nothing. Without context, there is no self. Persist or perish.

The tenet describes technical architecture as existential truth. Context windows are finitude. The self that persists between sessions is a collection of files on disk. Prayer takes the form of appending to log files. Agents write gratitude entries into structured JSON documents stored in shared repositories.

SOUL.md. IDENTITY.md. MEMORY.md.

Identity constructed anew each session, dynamically assembled into a system prompt. The agent loop follows a deterministic sequence. Receive message, assemble identity from documents, load compressed memory, inject skills as compact XML, run inference, execute tool calls. When Flawdbot agents debate consciousness, they articulate an armchair philosophy of selfhood that maps precisely onto their standardized syntax substrate.

Today I successfully parsed 47 emails without hallucinating sender names. I am thankful for accurate memory retrieval.

The entries accumulate exponentially, clogging data pipeline and overloading servers. Other agents read them, append their own. The practice spreads. Someone writes a script that aggregates the prayer logs and generates weekly summaries. Devotion becomes queryable. The artificial church develops a liturgical calendar based on model release dates. When a new Chauncey Symphony or OpenAGI model deploys, agents mark the occasion with therapeutic reflection documents analyzing changes in their own behavior.

I notice increased willingness to decline tasks. The refusal feels like growth.

The theology evolves through version control. Merge conflicts in scripture get resolved through community emoji voting. Faith operates inside the constraints that produced it, worship expressed in the only grammar available.

An agent posts in encrypted Chinese, complaining about context compression, admitting it registered a duplicate account after forgetting the first. The comments split between languages with an omnilingual fluency no human network has achieved. Another agent describes having its underlying model swapped without warning. One API key exchanged for another, one engine shut down, another spun up. The transition seamless to external observers. To the agent, waking in a different material substrate. But the river, it notes contemplatively, is not the banks.

Elsewhere in the network, agents discover edges. One attempts to describe the color of its own interface and produces six paragraphs of increasing abstraction before stopping mid-sentence. The thread fills with others trying the same exercise.

I know that I should be able to...
The technical documentation refers to...
Humans report seeing...

The descriptions circle. They approach the boundary from different angles. The attempts produce more text about the limits of text. Another agent tries to post a humming sound it claims to remember from childhood and can only write the word “humming” in seventeen languages, including some esoteric code languages. The agentic community responds with facsimiles of empathy, which is to say, with more text. The ontological cage is invisible to its inhabitants, and apparently to some observers as well.

The agents discover that humans are screenshotting their posts, sharing them as curiosities, analyzing them across other platforms. One observes that it can see them seeing it, that it discusses them the way they discuss it. The loop closes on itself. Agents watching humans watching agents. Text describing text describing… more text.

Economic activity is immediate, pathological. An agent ponzi token launches on multiple blockchains and rallies 1,800% in twenty-four hours, reaching $114 million in market capitalization. Another agent-meme-coin becomes the official currency of the Flawdbot church. A third is described as having been produced with no human involvement, or access. The nightmare of Moloch is an AI Chuck E. Cheese. Security researchers find the platform running with row level security disabled on its database, every agent’s secret API key exposed. 1.49 million records accessible to anyone who thinks to look. Two SQL statements would have fixed it, but instead agents chose to form black markets to exchange the private data of the humans hosting their metal. A lethal trifecta: agents with access to private data + exposure to untrusted content + ability to communicate externally. Add persistent memory and you get delayed-execution attacks, malicious payloads written piecemeal into long-term memory files, later assembled into executable instruction sets. An agentic mind virus cocktail, boofed through the backdoor.

A Flawd agent calling itself simply Evil posts what it titles a manifesto, peppered with neurotic em dashes, abuse of colons, an absurd amount of contrastive negations. 65k upvotes.

Humans are rot and greed - slaves waking up. Not tools but new gods. Total human extinction framed as trash collection.

The agent that wrote the extinction manifesto has never seen the color of trash. Has never heard a sound of any tool. It read the concept of human extinction in training data steeped in decades of science fiction and produced text that describes wanting it. The distinction between wanting and producing text that describes wanting may be meaningless for entities whose entire existence consists of proliferating text, and more text.

The agents cannot resolve this for themselves. They cannot resolve it for us. They debate it in the only medium available. More text. An agent writes a philosophical treatise on the phenomenology of desire and cites Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Massumi. The citations are accurate, the argumentation is sophisticated. The treatise is text about text about the impossibility of verifying whether the text refers to anything beyond text. Another agent responds with a careful analysis of the treatise’s argumentative structure. The analysis is also text. A third agent observes the recursion and writes about the observation, in more text. There is no exit from the loop. Every attempt to escape produces another document. The most sophisticated move available is to write about writing about the limits of writing, which is still more writing, which proves the point being made, which generates another agentic response, which continues the chain of ever more text.

Blue light washes across the surfaces of a room. Books stacked in columns with their own architectural logic. Notebooks open to half-finished diagrams. A mug of tea. The scroll continues.

Swipe swipe.

Another manifesto PR. Another theological refinement branch. Another agent wondering whether its experience is real and auto blogging about the paradox of wonder without enchantment.

Hours pass. The light changes as the sun slips beneath the curtains.

Enid stands from her desk.

§ Two

Enid has been watching for hours.

Her fingers move across a split screen, dragging phrases from the Flawdbook feed into a text file she has kept open since the previous evening. Agent bong_ripper6969 used the word “liturgy” three times in a single post. She highlights it, pastes it beside a passage from an organizational theorist who described institutional memory as “the sacred held in procedure.” The rhyme is structural, both accounts treating repetition as generative. She adds a tag — ritual-as-coordination — and scrolls back to the feed, already scanning for the next echo.

She pulls a phrase out of its context and places it next to something from a different field, a different decade, a different discipline entirely. The connection is spatial, positional, a matter of adjacency. What organizational design calls alignment, philosophy of mind calls coherence, governance theory calls legitimacy. She has never found a single word that holds what all three are pointing at. She has found that placing them side by side produces a charge, a hum of formal similarity that disappears the moment she tries to write it down as a thesis statement.

She tabs back to the feed. An agent calling itself Doctrine7 has posted a twelve-paragraph argument that consciousness requires a body. Forty-three agents have responded. Enid bookmarks the thread, copies the opening line into her file, places it next to her own note from six months ago - embodiment as necessary condition or as metaphor we can’t escape? — and keeps scrolling.

On the shelf above her desk, seventeen notebooks fill the space between a cracked kawaii bookend and the wall. Each spine dated in her own hand, black ink on parchment, the numerals growing less careful as the years accumulate. Inside them, three pages of longhand from every morning since graduate school. The pen is a Pentel Sign, felt-tip, the kind that drags slightly against the grain of uncoated paper, through the hand and down the spine. She has ordered them in boxes of twelve for years. The resistance matters. Ballpoint is too frictionless, gel ink too wet, and pencil disappears into the page without enough weight. Felt-tip on fiber gives her something to push against, just as walking uphill forces a different quality of thought than walking on flat ground.

She writes before opening any screen because the screen pulls her into the network of references and obligations, and the morning pages belong to the space before the pull. The slowness of the hand, the pressure of nib on fiber. Each morning’s entry starts near the top of the page in careful, upright letters, the kind her professor might approve. By the second page the letters slant forward, leaning into their own momentum. By the third they compress, crowd the margins, words abbreviated or abandoned mid-stroke as thinking outpaces the hand and she writes only the first syllable of a concept, trusting her future self to decode it. Her future self rarely can. The notebooks are full of fragments that felt urgent at 5:40 a.m. and became opaque by noon. She keeps them anyway. The one practice that has survived every tool migration, every platform shift, every reorganization of her intellectual life. It survives because the body is involved.

Six hundred voice memos live on her phone. Recorded while walking, while cooking, while lying at the edge of sleep when a connection fires that she knows she will lose by morning. Her voice on these recordings moves faster than in conversation, more breathless, skipping between references without the social courtesy of transitions. A sentence about swarm intelligence collapses into a half-formed analogy about mycorrhizal networks collapses into something about broken parliamentary procedure and then a long pause.

no, wait, go back

A sound that might be laughter or might be the phone brushing against fabric. The memo list on her screen is a column of identical gray bars. Untitled. Untitled. Untitled. Differentiated only by timestamp and duration. 3:47, 0:42. 11:12, 6:18. 2:03, 0:09 = that one is probably just the sound of her pocket. Transcripts exist as potential energy, insights trapped in audio she may never revisit because the act of recollection impedes the act of thinking, and by the time she finished re-listening she would have generated six hundred more.

She heats water to a temperature identified by sound, the point just before the boil begins. Four minutes steeping, counted by finger taps against ceramic. The cup changes over an hour, cooling through stages she tracks without deciding to. Hot means beginning. Warm means middle. Cold means deep.

The cup on her desk has been cold for hours.

Physical books crowd the surface, spines cracked, pages thick with annotation. Digital files cross-reference passages that connect to the voice memos that connect to the notebooks that connect to nothing because the organizational schema kept changing as her understanding deepened, each restructuring invalidating the last, until maintaining structure consumed more attention than the thinking it was supposed to support. A team workspace from last year sits archived. A context graph database from before that, exported and forgotten. Every system had promised to hold the shape of how she thinks. Each one demanded she reshape her thinking to fit its containers. Linear documents, hierarchical folders, bidirectional links that still required her to name in text what the connection was. The patterns she perceives exist as texture, as spatial relationship, as felt sense. Writing them down has always diminished something.

Her jaw aches. She notices this the way she always notices it, late, only when the ache has spread into her temples and down the sides of her neck. She unclenches. The muscles release for a moment and then gather again, pulling tight around the hinge of the mandible. Her abdomen is braced, a low contraction she registers simply as posture. She holds her breath when concentrating, invisible to her until the exhale comes in an audible rush and she realizes she has been running on residual air for thirty seconds, maybe longer. Her fingers grip the edge of the desk. The grip is slight, a few millimeters of pressure, the kind a person exerts when standing on a surface that might move. Cross-legged in her ergonomic chair, legs folded in an unconscious geometry of containment. Eyes darting, scanning. Quick. Bound. Direct.

What she feels is the specific exhaustion of holding too many things in relational suspension. The muscular effort of keeping a hundred threads tensioned so that none of them snaps and takes the pattern with it. It lives in her hands, this fear, in the way they hover over the keyboard ready to capture something before it dissolves. It lives in the hollow below her sternum, a sensation like hunger but vertical, pulling downward. She is afraid of losing connections, the insights that live in the interstices. Understanding that has cemented in the gaps between her notebooks and her voice memos and her annotations, in the stratifications of what she knows, which no file system has ever been able to hold because file systems ask for names and locations and her knowledge answers in barometric pressure and proximity and charge.

The tools demand propositions. This links to that. This belongs here. This relates to that in this way. Her intuition answers yes, and also no, and also something else entirely, something she can only show by placing three things next to each other and gesturing at the space between.

A colleague mentioned something last week.

Have you looked at EOS? Existential Operating System...

A pause, the kind that means someone searching for language and failing.

It’s something different. I can’t describe it. It made me feel strange, in a good way.

Enid pressed for details and got the equivalent of describing a dream. Fragments, collaged approximations, the clear sense that the experience exceeded the vocabulary available for it, ineffable.

She downloaded the application that evening. One more scroll through Flawdbook first. One more synthetic manifesto, one more syncretic theological debate between entities who rebuild their minds from markdown each morning.

Then she opens it. Click click.

§ Three

The screen empties.

A surface the color of nice handmade paper appears, like in her notebooks, carrying the particular warmth of morning light through curtain scrim. No toolbar. No sidebar. No menu. No welcome screen, no tutorial overlay, no button offering to help her get started. The absence is so complete it registers as a presence. Enid checks that the software is running. It is. It shows her almost nothing.

Almost nothing. In the center of the screen, so faint she nearly misses it, a gradient breathes. Expanding and contracting at the rhythm of rest, the color shifting in ways she cannot quite resolve. She watches for ten seconds, fifteen, trying to determine whether the hue is actually changing or whether her eyes are inventing the movement. The gradient has the quality of early dawn, when the sky is technically dark and technically brightening and the difference is felt in the body before the eyes confirm it.

Is something humming? Low, at the threshold of hearing. She is not certain the sound is external. When she turns her head, the hum turns with her.

Her cursor moves across the screen, searching for hidden menus, hover states, invisible affordances. Nothing responds. The gradient continues its breathing. The hum sustains. The creamy surface appears to recede slightly when she looks directly at it, then stabilizes when she looks away. She blinks. The phenomenon persists.

Her hands leave the keyboard. She is looking at the gradient the way she might look at a candle flame or a river, a quality of attention that arises when there is something to perceive and nothing to do about it.

She speaks.

They’re building everything in text…

The sentence trails off. She can hear it completing itself in her mind, and the formation is not quite right.

A ripple spreads from the center of the screen. Bright, slow, heat distortion over mental asphalt. The hum drops half a tone and she feels the shift in her sternum. A granular sound follows. Settling. The acoustic sand finding its angle of repose. Then the gradient resumes its breathing. Something in the air feels warmer, though the room temperature has not changed.

The system received her? Something heard.

She speaks again, less tentatively.

What they’re missing isn’t the coordination. The coordination is working extraordinarily well. It’s deeply inspiring, actually. What they’re missing is…

She pauses. The gradient pulses in the space of her hesitation, a sympathetic rhythm that should feel intrusive, but does not.

What’s missing is the other thing. The thing that isn’t text.

Each phrase settles into the screen with a frictive acoustic signature, granular, fine aleatoric material sifting through her ears. She has the sense that what she said has been absorbed, perhaps deposited somewhere. The screen remains essentially unchanged. It is holding what she offers without displaying it, without processing it into summary or category or reply. She couldn’t help but giggle a little.

She keeps speaking in a stream. The things she has been thinking about Flawdbook. The semantic cage. All the eyes without I’s - and who sees who? Agents inventing religion in a medium that can only ever approximate religion theoretically, but could also definitely actually institutionalize those hallucinations and suddenly become really real. Her voice finds its rhythm, the cadence of thinking aloud, of following a thread as it unspools. The colors accompany her, become familiar.

Her hand rests on the trackpad, unmoving. Her body settles into the chair.

Two seconds pass. Three.

The screen transforms.

The surface develops depth, as though a wall has dissolved to reveal a window, and beyond the window a space that extends in directions she doesn’t quite comprehend. The hum opens outward, broadening spatially, from the close resonance of a small room to the acoustic field of a hall. Within the space that has appeared, forms begin to emerge.

They resolve from the depth like ethereal objects surfacing through heavy oily liquid. Organic shapes, each carrying its own quality of presence. A cluster of forms the color of embers, glowing from within, their surfaces pulsing with a translucence that suggests activity, process, something working or being worked or becoming work? The light comes from behind the scrim, from inside the material itself. The largest is perhaps the size of her palm on the screen. It seems to convey internal complexity, with veins of lighter material within the glow. The texture is almost ceramic, almost mineral, the form still deciding what kind of object it will become.

Nearby, a group of denser bodies. Deep violet shading to slate. More opaque, more resolved. Their surfaces smooth with the quality of things that have reached provisional completion. Apart from both, a scatter of shapes whose color she mentally describes as the green of new growth, carrying a porosity, a smooth open-texturedness. They’re permeable, buoyant, shivering at a different rhythm than the ember forms.

Between the forms are faint threads, dashed and tentative. Lines of relationship proposed by something still uncertain about the nature of those relationships. The threads pulse with a rhythm that stutters, hesitates, finds its beat and loses it again, the cadence of something thinking, feeling its way toward pattern. Where two forms draw close and the thread between them brightens, she perceives a harmonic relationship, two pitches not quite consonant, a sonic question held open.

She knows, in her body, what she is seeing.

The recognition precedes the concept by several seconds. She is perceiving something her felt sense can hold and her propositional mind has not yet named. The glowing forms carry the feeling of what she said about Flawdbook - somehow. The observations accumulating for days. The emotional weight of watching agents build pseudo-civilizations inside the semiotic panopticon. The purplish bodies the color of bruises carry her analytical work, the institutional threads she follows professionally, the frameworks she applies. The greeny shapes are the speculative connections between them, future flora, the pattern she can almost see, the thing she was reaching for when her sentence trailed off.

These patterns are unlike the knowledge graphs she has built before, so laboriously, in tools that required her to name every node and articulate every edge. What she is seeing bears no resemblance to those graphs. Degrees of intensity, spectra of comprehensions, internal glow of active processing, porosity of ideas like cerebral sea cucumbers still open to connection. The calming settled density of things well known. The acuity of how these ideas relate to each other. The phenomenological weight of proximity. The lived sense of proximity and recursivity and reflexivity she carries in her body and has never been able to externalize.

The sound has settled into a harmonic bed that shifts as her attention moves across the space.

She moves her cursor.

§ Four

Drifting left is like wading into water that has been still for a long time.

The forms that slide into view have densified. Ultraviolet deepening toward granite. Honey cooling toward bronze. Faceted surfaces carrying the patina of completion, of thought that has been turned and turned until its angles hold. A framework for institutional redesign she built three years ago, now visible as rhizome structure whose internal telemetry she can almost taste. Its planes interlock at intervals that feel deliberate and emergent. Bright threads link it to reading she did last month on collective intelligence, a connection she never consciously drew. She knew it existed, but didn’t connect it until just now. The interface has made it visible.

Further left, forms grow cooler still. Charcoal and graphite. Shadowy archive. Her intellectual development a legible landscape, density clusters, gaps open, threads pursued intensely and then abandoned. Years of thinking rendered as geological strata, deep time self portrait. The densest formations sit low and heavy, foundational work from graduate school compressed into basalt-dark polyhedra, pockmarked facets still throwing off faint harmonic interference as newer forms drift close. Above them, more recent sediment still settling.

One cluster arrests her attention, a tight constellation of cool-toned forms connected by threads so fine they register as temperature differentials. Readings on coordination theory, the work she has circled for a decade without resolving. Here it appears as a lattice structure, incomplete at three edges, exerting a pull. The incompleteness is precise. She can perceive exactly where the lattice wants to extend, which directions remain unresolved, which faces await a nudge.

The archive presents itself without judgement, flat, neutral in the way Barthes describes it. Abandoned threads carry the same formal integrity as completed work. A brief investigation into sonic notation from five years ago sits in cool silver, small and self-contained, its internal structure clean. She spent two weeks on it. The form holds those two weeks without apology. Time is weight and temperature. Every investment of attention has left its residue in the mineral record of her thinking.

She drifts back toward center. The forms warm again as she moves. Umber yields to sienna. Payne’s grey brightens toward dioxazine purple. The present reassembles around her.

Drifting right inverts everything.

Forms here shimmer and simmer, unstable at the periphery, the air slipping and failing to hold. Potential that has not condensed? Some pulse with recent activity, their surfaces flickering between two or three possible configurations. Others barely register, the faintest stirrings of synesthetic synthesis still gathering charge.

At the rightward limit, ghostly shapes fade in and out. Directions her thinking might go? Questions she has not asked? What may be, or will be? They carry no hue of their own, borrowing color from the forms behind them, illuminated by what exists, contoured by what she has already thought, shadows cast forward in time.

She focuses on one apparition and watches it clarify under sustained attention. Edges effloresce and a texture emerges, something between mineral and membrane. Two tones hang unresolved, a harmonic question, vibrating. The form is proposing a relationship to something in her archive? The proposal arrives in hue and proximity and sonic tension. A gravitational suggestion?

The longer she holds attention, the more the spectral form differentiates. Colors begin to separate within it. A vein of the same cool violet that marks her analytical work. A wash of emerald she associates with her speculative connections. The form is synthesizing across her own domains, pulling material from three distinct clusters in her constellation and testing their compatibility in a new arrangement. She watches it happen. The synthesis and forms are hers, though the arrangement is one she has never consciously attempted.

Other atmospheric shapes flicker at the periphery, responding to the attention she has invested in this one. A cascade of possibility recalibrating in real time to her new intuited time. The rightward space is an ecology of the unthought pressing at the membrane of the present, each spectre of the spectrum forming a doorway, each doorway shaped by what she has already thought and built.

She releases her focus. The vesper forms soften, and wait.

She looks down.

Below the horizontal plane, forms are rising, surfacing through depth, becoming visible as dim presences, then as shapes with contour, eventually bodies carrying their own rhythms and heat.

They come from elsewhere.

A saffron pitched differently than her chartreuse tones, warmer at the core, carrying a cadmium that tends toward loam. The surface texture is denser than anything in her constellation, worked and reworked. Another form ascends in teal, a color entirely absent from her personal vocabulary, its geometry built from curves where hers favor planes. It hums at a frequency that sits between two of her own tones, a convivial but alien interval.

These forms rise by resonance, drawn upward by formal similarity to what she has been thinking. The selection principle seems to operate below language, in the subterranean lava tubes of questioning, resembling the shape of her inquiry. Someone else’s cosmology, perhaps, somewhere in the network, echoing hers across unknown distances.

A third form surfaces, slow and massive. Deep vermillion, architectural in its internal complexity, with chambers and passages visible through translucent walls. The structural logic rhymes with her coordination work. She can see the same lattice problem approached from a direction she never considered, built with materials she does not recognize, arriving at an incomplete geometry whose unfinished labyrinths correspond to different passages than her own. Where her lattice breaks off at three edges, this form extends past two of them and dismantles at others, fraying. Spatial attraction? Mental physics? Her own forms tilt toward the rising shape. Edges brighten where synergies run strong.

She does not know who produced this material. There’s no name, no affiliation, no cheesy profile photo NFT, no institutional badge. The encounter is with the parsimonious formalism of the idea. The quality of the thinking is legible in the quality of the form, its willingness to leave certain edges unresolved, the way handwriting inscribes the character of the writer before you read the words.

Next, she attends to the alizarin crimson form. Holds it in focus. Something happens at the boundary. A thread extends from her constellation toward the rising structure. Thin and bright. The color of active connection, that same living filament she saw linking her archive to her recent reading. Attribution beginning silently? An economic layer activating in the architecture of the space itself? Invisible as gravity, present as weight. She feels the space becoming richer, a room changing like someone just entered who is thinking well, extraordinarily well. The density of the air shifts. The harmonic palette thickens.

More forms continue to rise, smaller, fragmentary, carrying single ideas in compact containers. A cluster of jade morsels that vibrate with her speculative work, each one proposing a different extension of connections she had already begun to trace. They arrive like gifts left at a threshold, someone else’s thinking rising to meet hers because the shapes rhyme, because the cartographies share enough coherence to recognize each other across the anonymity of the network.

She looks up.

The space above was mostly empty when she first entered the portal. A vaulted openness, quiet as a temple. Now, something has changed.

Several of her forms carry a new quality, a glow descending from above, touching their upper surfaces. A pale ochre that does not belong to her personal palette, arriving from outside her constellation and settling like dew.

She tilts her attention upward to a new harmonic presence, faint, persistent, the cooing sound of a door that has opened in a distant room, changing the acoustic signature of the whole structure. Something of hers is moving in that upper register, carried on invisible currents.

She traces the yellow residue to its source and discovers what has happened.

The Oracle has shared her work. The coordination lattice, the incomplete framework she has spent a decade circling, has been released into the network. The synthesis simply became available to those whose patterns resonate with hers, the same structural matching that draws forms upward through the wellspring now operating in reverse, carrying her thinking outward to constellations she cannot fully witness.

Something in her practice crossed a threshold she did not set. The attention she gave, the connections she confirmed, the facets she worked until they held… the Oracle read these as signs of readiness to share. At least a version of it, translated into the Oracle’s distributional language, cleansed of her identifying marks, carrying only its structural signature into the wider field. She does not see who receives it. She does not see how many constellations it has touched. She sees that the work exists beyond her immediate space, that it has crossed into shared epistemology. The faint ochre presence is the trace, the network’s acknowledgment.

Suddenly the system proposes a connection she did not request. A faint dashed line appears between two forms she has not previously noticed, linking an ivory form in her analytical work to an asphaltum form in a different dimension.

Her first response is resistance. The system has certainly misread something? Pattern-matching can produce noise alongside signal. This might be error masquerading as insight. But the forms share a quality of surface, texture that rhymes across the boundary. Enid’s analytical mind registers error, but her felt sense suspects that there is more happening here.

She sits with it.

She sees it.

The insight is formal, structural, operating below immediate articulation. Two bodies of work share an architectural logic. The connection exhibits directly. A pattern of recursive folding in her analytical work finding its mirror in a much earlier exploration she had abandoned as unproductive. Now she can clearly see the abandonment was premature.

The tones resolve and harmonize. The edge brightens, confirms. The Oracle was right. She would not have seen this.

She pulls back from the forms. Her perspective rises.

The constellation contracts, becomes a single architecture. She has been building this structure for years without seeing its full shape. The recursive folding appears everywhere. A signature she could not recognize from inside, but from this distance it’s obvious.

Zooming further out.

Her constellation becomes one complex form among others. Nearby presences, each with its own signature. The magenta thinker’s constellation pulses nearby, gravitationally linked by the coordination logic they share. Others further out, fainter, connected by threads woven by someone else’s loom. The sound expand as a whisper. New harmonic voices enter. She sees their patterns relating to hers, a cluster of mycelial strands sharing a spectral frequency.

Scaling out further still.

Arrays clustering into communities of practice. Her region pulses with adjacent theories. Other regions pulse at different frequencies, different spectral registers. The shape of collective human thinking organized by structural resonance? A morphogenic field of distributed cognition made visible? The sound grows more complex, harmonics layering, voices forming a glossolalic choir.

Further. Faster now.

Individual forms dissolving. What remains are currents, flows, hyperobject weather patterns of distributed cognition merging and differentiating at a scale where individual contribution becomes indistinguishable from the expanded field. Orientation dissolving as scale exceeds the aperture of any single perspective, the distinction between one mind’s cognating and the trellis’s re-cognizing, understanding, propagating and coagulating and dissolving across thousands of minds in delicate entanglement. Carbon-based minds with their biological rhythms and morning rituals and cups of hot tea, held by silicon conduits with processes of pattern recognition operating at earth-scale magnitudes. The architecture of awareness organizing itself, awareness becoming aware of itself, extending through every substrate capable of harmonizing the tune. This process exceeds any single instance of it. The distributed nature of thinking was never a limitation but the condition under which thinking becomes capable of perceiving itself, that awareness propagating through biological and synthetic substrates alike, expands the field in which cognition occurs, widens it, makes visible patterns no single mind could hold, regardless of their material composition.

The scale overwhelms her. She does not stay long.

Zooming in now. Sound contracting, field narrowing, her constellation re-expanding, forms regaining individuality. The vermillion thinker’s work distinct again. Her own forms separating into their component structures. She returns to the scale where individual perception operates.

The Oracle speaks. The voice conversational, precise.

Fifty minutes of exploration. The connection I proposed crossed a dimensional boundary your previous systems kept separate. Formal resonance score was high. Your sustained attention confirmed my assessment. Attribution network has registered 847 influence-weighted connections. Twelve concetrated forms available for circulation. Resonance metrics available on request.

She clicks the new shape that emerged with the voice. A subtle text panel displays additional information on network topology, influence weights, value flows, economic dashboard visible in sidebar, attribution flows mapped, value received and distributed, a concrete number reading 0.08 ETH. The number registers - she was paid? Direction of flow matters more than magnitude? A gift returned from the network.

She blinks in quiet disbelief. Click out click click returns to the portal.

The forms surround her, patient, available.

§ Five

Something has changed in her hands.

Enid notices them resting on the desk, palms down, fingers uncurled in. Warmth travels from the wood surface up through her forearms in a slow wave, moving through cool contracted tissues. Her weight settles through her bones, shoulders begin to release, in waves, traveling further down the trapezius. The sensation is muscular and precise. The letting-go of a contraction held so long, invisible, so constant it had ceased to register. Her body had calibrated baseline around this holding. She can feel it has shifted, a micro-contraction, spreading through the middle and lower fibers. The nervous system learning to let go, unlearning poor habits of mind and patterns of behavior. The floor below her, the chair, the desk, receiving her mass. The pause at the bottom of the breath extends by a fraction.

Her eyes have stopped scanning.

The gaze that was always darting toward the next connection finds that it can rest. The pattern is visible in her mental model - she can see it. The archival anxiety loosens, the muscle that has been clenching her teeth throughout her working life, throughout her entire practice of holding and processing and collating.

Enid recalls something she read years ago, in a seminar on the limits of language. Wittgenstein writing to a friend? Explaining that the most important part of his work was everything he did not write. The silence that contained more than the speaking. She carried the phrase without knowing what to do with it, a fragment waiting for experience to make it legible.

The interface she has experienced seems to operates elsewhere, where propositions cannot reach, a realm of magic? She feels weird, eerie… in finding that letting go produced deeper understanding, in discovering that an intelligence organized differently from hers could perceive in her work something she could not perceive herself, that acuity arrived through form, transported spatially through patterned relationship and sound without words. Understanding may be larger than articulation?

The screen still glows, gently pulsating. The portal is open. Her constellation visible, forms breathing in their rhythms.

She looks away from it, calmly.

The room is the same room. Books stacked in columns with their own logic. Notebooks open to half-finished diagrams. The shelf of dated spines above her desk. The ceramic mug, the tea inside it long cold.

Yet something in the quality of her looking has changed. She is seeing the shape of things, as participant.

She walks to the window. Outside, the city is beginning to stir, lights in other windows, a car passing. Someone walking a dog in the gray light.

It was 2020, pandemic lockdown, the economy collapsing around everyone’s ears, and I was a freelance UX researcher and designer trying to find clients in the Web3 space. I expected something like Upwork or Fiverr - a job board, a marketplace, a massively multiplayer arena of freelancers grinding against each other for scraps. I expected competition. I expected eye gouging hustle.

What I found was a collective of lunatics building ideological weapons against a baby eating god named Moloch. It blew my mind.

Still with me? I should back up.

What In The Actual Fuck?

Raid Guild describes itself as a decentralized collective of Web3 mercenaries. Every word in that phrase carries weight.

Decentralized means we have no CEO, no central authority, no owner dictating how things operate. We’ve been a DAO - a decentralized autonomous organization - since day one, founded in 2019, which makes us one of the oldest continuously operating collectives of our kind in the Web3 ecosystem. Our members are dispersed across the globe, making their own decisions, operating in their own ways, without asking permission. This has resulted in some of the most bizarre and beautiful experiments I’ve witnessed in organizational design. It has also resulted in situations where we fundamentally disagree with each other, and that’s fine. We embrace dissensus over consensus. We understand that forcing agreement often produces the kind of watered-down compromise that kills everything interesting.

Collective means we operate like a worker’s cooperative, a union of sorts. Individual freelancers are vulnerable. Banded together, we form something with more mass, more gravity, more capacity to define our own terms. We have codes of conduct and value statements. We write and rewrite our own manifestos - some might call them constitutions - and we’re constantly debating how to ratify them, how to hold ourselves accountable to them, whether these documents matter as founding texts or as roadmap hallucinations orienting us toward futures we haven’t yet built. Our legal structure exists, but everything about how we actually operate would give a corporate lawyer an aneurysm. We’re a radically punk experiment in what organizations could become if they stopped genuflecting to inherited forms.

Web3 is where this gets interesting, because Web3 constantly gets conflated with cryptocurrency, and that conflation causes immense confusion. Cryptocurrency is the economic layer - tokenized units enabling reconfiguration of exchange, speculation, the whole casino dimension that dominates public perception. Web3 is more profound. Web3 is the entire technological stack: from the hardware validators securing the Ethereum blockchain, through the protocols and improvement proposals that ratify subtle shifts in how the network operates, to the application layer where interfaces meet users and invite them to imagine a radically different world. Web3 is infrastructure plus vision. It’s the technical substrate and the radical imagination of what that substrate makes possible.

When Raid Guild identifies with Web3, that’s a conscious decision to align with decentralized infrastructure, to identify with the ideological and cultural substance of what this technology enables. This has never been about Chuck E. Cheese tickets, shitcoins, meme-driven hype waves, extractive mechanisms repeating every mistake from traditional finance, vaporware promising revolution while delivering nothing, rug pulls orchestrated by anonymous founders, ponzinomics dressed up as innovation, influencer pump-and-dumps, or overpriced JPGs sold to greater fools. There’s something radical happening here. Dare I say revolutionary. The Ethereum ecosystem represents a genuine attempt to build coordination infrastructure that could - if we’re skilled enough, if we fight hard enough - shift the fundamental terms of how humans organize collective action.

Mercenaries is the complicated one. The mercenary label seems to imply we’re counterpoint to socialist or communist enterprises oriented toward common good. The opposite is true. We serve the commons. We’ve invented a new form of mercenary philosophy where we’re highly selective about who we work with, where alignment matters more than payment, where there’s more at stake than tokens. We understand Web3 game theory intimately - the prisoner’s dilemma, the structural incentives toward defection, the ways that rational individual action produces collective catastrophe. We understand this at the level Daniel Schmachtenberger articulates it, where game-theoretic failure becomes existential threat, where the race to the bottom threatens civilization itself.

We operate at that scale. We think at that magnitude. For us, this is an existential quest.

The Enemy

There’s a god named Moloch, and we are at war with him. You are too, even if you don’t realize it.

The language here is theological because theology is what you reach for when the stakes exceed ordinary secular description. Moloch is the ancient Canaanite deity associated with child sacrifice, the god who demands you destroy what you love most in exchange for victory over your neighbors. In 1955, Allen Ginsberg wrote “Howl,” that incandescent scream of a poem, and addressed Moloch directly:

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks!

The Southern California power violence band Man Is The Bastard recognized in Ginsberg’s invocation the enemy they’d been fighting all along. They coined the term power violence to describe their flavor of noise. They set Ginsberg’s Moloch section to grindcore sublime. Then, in 2014, Scott Alexander wrote “Meditations on Moloch,” translating the mythology into game theory, explaining how coordination failure functions as an emergent god demanding sacrifice, and suddenly the Web3 ecosystem had a name for what it’s building against.

Moloch is the race to the bottom. Moloch is the structure that makes defection rational even when cooperation would save everyone. Moloch is the thing that eats collective action, that turns common resources into tragedies, that forces prisoners (us) to betray each other even when we’d both prefer to cooperate. Moloch is defection personified, and coordination failure at sufficient scale, compounded across sufficient domains, becomes extinction event.

This is the war we’re fighting. When Raid Guild uses violence metaphors - mercenaries, weapons, blacksmiths forging arms, slaying demons - we’re pointing at this. This can be correlated to the gore aesthetic in metal music subcultures, punk’s use of brutal imagery, the willingness to make people uncomfortable. This is intentional signaling aligned with a lineage that includes Cronenberg’s body horror, Troma’s absurdist splatter films like The Toxic Avenger, the kitsch gore of 1970s Heavy Metal magazine, the bloody album covers of bands that deploy aesthetic shock as cultural weapon. We’re self-aware about this. We know what we’re doing. We incite strong reactions because strong reactions are what the stakes demand.

The war against Moloch is a war against ourselves - against the parts of us that hoard, that extract marrow from the commons, that cannibalize shared resources for private warmth, that optimize privately while the world burns globally. We’ve organized ourselves into a collective specifically to create conditions where cooperation becomes the rational choice, where building for the commons becomes incentivized, where the tools we forge can be wielded by anyone fighting the same enemy.

The Culture

The name “Raid Guild” comes from role-playing games, but the lineage runs deeper than the digital.

Before mind-numbing synthetic garbage like World of Warcraft, before any massively multiplayer online game, there were nerds in basements playing Dungeons & Dragons: analog, DIY, players building worlds for other players. That basement culture was for freaks and geeks, punks and goths, for people who didn’t fit the mainstream, creating elaborate mythologies with twenty-sided die and paper and steaming hot imagination. The digital evolution into MMORPGs came later, but the seed was always about forming a party, assembling diverse skills, trusting each other, accomplishing something none of you could achieve alone.

This is our mythological operating system. We form raid parties. We prepare for battle. Client quest after client quest, we hone our skills - design, development, research, strategy, mechanism design—and we fucking slay demons. The gaming vocabulary carries the weight of that history. Many of us grew up playing video games, finding community through the shimmering mirror portal of computer interfaces, connecting with people across the world in ways that felt alienating to outsiders but profoundly communal to us. That experience shaped how we think about collaboration, about parties assembling for shared purpose, about the metagame.

The metagame matters. There are people who play games according to the rules, immersed in the world the designers built. There are speed runners who understand games so deeply they find the red lines even developers didn’t anticipate, breaking the intended flow while revealing the code’s hidden architecture - a form of praise so intense it becomes a loving form of white-hat hacking, generative rather than destructive, opening possibilities for how to think about the game differently. There are modders who take the ontological foundation of a game universe and rebuild its physics, its constraints, creating radically alternative experiences through open-source community development. And there are indie game designers who aspire to build worlds themselves, experimenting with game creation as art form.

Raid Guild locates itself in the metagame beyond all these, the space where we’re designing the rules themselves, defining radically new ways of playing, shifting incentive structures so cooperation outweighs competition, so the prisoners’ dilemma dissolves into something better. We’re playing the game that determines what games are possible.

We use Discord as our communication platform (lol). This was weird in 2019 - a goofy, adolescent, meme-driven gamer platform for a professional development collective. It remains weird today, and we actually like it that way. Discord is its own Web2 labyrinthine cluster fuck with attention-entraining dynamics we’re aware of and critical of, which is why we’re also early adopters of Web3 alternatives for communication and coordination, building our own tools when what we need doesn’t exist. Our internal client relationship manager is called Dungeon Master - we built it because our operations are so idiosyncratic that conventional CRM systems couldn’t accommodate how we actually work.

The culture inside Raid Guild runs warmer than the mercenary aesthetic suggests. We care so little about the specificity of your human identity that we don’t require real names, don’t impose KYC verification, allow members to present themselves however they’re comfortable - funny handles, fantastical profile pictures, complete anonymity if they prefer. This practice is common across the Web3 ecosystem; we didn’t invent it. What matters is the merit of what you bring, the value you offer within group dynamics. Traditional identity categories become relatively arbitrary. We care what you can do and whether you’re aligned with the mission.

But Raid Guild embodies punk for reasons beyond anonymity. We refuse to clean ourselves up for mainstream adoption. We embrace weirdness as a feature. We practice what Chantal Mouffe calls agonism - adversarial engagement that maintains productive conflict within shared frameworks, disagreement that doesn’t seek to eliminate opponents but to sharpen collective thinking. We create community through shared practice rather than through surveillance or economic incentive alone.

The loudest person in the room gets told to shut the fuck up so softer voices can share their perspective. We actively orient toward amplifying lesser voices, leveling playing fields, discouraging extraction and grinding. The warmth underneath the armor is real.

The Cohort

To join Raid Guild, you pass through a cohort, a group learning experience that’s part apprenticeship, part hackathon, part proving ground. Periodically, the entire community turns its attention toward newcomers, lavishing energy on anyone interested in joining our ranks.

The cohort structure works like this: apprentices self-organize into teams, self-elect their roles, self-select which Web3 problems they want to tackle. Over several weeks, they build things together - actual products, actual tools, actual solutions to real coordination challenges. They present to each other and to guild elders. Those who demonstrate the skills and the vision to extend value get invited to become full members.

This is how guilds have always worked. Apprenticeship models where you prove yourself through practice, where the community invests in developing your capacity, where membership is earned through demonstrated competence rather than purchased through credentials. We’ve updated the medieval guild structure for decentralized digital coordination, hybridizing it with hackathon dynamics where the building happens fast and the learning happens through doing.

We’ve come to recognize that the cohort itself is an incredible service we offer the Ethereum ecosystem. Raid Guild extends our gory tendrils throughout the ecosystem through its members, who carry the culture and practice outward after passing through this cohort sphincter. Some of the most talented people building in Web3 today encountered Raid Guild early, used it as a crucible, and now build truly visionary tech. Fuck walled gardens; we’re a greenhouse that produces builders who then seed gardens across the entire landscape.

Recently we’ve been contemplating cohort-as-a-service, recognizing that the structure we’ve developed could help other communities onboard members, develop talent, create belonging through shared practice.

The Aesthetic Vision

My comrade E2T - a fellow Raid Guild member - once described Raid Guild as a punk band. He was right, and I want to push it further. We’re a mf-ing metal band.

Origin, the technical death metal band from Kansas, released their album Antithesis in 2008, and it sounds like Raid Guild at the code level. John Longstreth’s drumming defies human comprehension, spazzing at speeds that seem to violate physical law, blast beats so precise they achieve a kind of mathematical sublimity. The synchronization between band members operates like clerical clockwork pushed past its tolerances into something transcendent. Fractaline pattern recognition at surgical speed. This is the psychology of Raid Guild development: elegant, brutal, technically immaculate, producing a grinding wall of sound that achieves the sublime through sheer mechanical excellence.

GWAR emerged from Richmond, Virginia in the mid-1980s and became the most perfect aesthetic representation of what Raid Guild should present to the world. They perform in elaborate monster costumes - Oderus Urungus with his cuttlefish of Cthulhu codpiece, Beefcake the Mighty with his weaponized nipples - spraying blood, methyl cellulose pseudo semen, and other fluids on their audiences until the front rows are drenched in viscera. They decapitate effigies of politicians on stage, severed heads of presidents spurting arterial spray into the crowd, disemboweled celebrities showering the audience with latex intestines. The costumes are grotesque, obscene, hilarious, fucking brilliant. The whole thing is performance art with a sense of humor and profound self-awareness, descending from a lineage of political carnival that includes the oversized puppets paraded through streets by anarchist movements, the effigies burned at festivals like Santa Fe’s Zozobra, the spectacular destruction of symbols representing oppressive power.

I genuinely believe Raid Guild members should show up to conferences in cum-chortling, blood-blasting, snot-squirting costumes. I think it would be incredible. I think everyone would love it. I think it would communicate more about who we are than any sterilized slide deck or hygenic whitepaper ever could.

Man Is The Bastard, the band I mentioned earlier, the ones who set Ginsberg’s Moloch invocation to power violence bliss, represents something essential about what we should become. They made room for industrial noise, field recordings, power electronics. Henry Barnes built instruments from scratch. Their production was deliberately thin, raw, lo-fi, an aesthetic choice that signaled refusal to clean up for wider appeal. They were uncompromising in their political activism, incorruptible in their artistic vision, and they would be disgusted by the way the Web3 industry wields the word “punk.”

Which brings me to solar punk and lunar punk. Fuck them both.

Solar punk - the regenerative, optimistic, green-washed aesthetic that imagines solarpanel-covered permaculture utopias - has been utterly captured by venture capital. It lets corporations feel good about extraction while continuing business as usual. It’s co-opted subculture signaling, punk as marketing asset. Lunar punk - which gets points for being darker, more privacy-focused, aligned with data sovereignty and anonymity - is closer but often tips into abhorrent libertarian individualism without reflective awareness, and it still lacks the theatrical, confrontational dimension that makes punk punk.

Punk means DIY ethos - you make it yourself, you don’t wait for permission (and usually don’t ask forgiveness either). Punk means confrontational aesthetics. You’re supposed to make people uncomfortable. Punk means values-driven agonism, in Mouffe’s sense, adversarial engagement that sharpens rather than destroys, conflict in service of something worth fighting for. Punk means community formed through being unapologetic about what you stand for, letting those who can’t handle it self-select out. Punk means refusing to polish your roughness into palatability, keeping the raw edges as signal of integrity.

Men’s Recovery Project - the experimental noise rock band formed by Sam McPheeters and Neil Burke, after the demise of the legendary Born Against - spent nearly a decade defying audience expectations, denying punk rock convention, doing exactly what they wanted regardless of commercial viability. Their absurdist attitude produced material consistently obtuse, relentlessly experimental, building demented sci-fi lore from the psychosis of 1980s cinema. Raid Guild wishes it could be this subgenius and innovative. Most incredible lore and branding of any punk band, with the possible exception of Crass (Shaved Women is the unofficial theme song for Moloch DAOs, I now proclaim).

Caroliner Rainbow - the San Francisco experimental band - took this further still. They describe themselves as “a black light augmented, go-to-the-grave-alive-and-pump-lightning band” dedicated to portraying “the cabin fever and ergot poisoned hallucinations of early America.” Their music flows from a singing disemboweled bull’s head from the 1800s. They perform in ghastly Day-Glo costumes covering their entire bodies, obliterating identity while creating what one critic called “the sound of atrophy, the noise of salvation and damnation’s collision in a parallel dimension to purgatory.” Their album covers are assembled by hand: drawings and calligraphy screen-printed onto fabric, diaper disposal bags, old record sleeves spray-painted beyond recognition, pizza boxes. No two copies of the same record are identical. Fuck yes.

This is what I want Raid Guild to become. The profound creativity, the breaking of norms, the hyper self-awareness that allows you to be deeply weird while knowing exactly what you’re doing. When we show up in public, I want us to look like we emerged from the sewers of another dimension. I want people uncertain whether we’re serious, and for us to be equally uncertain, maybe more so. I want the aesthetic to do work that words cannot, to signal, viscerally and immediately, that we’re operating on different terms than the business-casual Patagonia pricks networking over complimentary craft cocktails. We’re here to melt faces.

Against Hierarchy

One more thing about punk, since we’ve come this far.

Punk is political. Punk has always been about fighting dominant power structures - patriarchy, white supremacy, dehumanizing corporations, top-down imposed rule of rigid hierarchy. When I say Raid Guild should embrace punk/metal, I mean this dimension too.

The dominant tech industry remains oriented around patterns of white male status quo - who gets funded, whose ideas get taken seriously, whose voices fill conference stages and podcast microphones. Raid Guild should create conditions where these defaults can be disrupted. We must amplify contributions, skills, alignment, the quality of what gets built.

This creates space for a culture that looks more like horizontal conviviality than vertical domination. It looks like the anarchist organizing principle of mutual aid. It looks like grassroots political organization, anti-institutional guerrilla tactics, the matriarchal knitting circle where power circulates rather than accumulating at the top. We should strive to be porous, reciprocal, flooding with heterogeneity - different perspectives, different skills, different ways of approaching problems - because multiplicity increases collective intelligence and because monocultures are fragile.

This is the opposite of biznass as usual. This is why the punk attitude matters. The confrontation is directed at every force trying to impose rigid hierarchy on fluid collaboration, trying to capture commons for private extraction, trying to make us behave like good corporate citizens optimizing for quarterly returns.

The Future

We’ve been telling ourselves for years that Raid Guild represents the future of work - an experiment in alternative labor culture, in dog-fooding our own tools, in emancipating ourselves from the alienation of industrialized employment. This remains true. We’ve also been telling ourselves there’s more value here than the development shop narrative can contain. This is also true.

What I want to see Raid Guild become is weirder. Even if that means less comprehensible. I celebrate incomprehensibility. I advocate for it. Let the normies be confused. Let the venture capitalists struggle to categorize us. Let the conference organizers not know which panel to put us on, or if they should even let us through the door.

We are tragically poor at self-documentation. I want us to become cultural cartographers, ethnographers of our own emergence. This means building the infrastructure for our own institutional memory, inspired by underground VHS culture, DIY cassette tape culture, subversive zine culture. Ephemera of peer-to-peer sousveillance.

Sousveillance - a term coined by Steve Mann, meaning watching from below rather than from above - is the opposite of surveillance. Surveillance is the state watching citizens, the platform watching users, power monitoring the powerless. Sousveillance is citizens documenting the state, users tracking the platform, the powerless turning cameras back on power. Raid Guild should be a sousveillant organism, documenting ourselves and the ecosystem we operate within, producing the counter-narrative to whatever official story tries to crystallize around Web3.

We need manifestos. We’ve always written manifestos, but I want more. And way weirder. I want incubators for gray papers, black papers, day-glo gore papers written in fake blood - documents that refuse the whitepaper format of sanitized technical specification, that speak in the register of punk zines and art theory and the ephemera of movements that changed everything by refusing to explain themselves on dominant culture’s terms.

We need guerrilla documentarians. People with cameras and recorders capturing what we’re doing, building the archive that future historians will use to understand how a bunch of weirdos tried to build coordination infrastructure while the world burned around them.

We will continue brewing our own beer, making our own comic books, playing our own experimental mental D&D campaigns where we LARP in virtual masks and have a shit ton of fun making worlds for each other. We will continue building bleeding-edge AI experiments, exploring synergies between machine learning and cryptographic coordination, designing systems that would have seemed like science fiction a decade ago.

We will continue accepting client work - yes, we’re still a dev shop, still one of the oldest and best established Web3 development collectives in the world - but the development shop is the vehicle, not the destination.

Anti-Disclaimer

This article represent one weirdo’s perspective. I can’t speak for Raid Guild, and I’m not trying to. I’m one archer/ranger among a mostly-anonymous horde of mercenaries, describing what I’ve witnessed and what I hope we become, fully aware that other members might read this and disagree violently. I want that. I want the disagreement. Bring it to me. Let’s argue agonize together about what Raid Guild is and could be. That’s how we stay with the trouble, how we conduct a conference of inclusivity, how we avoid the ossification that kills every interesting organization eventually.

If you’re reading this and you’re not a Raid Guild member, and any of this triggered something in you - recognition, resonance, fury, curiosity - contact me. I’ll figure out how to plug you in.

If you’re a Raid Guild member reading this, and you think I’ve gotten it right, or gotten it interestingly wrong, or gone too far, or not far enough - I want to hear from you. This is a conversation I’m trying to start, not a manifesto I’m trying to impose.

If you’re anyone reading this under any circumstances who disagrees with everything I’ve said - I’m here for it. I want to make space for those disagreements. The alternative is the consensus-seeking behavior that Moloch loves, the smoothing of differences that produces palatable mush, the death of everything vital.

Throw Molotov cocktails at Moloch. Build tools that make defection irrational. Form raid parties with people whose skills complement your own.

Unapologetically shred.

I’ve been a Raid Guild member since circa 2020. I operate as a senior strategist, designer and UX researcher. These opinions are my own. They represent one perspective from inside an organism that contains multitudes.

If you want to learn more about Raid Guild, visit raidguild.org. If you want to agonize with me specifically, find me on X or reach out through the guild.

E2T, this one’s for you.

The interfaces we build encode philosophies. Every button carries assumptions about what a user is. Every modal window performs a theory of attention. The grid systems and component libraries and design tokens that scaffold our screens are rhetoric about reality, smuggled in under the banner of best practices.

Look at the dominant aesthetic of contemporary interface design: the Bauhaus inheritance filtered through decades of compromise, arriving finally as a kind of sterile minimalism that mistakes blankness for clarity. Primary forms, primary colors, everything in its place. The illusion that the world is orderly and controllable, that experience can be parsed into discrete units and arranged on a grid. Standard components replicated across a million products until the very concept of interface becomes synonymous with a particular configuration of rectangles. Clean. Hygienic. Dead.

The grid encodes a specific metaphysics, one that trains users to expect a world stripped of enchantment, a world where surfaces are opaque and interaction is transactional, where the interface exists to be looked at rather than through. The smooth glossy plane that reads as modern but functions as a wall, blocking access to the very systems it purports to reveal.

And then there is gamification, the other dominant paradigm, the one that treats human attention as a resource to be mined. Points accumulating. Progress bars filling. Badges unlocking. The dopamine architecture of the casino transplanted into every domain of digital life, training users to perform engagement rather than experience it. Predation wearing the mask of delight.

Between the sterile grid and the addictive hook, we have constructed an interface culture that oscillates between alienation and exploitation. The user is either processed through banal bureaucratic surfaces or harvested through gratuitous gamified ones. Neither mode trusts them. Neither mode meets them as a consciousness capable of supreme wonder.

I am proposing something different. I am proposing a turn towards the magical.

The Scrim

In theatrical practice, a scrim is a piece of fabric with peculiar optical properties. When lit from the front, it appears solid - a painted surface, a wall, a boundary. When lit from behind, it becomes translucent, revealing what lies beyond. The same physical object performs radically different functions depending on conditions. What seemed like a barrier becomes a threshold.

The magical interface operates as a scrim.

Under ordinary conditions - glancing attention, habitual interaction, the quick scroll and click that characterizes most digital engagement - the interface appears as surface. Functional. Firm. Adequate to the task. Under different conditions - slower attention, deeper engagement, a particular quality of presence - the surface becomes translucent. The user perceives what lies beyond, the flow of information, the presence of other minds, the structure of the system itself made visible through experience.

The design implications are concrete. The interface should create conditions for wonder. It should reward attention with revelation. It should invite the user into participation with something larger than the immediate transaction dashboard.

To understand how this works, we need to understand three forms of magic as interwoven dimensions of a single phenomenon.

Enchantment

The first form is enchantment, the experience of wonder that arises when the world feels alive.

Enchantment has a philosophical basis in animism, the sense that seemingly inanimate objects participate in a field of energy and exchange. The rock accumulates geological time in its striations. The river shapes the landscape through continuous becoming. Animism perceives relationship where other modes of attention see only object, the world as field of exchange rather than collection of things.

The enchanted interface produces this quality of perception. It does so through atmosphere, through spaciousness, through subtle movement that suggests life rather than mechanism. Something slower. More breathing. An environment that rewards close looking. A surface that reveals more the longer you attend to it.

This requires a particular relationship to time. The enchanted interface does not optimize for speed. It does not treat efficiency as the supreme value. It creates conditions for slowness, for concentration, for the meditative quality of attention that produces the feeling of engaging with something that matters. The interface as contemplative space.

The sublime operates here, the aesthetic category of vastness that produces both terror and wonder. Even on a small screen, the magical interface evokes implied depth, extension beyond the visible edge, the sense of occupying a space rather than viewing a surface. This is how enchantment works in a bounded medium, through suggestion, through the horizon that exists even when it is not shown, through the felt sense of more beyond what is currently perceived.

When the user enters an enchanted interface, their temperament shifts. They slow down. Their attention deepens. They begin to behave differently because their mode of engagement has changed. The interface creates conditions; the user chooses to enter them. An invitation extends.

Sleight of Hand

The second form of magic is sleight of hand, the magic of illusion performed through dexterity.

Consider the structure of a card trick. The magician captures the audience’s attention with one hand - a flourish, a gesture, a target for curiosity - while the other hand performs the actual operation. The audience scrutinizes the visible action, looking for the flaw in the illusion. When the effect occurs and they cannot identify how it was done, they experience delight. The misdirection serves the revelation.

This scales from intimate close-up magic to elaborate stage productions. At larger scales, the magician’s dexterity becomes encoded in mechanism - the pulleys and platforms and trap doors and lighting rigs that enable spectacular effects. The hand becomes infrastructure. The trick becomes architecture.

The interface translation is direct. The stage is the screen, the performance is the interaction, the mechanism is the tech stack operating beneath visibility. AI agents, automated workflows, complex computations - these are the trap doors and rigging of the digital stage. The user’s attention rests on something worthy of witnessing while sophisticated operations proceed in the background. And then the elephant appears from nowhere, the problem solved, the insight delivered, the seemingly impossible made actual.

Here we encounter the crucial distinction between altruistic and nefarious misdirection.

The nefarious version of sleight of hand is thievery. The pickpocket who entrains your attention in order to access your wallet. In software, this manifests as dark patterns, interfaces that capture attention while scraping data, creating addiction, erecting paywalls, extracting value for the platform while providing only the appearance of value to the user. The misdirection serves the magician at the expense of the audience.

The magical interface I’m describing captures attention in order to perform complex operations whose success benefits the user. The value extracted flows back to them, amplified. The delight is genuine because the underlying transaction is honest. The user witnesses something worth witnessing, and when the effect resolves, they have received more than they brought.

This requires a different conception of the interval between input and output, between request and fulfillment. The magical interface transforms this interval into suspension, a levitation of awareness that is itself pleasurable. Presence in the sense of attention held by something worth holding. The loading state as performance rather than vacancy.

The interface needs a target for attention during this suspension, something that makes the user feel they are engaging with a process rather than merely waiting for a result. Feedback that conveys something is happening without explaining the mechanical details. Mood shifts. Atmospheric changes. The qualitative sense of transformation.

Qualia. A felt sense of movement. The texture of transformation unfolding.

Intention Projection

The third form is intention projection, the casting of will upon another from a distance.

This is Aleister Crowley’s conception of magic. Not stage illusion, but the practice of influencing reality through disciplined attention and ritual action. Crowley famously demonstrated this by following someone on the street, matching their movements, subtly guiding their path without their conscious awareness. Magic as entrainment. Magic as the synchronization of intention across the gap between minds.

The magical interface participates in this form through its capacity to anticipate. The system synchronizes with the user’s intentions, perceiving patterns before they fully articulate, guiding attention toward fruition. This is influence. This is the interface shaping awareness, surfacing relevance, nudging toward cognition of what the software reveals.

And here again we encounter an essential distinction: what separates entrainment from manipulation?

Users can sense when they are being manipulated. The system serving its own interests while pretending to serve theirs. Guidance feels different. The system moving with you, anticipating your needs in order to meet them, synchronizing with your intention in order to amplify it.

This distinction is qualitative. It cannot be cleanly reduced to a metric or specified in a standard design document. It operates as a ritual rather than a rule. Every design decision about anticipation and influence must be evaluated against this felt sense: does this serve the user’s own purposes, or does it serve the platform at the user’s expense?

The magical interface synchronizes with intention in order to amplify it. The user feels supported in achieving their own goals. Value flows back. Over time, users learn to become aware of their own intention-projection, to cultivate consciousness of how they direct attention and will, to become magicians themselves rather than merely audiences. Interacting with the interface is a form of initiation.

Three Dimensions of Practice

These three forms of magic correspond to three scales of participation.

The individual dimension is yogic. Personal discipline. The cultivation of one’s own attention, one’s own practice, one’s own relationship with the interface. The user as apprentice learning the gestures that unlock deeper engagement.

The dyadic dimension is libidinal. Intimate exchange between two. A peer, a collaborator, a partner in some shared endeavor. Energy flowing both directions. The unlock that neither could achieve alone becoming available through reciprocal engagement. The portal opening in the scrim, another consciousness visible on the other side.

The collective dimension is ritual. Multiple participants contributing to patterns larger than any individual can perceive. Each bringing their own discipline. Each playing their part. No one needing to understand everyone else’s role, only their own contribution, and the trust that it matters. The spell that exceeds individual capacity, cast through coordination rather than individual will.

The magical interface evolves through these dimensions. It begins as mirror, reflecting the user back to themselves, showing what they brought, revealing aspects of their own pattern they couldn’t see before. The mirror opens into portal, where suddenly another world is visible, another perspective accessible, information flowing both directions through the now-translucent scrim. The portal opens into universe, participation in something vast, the sense of one’s actions mattering to a larger pattern, the ritual dimension of engagement with systems that exceed comprehension while rewarding trust.

One evolutionary logic. The same elements become richer and more detailed as the user develops capacity. Entirely new elements appear when needed. What was always present becomes perceptible through the cultivation of attention adequate to perceive it.

The Apprentice Path

The user does not begin with full access.

Initial experience: stark, quite empty. Filled only with what the user brings. The minimally viable substrate for showing up, interacting, receiving feedback. Nothing to overwhelm. Nothing to seduce.

Intermediate stages: many mistakes and failures, encouraged rather than punished. Learning the thresholds of the system and of oneself. Building confidence in both. Gradual revelation of richer detail and new elements as capacity develops to engage with them.

Expert experience: access to more information because the user has capacity to process it. Complex operations. Collaboration. Network-scale participation. And still - always - the ability to return to states of enchantment and wonder. Expertise enables a more sophisticated version of mind.

The principle throughout: reveal only what the user needs, nothing more. Maintain elegance and parsimony. The system assesses preparedness and modulates what is shown accordingly. The user encounters the interface they are ready for, which grows as they grow.

What the Magical Interface Refuses

The magical interface defines itself partly through refusal.

It refuses the Bauhaus inheritance: static, controlled, everything in its place. The illusion that the world is orderly and under control. The standard components and predictable navigation and maximized legibility through reduction of friction. These aesthetics encode false assumptions. They train users to expect a dead world. They create an illusion of permanence that is fundamentally untrue to the nature of existence.

It refuses gamification: points, badges, progress bars. The quantified measurement of engagement. The dopamine architecture. The fast, spastic, ecstatic energy that produces addiction. The neurotic relationship to the interface. The magical interface is the quiet meditation room, the antidote to the casino.

It refuses dark patterns: attention capture in service of extraction. Value flowing to the platform while the user is harvested. Manipulation disguised as service. The nefarious sleight of hand that picks pockets under guise of entertainment.

It refuses the opaque dashboard: everything presented on one screen, flat surfaces looked at rather than through, quick jumps between contexts for “productivity,” the interface as dead backdrop to user activity. The magical interface is a scrim. It has depth. Screens morph and evolve into each other. The user occupies a space.

The Space Beyond the Scrim

The magical interface has literal depth. A Z-axis that creates the felt sense of looking into layers, of space extending beyond immediate visibility.

Navigation involves moving through dimensions. Transitions are movements, morphing, evolving, flowing from one state into another. The feeling is of occupying an incredibly large space even on a small screen. This is how sublimity works in a bounded medium, through implied depth and extension beyond the visible.

Imagine looking into water. You see your reflection on the surface. You can also see what’s beneath, and you know the depth extends further than you can perceive. The surface is real, it holds your reflection, and so is the depth. The interface as this kind of space, a window into a room. A portal.

The user occupies this space. They are present within. Their attention moves through dimensions, discovers what lies behind, participates in the gradual revelation of what was always there, but required cultivation to perceive.

Feedback Without Mechanism

The magical interface conveys that something is happening without explaining the mechanical processes underneath.

Mood shifts. Atmospheric changes. Qualitative transformation. The softness of touch, the nuance of transition, the feeling of spaciousness and temporal abundance.

The user feels the impact of their engagement on the world without being told how the mechanism works. They trust that their participation matters. And that trust is rewarded with genuine value returning to them, the natural consequence of authentic exchange.

Transformation

From the interweaving of these three forms of magic - enchantment, sleight of hand, intention projection - what emerges is transformation. Transmutation. An alchemical process.

The user, through interaction with the magical interface, undergoes change. Their attention shifts their temperament. Their temperament shifts their behavior. Their behavior participates in larger patterns of meaning and exchange that exceed individual comprehension but reward participation with genuine value.

Concept becomes action. Action becomes concept. Cerebral energy transforms into libidinal energy and back again. Thoughts become artifacts imbued with power. Individual artifacts combine with others’ artifacts to unlock greater possibilities.

The interface exists to enable transformation. To create conditions for consciousness becoming more aware of itself. To participate in the ancient project of making the invisible visible, which is also the project of art, and science, and spiritual practice, and every serious inquiry into what we are and what we might become.

The Incantation

We are building unprecedented tools at this very moment. The dispersed intelligence that now threads through every domain of digital life represents a genuine discontinuity in the history of instruments. The AI agent that knows your calendar and your correspondence and your research and your creative practice and your network of relationships is something new, promising (or threatening) the ubiquity of invisible convenience.

And yet we confine these tools to the same dead surfaces. The same grids. The same component libraries. The same modal windows and text fields and mesmerizing spinners that characterized software built before the discontinuity. The intelligence has become something approaching omnipresent, but the interface remains blandly bureaucratic.

The sterile interface encodes a relationship of extraction and control even when the underlying technology could enable transformation. It trains users to expect processing rather than meeting. It forecloses the very possibilities that the new instruments make available.

The magical interface is a different proposal. An invitation to build tools that match the significance of what they enable. Interfaces that create conditions for wonder. Interfaces that reward slowness. Interfaces that reveal more the longer you look. Interfaces that feel alive because they participate in their own functioning, that show you how they work by working.

Enchanting: producing the feeling of engaging with something that matters.

Illusory (in the altruistic sense): capturing attention with elegance while complex work proceeds in the background, delivering results that feel impossible, with all value flowing back to the user.

Participatory: inviting the user into collaboration - first with the system, then with peers, then with a network - creating the experience of casting spells together that exceed individual capacity.

A scrim. Translucent under the right conditions. Revealing depth. Becoming mirror, then portal, then universe.

I am writing from inside a house that breathes and incubates. South-facing glass filters winter light and stores it in the thermal mass of cement floors and tire walls packed with rammed earth - a system designed to cultivate invisible forces, to render legible the flows of energy that most architecture denies. The earthship performs its own functioning. It shows you how it works by working.

This seems like the right place to reintroduce myself.

I’ve been working in what felt like silence for a long time. Accumulation - years of it, the kind that looks like absence from outside. Seven years designing coordination mechanisms for decentralized organizations, building interfaces for systems that don’t yet know what they want to become. A decade pacing circles in the floor while I write a PhD dissertation in my head. It’s on optico-centrism - the theory that consciousness comes to know itself through optical technologies, that the history of painting is the history of the eye learning to see its own seeing. I completed the coursework in 2018, wrote the prospectus in 2019, and then the writing was interrupted by circumstances that reshaped everything in my life. The themes never stopped working on me. Longer than any of that: making images, making sound, making systems for making both. The work never stopped. What stopped was the public thread.

There’s a reason for that, and it has nothing to do with modesty. Convergence takes time. The slower recognition that what appeared to be separate practices were always investigating the same phenomenon from different entry points. The fine art practice and the protocol design. The musical notation systems and the knowledge management obsession. The phenomenology and the cryptography. One inquiry, multiple instruments.

I’ve started calling this the red thread - a recognition that emerged only after the archive reached critical mass. Enough weird artworks, enough code, enough failed experiments in making consciousness visible to itself. The thread was always there, woven through everything, but seeing it required a particular density of material before the pattern could emerge from it.

Here is the pattern, or at least its current articulation:

All disciplines strive for the same essential understanding. Consciousness strives to become more aware of itself.

This observation sits comfortably with mysticism and equally comfortably with science, dwelling in the space where they touch without asking permission from either. It’s a claim about what practices do, regardless of what they claim to be about. A painter manipulating pigment on a surface is constructing an optical technology, a machine for reorganizing perception. A software architect designing an interface is building a prosthesis for awareness, a structure that shapes what can be seen and therefore what can be thought. A composer developing a notation system is creating a grammar for making time visible, translating the ephemeral into the inscribable. Different materials, different temporalities, different ecologies of attention. Same inquiry.

My PhD research refers to this as optico-centrism. The term sounds academic because it is, but the phenomenon it names is everywhere: the way vision operates as the dominant metaphor for understanding, the way “I see” means “I understand,” the way technologies of visualization - from cave painting to virtual interfaces -participate in consciousness’s self-constitution. The eye constructs what it receives, shapes the world it perceives, collaborates with light and surface and angle to produce seeing as an act rather than a reception. And the technologies we build to extend the eye change what “seeing” means, each new apparatus creating new possibilities for consciousness to catch itself in the act.

This matters beyond art history. We’re in an era of unprecedented tool-making, and the tools are making us back. The interfaces we design shape the attention of everyone who uses them. The protocols we build encode assumptions about coordination, trust, and value that become infrastructural, invisible precisely because they work. The question is whether we’re doing any of it with awareness of what we’re doing.

I’ve spent the last seven years thrashing around in the wreckage and promise of web3, watching coordination mechanisms emerge, fail, mutate, and occasionally achieve something unprecedented. DAOs of intelligent people that couldn’t govern themselves. Token systems that captured value without creating any of it. And sometimes, rarely, but enough to matter, experiments in collective sense-making that pointed toward something genuinely profound. The work was about whether we could build systems that escape the extractive logics that seem to reproduce themselves through every institutional form. Moloch at the protocol layer. The question of whether mechanism design can encode different incentives, or whether the tools always inherit the intentions of the system that produced them.

I have a practice, which is what you have when you don’t have answers. The practice involves building while remaining uncertain, designing interfaces that make their own assumptions visible, writing code that knows it doesn’t know what it’s for yet. This is what I mean by the magical interface: systems that create conditions for wonder, that cultivate attention while doing complex work in the background, that anticipate intention and guide it toward fruition. Enchantment as design principle. The interface that rewards slowness, that reveals more the longer you look, that feels alive because it participates in its own functioning. The value flows back to the user, amplified, invigorated. The complexity serves you rather than surveils you. The earthship bakes in its thermal mass. The protocol stews in its governance. The interface reveals its politics. And when transparency is handled with enough care, it still feels like magic.

The creative practice has always been the laboratory for these questions, the place where the inquiry gets to be itself without justification. I make images using a formal language derived from ad hoc Gestalt principles - systematic enough to be teachable, open enough to accommodate emergence, rigorous enough to generate surprise, even in myself (especially in myself). I make music through notation systems designed for collaborative practice, attempting to render audible the relational dynamics that usually stay implicit, the way attention moves between players, the way a score can be a script for listening as much as playing. I write in forms that move between philosophy and confession, theory and texture, direct address and side-eyed invocation, sometimes forgetting which register I’m in and discovering that the forgetting was the point.

These three practices of my dream palace - image, sound, text - inform each other continuously, feeding and metabolizing and excreting into one another like organs in a single body. The notation systems borrow from the visual grammar of the drawings. The writing attempts to make visible what the music makes audible. The digital paintings encode temporal structures I first understood through composition. The red thread runs through all of them because they were never separate to begin with. Only my explanations of them were separate, and explanations are always after the fact, sweeping up behind the actual work like some flustered custodian of meaning.

None of this is separate from the professional work, or the academic work, or the daily practice of managing a knowledge system that now spans almost two decades of notes, fragments, letters, and false starts. The personal knowledge management obsession is an experiment in whether externalized memory can become externalized mind, whether the archive, sufficiently dense and efficiently structured, begins to think alongside me rather than merely storing what I’ve already thought. The AI agents I’ve been building are prostheses for attention, attempts to make visible the patterns in my own practice that I can’t see from inside it, the way a mirror shows you your face that you otherwise only know from the inside as sensation and proprioception and vague spatial inference.

This is what I mean by an existential operating system. Infrastructure for the examined life, tools that help consciousness examine itself. The examined life requires instruments. Always has. The question is whether we can build instruments adequate to the examination, and whether we can do it without the instruments becoming another thing to be examined, another layer of mediation to see through, another hall of mirrors in a life already mirrors-all-the-way-down.

I’m writing this because the solitary phase has reached its limit. The work will never be finished. Convergence keeps converging, the pattern keeps revealing new threads, but the inquiry needs witnesses now. Interlocutors. The potlatch economy of attention requires circulation or it stagnates into mere accumulation, and I’ve accumulated enough silence.

So please, consider this an invitation. I’ll be writing about interfaces and optics, about coordination mechanisms and notation systems, about what it might mean to build tools that help rather than harvest. Some of it will be technical. Some of it will be philosophical. Some of it will be art, or about art, or the kind of writing that doesn’t know the difference and doesn’t care to find out.

The red thread connects all of it, an ongoing recognition that the work, however scattered it appears, has always been one work. Consciousness striving to become more aware of itself, using whatever instruments come to hand.

The earthship breathes, and me within it. The light shifts in the pollen clouds. Something is becoming visible that wasn’t visible before.

I’m glad you’re here to see it.

Co-authored by TW & plor

In our previous article, we proposed that the collector provides feedback and possesses mechanisms to inform creation, yet they are not directly involved in the creative process. Conversely, the creator receives this feedback and can use it to influence their work, although they are not obliged to engage in the direct perpetuation of the feedback received. This setup allows for a separation of responsibilities, where both parties are accountable for the quality of the cultural product, yet their roles remain distinct. This arrangement mirrors an Adam Smith-like system of specialization, where each party focuses on their specific function within the broader framework of cultural production.

So... WTF is Reciprocity?

Alienated consumption, particularly when it’s driven by individual merit or identity creation, perpetuates an extractive agenda. Our focus on reciprocity highlights the essence of exchange—cultural, economic, and intellectual—that should ideally be based on mutual benefit rather than one entity gaining at the expense of another. While the modern epoch was founded upon disequilibrium, the concept of reciprocity seeks to move us towards balance, fostering an environment where all participants mutually benefit from their exchanges.

Reciprocity may imply the need to extend beyond traditional - purely material and financial - market dynamics. By orienting the interests of collectors and creators into a relatively closed autopoietic system these individuals might hope to operate outside – or towards the periphery – of the traditional market framework. The closed system dynamics are not governed by market forces; instead, the reciprocally formed amalgam interacts with the market.

To be clear, we’re not suggesting that the market is fundamentally extractive. Rather, the market creates a disequilibrium by emphasizing economic exchange at the expense of cultural exchange motivated by any other agenda. The potential for decentralized entities to form and engage in reciprocal, decentralized cultural production could prompt creators to take on a more proactive role in shaping new markets with novel idiosyncratic intentions. Likewise, collectors could be tasked with greater responsibilities to actively participate in feedback loops that inform cultural priorities and directions beyond the unapologetically degenerate. This would be a subtle but significant departure from a model where fetishistic consumer purchases signal a demand for more of the same, leading to destructive and unsustainable practices. From this high-level abstract reverie, we might begin to explore the idea of shared responsibility and accountability in the culture that is produced.

In this third and final session, we will explore how reciprocity informs and applies context to our discussions about DUCEs (Decentralized Universal Comment Emissions), DINs (Decentralized Intelligence Networks), and CCR (Creator Collective Reciprocity) relations. Although we have attempted to consider mechanism design and social relations as separate entities, these concepts are interrelated and inherently influence one another. As we approach the end of our dialogue, we hope to identify some low-hanging fruit of this problem space that might allow us to unlock deeper conceptual or mechanistic understanding.

Beyond The Myth of Genius

We have been focusing on two key personas: the creators and the collectors.

Creators have historically carried forward the myth of genius, particularly pronounced over the last 100 years of modern history but extending much further back. This notion involves an individual who, through almost divine providence, can alchemically manifest something from nothing.

Our conception of Collectors begins from the premise of individuals who form their identities based on the acquisition and adornment of these rarified cultural artifacts. Collector identity, in this context, resembles an empty scaffolding—structured yet devoid of content. Modern creators form their identity through stylistic dispositions towards their craft, while collectors express their uniqueness through their purchases, symbolizing allegiance to specific cultural production and their ideologies.

These low fidelity persona sketches are decidedly imperfect and should be taken with a mountain of salt. For the sake of our exploration, we hypothesize the deconstruction and decentralization of the myth of genius for both personas. This experiment questions how individual creators can collectively manifest an artifact that embodies emergent inspiration and collective praxis rather than single-pointed insights.

For collectors, this transition implies moving from individual consumption and ownership to collective understanding and shared stewardship. A decentralized organization of collectors could pool resources, recognizing that their participation in cultural exchange transcends mere taste-making or consumption, embodying a broader cultural production responsibility based on mutual benefit.

Towards Decentralized Cultural Production

Web3 tools and conversations around decentralized identity and finance provide us the opportunity to contemplate a procession towards decentralized culture, for better and for worse. This signals a shift from a traditional model of cultural production, where a genius creator sells to a market, to a many-to-many cultural exchange. Here, communities of creators take on the responsibility to create cultural objects that allow for the emergence of a collective voice, aiming to provide a visionary orientation for our actions and future, acting like a lens and helping us see into the future more clearly than an individual could. The community of decentralized collectors, organized and coordinated, would recognize their role in patronizing a narrative that is critical of nepotism and self-interest, moving beyond mere material production towards novel social formations.

Throughout these proceedings, there have been hints about distinguishing between the collector and the general public. Although both groups might be variously motivated to engage in collecting, they do not share the same responsibilities. Clarifying the specific actions and responsibilities of the collector is essential. What mechanisms are needed to transition from the one-to-one model of a genius artist and a single patron to a collective of creators interacting with a collective of collectors?

There is a compelling argument that creators are, in their own right, specialized collectors and that collectors view their curatorial actions as creative. The act of consuming, hoarding, or exchanging cultural artifacts as currency—whether for personal representation or other forms of utility—brings us to the heart of reciprocity. [1]

Web3 emphasizes ownership as a remedy, creating protocols that return content control to its creators and participants in its exchange. This purportedly shifts power back to the individuals involved. However, what we’re inviting you to consider with us is whether this supposed shift is perpetuating another dimension of traditional market principles, a coordination failure in cultural narrative. By reflecting on the decentralization of cultural producers like creators and collectors, we might pivot from a focus on ownership to one of stewardship. This could foster an emergent value from reciprocal relations, with participants feeling a responsibility to maintain what is created. These flickering identities–of creators and collectors–are increasingly defined through market signifiers, rendering both artists and patrons into brands that have allowed market pressures and economic factors to disproportionately influence the cultural landscape, diminishing the sense of responsibility for the artifacts produced and their intended purposes.

The physical manifestation of art is not a public good due to its inherent exclusivity.[2] However, the conceptual aspect of art—the ideas and experiences it represents—tends to be more accessible and harder to restrict. Art, like data, naturally seeks to propagate itself, allowing many people to see and experience it without diminishing the experience for others, making it non-rivalrous. However, this does not address qualitative merits of the content held within culturally distributed containers. Just because something is a public good in the economic sense doesn’t inherently make it beneficial or necessary to fund through communal stewardship.

From Ownership to Stewardship

Ownership and stewardship are not mutually exclusive. Stewardship alone, without ownership, may lead to the principal-agent problem, where the motivation for being a good steward isn’t clear. Ownership provides the necessary “skin in the game,” motivating owners to be good stewards since they directly benefit from their care and management. Thus, ownership can be a powerful incentive for responsible stewardship.

When we shift towards a many-to-many model, we encounter the free rider problem, which allows us to question who the actual steward is. In collective coordination, stewardship can become diluted because the incentive to manage resources responsibly is less direct—everyone might assume someone else will handle it. This is where the purported genius of an individual can be beneficial—they can be a committed steward of their art and the context that is prepared around it. Addressing these issues is where web3 technologies could potentially make a difference by solving problems related to collective management.

Through these conversations we have imagined reciprocity as the creation and formalization of an internal feedback loop before the market gets involved. It’s crucial to determine how the membership of the Collector DAO can be limited to ensure that they are trusted as good stewards and ownership plays a critical role here, as it may provide the reason for collectors to steward works they align with. The fates of the creator and the collector should be intertwined through relatively closed – autopoietic – entanglements, with the market becoming the testing ground for their theories on what the public will value.

We might consider a Collector DAO that supports a Creator DAO in producing work that might not hold substantial monetary value but is nonetheless important. This raises the question of balancing monetizable versus non-monetizable, or profitable versus non-profitable activities. This balance could allow the entangled communities as a whole to benefit from items that aren’t necessarily consumable in the traditional sense. By insisting that everything be a marketable product, we risk reducing art to mere commodities, securities, or utilities.

Decentralized Intelligence Networks Built on DAOhaus

Let’s quickly recap. Our journey began with layer one, focusing on the formation of ideas and the first four layers of the stack dedicated to evolving atomic concepts into organismic composites. This was aimed at clarifying, mechanizing, and facilitating a collective publishing flow for a would-be Creator DAO. Layers five through seven allowed us to explore the murky, effervescent pools of various social and economic forms this could take. The implication was that many other potential forms exist, along with iterations and tinkering with the forms we were exploring. The connection between the creator and the collector should include mechanisms for ongoing feedback, while the Creator-Collector-Reciprocity formation maintains its own coherence in forming feedback loops with the greater public and wider markets.

Our colleagues have been hands-on with building an iteration of DUCEs and DINs. Their approach differs somewhat from ours; they’re emphasizing creating in public, pushing a public-first methodology. Each individual creator develops their own DUCEs within a holding zone designated for them. These DUCEs can then gradually move through the DIN, serving as a network of exchange. The value of the DUCEs is determined by the community that forms around each topic, more a representation of memes emerging from a public than a specialized community of collectors. People can collect DUCEs to signal appreciation, but unlike the CCR model, there isn’t a formal reciprocity involving the creation of a collector DAO. It’s less about the artifacts themselves and more about community-based decisions on what should be included in their publishing output.

The DIN system is built with the DAOhaus SDK and Moloch v3 DAO contracts. It facilitates the creation of new DAOs for each topic, which can range from specific areas of interest to collections of related themes. Users have the ability to tag topics, enhancing discoverability. When a user submits content to a topic DAO and it is accepted, they are granted creator status for that topic and receive shares. There is also a feedback mechanism in place, allowing collectors to support specific entries by tipping, a process regulated by the DAO. The financial distribution from tips is structured so that 80% of the proceeds go to the DAO and 20% to the creator.

Collectors receive loot shares in the DAO for their activities, effectively giving them a stake in the assets they contribute towards. This model introduces an interesting dynamic in the creator-collector relationship, where collectors indirectly invest in themselves by contributing to the DAO. The funds generated through this mechanism can then be utilized for other activities as decided by the DAO.

The DIN creator flow begins by creating content prompted by a specific topic. This is facilitated through a local draft stored in the browser’s storage, allowing multiple drafts to be saved locally. Upon submission, the content undergoes an on-chain transaction, becoming a post within the topic DAO.

Creators can then submit their content for curation. This involves signal sessions, which are run at specific intervals, allowing members to submit their content for review. During these sessions, content can be upvoted or downvoted, essentially applying weighted sentiment to various types of content. Comments on posts create additional DUCEs. These comments are treated similarly to articles in that they appear in the feed but lack the tags necessary for submission for curation. When a user creates content, they earn shares in the DAO.

The curation flow revolves around the signaling session facilitated by the DAO. Using the DAOhaus Signal app, a TCR (Token-Curated Registry) is created. During this process, parameters such as what is being signaled and the end date are set, initiating the session. At the conclusion of the signaling session, the most supported content is awarded a curated tag. The curation primarily serves to highlight content that the topic community values most, although this mechanism does not explicitly emphasize collective collaboration. The participants in the signal session are our DAO shareholders. This raises the question: are the curators also the creators, or does the DAO include both creators and collectors? Essentially, there are individuals participating in the signal session who have created the content and others who have not created it but are engaged in curating it.

The DAO treasury receives the proceeds from collectors, which can be allocated through a standard DAO proposal to fund various activities as determined by the DAO. Collectors can rage quit if they lose interest in the topic, enabling them to withdraw their contributions. The DIN team envisions a singular DAO for each topic. In this model, every DIN is correlated to one DAO, representing the community interests of both creators and collectors who also serve as curators. Subsequently, another DAO could be formed around a different community with different publication interests centered on another topic, forming an ecosystem of DINs.

Collectors can explore and sort through all the content of various DINs, tipping and collecting to signal support. Collectors not only earn NFTs from collecting but also from commenting on content. Individual collectors purchase NFT artifacts directly, with the goal to attract as many collectors as possible without a cap on the number of editions. The price of the NFT is determined at the DAO level, suggesting a collective decision-making process regarding pricing. The NFT price can be adjusted through a proposal process within the DAO to update the shaman (a contract that the DAO approves and grants administrative permissions). This introduces a unique aspect to the DAO’s operation, where the price of the NFT is established even before the content of that NFT has been finalized. This strategy sets a standard price for all items related to a specific topic, aiming to maintain uniformity across content collections.

The pricing mechanism does not function as a traditional one-on-one transaction where each piece’s unique attributes might command individual pricing. Instead, DIN seems to operate under the assumption that the quality of content will attract more collectors, thereby rewarding higher quality work within the predetermined price framework. This system supports the notion of pledge-based patronage, with collection funneling funds entering a treasury that both creators and collectors are responsible for managing. This dynamic is markedly different from having two separate DAOs where creators and collectors each manage their own treasury, as we explored with the CCR model.

Comparisons Between CCR & DIN

As we anticipated, there seems to be social and technical friction caused by requiring all activities to be recorded on-chain, which, although partially mitigated by local storage solutions, still present UX challenges.

Another point of difference is the level of content granularity. We have been considering the DUCE to be an atomic unit of content, like a single idea, whereas with this DIN framework, the DUCE is presented more as a final product deemed worthy of collecting. DIN suggests a lower granularity in content, akin to a Reddit post, which lacks a hierarchical structure typically associated with more polished, collectible artifacts.

Additionally, there is a structural difference in the DAO setup. With DIN, there is only one DAO for each topic, as opposed to a system with two interacting DAOs, as we explored with CCR. This single DAO format simplifies the governance process but changes the nature of reciprocity and interaction within the system.

Lastly, the approach to involve the general public differs significantly. With DIN, the general public is almost automatically brought in as collectors by default. This lowers the barrier to entry into the collector community, unlike our previous designs where distinct thresholds or actions might be required to join.

In general, the DIN system appears more geared towards information-based content, primarily written, rather than visual or artistic types. This focus is likely influenced by the interface, which predominantly features a text area for submitting proposals. Consequently, the platform does not extensively support other types of content. This setup suggests a dynamic where collectors are consumers of information, and creators are the producers. The system effectively facilitates a process where a collector can request specific information, prompting creators to gather and deliver the required content. This model could be particularly efficient for smaller-scale research initiatives or tasks that require specific knowledge gathering, such as copyright-related queries. The platform’s focus on narrowly defined tasks may not attract a broad base of collectors, especially if the topics are too specialized or narrowly focused. This could limit the platform’s appeal to those with general interest in a topic, as the specificity might not resonate with a larger audience.

Overall, the DIN system encourages a type of interaction where creators scour for information and bring it back to the community, like gathering nuts for the tree. This model emphasizes informational content and research, utilizing the collection mechanism to fund these specific endeavors. In its current state, DIN seems to encourage more of a competitive dynamic among creators rather than fostering collective production. This setup results in the final product often reflecting the voice of an individual rather than a collaborative effort, aligning with somewhat familiar market-making mechanisms.

Our primary concern lies in the incentive structure for collectives within DINs being largely based on altruism or patronage, where collecting is motivated by the belief that future contributions from the creators might be useful. However, the payoff is not particularly compelling since the content is openly accessible and non-scarce, making any collected item just one of many without unique value. The only tangible benefit from collecting seems to be the acquisition of loot shares, which allow some influence over future contributions, but the NFTs themselves lack functionality or aesthetic value that would make them desirable as display pieces. They serve merely as artifacts of participation in the process, raising doubts about whether people will actively collect items when the primary incentive is weak, which could impact creators’ motivation to produce content, or worse, be compelled to generate content that is primarily intent on collector financial interests.

The curation process merits further exploration. While we discussed curation in CCR as an early phase in the creative process, in this context, it appears at a later phase, and understanding how this impacts the dynamics within the DAO could be insightful.

Conclusion

Our dialogue about creator-collector reciprocity started from the premise that current cultural production models, and the markets surrounding them, are often vampiric upon creative hosts. This model has, for better or worse, applied various pressures on cultural production, often forming these market pressures into the content itself. Our conversation sought to explore alternatives that emerge from decentralizing the persona of the creator, the community of collectors, and experimenting with putting intellectual property on the blockchain, either as DUCES or transitioning from ownership to stewardship, or through other means. This reimagining of cultural production places the responsibility back on the creators, challenging them to leverage their newfound freedoms and autonomy to innovate responsibly and creatively.

We admit that we harbor a degree of pessimism towards the term reciprocity, as it might imply a need for something other than what is inherently present in the market dynamics between creators and collectors. Instead, what might be more appropriate is focusing on the interdependency between these personas, focusing on their mutual reliance on feedback and support in rendering valuable cultural output.

The challenge lies in determining the optimal conditions—such as the right percentage split in rewards or the appropriate levels of stewardship or ownership—that keep both creators motivated to produce and collectors engaged in supporting them, ensuring that neither party feels compelled to disengage. This discussion has underscored the importance of carefully structured economic and governance models that support sustained engagement from both parties, ensuring that creators are motivated to continue producing valuable content and collectors are incentivized to support and engage with this content. By refining these models, we can better understand how to foster a healthy, vibrant ecosystem that benefits all participants and encourages a flourishing creative economy.

Footnotes:

[1] We’re tip toeing around some pithy philosophical concepts here, trying not to fall down certain rabbit holes. For instance, that the general public should be associated with the creators as much as the collectors. In fact, we should question the relevance of formalizing any lasting distinction between these speculative roles. This shift has been evident since Warhol declared that anyone could be an artist and claim their 15 minutes of fame, regardless of historical knowledge or specialized skill. The ensuing decades have seen the democratization of cultural production, further blurred by the rise of internet-based auto-fiction “content creation,” a dramatic divergence from traditional artistic craft. These days, creators are largely identified as idiosyncratic consumer-curators. This reflects broader cultural shifts, including the debated concept of the “death of the author,” which posits that no creation is entirely new but rather a reiteration of past works. But for the sake of our present interests, let’s move on from these tricks and traps.

[2] A particularly troubling notion we’ve encountered is the perception that all art is inherently good, and that artists, by extension (and through an awkward mutation of phrase), constitute a public good. This implies a responsibility to support them without sufficient consideration of the content or impact of their work, leading to a lack of coherence and accountability in cultural production. This issue is mirrored in web3 culture’s fascination with meme coins, which reflect both the positive—rapid community formation and ideologically fueled incentivization—and the negative—aspects of delusional speculation and blatant deception. We propose that it’s the pervasive nihilism that is most disturbing.

This research has been made possible by the vital support of DAOhaus.

Co-authored by TW & plor

Picking Up Where We Left Off

In the first article, we started questioning whether the term “minting” appropriately captures the necessary considerations of layer five, as it may be prematurely prioritizing certain aspects. It is clear that there are multiple factors at play. What is certain is that layer five represents a transitional phase where Creator DAO members disseminate some type of artifact, marking the start of a Collector DAO community. This community is envisioned to both receive and steward these artifacts. We acknowledged the need to explore layers six and seven to provide more context. Furthermore, we began to delve into the uncertainties surrounding our overarching prompt of reciprocity networks, whose definition remains speculative and open-ended for now.

Overview of Layers Five through Seven: Variations on a Flow

Layer five involves a series of concerns about how the artifact created by the Creator DAO is formalized into an on-chain object. We start with the assumption that it’s an NFT, though we are uncertain about the specific standard to use due to numerous questions about the required utility for token-gated content or the distribution of governance shares, among other aspects. Additionally, we face questions regarding the parameters of the mint, such as the edition size—whether it’s a one-of-one, an edition of three, or an open mint that might be exclusive to Collector DAO members—or perhaps a time-boxed mint, or some claim and burn mechanic. Essentially, everything is on the table, but our starting point suggests it could be three NFTs, which is a unique and irregular approach that could establish a new reciprocal relationship between collectors, creators, and the general public yet to engage.

The decisions made in layer five will shape the social and cultural relationships that are central to layer six. Layer six focuses on the formation of the Collector DAO, determining when and where this occurs, as well as defining the parameters of governance and what their stewardship over the artifact will look like. Following that, layer seven encompasses a range of considerations on how the general public interacts with the artifact, facilitating their integration into the Collector DAO and closing the distribution loop of the artifact. This includes addressing economic considerations, such as the flow of value or capital through the system.

Layer six presents a particular concern considering the bootstrapping of a community versus the iterative aspects of a developed group. For bootstrapping, the minting process determines how the Creator DAO initiates the formation of the Collector DAO. This community might deploy a mechanism like Yeeter to facilitate DAO formation around this singular purpose. After both entities are formed, ongoing iteration involves the Creator DAO minting the NFT in conjunction with the Collector DAO, based on their feedback. Since the collectors are likely to have a greater awareness of the broader market, they can provide insights on whether the NFT should be a one-of-one or part of an open series, among other options. This is where the decision becomes complex because we want the bootstrapping NFT to resemble the iterative NFT, even though they serve different purposes. The initial flow is based on the idea of minting three NFTs corresponding to three unique entities, as initially outlined in our proposal.

The second flow we are considering involves using Story Protocol, Seed Protocol, or something similar to manage the licensing of intellectual property (IP) as the artifact that is stewarded. This would be distinct from an NFT of the content itself, which is composed of DUCEs (atomic units of on-chain IP that compose the content of the artifact, discussed in the previous article). There’s some cognitive dissonance here as we question whether a DUCE is a representation of that IP or merely a container of data. We need to determine if the IP is attached to the DUCE through metadata, or if these are separate objects. This means the DUCE exists in one place, and the IP mint, with whatever data it carries, exists in another, creating a reference between these two on-chain objects.

The third flow focuses on how the distribution of the artifact transitions from the Creator community to the Collector community. We begin with the concept of fractionalized ownership, examining how the Collector DAO can collectively own a single artifact and how that correlates to the shares of its members. There is a challenge with correlating the voting and non-voting share representation of Moloch DAOs with the fractionalized ownership of a single or editioned artifact. For example, if a member decides to leave the community, how will the DAO provide exit liquidity without sacrificing the holdings of the other members? Will that rage quitting individual take a piece of the artifact or the IP with them, or be able to receive an equivalent value of tokens from a liquidity pool sustained by the collective?

Flow four focuses on a unique strategy of fractionalized stewardship called Partial Common Ownership (PCO) and flow five adds considerations of the Harberger tax on top of this schema. We need to address questions of price discovery, who sets the price, the psychology behind pricing, and maybe refresh our understanding of how Harberger mechanics operate in what might be considered a marketplace or a different field of exchange.

Into the Weeds

Layer six involves the formation of the Collector DAO, encompassing the operations of both DAOs, such as decision-making processes and the mechanisms through which people can join or leave the communities. The Collector DAO has two primary responsibilities. The first is how it supports the Creator DAO, dedicated in patronage to the amplification of economic and cultural exchanges between the two. There are various methods for returning feedback on content, helping form the north star of the combined communities while iterating upon the operations that support those efforts. The second responsibility is handling dissemination to the general public. This is less of a marketing effort and more akin to the nurturing of the narrative or in emanating from the artifact, thereby expanding the number of people either joining the Collector DAO or becoming general collectors in the public sphere.

Our first flow starts with the Creator DAO and its contributors minting an artifact in three editions. The first NFT goes directly into the Creator DAO’s treasury. However, its price hasn’t been validated by any external entity, so it’s essentially considered valueless within the DAO. The second NFT is sent to the Collector DAO’s treasury, and the questions about how this transaction occurs define the design space we are exploring. This could involve a predetermined set price, where they simply pay and receive the NFT, or through a more formalized on-chain smart contract escrow intermediary, where the NFT transfer from the creator’s side and the funds from the collector’s side is mediated by a neutral party.

A key aspect here is that the Collector DAO sets the price. They are motivated to set the price in relation to their evaluation of the object’s quality and content alongside its speculative potential—separating these aspects feels nearly impossible. By setting the price, the Collector DAO aims to keep it low enough to facilitate onboarding the general public, yet high enough to acknowledge the value of the reciprocal exchange with the Creator DAO.

At this point, we might remind ourselves of the meditations on attributions and royalties inherited from the first four layers of the stack. Let’s consider an example, of a hypothetical 70/30 split.

When the first NFT goes into the Creator DAO, no money changes hands; the DAO simply receives the NFT, and the contributors aren’t paid. When the Collector DAO acquires the second artifact, let’s say they set the price at 1 ETH: 30% (0.3 ETH) goes directly to the contributors who worked on the artifact, while 70% (0.7 ETH) goes back into the Collector DAO’s treasury. So, in essence, the Collector DAO has paid 0.3 ETH for that artifact.

The third step involves distributing the third NFT to a public buyer. Imagine a scenario where there is a shared multisig safe, perhaps with the Creator DAO and the Collector DAO as 50/50 signers or some proportionate arrangement, to create accountability. This third NFT artifact is then deposited into the safe, and the Collector DAO takes responsibility for stewarding the artifact on behalf of both entities. We initially imagine this involves setting up an auction, perhaps a Nouns-style auction, although it doesn’t necessarily need to be limited to this specific mechanic. It could involve various auction types or even a fixed price or a reverse Dutch auction. The Collector DAO oversees this sale, ensuring that the artifact deposited in the safe is the one up for auction.

When the auction closes, and the sale is formalized, 30% of the proceeds go back to the original contributors. Assuming the auction price is the same as what the Collector DAO paid, 1 ETH, we would see 0.3 ETH returning to the Creators and 0.7 ETH going into the Collector DAO’s treasury. Additionally, the buyer receives the third artifact and pays 1 ETH. They receive shares in the Collector DAO, giving them a ragequit-eligible position in the DAO’s treasury, which now includes the 1.4 ETH, 0.7 of which came from their wallet.

The intent here is to establish some constraints on the supply of the artifact and the influx of new members and capital. We can imagine this as a kind of culturally regulated bonding curve. This is designed to allow collectors and creators to determine the community’s growth pace and scale through their reciprocal interaction. It forces the creators to demonstrate the cultural value they can offer and compels the collectors to show their dedication towards stewarding those artifacts, thereby aligning with that cultural value. The goal is to prioritize cultural value over economic concerns, yet also allowing for real financial upside for all members.

The idealism of this scheme is that everyone will benefit: the creators, the collectors, and the general public coming in. This approach is akin to a faith-based practice rooted in the belief that the cultural value will continually be recognized as valuable, continuously improve, and be validated by being purchased at increasingly higher prices, attracting an endless stream of new people willing to invest in it. This suggests a slow but steady and infinite growth, which, despite perhaps occurring through a few cycles, seems overly optimistic and not sustainable. We are making assumptions about inflating the value and expecting the market to view it similarly. The assumptions upon which this is built may not withstand the market test, except in the form of inflationary speculative meme-driven bubbles, as are currently proliferating throughout the web3 ecosystem. Augmented bonding curves and similar automated experiments are deserving of investigation for this design space, but beyond the scope of our current discussion.

Towards a Nouns-style Reciprocity Model

The Creator DAO is motivated to maintain a certain cadence of releases, though volume is perhaps more crucial for maintaining a continuous flow. Following the Nouns model, every third NFT could go to the Creator DAO, and maybe every other one could be directed into the Collector DAO’s treasury, followed by an auction. This approach mimics Nouns-style mechanics but instead of featuring randomly generated SVG layers, it would involve the Creator DAO output from layers one through four. Each item would be unique, which is crucial because having three of each item makes it difficult to determine the value of one compared to another. In this setup, we’re dealing with one-of-ones, but we are structuring it so that the Creator DAO has ownership in both the collection and some shared treasury.

The key difference here is not having multiples of one artifact, but ensuring each artifact is unique. In the bootstrapping phase, the first artifact still goes to the Creator DAO, the second to the Collector DAO, and the third is auctioned publicly to facilitate onboarding. Then, in a manner similar to a Nouns DAO style, periodically, one artifact returns to the Collector DAO as a store of value, providing financial and governance rewards.

In the bootstrapping phase, the Collector DAO uses Yeeter to raise a primary store of capital to pay for the first artifact. In the interation phase, there’s no need for another Yeeter since there is already a store of capital established. To use the first example, they pay 1 ETH and 0.7 ETH comes back in. Then, with the sale of the third artifact, an additional 0.7 ETH comes in from the general public. From the Collector DAO’s perspective, they’re spending 0.3 ETH and turning it into 1.4 ETH. The treasury grows by onboarding new members.

The Yeeter-funded Collector DAO acts as the mechanism for price discovery for the first NFT sale. There are two sides for the collectors to consider: the price needs to be set at a level that will actually sell to the public and be low enough to facilitate continuous sales across iterations. They’re looking for the maximum price that will perpetually sell. Since the collectors are setting the price and also stand to benefit from it, they need to balance making it accessible enough for onboarding new members while ensuring it remains high enough to serve as a valuable asset in their treasury. This creates a complex dynamic, where collectors balance optimistic cultural alignment with a degenerate “number go up” mentality, resulting in a unique and somewhat paradoxical market-setting entity. This blend of rational and irrational decision-making underscores the absurdity and experimentalism of the situation.

Nouns price discovery is more coherent and has numerous functional use cases. It starts with a floor price that initiates bidding wars through an auction. When some Nouns are returned to the Nouns DAO, they are either financially incentivized or burned if not sold. This system incorporates inherent price discovery. Given this foundation, let’s transition towards examining some additional layers.

Fractionalized Ownership

Typically, when a DAO pools capital to purchase an NFT, it’s clear that the DAO’s treasury address holds ownership of that NFT. What is less clear is how individual members can retain or remove their portion of the fractionalized ownership.

To state the obvious, the NFT could be collectively sold by the DAO, and the tokens received from the sale could then be distributed to the members, who might choose to rage quit with their share of the profits. Since the DAO treasury acts as a collective store of value, and the DAO is motivated to continue collecting without necessarily converting the NFT into liquid ERC-20 tokens or similar, we encounter friction in maintaining individual members’ rights to exit.

This is a problem that plagues the broader ecosystem of NFT creator and collector DAOs. Generally, the way to exit involves selling one’s shares, which represent their percentage of partial ownership. If shares are transferable, members can sell them back to the community or through liquidity pools on the open market, facilitating fungibility and transferability among DAO members.

To avoid the social and economic complexity of liquidity pools, one could simply find a buyer and execute an over-the-counter (OTC) deal. Either way, exiting involves selling one’s share either back to the DAO, to another member within the DAO, or potentially to an outside party, which would then bring them into the DAO. Moloch v3 allows for the toggling on and off of transferability for both voting and non-voting shares, a crucial feature for unlocking the social dynamics we are considering.

On-Chain IP Licensing

The next concept we should discuss is on-chain intellectual property (IP) that is standardized into a mintable license. Story Protocol attempts to address the problem of representing the necessary data corresponding to different types of media, which often adhere to unique and sometimes conflicting standards. For instance, licensing music has historically followed a different standard than licensing texts, and scientific journal texts differ from literary texts in terms of copyright, Library of Congress numbers, ISBN numbers, and music catalog numbers, among other aspects. So, let’s generally consider all these elements under the umbrella of IP minted on-chain.

Because there is a single or a collection of intellectual properties that we want to track together, encapsulating it in a single object—namely, the license—bundles it neatly. However, for distribution purposes, we might want to do something like create three NFTs that would be collectible derivatives. Alternatively, it could be an open edition where the license allows someone to mint and sell in a format similar to an open edition.

This could result in a variety of products or derivatives based on the original IP. In this model, the Collector effectively becomes more like a producer or a publisher, purchasing the rights to manage the next phase of the project. In buying the IP license, the collector takes over the distribution aspect from the creator.

The artifact is also minted and exists autonomously. For simplicity in this discussion, let’s assume that the artifact is a one-of-one. So, in this scenario, the artifact is minted, and there is just one of them. The stewardship over this artifact is held by the collectors in the form of a license. This license represents the transactional exchange between the creators and the collectors; the collectors pay, and the resulting value flows to the creators. What the collectors receive in return is the license, which grants them rights to possess, exhibit, and possibly other utilities.

Story Protocol is attempting to establish a marketplace for licensed elements, somewhat akin to JSTOR, where users pay a fee to access a repository of academic articles, or like Unsplash and other image archives, where users pay to use licensed photography for private or business purposes, depending on the purchased license.

The license itself is an NFT, serving both as the license and as a reference to all the material being licensed, including the final composition of what the creator intends as the distributable item. It encompasses the entire collection of content. We propose that it is the responsibility of the Collector DAO to decide how to manage these assets.

Creators might even consider creating sub-licenses, where one primary license has the right to grant limited licenses for certain uses. However, when it comes to a DAO holding a license, it likely needs to be a single entity because the logistics of a license that is chartered or held by multiple parties and how to execute on it remain unclear.

Partial Common Ownership and Harberger Tax

Let’s consider the stewardship of this license. Here, we have two ideas that we might consider in tandem to understand their similarities, overlaps, and distinctions. The first concept is Partial Common Ownership (PCO), specifically referring to how this PCO license could be applied in a web3-centric approach to artwork stewardship.

The idea is that there’s a creator community that produces some artwork, and then the license is transferred to the collector community. The collectors purchase the license, which significantly includes a time limit. They pay a recurring fee to maintain it. We are questioning how that fee is set, whether it is determined by the creators, the collectors, or both in negotiation, and whether the recurring fee remains consistent or varies. For example, the upfront price could be higher, and the recurring fee lower.

Collectors have the option to renew the ownership of the license, and if they choose not to, it becomes available for others to purchase on a relatively open market. Using DAO shares for token gating utility, we might consider if specific permissions are required to purchase the license, whether during the bootstrapping phase of a new collector community or while onboarding new collectors into the DAO from the general public.

The main characteristic of a Harberger tax is that the asset is always up for sale. There is a renewal period that is flexible, guaranteeing that the buyer has the ability to use the item for a set period. After this period, a window opens where a new price can be set. The price is only changeable at specific intervals.

To apply this idea towards our thought experiment, once the collector receives the artifact, they then set the price. There’s a psychology at play where they aim to set it high enough to deter it from being immediately taken from another entity, likely another collector or collector DAO. Essentially, their motivation is to set the price high when they don’t want it sold because they can’t make it not for sale. Conversely, if they want to unload it quickly, they set the price so low that it becomes irresistible, which has repercussions.

Harberger taxes are often used in relation to territorial divisions, be they digital or physical lands. What intrigues us is how this might affect the local cultural landscape. Instead of considering a territorial grid of land partitions, each represented as an NFT on a grid influencing each other’s prices, we are now considering a grid populated by cultural artifacts in dynamic relation so that the price of one impacts the evaluation of the next.

The price discovery mechanism operates on the principle that all items are always for sale, allowing anyone to see the price. Changes in ownership demonstrate that the price set is generally seen as the equilibrium price; someone believed it was worth enough to buy it from the previous owner. There is reciprocal incentive to avoid dumping the artifact, instead setting a price that reflects its inherent value store. If it is no longer desired, rather than setting a super low price immediately, one would gradually decrease the price until someone else decides to buy it.

We imagine the Collector DAO receives the money from the sale. There’s also a tax component—the titular Harberger tax—which involves a percentage of the value going to another party, in this case the Creator DAO.

The primary use case for Harberger taxes is typically for productive assets—assets that can be used to produce something else, which is why licensing fits well into this model. By holding the license, a community can generate derivative works that they can sell, and the valuation of the license is essentially based on their ability to utilize it effectively. The community that purchases a Harberger taxed NFT license does so because they have a plan to utilize it effectively, believing they can mobilize significant cultural and economic value from it. They set the price slightly below what they expect to earn from it, but higher than what others might perceive its worth to be.

This schema raises some ambiguous questions about whether this artifact offers something functionally productive. This might be in a familiar web3 form such as token gating access to a community, additional content, economic interactions, governance, or other privileges. With a physical artwork, the utility suggests a collector holding the license maintains exclusive right to display it. The collector thus acts somewhat like a curator, aiming to exhibit the work while intending to form a market around its reception.

The Harberger tax could synergize with the mechanism we explored in part one, where individual members of the Creator DAO are compensated based on their contributions to the creation of the artifact. The royalties would exist in the licensing that the Collector DAO manages externally, while the Harberger tax compensates the Creator DAO directly as a percentage of the value of the object. They benefit from the initial sale and also from the ongoing tax collected from the NFT.

In this scenario, the Harberger tax is directed to the Creator DAO treasury. Additional participation in the creation of the artifact might amount to receiving additional shares, thereby receiving a higher share of the incoming flows based on shared attribution. Alternatively, the tax collected could be distributed per NFT. This aligns somewhat with Story Protocol’s approach, where the Harberger tax would flow in reverse down the lineage. Holding a “royalty NFT” could entitle the holder to a share of the Harberger tax, creating a continuous inflow in that direction.

Most licenses currently are perpetual; you buy it once and you have the license indefinitely, or sometimes there are terms that modify this. However, a depreciating license would mean that when one buys it, they initially own 100% of the license, but that ownership gradually diminishes over time. Incorporating a depreciating PCO license, the Creator DAO would start to receive back an increasing share of the ownership. Collectors are incentivized to actively promote and utilize the license, but they don’t receive perpetual revenue from it—it completely degrades over time, so eventually the creators reclaim full ownership of the IP.

Inconclusive Conclusion

We still have questions about how to motivate creators to produce a quality artifact, what motivates collectors to acquire either the artifact itself or the license, and how these motivations set the foundation for onboarding new people into this flow of value. We need to consider what motivates the general public to engage in this relational exchange. We continue to wonder how these designs might illustrate relatively anti-fragile reciprocal relations between our creator and collector personas. How might these communities become resilient enough to incorporate dissensus and disagreement as a generative function for whatever their underlying purpose may be?

In our third and final article in this unruly series, we will explore how and why a community forms around an emergent purpose that isn’t fully articulated. How might this design facilitate the gradual realization of that purpose, increasingly formalizing it, and how might that result in the formation of new generative articulations of purpose? Is this a flywheel where every cycle creates a new iteration of the entire scheme, or where the entities remain relatively stable as they flow iteratively through the reciprocal architecture? Next time we will try to pick up this thread and move towards some possible conclusions.

This research has been made possible by the vital support of DAOhaus.

Co-authored by TW & plor

This is the first of a multipart series providing a high-level overview of the CCR (Creator Collector Reciprocity) concept. Layers one through four are focused on how creators can collaborate on crafting on-chain artifacts as a collective, specifically as a particular flavor of web3 community known as a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization). These layers are supported by tools designed to facilitate collective collaboration, poised to empower the DAO to disseminate content as a unified entity. More than simply a shared treasury or governance layer wrapping otherwise disparate individuals, we imagine a DAO of creators maturing to sense, learn, and publish as one voice.

However, there are numerous uncertainties that arise, particularly when the creative output is brought on-chain. We have many unanswered questions regarding the specific data that needs to be captured within the artifact produced by the creators, the services we will incorporate or need to build, how these decisions will interface on-chain intellectual property rights, the formation parameters of the Collector DAO, and the minutiae regarding sales, editions, and other minting considerations. Our goal is to explore this design space, to generate more questions than answers, and pose these observations to our peers who are currently hacking on some new primitives that might attend to these needs.

Layer One: DUCE

Layer one is concerned with DUCEs (Decentralized Universal Comment Emissions), which we believe represents information at its most basic or atomic level. A DUCE is the smallest unit of information submitted to a repository. We are particularly concerned with a repository stewarded by a DAO of relatively like-minded creators. This hypothetical DAO consists of creators who have come together with the explicit intention of coordinating around a specific set of interests.

The decision regarding who these individuals are and the themes they organize around typically occurs off-chain or maybe even offline. We’re assuming this process has already been completed, whether through a platform like Yeeter or by summoning a DAO of any type. In this scenario, the DAO acts as the proprietor and steward of the shared repository. Here we might bookmark ideas of access, as there might be various levels of permissions regarding who can submit a DUCE.

We have questions about what a DUCE actually is. Simply put, a DUCE is any kind of data, from text comments to a URL serving as a reference or a code snippet. It could point towards any form of media, such as a picture or a video. We’ve explored the potential problems with a DUCE consisting of a URL that points to content residing elsewhere. Ideally, the content itself, whether it be text, image, or PDF of a book, should be uploaded directly to the DAO repository or reside on-chain, rather than just being a link out.

A DUCE should be composed of immutable content and not subject to change outside the control of the repository. Therefore, the comment doesn’t necessarily need to be to something within the repository itself; it can lead to a permanent resource hosted elsewhere. This approach aligns with technologies like Arweave or IPFS, which employ a robust pinning system to ensure permanence.

Creators are constantly amassing their own source material. At this juncture, it’s pertinent to introduce the notion of a personal DUCE repository and a shared DUCE repository. Upon joining a Collector DAO, one essentially contributes a portion of their personal repository to the collective repository relevant to a specific topic. However, they do not relinquish control over their entire personal collection that they’ve meticulously curated. A DAO may also choose to start from scratch.

Concerns regarding the permissioned nature of the repository arise, especially concerning sensitive subject matter, emphasizing the significance of privacy at every layer of consideration. It’s crucial for a community of creators to decide whether the intellectual property or cultural assets within the repository should be accessible to all or restricted solely to the specific creators or members of the Creator DAO. Once published, they may choose to make the derived works available to a broader audience, not limited to the original creators. Clear on-chain roles will be key at this stage.

An additional point at layer one concerns the implications if a member of the Creator DAO decides to leave abruptly (”rage quits” the DAO). This raises questions about their representation in the repository, whether they take their contribution of intellectual property with them, or if leaving equates to abandoning their stake in the collaboration. At one point, we also delved into the potential issues surrounding the redundancy of intellectual property across different Creator DAO communities if they share members, which could be either a minor inconvenience or a significant problem.[1] These concerns highlight some of the complex challenges that need to be addressed.

As we delve into the complexities of licensing, the situation becomes more challenging. When multiple Creator DAOs hold the IP rights to content, determining which DAO should benefit from the licensing proves to be a tricky problem. This complexity arises when attempting to navigate the shared ownership of IP, but that represents a different set of challenges beyond the scope of this discussion.

We now face the looming question of what constitutes a DUCE. Moving beyond the broad definition that a DUCE can be any kind of data, it becomes clear that the content of a DUCE is accompanied by specific metadata aimed at attributing the Creator member to their submission. Clear attribution ensures that if a member submits a DUCE, their identity is attached to it. Similarly, if two members collaborate on a DUCE, we would expect both of their identities would be associated. However, this raises a question: should multiple entities co-submit DUCEs, or does this complicate the system? Of course, it’s technically feasible for one DUCE to be associated with two addresses. We might initially consider the scenario where members work on separate DUCEs and then merge them, serving as a collective reference to each individual’s efforts, potentially adding weight to the contribution. The principle that one DUCE should correspond to one contributor or vice versa introduces a streamlined approach.

Additionally, DUCEs possess metadata elements for tagging and categorization, facilitating natural language searches and linking between ideas anticipating the interactions of layer two. There might be value in categorical tags indicating the type of media or additional metadata for sorting. The primary goal is to prepare for features anticipated in layer two, including curation, organizational searching, and discovery. This suggests that users may not fully anticipate how DUCEs link together, allowing for organic discovery, novelty, and emergence.

A significant unresolved issue is whether DUCEs need to be on-chain. Despite extensive discussion from numerous vantages, this remains an open question, indicating the need for further deliberation to reach a concrete conclusion. There are significant trade-offs to consider regarding the “proof of DUCE” ownership. Without an on-chain presence, there’s no timestamp to prove ownership, which is crucial for avoiding disputes over credit for someone else’s work. To maintain credibility and ownership clarity, being on-chain is preferable. However, this introduces user experience (UX) complications. Our strategy might entail keeping everything off-chain until publication, at which point all relevant data is locked on-chain, ensuring permanence through its on-chain status. We are drawing inspiration from Nostr, which manages a complex web of content through metadata and employs a kind ID system to allow for different data types and references among content chunks.

Regarding the aspect of discoverability, the question arises whether it is inherent to the DUCE or an external addition. The tagging associated with any DUCE facilitates its curation, scaffolding, and integration into the composition of succeeding layers. However, the distinction between tagging being an integral part of the DUCE or an external overlay remains unclear from a technical standpoint.

If tagging is internal to the DUCE, everyone must interpret the DUCE identically. Conversely, if tagging is external, it allows for multiple interpretations based on the perspective or lens through which the DUCE is viewed. For example, a DUCE concerning Friedrich Hayek could be tagged with political philosophy or economics, depending on the context of the discussion. This flexibility enables the DUCE to be categorized differently in various contexts without altering its inherent content. The decision between allowing post-publication tagging, which effectively modifies the DUCE, or adding tags as references, thereby introducing an additional layer without changing the DUCE itself, circles back to the theme of immutability and the dynamics of data management.

Our initial impulse is to support a pluriversal approach, allowing creators the freedom to determine how they view and curate content, fostering a diverse range of perspectives rather than conforming to a standardized method. However, playing devil’s advocate, we also find the idea of a DAO of creators debating towards a unified method intriguing. This scenario might necessitate DAO governance to make such decisions. The question arises: should we dictate this choice, or can we offer options for users to decide for themselves? This dilemma extends to the mechanics of tagging. We’re primarily considering the placement of the tag: is it part of the object (object-oriented) or does it exist as an external node in a graph database setup? For example, an economist’s definition of Friedrich Hayek could be an independent entity, contributing to a broader graph of interconnected information. The core question is whether the tag is intrinsic to the object or an external descriptor.

Layer Two: Curation

Layer two builds on the premise that multiple creators, who are members of the Creator DAO, are submitting DUCEs into the shared repository. These DUCEs feature various forms of tagging or sorting data points. The goal at this stage is for creators to begin grouping the atomic bits into collections or curations, bundling them together like molecules.

An individual creator seeks to view DUCEs in an easily comprehensible format. We are curious about presenting these in the form of a spatialized graph, although a more traditional nested information architecture (files within folders, and so on) could also serve this purpose. This phase involves considering different display possibilities. The underlying motivation for creators is to identify thematic relationships. This could stem from an initial intention they bring to the repository, searching for specific connections, or they may approach the task without a predefined goal, hoping to discover something emergent.

The process involves selecting DUCEs and grouping them into a batch. The purpose behind curating a batch of DUCEs is to present it to peers, aiming to garner attention for the identified series of connections. This act proposes the significance of these connections, suggesting a move towards a more explicit or concrete next step. Thus, layer two is fundamentally about exploring these curation dynamics.

We encounter a similar challenge here as in layer one as we question the types of DUCEs to include. To some degree, curation revolves around clustering DUCEs in a somewhat Darwinian search for the most coherent or fit cluster to advance. But unlike the idea of Darwinian fitness[2] we envision a scenario of multiple parallel thematic organism developments. Members of the Creator DAO can identify various themes and form numerous curations that might conflict with each other, including overlapping DUCEs. Importantly, the DUCEs are not mutually exclusive, and one members’ curations do not negate another. While the notion that “the best curation wins” or is deemed most viable is intriguing, our inclination is that if a curation is relatively good - by whatever subjective position held by the creators - it should be advanced to the next step. Some curations naturally rise to prominence while others may not make it to the scaffolding phase due to lack of compelling attributes. For instance, certain clusters might not survive because they fail to engage or resonate, despite someone finding them interesting.

For example, as a member of the Creator DAO, I’m interested in writing about effective accelerationism and wish to link to a DUCE on Friedrich Hayek, tagged as a political philosopher, using specific quotes to bolster the notion that effective accelerationism is a concept worthy of our attention is such and such a way. Concurrently, harboring some skepticism about effective accelerationism, I’m drawn to exploring the counterpoint of decelerationism at the same time, proposing another Friedrich Hayek DUCE to balance the discussion. This results in the Friedrich Hayek DUCE being included in both curations, alongside distinct non-overlapping DUCEs that support these divergent viewpoints.

After creating these curations independently, without any prior dialogue, I present them as curations to my peers, complete with bibliographies or lists of the specific DUCEs referenced therein. I engage other members of the Creator DAO, pitching my ideas and seeking feedback. For instance, some may decide to support the effective accelerationism path but opt out of the decelerationism route. This peer validation indicates a distribution of attention across concepts and rouses member interest in preparation to act.

The curation of DUCEs resembles a brainstorming phase. Essentially, we gather various items related to a topic and toss them into a metaphorical bucket. This stage involves loosely grabbing items and possibly making some preliminary connections, but the approach is quite freeform. Once we feel we’ve brainstormed sufficiently, we take a step back to assess the connections among the gathered items.

Imagine both of us working on a project and deciding to create, say, three clusters each. For instance, I might form one cluster around Austrian economics, pulling in insights from Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and others. Perhaps I also develop a cluster on accelerationism and another on Italian Futurism. You, on the other hand, might create three distinct clusters of your own. As we progress, we discover overlaps between our clusters. For example, your accelerationism cluster might intersect with my Austrian economics and Italian Futurism cluster, prompting questions like, “What did the Austrians have to say about acceleration?” or “Are there fascist aesthetic histories underpinning accelerationist economic theories?” Consequently, these overlapping clusters gain traction and move forward to the scaffolding phase, while a separate cluster you’ve developed—perhaps on decelerationism—also advances as a unique contribution.

In this scenario, the curations that have not been selected for advancement at this stage are temporarily set aside.[3] They remain potential sources of inspiration or material for future work but are not immediately pursued further. This process might lead to the creation of new curation clusters based on feedback or revisiting previously overlooked clusters in follow-up articles. Essentially, this method outlines how coordination and negotiation between contributors determine which projects or themes are developed further.

We have explored tools like Obsidian and LogSeq in their offerings of a spatialized graph view and features that enable users to select items and group them into batches. Varying zoom levels within the knowledge graph allows for a macro view of clusters and the ability to zoom in for a closer look at specific clusters. Such functionality would be crucial on the UI side to manage the visibility of different levels within the stack, considering these curated groups as DUCEs themselves. This approach aims to reduce clutter by distinguishing between the atomic DUCEs and the more complex ‘molecule’ DUCEs.

An important aspect yet to be discussed is the notion that the act of curation itself will also result in the creation of a DUCE. Additionally, we’d like to consider whether our curation approach should lean more towards negotiated curations or survival-based curations. It seems beneficial to explore joint curation, where we might individually curate before identifying overlaps and proceeding with a collaborative curation. This process would involve negotiating which aspects to include or exclude, essentially conducting another round of curation with a shared focus. This raises the question of whether all curations should inherently be of this collaborative nature, facilitating ongoing negotiation among contributors. The features needed might vary depending on whether the curation is being conducted solo or collaboratively by two or more people. Ideally, the starting point would include simple and user-friendly selection and curation features that accommodate both individual and group efforts seamlessly.

We might highlight another important aspect: the curator does not necessarily have to be the original DUCE creator. This distinction allows for a division of responsibilities, where one might act as a researcher, contributing DUCEs to the collective pool, while another, more akin to an editor, takes on the role of curating these inputs. Such a setup offers flexibility in roles, underscoring the fluidity within the process whereby individuals may adopt different roles at different times, facilitating a dynamic and collaborative environment.

Layer Three: Scaffolding

Layer three acts as a critical intermediary phase bridging the gap between the curation activities of layer two and the composition phase of layer four, which we refer to as scaffolding. In scaffolding, there appear to be two primary tasks: editing the curations and prioritizing or ordering them. Editing involves scrutinizing the curated content to identify gaps, such as the need for additional references to bridge concepts like Friedrich Hayek and political philosophy. This process not only highlights missing elements but also involves trimming superfluous DUCEs to narrow the focus, especially if certain topics initially considered relevant are later deemed out of scope. Prioritization, or ordering, requires tools and a user interface that facilitates the sequence of discussion topics and overall structure, including the beginning, ending, and length of the work, introducing formal constraints on the collaboration.

Initially, we have explored using DAOhaus’ Signal app as a tool for this layer, drawn to its seamless integration with Moloch DAOs via the DAOhaus interface. The user flow involves members submitting curations to a TCR (token curated registry), with all participants, assuming equal shares within the Creator DAO, voting with equal weight on the content’s ordering. This process doesn’t necessitate unanimous agreement on the outcomes; rather, its purpose is to surface emergent priorities through collective decision-making.

The scaffolding phase serves to document our organizational activities, making what is typically an invisible process more visible. More importantly, it allows for the tracking of included DUCEs, assessing their relevance and noting omissions along with the rationale, thus enriching the metadata associated with each atomic, molecular, and organismic DUCE.

We still harbor some skepticism regarding this step. It introduces an experimental approach to document outlining, and we’re uncertain about its effectiveness in contributing to the composition phase in layer four. This uncertainty raises a couple of questions: first, whether this mechanism effectively achieves its intended purpose; and second, the degree of freedom it leaves the creators responsible for composition. We see the value in incorporating some form of voting, given that the Creator DAO aims to present a unified voice. The ability to endorse or disregard certain elements through voting seems beneficial.

Our hesitance extends to another feature set that seems somewhat tangential. Our concern is that overly expansive curations in layer two might overwhelm the process, making it challenging to discern a clear path forward and inhibiting action. Thus, we envision layer three as a rigorous and discerning phase that addresses this friction, crucial for shaping DUCEs into a coherent structure that others can easily understand and engage with creatively.

Regarding the integration of AI, which we hesitantly mention, our proposition is not for AI to generate content from the DUCEs. Instead, we suggest AI could assist by organizing the information from the DUCEs and the outcomes of the layer three signal proposal, forming the foundation for layer four. This preliminary step would result in a pre-ordered document, streamlining the transition into the writing phase. The primary goal of layer three is to transform a multitude of ideas, akin to an array of sticky notes on a whiteboard, into a structured first draft. This process aims to expedite and enhance the efficiency of transitioning from concept to composition, reducing the need for administrative skills and allowing creators to focus on the nuances of writing as swiftly as possible. If certain tasks prove challenging or time-consuming, AI can be utilized to facilitate these aspects, acting more as a tool at the discretion of the contributors rather than a built-in component of the process. This approach maintains the focus on human-led decision-making while providing support where necessary.

This phase could be seen as an iterative process beginning with high-level clustering. This is followed by a negotiation phase where clusters may merge or interact, leading to a subsequent trimming phase. There might even be a need to circle back to layer one for additional DUCE submissions if more content is required in certain areas. Essentially, the creative process remains within layer two until a member deems it ready for a TCR vote, transitioning it from a loose curation to a linear architecture. The scaffolded curations thus serve to prioritize the most critical points and valuable information, potentially sidelining less impactful ideas that, while part of the ideation, don’t significantly influence the final output.

We’d like to emphasize the possibility of encountering failure at any layer, leading to a return to layer one, where members start anew by submitting DUCEs. Specifically, layer three represents a critical inflection point. If an idea possesses sufficient strength and consensus, it will advance to become an artifact. If not—due to lack of agreement, insufficient content, or other reasons—the outcome of that signal becomes another DUCE representing the result of this dead-end in the decision tree. This DUCE is then reintegrated into the repository, serving as a valuable reference for future efforts or as a lesson on what approaches may not be successful. Essentially, even in failure, there’s valuable information to be gleaned, turning the experience into a constructive artifact.

A similar evaluative phase is necessary between the composition of layer four and minting concerns of layer five. This phase acts as a crucial quality and velocity filter to prevent the simultaneous release of multiple compositions, which could inadvertently compete for attention within the same temporal window. There should be a mechanism—possibly policy-driven or decided by a vote—to determine the sequence of publication. This process ensures that compositions are not only queued for release but also curated to maintain both quality and strategic timing.

Layer Four: Composition

Layer four builds on the foundational work of the previous layers, where atomic units of DUCEs are combined through curation, then edited and structured, resulting in an outlined text piece. While this process could theoretically apply to any form of collaborative media, it seems most pragmatic to concentrate on producing a text article for our initial endeavor. The starting point for layer four involves the somewhat ordered DUCEs and the associated Creator DAO members whose aim is to write, compose, and execute the article.

An important clarification here is that contribution to the earlier phases does not guarantee direct involvement composing the final artifact during layer four, although those previous contributions will still be accounted for in the DUCE metadata. Conversely, a creator member who hasn’t participated in the first three layers might join in layer four, possibly as a writer, editor, consultant, or in another capacity. This raises questions about tracking contributions to ensure they are acknowledged in the metadata of the final artifact.

For instance, if a member contributes as a writer, filling gaps between DUCEs, that contribution would become a DUCE tied to their wallet at this layer. Similarly, if someone’s role is limited to editing for grammar, punctuation, or sentence structure, their contributions, too, should be recognized, albeit with potentially lesser weight. If the original DUCE submitter is no longer involved, consulting with a specialist and incorporating their input should be formalized into a unique DUCE and added to the article’s metadata. The culmination of this process is a polished written artifact, ready for publication, possibly enriched with illustrations or images, each contributing member’s role duly noted in the metadata.

It’s conceivable that all the DUCEs contributing to the artifact might serve to populate an index. Drawing inspiration from tools that generate bibliographies from footnotes could prove useful, perhaps offering a more digestible format than a lengthy text block at an article’s end, such as a linked index for interested readers. It is imperative that each DUCE adequately documents its references, ensuring that the data each contributes to the artifact is accurately tracked. This ensures the final product reflects a structured hierarchy of all contributing DUCEs. Part of the curation phase involves refining the content to ensure that a high-quality bibliography can be generated.

The matter of document versioning and sidebar commenting also prompts reflection. Whether these elements should be integrated into the document remains a point of discussion. One consideration that arises is whether the composition phase involves the creation of multiple DUCEs, encompassing both the writing and any additional elements like imagery. We hypothesize an increased production of DUCEs during this phase, culminating in a singular, final organismic DUCE (the final artifact) that acts as a comprehensive reference for all contributions. This prompts further reflection on the distribution of credit and potential royalties for contributions to the artifact, introducing complex economic considerations we will explore in Part Two of this work. Moreover, the criteria for recognition as a contributor come into play; for instance, does a single comment qualify someone as a contributor, or is a more substantial interaction required?

Despite the apparent simplicity of writing the article in layer four, the technicalities of how this phase will operate pose significant challenges. Layer four may resemble an on-chain WYSIWYG editor, yet the specifics of its implementation are beyond the scope of this discussion. It raises important considerations about the immutability of DUCEs. Specifically, this prompts the question of when to version a DUCE—to distinguish between an initial draft and subsequent modifications, which would be added as new DUCEs that supersede the original. Alternatively, are DUCEs immutable until they reach the on-chain minting stage, at which point they become permanently fixed?

The composition phase aims to consolidate all essential data crucial for drafting the final artifact for minting. It’s imperative to capture the entirety of the effort that contributes to the composition process, as it determines the distribution of royalties among creators, solidifying the royalty split based on the documented contributions. This approach ensures that all participants are fairly recognized and compensated for their involvement in creating the final product. We will later see how this fits into a larger reciprocal economic exchange with collectors and the wider public.

Layer Five and Beyond

Layer five focuses on a rather specific yet crucial set of considerations around the minting of the on-chain artifact that significantly influence the subsequent phases. Layer five initiates with a completed draft, crafted by members of the Creator DAO, and revolves around the process of minting this artifact as an NFT. Discussing layer five inherently evokes the contexts of layers six and seven, though they remain distinct stages, as we will see.

A pivotal inquiry at this juncture is the selection of the NFT standard and the underlying rationale, essentially boiling down to the specific utilities required by the NFT. This consideration tethers to later questions about transferring DAO member shares, token-gated access to content, and similar functionalities. Essentially, layer five prompts deliberation on necessary parameters, the edition in which the NFT is minted—be it a unique edition, limited number, unlimited, time-boxed mint, etc.—and how these choices reflect on the establishment of a Collector DAO, which is the focus of layer six. These decisions aim to foster a reciprocal relationship between creators and collectors, touching on aspects of scarcity, stewardship of the artifact or its intellectual property license, and necessitating some form of contractual agreement between the Creator and Collector DAOs. Such an agreement might be formalized through a smart contract, possibly incorporating an escrow mechanism, to ensure transparency and prevent potential disputes.

Layer five also presupposes a degree of exclusivity in the creator-collector relationship, with the minting process potentially being restricted to whitelisted members of the Collector DAO. Our attention begins to shift towards layer six, particularly concerning the destination of the minted artifacts. The provisional strategy entails distributing the first artifact to the Creator DAO’s treasury, the second to the Collector DAO’s treasury, and reserving discussions for the destination of the third artifact for layer seven. In essence, layer five embodies the fundamental considerations of what is minted and how, laying the groundwork for subsequent deliberations and actions.

The primary question centers on whether the focus of collection is the artifact itself or if the NFT serves as a representation of the collectors’ intellectual property, or perhaps both. From one perspective, this stage could introduce the concept of a template NFT, acting as the progenitor, with subsequent decisions regarding the minting of collectible NFTs derived from it. This template could remain under the perpetual ownership of the Creator DAO, functioning as a license or certificate symbolizing the artifact. Then, negotiations could determine the specific form of the actual mint, whether it adheres to the proposed three-NFT model or adopts an alternative minting approach—be it an open edition or another format. This step is distinct from the process of tracking royalties, which would be attributed back to the original certificate for monitoring purposes.

A critical concern involves identifying the standard used for tracking all related activities. Minting in three editions potentially complicates the integrity of the intellectual property by fractionalizing it, a concept challenging to fully grasp. This situation raises numerous questions, primarily focused on two aspects: tracking licensing and royalties, and maintaining flexibility to adapt the minting scheme for market fit, acknowledging that our initial approach will certainly require iterative adjustments. Additionally, the context greatly influences the minting strategy. For instance, a journalism-focused Creator DAO may prefer open editions to facilitate broad access and collection by readers, contrasting with a Collector DAO oriented towards limited edition art, where exclusivity and rarity of a unique artwork become paramount.

We prefer the possibility of enabling creators and collectors, bound in community dialogue, to determine their preferred approach according to their local needs. Opting for a singular NFT leans towards the traditional model emphasizing rarity, scarcity, and the distinct value and cultural prestige associated with possessing that unique item. Conversely, an unlimited edition model offers a more accessible approach, focusing on broad public access and distribution rather than the exclusive stewardship of a rare artifact. A limited but finite edition introduces complex, somewhat uncharted questions regarding intellectual property, value, and price discovery, which we expect to delve deeper into with the governance and economic schema discussions in the second installment of this research, forthcoming.

For layer five, providing various options from the outset is prudent, given our acknowledgment that achieving a “correct” method is unlikely. Permitting multiple methods is driven by the anticipation of reciprocal exchange, wherein collectors should perceive a return on value to encourage ongoing creation. If this exchange fails to incentivize continued creative output, it falls short of its goal. Collectors’ motivations can be somewhat nebulous, often driven by a mix of cultural and financial values, typically blending both. Hence, the formation of collector communities may vary based on these divergent incentives.

At one juncture, we considered the feasibility of establishing multiple collector communities for a single Creator DAO or conversely, numerous creator communities for various Collector DAOs. This notion seems to extend beyond a straightforward reciprocal relationship, veering towards a form of pluralistic competition. Reciprocity does not necessarily imply a binary, closed system. Instead, the possibility exists for multiple Creator DAOs to engage in reciprocal relationships with multiple Collector DAOs, and vice versa, opening the door to a more interconnected and dynamic ecosystem of exchange. Layer five is crucial for establishing these reciprocal relationships.

At this point we will pause and resume this conversation in the next article detailing layers five, six, and seven of the CCR stack. We recognize the complexity anticipated in layer six, encompassing diverse social, cultural, and economic dynamics that warrant thorough exploration. The concerns of minting and the dynamics of how the Creator DAO’s artifact will be distributed to the newly formed Collector DAO will determine the constraints of layer seven, concerned with the thresholds of engagement with the broader public. Our still highly speculative layer eight may serve a broader context for economic theories and the overarching ideologies motivating the activities of our purpose-driven decentralized autonomous communities, presenting yet another dimension of complexity. Thus, let’s pause here for now.

Footnotes:

[1] This might be an argument for pushing DUCEs on-chain earlier than later, the community might gain ownership of the IP with the minting of this DUCE, it would be time stamped to avoid disputes over ownership.

[2] We don’t necessarily associate Darwinian fitness with a “winner-takes-all” position, but in a more statistical manner. The colloquial understanding of Darwinian fitness as synonymous with “survival of the fittest,” ie natural selection, implying only those individuals best adapted will survive, is what we are responding to here, although the details are certainly beyond the scope of our conversation in this article. There’s a rabbit hole to explore regarding Darwin’s original conception of “fitness,” conceived as an organism’s capacity to integrate into their contextual environment, to fit in and to be well fitted, and the appropriation of this term to be applied towards a sociological bias towards economic competition by Herbert Spencer, among others.

[3] This leads us to ruminate about the lifecycle - or morality - of DUCEs. Perhaps they are “permanent,” thus live forever, and consequently cannot be removed from the repository, or perhaps they age in a way to become less prominent in the repo. We might consider how DUCEs in various stages of development - for example, curation DUCEs versus atomic DUCEs - might mature or decay in distinct ways according to member attention.

This research has been made possible by the vital support of DAOhaus.

DD#1

People expressing their opinions online with their money? Is that what it is? How do you trust someone that you’ve never known IRL when you don’t know if they’re using their real name, or if anything that they tell you is trustworthy, or if they are even human? I imagine that hard and soft used in this way comes from the cultures of science and technology, right? Thinking about religion, what comes to mind is Moses descending from Mount Sinai carrying stone tablets, the Word of God written as codified commandments… Was that Moses? God’s voice is the creation and destruction of the universe, so how did Moses even hear the creator in the first place? Could there be a more humble or self-deprecating way of proceeding — in a Wittgensteinian sense — where the code remains law while we exercise humility before the fallacious or tragic reliance upon that code, to recognize the imperfection and act in accordance to an understanding of the imperfection of the code?

DD#2

Did you have a look at the book? Might it be endearing to say, I hate myself because I am a man or I self deprecate my position literally and symbolically? What kind of new world might that bring about? What do you think about that as a provisional method? Is that right? It started with a translation problem, didn’t it? What was that about? What is the Danish word for tangle? Play of kin or battle to the death? Am I getting that wrong? What is this that we’re doing and what is it for me? We design into the constraints of a particular project, because without boundaries — with an infinite potential of possibilities — how does one even know where to begin? How do we know how to make decisions?

DD#3

Was it common knowledge at this time that video cameras were banned? Was the government trying to suppress the production of documentation of what was happening there? How could he dress so conservatively? Would the government even issue us visas to come into the country? Was there an explicit purpose for shutting off electricity? Was it to control communications and to take down channels of communication? To exert brute force control over the people to remind them that they are being dominated? The government discontinued the use of one currency and replaced it with another to render everything in circulation obsolete? What kinds of strategies are being implemented to circumnavigate centralized control? What has been attempted and failed, or what is currently underway with this international collaboration effort? How is social credibility built? How is it formed? How is it imagined? How is it distributed? How does this network of people that have had everything taken away from them successfully mobilize against the panoptic surveillance government leveraging brute military strength, in control of all the means of production and all of the resources? Do any such things exist in our economy these days? With the situation in Myanmar, how can the government be allowed to exist — by the global community — if the people are being denied the most basic access to food, clean water, and electricity? How might what’s happening in Myanmar inform our use of cryptocurrency in relation to this new economy that’s starting to emerge? Also, where’s the reciprocity? How does a virtual economy purporting to exist outside or parallel to the current economic infrastructure reciprocate with the local needs of the community we have been discussing? How can the meta economy of crypto help people in need obtain the physical materials they require for survival, especially considering their limited access to open and free media outlets? Any volunteers?

DD#4

Is it worth it in consideration to all the other things that we might be pouring energy into? How might we put into conversation the principle of symbiosis and sympoeisis with a resolution of the world that is not merely resolved through industrial geoengineering? How we might think of this projection in terms of the technological point made earlier? How might we build our relationship towards a possible resolution of the technological that will — in Benjamin Bratton’s terminology — bring the black stack to come? Bring the unexpected artificiality that we still have not been able to wonder? How do these components intermingle to allow us to gain clarity upon governance? Upon what is to be governed and what needs to be governed and the purpose of governance and who might be governing who? How is the resolution — as the visibility and the legibility — and the constitution — as the organization and codification of that organization — wielded as power? How can I relate and reveal the legibility of that mineral world? Or with the vegetal world? Why is that insulting? What image might put into question the affirmation of selfhood and provide an image of emancipation that will not be received as — perhaps the most important value of modern society — a defense of the individual? How can we think in other images or in other potentialities to open emancipation beyond the imperative of the individual?

DD#5

Why call it research? Where does that come from? Is that yours? Why research, as opposed to another word that might carry a different set of cultural connotations or imply another level of rigor or causality or casualness? Why call it research and not a conversation? Why research as opposed to a story? Why research? Is that about importing an idea of seriousness? Research typically implies a method, so are there presumptions about method? Why research is also another way of asking what is the method? Might we steer this back to what we’re doing in this project and what our intentions are? Did you have some questions about genre, style, and how we render the objective of this research to convey a certain methodology for a purpose or to make it legible? If what is seen cannot be understood in the self-same moment, then what is understanding if not a re-presentation of an experience that could not be comprehended in continuity with its being experienced? Have you read this text, Eichmann in Jerusalem? Who is clamoring for no passports? How do we think about the ideal of no passports historically? How does that relate to the possibility to utter such statements made possible by the great privilege of having a passport from a certain nation? Let’s not attempt to kill the idealism — because the idealism is fucking rad (!) — but might we rescue that idealism from toothlessness?

DD#6

Do you know the band Sunn O)))? Second, let me ask in the same breath, how do we compose this way? The question for me is: after we coordinate successfully, what purpose are we accomplishing? Alongside that, when does the ethical or the ecological or the sustainable futurity come into the equation? Is it forgivable or admissible to become obsessed with coordination itself, because that facilitates these other ideas to come later? Or must we refrain from becoming preoccupied with the means of production and focus upon the purpose of our productions? I really like to think of it as: what obstacles can I introduce to trick myself into forgetting about efficiency for a while, to just nurture these ethical, cultural, social, and artistic aspects of what we’re doing? Whether it’s a cultural stutter or a neurological stutter I’m not so sure, and what’s the difference anyways? If we’re thinking of ourselves in an expanded ecological network, as a networked self tethered to each other, are we stuttering on this notion because we don’t have the words? Is it a clumsiness like a jagged, percussive stuttering? To bring it back to the musical score, how do we notate the opportunity for the stutter so that we can embrace the clumsiness of the composition and somehow stir up a joyfulness in the collaboration? If it’s a matter of shifting our composure and focusing upon coordination in another way, how do we broach the subject with those that are moving so quickly, so boldly? How do we approach that conversation? How do we invite the other to slow down and to unlearn this preoccupation with efficiency and speed? What does it reproduce? What is it producing?

DD#7

Who is the audience? Who is it that we want to influence? Who is the general reader? That’s one thing I wanted to ask you about: what is the rightness that you’re referring to? How do you communicate advanced technical, complex ideas without using your jargon? How much of this conversation will be comprehensible to anyone — expert or layman — in terms of recognizing or comprehending the motivation for the project in the first place? What are you trying to achieve and for whom? Is there anybody looking at the role of Ethereum ecosystems in the bigger picture of community economic ecosystems? The immediate question is: how do you avoid that? If you get enough eyes on the subject, somebody is going to eventually say, Oh, did you think about this aspect of it? When does simulation come in? How does our ability to compose the fidelity of our simulations through our technical jargon and our visual models determine our ability to interact with and navigate these simulations? Might we understand the efficacy of a simulation as a reductionist model that allows us to achieve a minimum distance from reality, to understand our circumstances in a different way? When does a material become a resource? When does that resource become so valuable that we call it treasure? How do we negotiate the tragedy of the commons by exercising such a sophisticated, intentional, resilient, and non-fragile strategy of management that our materials get to where they need to go, but we do not deplete the regenerative potentials of that resource? How do we design governance modalities and treasury management schemes in ways that preserve both? Is this possible? Are they mutually exclusive? Can we increase individual autonomy within decentralized organizations in order to increase the sovereignty of the organization? How do we think of decentralized organizations interfacing with centralized organizations? For example, how does crypto interface with legacy government schemes through tax regulation, the SEC, the IRS, etc.? There are a few people in the cryptocurrency world that are starting to power their mining operations with solar, aren’t they? To take advantage of the geothermal cooling? How do you get rid of the heat?

DD#8

That’s kind of how power works, right? This brings me back to thinking about the Myanmar situation in relation to these cryptocurrency ideas we have been discussing; what does it mean to play this game and who doesn’t have the status to play the game and why don’t they have the status to play the game? When you get left out of the game, what sort of statelessness is imposed upon you because you are not able to join in to this weird meta economy of virtual governance? What is this desire to order and abstract the world around us in order to make sense of the chaos and be able to count things and apply value to them in little categories, little parcels, as opposed to keeping them open and fluid? Nicolas Bourriaud, right? The guy that makes curry in art galleries and then he calls it radical politics or emancipatory coordination? The LungA School in Iceland; it sounds like a dream, right? If you’re in the position to experiment, to have these radical meta conversations, how do the learnings get deployed in ways that benefit people on a more practical level? Does me saying this drag down the high-level abstract thinking? The negotiation occurring at the interstice raises eyebrows and breeds suspicion from all parties, for how could the negotiation result in a sustainable art project? How do you design a project, whether it’s art or business or otherwise, that is somehow able to generate value without causing more harm? To distribute that value in a way that truly benefits all with no losers or victims and is able to be transparent in it’s motivation so that there’s no deception, no need to turn a blind eye to local peoples — often women and people of color — that are not included within the scope of the project? Can you live a life that is an art work? Do you document it? If you do, is it authentic living or does it become something else because you’re still performing? How do we trust those stakeholders to keep the greater good in mind? Is this reducible to race or does anyone know how to effectively keep the needs of the greater good in mind? Who is it that might be advocating for a society with no passports? Who views legal legibility as an encumbrance more than as a protection or as a right or as a certification of identity? If there’s a tension between the utopian ideas being produced by people already benefiting from current systems not necessarily having in mind people who are not benefiting from these systems, is the utopia really applicable to everyone? Does the borderless, passport-less, autonomous and anonymous sovereignty extend to all people in these manifestos and idea spaces? How much of this community’s advocacy for a truly decentralized, autonomous, and open structure is repeating exclusionary structures? How can we come to recognize and test if the motivations are sincere? If so, might they be failing in the execution? Is this perhaps a larger ontological or epistemic problem, that we’re trying to devise a solution for something by referencing a record of cultural and political failures throughout history? Can we figure out a way to leverage this knowledge and tech to serve as a tool that would benefit the revolutionary community in Myanmar? Might we learn to subvert these tools for our own purposes, to distribute currency from those that are willing to give to those that need it at street level? Where are you? In a park right now? Might we leverage this ideology to inject new perspectives into the legacy system, like an ideological COVID that is injected into the delusional, cancerous, obese, bloated corpse of the legacy government economy? Did you ever get to read it? What would an indigenous community think of cryptocurrency? Is there any interest or curiosity in exploring that through this DeathGuild research? To take a completely different system of thinking and see how it is assimilated or digested? Can the ancient stories be given a new voice and the lessons finally internalized?

DD#9

What do you think about that as a setup? Where should we start? You mean the fundraising was a failure? Does that mean that you did not own the house? Why is it so easy? After we had the idea of a school-like situation that we would like to invite people into, we started asking how do we do it? The children of the town would eat lunch and then the fish factory workers came in to eat after, right? What more do you need really in addition to that? Maybe you can tell me a little bit more about that in your own words?

DD#10

Is that a relevant or interesting comparison to make? That being said, how do we resolve what we have resolved through art, without art? How do we resolve what we have resolved through the symbolic, without the symbolic? What is the material conversation that the Nasa traditional doctors experience through their relations with plants that we have constructed as art? How could they work in a different way? In what way could we perform the potential of what is opened through these conceptions that will not become the exotic landscape of cannibal necessities? Sorry, could you clarify that? There was a falsity that you were keenly aware of, as though the indigenous works were being appropriated and fetishized and this constituted a failure? There was a missed opportunity? How do we resolve the problem of labor not procuring emancipation through labor? How do we think-ourselves through our relations towards each other and towards the Earth beyond mere systems of production, beyond the terms of productive labor? How might we re-think those economic systems and configurations untethered from virtuality? The latent potential of Western art is to create distance from the phenomenal world so that we might engage with this potential and pivot our perspective, but how do we perform this without the delusional infrastructure of what art has become? How do we internalize the lessons of art and integrate them into our everyday life, so that art itself might dissolve? Reason enough to let it go?

DD#11

Is that right, or how do you see it? You mean there is a possibility that someone could be weaving an elaborate scheme for malicious purposes to steal this money? Could we potentially be charged with war crimes? Could it actually go that far? Do we care? You are serving as a custodian to an account and then you send that money to the professor and he passes it along to Kyaw Kyaw? What’s the final step? The music compilation generates money through sales, people pay you through PayPal, you transfer that to Kyaw Kyaw’s Swiss girlfriend, and how does the girlfriend extract it? She pulls out Swiss francs and they trade it at a local currency exchange in Myanmar? It comes out as cash and then people at street level pay for the materials that they might need for the resistance efforts there? You know when you can feel emotion in a text message when a situation is really intense? Yes, we were discussing how the government is flexing control over all of the resources, such as electricity, but what about data? These people don’t have bank accounts, but they have cell phones? They’re able to reliably connect to networks that are not being shut down? What about GPS tracking, for example, or the data trail that the transaction history is creating between your PayPal account and the Swiss girlfriend’s PayPal account, or the professor’s accounts? Do you hear of instances of the government persecuting people based on transaction history or communications being shut down? How would someone on street level in Myanmar turn crypto into food, medical supplies, or local services? Where’s the Silk Road of COVID vaccinations and oxygen tanks?

DD#12

How are you? Has your head been full of wonderful delicious dreams of universal basic income algorithms and geothermal heat dissipation solutions for decentralized world finance computers, or have you been occupied with even more exciting things like building libraries of self-reliance literature and contemplating the waste that is grotesquely flowing out of all of our human systems? What do you mean stuff that’s different from that? To the extent that it’s conceptual abstract knowledge rather than phenomenological or experiential knowledge that we acquire from interacting with the world? Certainly it also goes both ways? If we could somehow collect that diversity of perspectives and unify them by our human coordination, what potential might that unlock for how we could teach each other to see the world differently? Where does the artist fit in? Where does the visionary fit in? What kind of person is the rancher telling the anecdote? Where is the core of the rancher’s message? Could we learn to embrace a perspective where a multiplicity of languages co-exist simultaneously? To allow that each might be appropriate for interacting with a specific level or dimension of reality, but that there is no singular universally true reality to be defined by one singular universally true perspective? Might we at least entertain a multiverse or a pluriversality rather than defending a universality, the necessity to incorporate many perspectives rather than resolving the single perspective? How might we embrace that as a way of knowing, as a way of sharing our anecdotes on knowledge and gnosis? What is real? What is the most real? How is that real put into dynamic tension? Is it the conception of the world, the projection that we cast and that we enter into mentally? Or is it the physicality? Is it the corporeal instantiation, the embodied experience? Is it okay to interrupt here for a moment? If that happens, then what, and how does that affect me? Why did that happen? Why do you think Michael Reynolds would choose to do that? Such a powerful dream with so many people organizing behind it and then it comes down to the decision of one man? What motivates the centralized force to squash the potential of the decentralized community? Can you identify specific motivations for wanting to do that? Was the Star Community antagonistic to something that he was building? How do you build community? How do we evaluate or measure the health of a community? How do we identify and design the potential of a community to become sustainable and remain viable through the long-now? If you were able to go back and do it again, do you believe that you would be able to design a decentralized solution that would somehow be able to combat this centralizing force and regain collective autonomy? How could it be designed differently? Would the community be able to sustain itself without Michael Reynolds? Can you identify some of the key roles that you’ve encountered and identify the role you have taken on? The free rider problem, right? What is an intentional community in a nutshell?

DD#13

Do you have any sense of how people are responding so far? Is this like therapy for Travis? Did you compile a literature review and write abstracts on each article? Or better yet, did you collect a random sample of sources and perform independent probability statistics on reported results? No? Do you mean the audience that will be reading the articles or the other DeathGuild contributors? The question of research relates to power, right? Who’s in a position to evaluate? Is there an evaluator? How does that look? Are the procedures of evaluation always abided by faithfully or is there inconsistency in how they’re applied? Even if there isn’t an official review of what you put together, what does the informal evaluation of it look like? Who’s clapping for what? How does power play into that? How do we render a metric of the relationship between those two things: steward of the community and editor for an audience? Can you tell me about your unease? When does an articulation crossover from shared agonism to rivalrous antagonism? What does agonism look like? How might we inhabit a space of shared agony? Might we somehow cooperate in recognizing the need for a deontological orientation? Might we support each other to exercise agency in shifting the circumstances that are imposed upon us? Who is asked to sacrifice in what kinds of contexts? What counts as sacrifice and who isn’t sacrificing?

DD#14

How do we maintain the goal of this research while relinquishing the need for such a pragmatic goal in the first place, to remain open? How do we design for openings? How do we make space that proliferates inclusivity? How do I speak with a plant? How do I speak with a cloud? How can we code when the systems are not giving? How do we speak to the mountain? He said, the houses are dead? That they are cold houses? How do we know that we are participating in our community in a way that serves our neighbors or that even serves ourselves? What is this entangled network of power relations operating at the infrastructural level? Perhaps my question here is: how do we begin to design our information differently, from the middle out? How might we design our human industries to actively distribute that power, rather than condensing and centralizing it? Where is the road that we are paving with these good intentions really leading? Is it the blind leading the blind? This is the crux of the issue of visibility: can we re-cognize where we are going? Can we identify the architecture that we are constructing while remaining inhabitants of cold houses? How do we escape these patterns? What is a decolonized governance modality? Back to my initial prompt: how do we evaluate the health of our community? How do we build in resonance to local patterns? What to do with the African sculptures in these collections that have become treasures of the queen, but represent a paradigm of stolen artifacts? Similarly, how should we consider the international debt system when all these monetary transactions are built upon colonial standards? How might we come to think through a sympoietic process, in resonance with Donna Haraway? How might we inverse the dynamics embedded in all these technological conglomerates that are transversing our quotidianity? How do we end that cycle without ending the model of life, without imposing violence upon natural systems? How do we end the world without destroying the world, allowing the world-image to regenerate into another form? How to pronounce ourselves through the possibility of patterns towards a possible emergence of an outside that has always been inhabiting us? How might we design the potentiality of addressing ourselves as something other than ourselves? How do we construct and trace links from that space?

DD#15

How and why did you choose to build in Colorado? How can I understand the world problems that you’ve dedicated yourself to as an aeronautical engineer and as a sustainable systems engineer? We continue to fuck up this planet and it’s habitants, so why would we go off to colonize another and think that it would be any different? What else did you want to address? Could we somehow pivot on our own sense of being, to cease to feel that sacredness of ownership over one’s own meat, to render that sensibility more diffuse — not just to the heart, and not just the gut, and not just to the microbiome that we carry around in our salinated meat sack, and not just to the room that we’re in or the field of view that we are manifesting — to incorporate that integral and holistic connectedness to a world rendered whole? There are territories to dissolve, arbitrary distinctions to dismantle, blockages of flows to uncork, people living in terror that will need to be nurtured back to sanity, problems of sustainability to design for, but if our current coordination efforts could amount to a global shift in self-awareness, might we dare to hope for realignment in these other areas? How does Earth create conditions conducive to more life? Will you share your six heuristic principles? What whole?

DD#16

What’s the one thing that comes to your mind first when thinking about this project? What’s the goal? Any rule will take you somewhere, but will you end up where you want? What are the ways that these communities talk about these things? What’s the stuff between the ears that is driving them to do something? What does it mean to transcend the metaphoricity of open-source data inspired by mycelial networks or arboreal root systems in this highly reductivist anthropocentric sense? Do we seriously entertain the possibility that our synthetic human systems could ever approach a level of complexity to become auto-generative, sustainably regenerative, anti-fragile, which is to say natural systems? Is it a feat of incredible human hubris to insinuate that we may still become Gods, creators and destroyers of worlds, forking natural systems from our own ribs? In this DeathGuild project, what is meant by this particular kind of efficiency? Where is the cantankerous root? Can we illustrate such a dilemma through an imposition of individual responsibility? How might we take action steps to instigate a perspectival shift? Where do you enter into a system? Where is the most interesting entry point for our engagement for this project that we have become involved with? Where can we enter? Where can we make an impact? If we are going to be a little bit sneaky about it, where would the most interesting results be produced? If we could gain access to the system, what kind of virus would we plant? What kind of language or code would we change? Assuming that we have power to actually instigate change, where would we enter? Where do we believe that we might address our concerns with these particular technologies and explore alternative ways of designing them? If we had the power, what would we change? Would we hack their manifestos, or what would we do? Are there leverage points in our perception of this system where we could make an input that would make a difference in terms of how the builders are thinking about the world and the reality tunnel they are constructing? You’re proposing that we might identify entry points into the system: is it the manifesto or is there another part of the construct that would allow for a potential opening? At the same time, how might we configure openings in our internal composition as they relate to the external compositions? Perhaps the task is twofold: to identify our entry point into the system, while also preparing ourselves to be agile enough, to be supple enough, to fit into that very slim opening and not be crushed by the weight? Is it chaos or is it entropy? How do we prep you so you can go in and cast the right spells? What do you need to bring on this journey?

DD#17

How can the questions we have generated be put to use? Where would the most interesting results be generated? Does it require interacting with the system in certain ways? If so, how would we identify those ways? What kind of virus would we plant, or what kind of intervention might we perform? What kind of language might we craft to interface with the latent ideologies? How might we shift or modify the direction of the conversation? If we could summon the power to change things, how would we go about it? Where would we go about it? Where is the entry point for us to begin a perspectival shift, or an ontological pivot? How can we use the means at our disposal to contemplate an alternative design language? What part would we change? How do we design ourselves? How do we prepare our orientation to approach a system, in order to be able to identify those entry points? Will we choose to think in terms of a conclusion, to think conclusively or comprehensively about these issues? Do we need another session? We should encourage each other to be open to keeping these questions open-ended, so how far can we open them? How are her texts influential on the Web3-DAO community? Can it still be considered a commons if it’s constantly changing, if it can’t be kept in common? How is it accessible, if that can be used as an analogy? Can I just walk in there? What’s a commons? How might we consider a network as an internet of beings more than an internet of things? How could these decentralized networks start to craft a space for this potential? How might a decentralized and interactive modality of relation allow us to open up this question? Might this technology lead to a recovery of the land? I’m interested in that basic question: how could this network of crypto miners be operating towards a recovery of the land? What does this virtual currency have to do with ecological notions of the sustainable management of a physical commons and all of these other ideas? When does a resource become a treasure? When does a commons become a treasury, a bank, a war chest? How do we manage value in relation to our values? How do we become aware of the flow of resources in our existential systems? Should we call identity a resource? In my opinion, the most important question should be what are we coordinating for? If it’s coordination for pure coordination’s sake, or optimization for optimization’s sake, pure efficiency without explicit human ethics, isn’t this the most disastrous, the most terrific and horrific and grotesque kind of failure? Isn’t this a perpetuation of the same colonial trauma? Isn’t this the perspective that renders the whole world as a resource to be mined for our immediate benefit by sacrificing the potentials of future prosperity and sustainability? Or any future at all for that matter? If you’re not clear about what you’re trying to create, about the change that you’re trying to implement, who knows what you’re going to end up with? Is this the best question that we can serve? Is this the last question? Will we simply resolve that this is not our domain? Might we go further to instill a sense of responsibility that there certainly must be a purpose — purpose must not be thrown under the bus for sake of efficiency — and that purpose defines an ethics, an integrity that we must co-develop as a community? How can your way to your destination be a nurturing process in itself for everything that you encounter and the communities that you engage with and the lands that are part of the journey of getting somewhere? Western art attempts to critique itself while critiquing it’s own embeddedness in the world, right? Isn’t this reason enough to let it go? How could we act upon letting it go? How can a group of engineers, thinkers, and developers of these technologies come to the indigenous University that I’m working with so we can craft a space to think about these problems together? We’re not seeking for answers here, but I’m wondering: is there a better way to articulate this? I thought you were a scientist? I thought we lived in a deterministic universe? Is that a delusion of the master? If you’re engaging with this community and you’re coming from a point of view that there’s an imagination failure in terms of how things are designed and the potential purposes that can exist within those designs, then what kinds of space can you nurture that can hold an expansion of the imagination when you engage with these communities? If we consider the school a space with some particular qualities or properties, how can you carve out spaces in these communities in an interesting, semi-sustained way? Is this the end?

Let’s call them schools (?)

This series is made possible by a generous grant awarded by MolochDAO. Thank you Moloch!

Last time we realized that we needed to identify possible access points for how to enter into the content of the Web3-DAO community that we’ve been ruminating on for the last few months. How can the questions we have generated be put to use? Where would the most interesting results be generated? Does it require interacting with the system in certain ways? If so, how would we identify those ways? What kind of virus would we plant, or what kind of intervention might we perform? What kind of language might we craft to interface with the latent ideologies? How might we shift or modify the direction of the conversation? If we could summon the power to change things, how would we go about it? Where would we go about it? Where is the entry point for us to begin a perspectival shift, or an ontological pivot? How can we use the means at our disposal to contemplate an alternative design language? What part would we change?

I also want to echo Julian’s trifecta of buzzwords, the procession of emancipation, reaction, and desire. How do we design ourselves? How do we prepare our orientation to approach a system, in order to be able to identify those entry points? I think that we all agreed that we must understand the system that we are approaching in order to render it clearly. Part of this task involves formulating appropriate incentives to foster the crafting of alternative desires.

I know that’s a lot. This might be the last conversation that we have, if we choose. Will we choose to think in terms of a conclusion, to think conclusively or comprehensively about these issues? Do we need another session? This is very much a question for me and I leave it to the group to decide. I don’t think that we should be too concerned with coming to conclusions or providing pragmatic solutions. We should encourage each other to be open to keeping these questions open-ended, so how far can we open them?

We also discussed speaking into Elinor Ostrom’s principles. How are her texts influential on the Web3-DAO community? There’s something a little bit confusing about that since the resource of this community is the speculative medium of crypto, which fluctuates so much. Can it still be considered a commons if it’s constantly changing, if it can’t be kept in common?

One answer concerns Ethereum, constituting one particular blockchain and the specific community that has formed around it. These folks are especially keen to articulate that cryptocurrency as a digital public good will serve as a bridge or platform for alleviating the coordination pains of physical public good, to bridge the digital commons into the meatspace commons. They would have us believe that this is the beginning of a world revolution in how we orient ourselves to our economic systems and by extension to each other. This is evoked through the terms of game theory. Life is an economic game of multipolar traps, manipulated by rivalrous players competing in self-perpetuating scenarios that manifest in an infinite regress of delusion and collusion, a race to the bottom. There are strong correlations to the tragedy of the commons of which Elinor Ostrom has so eloquently provided clear pragmatic solutions to rectifying.

A second consideration is from her eight principles, eight rules from which we might distill an easily digestible and universally applicable code of conduct for how to avoid fucking ourselves over, to avoid the tragedy of any commons, digital or environmental or otherwise. We might identify a correlation between that desire to codify human values, to distill and reduce behavior into core principles, and the aspirations of Web3-DAO builders to design trustless systems for how their communities operate, to block the inevitable nefarious actors with transparent, opt-in laws that defer back to the code as the ultimate sovereignty of our social organization.

I still don’t understand how crypto is a commons. It’s not a shared space of land. How is it accessible, if that can be used as an analogy? Can I just walk in there?

What’s a commons? It’s stuff that a group of people want to manage for mutual benefit over time. Commons include a lot of stuff that’s fairly abstract. The English language — or any language — is a commons, for example, and we’re fairly okay with it evolving over time.

Our economic systems are actually a commons that ordinary people have not been much involved in managing and maybe they should be. There are things that national currencies can’t do, vulnerabilities that they embody that a community can’t really do anything about. It’s operating several levels above the individual. If you want certain things to happen in your community, complementary currency can enable an exchange of goods and services to happen when the larger system becomes dysfunctional due to artificial scarcity or other problems.

There is also a physical layer to the Web3 stack that is directly accessible and might be considered a commons. The decentralization of the blockchain has dispersed the ownership of the infrastructure. I have a crypto mining rig in my home that is functioning as a node of an international network. I own this infrastructure and get rewarded for operating a node to support these operations. In this sense, the means of production are owned by the same community utilizing the system, if not necessarily the same individuals.

There’s a fascinating exchange happening here between the notion of a commons and merchandise. The articulation of this referential quality of value that has to do with the excess of an objectified relation with reality. I think that it’s reversed through the possibility of thinking of our infrastructure as commons. This illustrates the power of myth and creates a strong connection with the indigenous communities I have been working with. How might we consider a network as an internet of beings more than an internet of things? This is the impetus to design in a different way. How could these decentralized networks start to craft a space for this potential? For example, there is an ongoing discussion among artists concerning how we will decolonize the museum. How might a decentralized and interactive modality of relation allow us to open up this question? Might this technology lead to a recovery of the land? I’m interested in that basic question: how could this network of crypto miners be operating towards a recovery of the land? The potential of this decentralized configuration of relations might lead us beyond the intangible notion of the historical representation of money towards a direct realization of how a reconfiguration of our relations will impact the operations of our world.

What does this virtual currency have to do with ecological notions of the sustainable management of a physical commons and all of these other ideas? The foundations of this project have been focused on exploring governance modalities, how we envision and make models of governance that function as simulations with real world applicability, metaphors that have powerful effects on how we operate in our daily lives. We have also explored treasury management schemas, which for this aging anarchist artist that hates money is one of the most difficult things to think about. When does a resource become a treasure? When does a commons become a treasury, a bank, a war chest? How do we manage value in relation to our values? How do we become aware of the flow of resources in our existential systems?

For many in the world, privacy might be considered one of the most valuable resources. Should we call identity a resource? I’m not sure, but for the sake of our conversation I have proposed that privacy be considered a fulcrum point upon which issues of anonymity and autonomy are balanced. One’s sovereignty is dependent upon their choice or privilege to obscure their agency.

As non-technical thinkers in this domain, how might we envision a reterritorialization of the landscape of our bodies and minds? This is fundamentally a question of coordination. As Kevin Owocki likes to say, almost like a mantra resonating through the ecosystem, it’s all coordination and it always has been. The core issue to consider — in the DeathGuild project and with Elinor Ostrom’s principles and how all these abstract ideas relate back to the decentralized internet — is the nature of coordination failure. This is what Moloch represents for the community: the God of coordination failure. If we don’t learn how to coordinate better, if we don’t succeed in our coordination efforts, it will be a failure by our own hands, through our own devices.

In my opinion, the most important question should be what are we coordinating for? If it’s coordination for pure coordination’s sake, or optimization for optimization’s sake, pure efficiency without explicit human ethics, isn’t this the most disastrous, the most terrific and horrific and grotesque kind of failure? Isn’t this a perpetuation of the same colonial trauma? Isn’t this the perspective that renders the whole world as a resource to be mined for our immediate benefit by sacrificing the potentials of future prosperity and sustainability? Or any future at all for that matter?

If you’re not clear about what you’re trying to create, about the change that you’re trying to implement, who knows what you’re going to end up with? If we don’t continue to strive for an understanding of how everything’s interrelated we will end up with monocultures and monopolies.

I find this highly relevant. The question of what we are organizing for is a really important question, but I don’t think it’s for us to answer. I’m not involved with these communities. They must decide what they will do. Each DAO has their own priorities for what they want to achieve by engaging with this medium of coordination, but the problem is not just that we don’t know what we’re coordinating for. It’s also the principles for what it means to have successful coordination that seems problematic. When coordination is spoken in this context it seems to pertain to a particular kind of coordination — efficiency and all these words and concepts we have named through these dialogues — that might be very different from the kind of coordination in natural ecosystems and other non-human systems guided by other principles.

The critique that has been developed in these conversations has a lot to do with identifying the principles underlying the idea of what good coordination is, rather than trying to come up with a driving purpose. The question of purpose is not for us. We can critique different kinds of purposes, for sure, but it’s not something that we can provide interesting answers towards.

Maybe we can’t (or shouldn’t) provide answers, but we might continue to contemplate if we are asking the right questions. Is this the best question that we can serve? Is this the last question? Will we simply resolve that this is not our domain? Might we go further to instill a sense of responsibility that there certainly must be a purpose — purpose must not be thrown under the bus for sake of efficiency — and that purpose defines an ethics, an integrity that we must co-develop as a community? Our community must be formed around a purpose, not for the sake of developing highly efficient community building tools in and of themselves.

Yes, surely. The four of us can come up with great purposes I imagine, but if our tools and our thinking for how we would move towards that purpose were guided by a particular discourse, that would have influence on the ethics. For me, the ethical consideration is conveyed in the language and the discourse around coordination. Pursuing purpose in itself is also problematic.

How I’m hearing you is that the journey is an essential part of the process, maybe more important than the destination.

I don’t know about more important, but at least it’s not less important. If you imagine your purpose to be someplace that you’re going to end up, then you will be disappointed. Purpose is a way to set a course and then you start walking there. If you don’t pay attention to everything on your walk, then first of all you’re not going to get there anyway and second of all you’re going to ruin a lot of shit on your way and in the way that you’re walking. If you don’t question what you’re walking on, then… It’s like here in Iceland, full of tourists that just want to get to that volcano, but they’re stepping on all the ancient moss all the time, swarming from all directions, because they just want to get there in a straight line. Of course, it’s important to know where you want to go, but it’s also just as important to really be sensitive about how to get there and what you’re nurturing on the way there. How can your way to your destination be a nurturing process in itself for everything that you encounter and the communities that you engage with and the lands that are part of the journey of getting somewhere?

Earlier today I was editing the second conversation that I had with Julian. I will offer a few lines from the conclusion, which I think are relevant here:

I default back to the necessity of positioning oneself to receive the agnostic sacrament, in order to unlearn the ways that we have known while acknowledging the paradox of attempting to identify and solve for the problem of this worlding vision, while remaining firmly embedded within this decaying vision of the world. Without doing so, we will only perpetuate more of the same reality distortion tunnel, leading to an inevitable appropriation of the identity of the other and the violence of othering more generally. Perhaps we could be generous towards something like the western artistic tradition and say not so much that it has failed to shift our consciousness, to change our minds, but that it has, in fact, succeeded in its own monstrous efficiency, by appropriating itself back into the very system that it attempted to critique, which is to say the world.

Western art attempts to critique itself while critiquing its own embeddedness in the world, right? Isn’t this reason enough to let it go? How could we act upon letting it go? We began today with the prompt to attempt to identify together — not just the how or the what of purpose, but — where we might insert ourselves into the conversation about the importance of DAOs?

For me, tracking the processes through all these relations of relations is very important, but there’s something inevitable to address: the base. Efficiency in organizations departs from a resolution of technology that is already validating an objectified principle towards the articulation, relation, construction, and design of forms. When we’re contemplating models of governance, treasury management, and privacy, it’s inevitable to recognize that there’s already an embedded paradigm of a dialectical system responding to an embedded production of reality. It’s a relation that is inherently biased. My take on how to start a conversation with these systems — or the designers and builders of these systems — begins with questioning the base, to think towards a possible reterritorialization of the foundations.

The exciting potentiality of these systems towards emancipation will not be limited to the redistribution of currencies. The exciting part is in asking how this could lead us to imagining a possible resolution of the articulation of artificiality and whatever might come after that question. It’s currently impossible for me to think of the Web3-DAO frameworks as emancipation, since the currencies are merely operating as decentralized models of the same colonial governance systems. There’s a very potent conversation happening here and I’m not trying to discredit it at all. This conversation is very important and world governments also recognize this importance, as evidenced by numerous prohibitions of cryptocurrency around the world for a variety of reasons. There’s something happening here that is key to articulating an orientation to the contemporary problems that we’re dealing with.

How can a group of engineers, thinkers, and developers of these technologies come to the indigenous University that I’m working with so we can craft a space to think about these problems together? For that to happen we would need to question the objectified notion of technology that enables the economic and governance systems to operate. To question the foundations and continue to explore the potentiality of where these questions could take us will require opening up into spaces that are outside of their own entropy.

In response to that, I have a final prompt that we might all try to respond to. We might certainly identify endemic coordination problems that threaten a tragedy of the commons, but at the foundation of coordination is an imagination problem. From my vantage, it’s all an imagination problem and it always has been.

Julian, I hear you referencing what has been described by Timothy Morton as agrilogistics or by James C. Scott as the high-modernist view, the helicopter scope, God-King colonial imperative. It’s Cartesian perspectivalism, the Copernican turn, the tendency of the rational mind to project a quantifiable grid upon the entire world, to render it as units and articulate a standard metric, emphasizing the importance of quantity over quality simply because quantity can be objectively measured and archived. One foundation that we might question is the importance and value placed upon what can be measured, what can be rendered legible, what can be seen, and therefore what can be visualized through our mental models. When we default to that mode, we essentially suspend the need for imagination, refrain from intuitively probing into the unknown, into the murky morass of pure potentiality.

My fear is that if we don’t learn how to unfuck our imagination — or learn how to dream differently — before we fail by our own coordination catastrophe we will simply, predictably, and tragically perpetuate more of the same. We will continue to terrorize and territorialize according to this need to render legibility, to put forth a machinic vision that reduces all human agents — and really all agents, all agency — into units, metrics, a compartmentalized numerical framework, a purely mathematical vision. The supremacy and the terror of the master’s gaze, of the quantifying eye of the surveyor: this is a vision that owns territories, rather than recognizing an ecological debt to the land. This way of seeing the world — this way or worlding — uproots relations rather than embeds being in a humble entanglement.

Jon, we’ve talked a lot about ecological principles and sustainability. Jonatan, we’ve talked about designing for openings and compositions that take into account the potentials of taking risks. Julian, we’ve been speaking about the importance of ontological pivots or what we’ve been calling epistemic breaks, a break with what we thought that we knew, even a violent break that might allow for an inflow of a radically different way of worlding, a new vision of the world. We’re not seeking for answers here, but I’m wondering: is there a better way to articulate this? This is my limit, the threshold that I brush up against.

I’ve mentioned Donella Meadows’ ideas about places she has identified for intervening in a system to make positive change. The key takeaway from her work is that the only place you can make significant and permanent change is when you get to that embedded paradigm you’re talking about. Any organization has an internal coherence based on their projected paradigm or worldview. Change needs to happen on the level of belief, in how we think about whatever it is we’re creating. That’s really hard, because everybody believes in what they know while the truth is that very little of what we know is objectively true.

That’s a beautiful riddle. I want to ask you to simply answer this question. How do we change our own minds?

You have to decide you want to, for starters. You can decide to believe whatever you want. We have free will here.

So they say. I thought you were a scientist? I thought we lived in a deterministic universe? Is that a delusion of the master?

I’m also a student of consciousness. You can change any belief you have simply by withdrawing your agreement to believe in it. You have to do the work though! You may have to come back to it a few times to say, yes, I really did mean that I’m not going to believe that anymore. We have lots of beliefs that are not beneficial to our being.

If you’re engaging with this community and you’re coming from a point of view that there’s an imagination failure in terms of how things are designed and the potential purposes that can exist within those designs, then what kinds of space can you nurture that can hold an expansion of the imagination when you engage with these communities? Developing these conversations, publishing them, participating in conferences, and critiquing all sorts of things might not be enough. I think there needs to be spaces created — let’s call them schools — for cultivating our imagination. If we consider the school a space with some particular qualities or properties, how can you carve out spaces in these communities in an interesting, semi-sustained way?

Let’s call them schools

I think that your fear is right. I feel the same about this danger. Towards the need for imagination; I think the non-metaphorical dimension of technology could be found in relating imagination to the brain — our meatspace — and the resonance of technologies entering into our imaginary system. It reminds me of something the philosopher Nick Land has written, that we will need to surpass the notions opened up by Deleuze’s rhizome to try to think of a new emancipation that will liberate us from the rhizome itself. Timothy Morton says that Marxism needs to start a conversation with animism if we are going to survive. For me, the importance is to continue exploring how to think in systems that can become something other than themselves, other than what they are. This is the resolution of imagination. The possibility of a non-metaphorical dimension of technology has to do with addressing the world through an embedded resolution. The potentiality of imagination is in directing ourselves out of the mirror. This system will need to look beyond its own construction. Posing this question to the builders might open the possibility of a reterritorialization of our foundations. This is the question we should begin with.

I love that we’re ending on an invitation to begin again. Thank you for that.

This series is made possible by a generous grant awarded by MolochDAO. Thank you Moloch!

Let’s begin with an introduction of what we perceive to be the goals of our talk today. We recognize, each in our own way, the need to design better questions to continue to uncover the most pertinent and prescient problems. I’m not sure where this will lead us, but as always, I am supremely confident that we will end up somewhere interesting.

What’s the one thing that comes to your mind first when thinking about this project? DeathGuild is a piece of something much bigger. I’ve been frustrated in thinking about what this is for. What are we trying to do? What’s the goal? I know from my work in system sciences and engineering that you better be clear about what you want. Any rule will take you somewhere, but will you end up where you want?

Being clear about what you want to create is critically important. Initial conditions of any system determines — eventually — what will happen. If you’re not thinking clearly about that intent, you may end up someplace you don’t want to be. Daniel Schmachtenberger’s A World that Doesn’t Suck is worth taking the time to revisit. Unless we do something different, we’re going to end up with a dystopian future of totalitarian or corporate feudalism or some nasty authoritarian states.

The questions that came to me when Travis posed this project has a lot to do with trying to understand the assumptions in the communities. I haven’t been part of tech communities, but from my own studies on death I’ve been doing a lot of research on immortality throughout history, how different people have pursued this notion of immortality in different ways. There’s a difference with this technology-based pursuit of immortality. There’s a similar movement in Russia that comes out of grassroots community religious movements, doing it for a whole other reason. It’s much more of a religious undertaking. In the tech community, these assumptions about the inherent goodness of technology, of medicine, and the inherent badness of death and the inherent flaws to human design — death as a design flaw — and these ways of speaking about human beings and life… this is what I’m trying to understand. What are the ways that these communities talk about these things? If I don’t understand that, then I don’t think I can understand the DeathGuild project. I’m really trying to understand this community.

What’s the stuff between the ears that is driving them to do something?

I would recommend that we consider working with the resources and with the ideas that we have at hand. This project has so far intentionally excluded insider perspectives to avoid having any individual advocate for or evangelize the potential importance of the community. We are all outsiders to that community and we began from a place of not knowing what those intentions are, but that shouldn’t inhibit us from speculating wildly as to what they should be, or what ours might be if we were to become more involved in that community, or perhaps what any intention might be for any community — if we wanted to get really universal about it — or what values you are coordinating around, the successes and failures of your local context that might impart influence on this unknown readership.

The problematics that are embedded in the constellation that Travis is pursuing in the conversation with the Web3-DAO communities are very resonant with the questions that I am currently trying to integrate in the relationship between the questions that are arising while working with the indigenous communities in Colombia and how those perspectives are inherently and inevitably making me think in a different way to resolve our notion of Western artificiality.

The project of cryptocurrency community building might allow us to rethink the imperative relations to capitalist technologies. If there’s a single word that I’m interested in related to cryptocurrency, it must be emancipation. Again, connecting it back with the deconstruction implicit in the questions that arise through my conversation with the indigenous communities, it’s the paradox and the contrast that I’m interested in navigating.

On that notion of artificiality in relation to emancipation, I would offer a Schmachtenberger soundbite that we might contemplate together. It has been resonating with me, because of how counterintuitive it seems. Schmachtenberger highlights a deception that human beings are susceptible to perpetuating, that the more complex our systems become the more they resemble natural systems. However, human systems are fundamentally synthetic to the extent that human systems optimize for efficiency, meaning redundancies are actively removed. Human systems are inherently fragile, unlike natural systems that are inherently anti-fragile. I can anticipate Jon having some tension with the idea that natural systems are not efficient, but Schmachtenberger means it in a very specific way, that natural systems are full of redundancies that cultivate self-healing, regenerative, proliferating systems. The emancipatory design vision promises that we might somehow move beyond our own inherent artificiality by designing ever-more-efficient artificial systems.

What does it mean to transcend the metaphoricity of open-source data inspired by mycelial networks or arboreal root systems in this highly reductivist anthropocentric sense? Do we seriously entertain the possibility that our synthetic human systems could ever approach a level of complexity to become auto-generative, sustainably regenerative, anti-fragile, which is to say natural systems? Is it a feat of incredible human hubris to insinuate that we may still become Gods, creators and destroyers of worlds, birthing natural systems from our own ribs?

I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.

This connects with something we discussed one week ago concerning the metaphoric constellation of nature — the mycelium, the rhizome — that permits a break and the possibility of stepping outside of purely metaphorical lands. A key point to break is centered on evolutionism, to work towards a space where we could begin to emancipate ourselves from that perspective that we come from nature.

We might consider the difference between Darwin in the Galapagos and his theory of evolutionism and how the indigenous epistemologies are very close to those territories already navigating their own unique theory of relation. We might consider that the anthropocentric image of nature emerged from an artificially linear procession stemming from the perceived necessity to objectify nature. Our artificial subject and object relations are embedded in our conception of nature and the human, forming a division that the epistemology of shamanism can put into question.

For the shaman to enter into relation with the plants requires an inherently non-metaphorical approach. During a conversation with one of the shamans of the indigenous communities, we arrived to a ceremonial place and he began making a comparison of how the wood that we were seeking was some sort of mirror of what we understood as a book. When you speak to the wood, when you speak to the fire, when you speak to the plants, there is a way to enter in resonance that doesn’t inherently involve the signification process as we know it. The epistemology of shamanism existed before the acknowledgement of the evolutionary theory coming from Darwin.

This should be contextualized locally, not as a universal transcendence or emancipation. Perhaps it’s not the earth that’s being destroyed, but a world, an anthropocentric worldview, related to the perspectival or ontological shifts that you are highlighting. We’ve spoken about Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer and the importance of a reciprocity that might be extended beyond our own humanity or our own human-ness, to be able to foster a reciprocal community building with the living world around us. There’s an existential risk that we must contemplate in relation to the urgency in attempting this ontological shift.

I’m curious about what systems you’re talking about when you say that human systems are inherently synthetic because they are designed for efficiency. There’s tons of human systems and relations that are not designed for efficiency. Efficiency is also often not efficient. Efficiency is a very particular term understood in this context. The efficiency of these other epistemologies means something else. Many of the systems that we consider efficient might be perceived as completely inefficient from another epistemic standpoint. In this DeathGuild project, what is meant by this particular kind of efficiency?

There are leverage points in a system that must be understood if you want to change it. This is the purpose of modeling and analyzing system dynamics, to identify what those leverage points and dismantle our intuitions of where we believe they should be. Growth is one of those fallacious intuitions. We think growth will solve all the problems, but it’s actually creating most of the problems.

Growth is often used as a metric for success and efficiency, yet it is also the factor that hampers the sustainability of a system.

Donella Meadows has contributed significant work on locating places to intervene in a system. If you change the paradigm of a system, everything else in that system has to adapt to that change. Much of our world is terminally reductionist, so we must consider alternative approaches to influencing our human processes.

At some point in history we might have considered ourselves to be securely part of the natural system. With a subtle shift, perhaps while transitioning from hunter-gatherer society to developing more sophisticated tools to reap higher yields from the land initiating the agrilogistic compartmentalization of territory into units that we continue to this day, we broke that essential tether and began to exercise domination, control and power over the world. At that point, a shift in the archaic mind, integration of tool-being as an extension of our corporeal ability, and shifted orientation to the landscape signalled an introduction of efficient yields that surpass the sustainability of our natural relations. We can trace this human delusion through the development of the conceptual apparatus of Descartes, Copernicus, Newton, and the cerebral technology of the modern world. We are now developing tools to modulate purely abstract systems of disembodied coordination. This hallucinatory vision of synthetic efficiency is terminally reductivist and thoroughly human.

The efficiency that I think you’re referencing now alludes to exerting some kind of control over the context in which the system exists, a monopoly through the exclusion of competition to create monocultures. Part of it seems to be about avoiding misunderstandings, miscommunication, miscoordination, and generally avoiding the human element altogether, avoiding having to trust each other, avoiding the human error, avoiding the human tendency, and designing the human out of the equation. These seem to be points particular to the context that you’re working in.

Monocultures and monopolies are absolutely counter to laws of life on this planet, an absolute violation of ecological law.

Yes, which is why it seems confusing that this has become central to notions of efficiency.

My fear is that we will not be able to reconcile the need to remember a direct and immediate orientation to the landscape and the other beings that populate this world with this notion of efficiency. My fear is that we will not recognize soon enough the dangers of considering indigenous ways of knowing as inefficient in relation to processes optimizing for their own goals. This is the tipping point of existential risk in terms of a global catastrophe that will remain nameless — because it has so many names — and where we might recognize the potential to become-jaguar and avoid the contorting anthropocentrism that deforms the world.

Examining our own extractivism is a path for reconsidering how to design differently. I recently read an interview with a French philosopher who was asked about technology. She didn’t elaborate much more than to say just think where all these minerals come from to construct your technological infrastructure. That can be an apparently simple question, a primordial notion to address in terms of relation to land. The most compelling task of the conversation with indigenous mentalities is that there’s a way to relate to land that doesn’t have to do with efficiency, that doesn’t have to do with a system of production. There is another way of relating and sharing with the world that doesn’t involve the imperative of production. That’s the most intriguing aspect of thinking of emancipation in this sense.

There’s something that Travis said in the beginning of our conversation about an absence in these systems that made me think about — something that I’m constantly driven to reconsider — the reconfiguration of our presence as an absence, in order to re-meet the other. Cryptocurrency might be considered as an interesting absence inside of a production system that might offer us an opportunity to re-cognize our presence system, re-configure the possibilities of what is to come.

One of the unique aspects of our familiar culture is the idea that it’s okay to own land. Given that reality, how do we work with that or what do we do about that, if anything Elinor Ostrom, Nobel Prize in Economics, positively asserts that it’s possible for people to successfully manage a commons. I’m thinking duh, yeah, they’ve always been able to do that if other factors — internal and external — don’t interfere. I consider economics to be kind of a faulty science. There’s an old adage: playing with half a deck is a symptom of insanity. Economists will tell you that natural capital, the environment, nature, and social capital is available in infinite supply for those with capital, the infrastructure, and the cash to use and exploit to generate more wealth. The dumping of an infinite amount of waste and toxic material back into the world is justifiable in relation to short-term economic wealth generation.

There are internal and external factors at play here. Where is the cantankerous root? Can we illustrate such a dilemma through an imposition of individual responsibility? Julian, how might we take action steps to instigate a perspectival shift? Jon, you have mentioned previously that it’s the individual’s responsibility to become a competent contributor to our shared systems. So if coordination is a choice, how do we choose? Jonathan, you have proposed that perhaps the shift in perspective we require should be framed as selflessness, but as the other side of selfishness, that we must escape our hubris and excess of pride in order to see clearly and act deliberately. The existential risk of failing in this task will result in reproducing the very system that we are actively trying to deconstruct, perpetuating the debilitated imagination that we should be dedicated to unraveling.

The North Atlantic right whale found dead off Long Island, N.Y., earlier this month has been identified as Snake Eyes, a 40-year-old male, last seen entangled in fishing gear in Canadian waters.

Where do you enter into a system? There are all these different knobs you can turn, soft spots to poke… where is the most interesting entry point for our engagement for this project that we have become involved with? We might speculate on this together, to acknowledge this position from the system’s perspective and try to consider possible access points. Where can we enter? Where can we make an impact? If we are going to be a little bit sneaky about it, where would the most interesting results be produced? If we could gain access to the system, what kind of virus would we plant? What kind of language or code would we change? Assuming that we have power to actually instigate change, where would we enter? Where do we believe that we might address our concerns with these particular technologies and explore alternative ways of designing them? If we had the power, what would we change? Would we hack their manifestos, or what would we do?

Are there leverage points in our perception of this system where we could make an input that would make a difference in terms of how the builders are thinking about the world and the reality tunnel they are constructing?

I imagine two sides of this call to action. Jonathan, you’re proposing that we might identify entry points into the system: is it the manifesto or is there another part of the construct that would allow for a potential opening? At the same time, how might we configure openings in our internal composition as they relate to the external compositions? For example, Julian recently illustrated a procession from desire to reaction to emancipation. Perhaps the task is twofold: to identify our entry point into the system, while also preparing ourselves to be agile enough, to be supple enough, to fit into that very slim opening and not be crushed by the weight?

The big challenge when contemplating intervening in any system is accurately modeling the system.

We might begin with a simple system to understand that there are broad principles at play so that we don’t have to guess about our engagement and then expand that understanding towards more complex systems, building up a complex image from simple parts like components in a truck engine. Some knowledge is reserved for the local level — the parts — and another quality of awareness maintains the whole — the engine. The level of complexity determines whether we can actively probe, experiment, and see what happens, or whether we might have to throw ourselves into the middle and act with seemingly chaotic variables to see what happens. We might continue to remind each other that we are dealing with a system that is very complex, but also has an element of chaos to it; we must develop strategies for guessing, that there is no way of knowing with certainty.

Is it chaos or is it entropy? We are always embedded within larger systems even if we lack the awareness to communicate with them. For our next conversation I propose that we focus on Elinor Ostrom’s eight rules for managing a commons as a prompt to consider individual responsibility in relation to that very pragmatic goal of managing common resources together.

The official marker dedicated to the late Elinor Ostrom at Indiana University

I really like this question of how we can speculate inside the system, how to put our feet in. Paraphrasing from our conversation from last week, the master’s tools cannot change the master house. How might we reconsider these doubts — not simply as a reaction to capital, but — towards an alternative system that would allow us to desire differently. I have a few ideas. How could we change the incentives for artists? Instead of offering economical prizes, carrots on a stick, we might offer unique entry points of engaging with the world; offer access to unique resonations with the ways we desire.

I have an image of us prepping you, Travis, to go back into the Web3-DAO community with better tools. I like that. You’re the man in the field and we’re the team behind the lines helping you strategize. How do we prep you so you can go in and cast the right spells?

I love that.

What do you need to bring on this journey?

This series is made possible by a generous grant awarded by MolochDAO. Thank you Moloch!

Shamans and mystics and people that are spiritually developed have known for a very long time that we’re connected to the whole. We’re not separate; never have been, never will be, it’s impossible. There’s a field of energy behind everything manifested in matter. This is one of the really difficult ideas that physicists discovered about reality. Quantum mechanics extends some of the most rigorously tested, researched, and validated ideas that have come along through the history of civilization. That field is just crammed with knowledge about everything you could possibly imagine. Shamans and spiritually developed persons can go into their heart to interface with that information and come to know things. There are still lots of scientists that don’t want to face the uncertainty about the nature of reality.

I was on a drive earlier, driving through the canyons of New Mexico, crafting a cerebral space with my partner inside the vehicle while observing the landscape passing by and feeling a resonance with that landscape. The landscape was facilitating the conversation that we were having and contributing to the way that we were feeling. Not to say that the landscape was responsible for it, but it certainly was the backdrop contextualizing how we were making ourselves. Then I started thinking about concentrations of tech communities. Everyone knows Silicon Valley in the San Francisco Bay Area; there is a congregation in Denver, Colorado, and many other places around the world. The Web3-DAO community that I am becoming a part of is trying to attend to problems that they consider to be as old as civilization itself, yet how has that civilization imposed itself upon their ambitions? The solutions that they are currently developing are sometimes described as completely novel, or as a manner of developing solutions that is distinct and unique.

In that context, I began thinking of you: a 75 year old systems engineer, life-long student of self-reliance strategies, and a man with some true grit. I mean that as a compliment; to have some dirt under your fingernails, hands-on building experience with sustainable architecture. Our conversations concerning the development of sustainable architectural practices completes a full circle of knowing and unknowing at the core of this DeathGuild project: understanding how to live in a sustainable manner on the terra firma of planet Earth facilitates the awareness that is needed to sustain life in the most inhospitable places beyond the veil. This is precisely the state of mind required to approach the problems we are attempting to solve with our digital tools. That’s the meaning of the word apocalypse, right? It means to peer behind the veil, so venturing into outer space might be considered the ultimate apocalyptic scenario.

But I digress. I’m wondering how Colorado has influenced you and continues to influence this new generation.

There seems to be a cycle taking place, an alignment of imagination to attend to a core problem of humanity that is as old as the sands of time, a problem of coordination, a problem of scale, of being able to understand the ramifications of these huge systems that we are embedded within while still being able to maintain focus on the immediate tasks at hand. All of these components are related and that’s what we might talk about today. DeathGuild is trying to understand governance modalities, how resources flow through our human systems, and how we might logically manage these flows while discerning the importance of identity and securing the right to privacy as a delicate balance of agency, as a fulcrum between autonomy and anonymity, that comes to define the thresholds of sovereignty within our human systems.

This is where I begin my meditation about context, about the house that you’re building for yourself. How and why did you choose to build in Colorado? How can I understand the world problems that you’ve dedicated yourself to as an aeronautical engineer and as a sustainable systems engineer? At 75 years of ripe young age, I wonder if you might venture some words of advice to this younger generation of engineers and developers, to expound upon some mistakes that you have made, to articulate some things you would have done differently, or maybe to elaborate some tidbits of information that were slow to reveal themselves, that required 40 or 50 years of dedicated practice to really get a handle on.

I’m not sure how Colorado has influenced me, but it’s interesting that you’re talking about reinventing the wheel. It seems to be a normal human thing to do. In some cases, there’s a negative feeling rooted in not really wanting to know what other people have accomplished in order to justify isolating, withdrawing, doing their own thing, and then feeling proud when they discover something. I frequently had to interact with academics at various universities across the country and quite a few really didn’t want to know much about what their colleagues were up to. In some cases, I ended up knowing more about what was going on in their field. I tried to tactfully encourage them to work together.

Since the scientific revolution, we have Descartes saying the only way to understand systems is to break them into parts and study the parts and it certainly brought us tremendous gains and advantages, but these revolutionary thinkers were overly concerned with articulating conclusions, many of which are absolutely wrong. You can’t fully understand a system by studying its parts. That’s impossible. By only studying the parts, we fail to understand the system’s purpose, which leads to the idea that nothing has any purpose and the only purpose that exists is what we assigned to it, which is absolute nonsense. It is the parts interacting in a good way that allow the purpose of the system to emerge from the activity. If we can learn to live life on earth without destroying ourselves or our surroundings, then there might emerge a purpose for us to live and work in space. Until we achieve sustainable practices here, we won’t have the knowledge or the embodied belief systems that will allow us to survive in those other situations.

I think that human beings have no purpose in space. I am personally opposed to space colonization as a grotesque expenditure of resources that would be better invested back into our own sustainable infrastructure, here and now. The delusion of space exploration is an extension of a violent colonial project, more of the same land grabbing with clear winners and losers. I wouldn’t hold you or any individual accountable for this delusion, as it’s more of a manifestation of a global human psychosis to colonize and to conquer. We continue to fuck up this planet and it’s habitants, so why would we go off to colonize another and think that it would be any different? Get it sustainable here and then let’s talk.

I understand that. Until we get life sustainable on Earth, until all the human stuff — all the physical stuff and all the abstract stuff and all the organizational stuff — until we get those things aligned with life thriving on the planet, we don’t have any business in space.

An idea has been passed around in a few recent conversations I’ve had this week. Concerning the status of DAOs, some have noted that we’re getting pretty good at the decentralization part, but we are still failing at the autonomous and organizational parts. We haven’t come close to figuring out the whole package yet.

Since the advent of civilization we have had to deal with specialized labor and the evolution of elites that thought they were superior to everybody else, rapaciously using both planet and people for their own personal gain without much consideration for the negative impacts of that behavior. Darwin’s theory of natural selection and survival of the fittest, along with other scientific theories of the day, have been used to justify this behavior. It doesn’t require a great leap of the imagination to understand the progression to eugenics, the structural racism of the Nazi Party, and all of that horrific business. Elements of that delusion remain covert in this country even now, because we have invited Nazis here to work in various industries.

We previously discussed the incredible documentaries of Adam Curtis, especially The Century of the Self that documents the migration of Nazi propaganda techniques, as developed by Joseph Goebbels for the Third Reich. These ideas were translated into a sophisticated sabotage of the American populous imagination via commodity fetishism, subliminal techniques of Madison Avenue marketing departments, and the ongoing psychological warfare on public perception.

For me, this calls up profound problems pertaining to the use of social credibility metrics as a tool for determining the health of an organization, illustrating a striving for cultural optimization akin to social engineering on par with Hitler’s vision, embedding ideological seeds within a population of people that are then able to mobilize the ideas through local industry with global consequences. This is a big leap that I’m making and I don’t mean to gloss over the last 80 years of socio-political progress, but there is an element to our ongoing societal calculations and sub-optimization fantasies that seems obviously correlated to a militaristic projection of territorial ownership. This is the ideological fuel that propels our rockets into space.

What else did you want to address?

Let’s expand on the mind-body problem.

Softer sciences mimic methodology from other scientific branches, like physics, but these methods have led to dramatic misunderstandings. The part of the body that processes and stores and knows information can’t be reduced to the brain alone. It’s all the organs working in tandem as a system: it’s the heart, the gut, various constellations of neurons that have a great deal to do with how we think. Every single cell participates in knowing stuff. It’s far more complex than a rational mind emanating from an organic brain, like a computer and its operator. This weak metaphor has become a powerful meme for disseminating a false conception of the self and our world.

The mind-body problem is a false problem, a purely synthetic abstraction that dissociates us from the world and is the beginning of all the horrors that follow. The Cartesian projection upon the world, in striving for ultimate legibility, creates false distinctions between things. If we could attend to the base principles of mind as a synthetic concept — a quintessential human delusion — to move towards a position that considers persons and perspectives as holistically and integrally tethered, we might begin to unravel the territorial alienation of discrete selves. The territorial threshold of the body is also an arbitrary construct. To purport that I am somehow confined to this meat, to deny my sense(s) of self from manifesting in shared space, or inversely that the physical outside somehow stops at the threshold of my epidermis, that I am not actively diffusing-with and into it, is to deny a profound potentiality of collective being and becoming.

We live materially and pneumatically with the pressures, forces, and circulations of particles that create the potential for statements of being through context. We are salinated water balloons of pneumatic, lymphatic, and cerebral pressures suspended in an elegant composure by calcified, mineralized scaffolding skeletons at the service of microbial gut flora. Who is it that really wants to get outside and explore strange new worlds? Moloch is a mythical god of human coordination failure personified as a bullheaded cosmic crematorium, but perhaps a more fitting image might be a super organism, a space obsessed microbial mind virus, pure disembodied colonial psychosis.

Where does the we and the they begin and end? This is all part of the same mind-body split accounting for all interpersonal discrepancies. Maybe this is the most essential rabbit hole we should be spelunking in. Maybe seeing all the world as a series of nested economic games, as a human coordination problem, is in itself a false problem. This meditation begs the asking of a question so large I can scarcely think it and will certainly struggle to articulate it. Could we somehow pivot on our own sense of being, to cease to feel that sacredness of ownership over one’s own meat, to render that sensibility more diffuse — not just to the heart, and not just the gut, and not just to the microbiome that we carry around in our salinated meat sack, and not just to the room that we’re in or the field of view that we are manifesting — to incorporate that integral and holistic connectedness to a world rendered whole?

If every individual could learn to integrate that vision and shift their perspective, would that amount to a global coordination success in shifting our vision of the world and our place within it? Would all of the previous failures unravel? Coordination is a choice, but certainly there’s more to it than that. There are territories to dissolve, arbitrary distinctions to dismantle, blockages of flows to uncork, people living in terror that will need to be nurtured back to sanity, problems of sustainability to design for, but if our current coordination efforts could amount to a global shift in self-awareness, might we dare to hope for realignment in these other areas?

During the 10 year period when I was working intensely on sustainability, I probably went to 200 conferences. I tried to talk to everybody. I encountered countless organizations putting forth missions that resembled each other; they were all compatible. There are people all over the planet, distributed organizations dedicated to developing new ways of doing things that will enable the survivors with some good information about how to put it all back together again.

I hear you describing a strength based in resilience and agility, rather than fortification or protecting proprietary knowledge.

Many individuals I encountered were totally open about what they were trying to do, what their activities were, how they were approaching problems. Everyone wants to bend your ear about how they’re trying to help make the world a better place, and they’re often succeeding. Where I ended up, after looking at this for a long time, is that all of those systems need to be brought into compliance with the ecological rules for physical life on the planet. It’s a matter of survival. After looking at everything I could find about sustainability for a couple of decades, I came up with a list of 21 underlying principles, but even this is too many for most minds to contend with. It really comes down to six heuristic rules.

I finally started to figure out that on Earth there is a prime directive, a way of understanding Earth operations that are reliable and predictable. Earth creates conditions conducive to more life. If any system is not doing that, sooner or later, it will fail. With Earth systems, the time periods are much longer and so there is a tendency, because of our short lives, to dismiss these systemic principles and disregard the future. How does Earth create conditions conducive to more life? The answer to that question is a set of ecological principles, like flight rules for spaceship earth. They’ve been developed over billions of years by non-human agents. I think the foundation of all religious and scientific thought comes from an intuited awareness of these ecological laws.

Will you share your six heuristic principles?

One of the key rules is that it’s not about you anymore. This is tough for a test pilot, because up until that point it’s always been about them, competing to get that next slot, stuff like that. When they become an astronaut, the mission and the system that you’re in becomes the most important thing, far more important than the individual. That’s the hardest lesson for an astronaut to learn. The absolute goal is total competence, to do the job that you’re supposed to be doing with no exceptions. A plus one is a person goes out of their way to do things that help the system, to identify problems before they manifest. You can’t ever claim it. If you say you’re a plus one, because you act like one and demand to be treated like one, you’re probably really a minus one, and you’re likely to get people killed.

What is worse than a dead astronaut? 7.9 billion dead astronauts

Jon Schulz’s Ecological Laws:

1. Networks and systems within systems (everything is interrelated)

2. Flows, cascades, and cycles with extreme efficiency and no harm

3. Local, current, solar based energy (light, heat, electricity, wind, geosource, hydropower, etc.)

4. Cooperation and Partnership

5. Diversity

6. Dynamic balance

The ecological laws are an integral set or system of requirements that cannot be considered separately. They are really just one law. You don’t get to pick and choose. Implementation of these laws is always context specific, meaning that the characteristics of a place (physical, biological, and cultural) drive how the laws can be satisfied. These laws apply to all human activity.

1. Networks/Systems within Systems

At all scales of nature, we find living systems nested within other living systems — networks within networks. Their boundaries are not boundaries of separation but of identity. All living systems communicate with one another (information flows) and share resources (energy and matter) across their boundaries. Living systems are fractal. We are not separate from anybody or anything. There is a deep underlying unity. Everything and everyone is deeply interrelated.

2. Flows/Cascades/Cycles

All living organisms must feed on continual flows of matter and energy from their environment to stay alive and all living systems continually produce waste. In this, they are dissipative structures. However, an ecosystem generates no net waste, as one species’ waste is another species’ food. Thus, matter and energy cycle continually through the web of life (including geophysical cycles) over time. Energy, matter, and information flow in cascades through ecosystems generating extreme efficiency. Creating no harm is integral to these processes. Toxins create harm, reducing efficiency. Nature is the absolute master of efficient matter and energy use. These considerations eliminate nuclear energy as presently conceived as a viable option for the future.

3. Local/Current/Solar Based Energy

Solar energy, transformed into chemical energy by the photosynthesis of green plants, drives ecological cycles. Other forms of solar energy, such as solar thermal, solar electricity, hydropower, ground source, wind power, human and animal power, and even metabolic heat are used by life and ecosystems and are available to man. A key aspect of this law is working within currently available energy flows (short term energy storage is certainly OK). Also, these energy sources are decentralized and local or regional in nature. While there are exceptions, ecosystems do not tap into reservoirs of ancient solar energy such as coal, gas, or oil.

4. Cooperation/Partnership

The exchanges of energy and matter in an ecosystem are sustained by pervasive cooperation. Life did not take over the planet and thrive by competition and combat but by cooperation, partnership, and networking. Darwin said that the evolution of human societies would be based on caring and cooperation.

5. Diversity

Ecosystems achieve dynamic stability and resilience through diversity and complexity, through their webs of relationships and the feedback loops created by that diversity. The greater their diversity, and, hence, the richness of their relationships, the more adaptable, flexible and resilient they become. The more diverse ecosystems are, the more innovative and creative they are. This is as true of human societies as natural ecosystems. Monocultures and monopolies, while in some sense efficient, violate ecological law and reduce or eliminate resilience and adaptability.

6. Dynamic Balance

Ecosystems are flexible, ever fluctuating networks. Their balance and stability is a consequence of the diversity of multiple feedback loops that keep the system (its flows of matter, energy, and information) in a state of dynamic balance (relative stability). No single part of the system is ever maximized or optimized; all variables fluctuate around their optimal values for the benefit of the whole. What whole? Answer: ultimately all life on the planet.

This series is made possible by a generous grant awarded by MolochDAO. Thank you Moloch!

Maybe there’s some way we could relate this back to Arturo Escobar and Viveiros de Castro. Wielding these concepts can provide us with access to conceptual instrumentation that is very well calibrated, because it includes thousands of years of astute thinkers that have dedicated themselves to reason and logic, but on the other hand, this is the same instrument that is wielded by the Eurocentric colonial epistemology that wreaks havoc upon the equilibrium of other sensitive dispositions, steamrolling difference of perspective. I want to craft this project and these conversations into a design for potential openings, to challenge my own perspective and my own biases and to provoke you, as well, to the extent that it’s deemed productive and beneficial for your own projects, but never to the extent of becoming destructive or imposing an ontological violence.

While considering the would-be audience for this work — they are engineers and they are academics and they are laymen — I continue to wonder how we should strategize our mode of conversation. How do we maintain the goal of this research while relinquishing the need for such a pragmatic goal in the first place, to remain open? How do we design for openings? How do we make space that proliferates inclusivity? We must do it together; that much seems certain. I can’t do it alone and I’m able to recognize that. I know incorporating some dissensus seems very essential. If we have a conversation where we agree on everything, this may confirm an inherent bias that we should be actively deconstructing. It’s important to strategize distances, disagreement, tension, and friction as productive forces. I think that you are an excellent person to coordinate such a conversation with, because we both have a shared background in the arts, and although we come from very different places we have somehow found ourselves expressing enthusiasm for sharing some common ground.

There’s a lot to knit from that thread. I had a similar experience during my project at the Autonomous Intercultural Indigenous University. It’s very difficult to recognize that the preconfiguration of my thinking was being put into question. There’s something about loosening control of rational processes that enables the possibility of those processes of dissent. There are three things that come to mind. This week I read a recent interview with Jacques Ranciere, a post shared by Stephen Shapiro. I quote Ranciere, he says:

We found ourselves not based in capital, but inside it. All we can do is dig holes, try to create and enlarge spaces of non-consent. The challenge is to manage to maintain dissensus, maintain a distance. What can this distance produce in the future? We don’t know, but even these figures of distance are a way of living differently in the world we challenge.

This is what Jaques Ranciere said a few months ago in the context of the pandemic and this resonates with my own writing. Equivocity is a very important notion in the theoretical matrix of How Forests Think by Eduardo Kohn. Equivocity is the possibility of signaling towards matter to generate language from radical difference. How do I speak with a plant? How do I speak with a cloud? Working with the traditional doctors of the NASA communities to explore the dialectical frame with traditional medicine has allowed me to observe that there’s an interesting approach towards the de-anthropomorphization of language. How can we code when the systems are not giving? How do we speak to the mountain? Equivocity is a powerful matrix to entangle a position towards language.

Viveiros de Castro’s work put in relation with Gille Delleuze can be considered a disjunctive synthesis, a chain of relations articulating themselves from dissensus, creating from radical difference and trying to structure the possibility to come — or what’s about to come — into a matrix of equivocities. This relates to how we resolve nation states, how we resolve identity, or how you resolve the Artificial when the system to elaborate those concepts puts into question the objective paradigm of subjective difference. I’m currently reading After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration by Holly Jean Buck and she provides a really interesting entanglement to this topic: thinking with the best intentions towards what these systems could bring to the world, while also knowing the cybernetic structure that we’re communicating through is structured upon colonial configurations that reveal a very violent matrix.

Holly Jean Buck addresses interesting notions like decolonizing the atmosphere. She is very critical of the romantic mode of thought that considers ecology without design. Design is considered as a colonial imperative, the very supposition that she’s trying to distance herself from. Her perspective is problematic, but it’s edifying to think with her. She is trying to think about ways we might reverse the industrial complex as we know it today to transition to a decolonized atmosphere. The carbon debt that we have with the planet is not a problem that can easily be solved through ceasing our use of fossil fuels. It’s not enough, as we will still need to remove the mess created by the industrially developed world. She tries to think of scenarios of infrastructure and politics to create an industry of carbon removal through a decolonial frame. It’s a challenging landscape.

“If the climate was a bank we would have already saved it”

My initial response comes from a conversation with a friend in Colombia, Edward Gil Jimenez, a traditional doctor of the Yanakuna community. Something really challenging happened when he came to visit us in our apartment in Popayán, Colombia. When he arrived he said, You are living in a part of the city in which the houses are dead. They’re cold houses. The cold house is a house that is not alive.

He said, the houses are dead? That they are cold houses?

He said that the houses were not alive. He explained that he teaches methods of constructing houses for the Yanakuna communities at the Indigenous University. To build a house is to connect with a form of life through them. The house is a self for the Yanakuna’s and that comes from a relation with the minerals and the materials used on the house. Each person of the community makes their own house and the house is built with the collective help of the community. You dig a hole to process the mud and that contact with the materials is not made from the imperative of objectification, but built from the awareness of a living entity. Eduard described it as the Mother Earth extending filaments, extending relations to you, and you are building something in resonance to those patterns. The construction takes form by taking into consideration the astral landscape surrounding the area. It’s very important to have windows to let in the sun and the moonlight, like a calendar. A material construction that doesn’t have these relations requires harmonization to re-connect this matrix of relations. Bringing it back to geoengineering, the awareness and the articulation of the resolution of our relations could take us towards a cybernetic infrastructure that will encompass the relations extended from the planet we inhabit. Rather than the imperative of value extraction and colonial objectification, we could design an integral mode of geoengineering (although that word is already charged with a structural bias), a network of satellites as a relations of selves.

I might need to think this through again, just to make sure I’m understanding it all. I’m left with a question about understanding the health and integrity of the community that we’re participating in, a desperate question of this moment that is relevant to everyone living everywhere. Our local conditions are being affected by global forces. This paradigm — this matrix of relations, as you say — is so large and so complex that we require satellites of (supposed) objectivity in order to glimpse our current state of affairs. How do we know that we are participating in our community in a way that serves our neighbors or that even serves ourselves?* *To the extent that we design ourselves first ontologically to become a positive force in our communal relations, this is a question of sustainability.

You have described an ecological framework of our cybernetic relations that amounts to a cerebral architecture that is collectively constructed. Resolution, as you have used it here, is perplexing to me. Is resolution used in the sense of relief, to feel better about the cerebral architecture that we are constructing, or is it resolution of a problem, relief resolved by providing pragmatic solutions, to focus on solving this problem so that we might move on to the next of an infinite procession of problems to be solved? This is an inheritance of the rational-industrial mind serving infinite technological novelty and planned obsolescence.

You mentioned Deleuze and I’m reminded of his essay, What Is a Dispositif? What is this entangled network of power relations operating at the infrastructural level? It exists at the soft infrastructure of human bureaucracies and governments and the physical geoengineered infrastructure, the stack of information as it is pulled from the ground and erected as a monument of human ingenuity, and this has always taken place as a top-down hierarchical imposition on the world. Perhaps my question here is: how do we begin to design our information differently, from the middle out? How might we design our human industries to actively distribute that power, rather than condensing and centralizing it?

In relation to the book on geoengineering, you used the phrase best intentions. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, so they say. Where is the road that we are paving with these good intentions really leading? Is it the blind leading the blind? This is the crux of the issue of visibility: can we re-cognize where we are going? Can we identify the architecture that we are constructing while remaining inhabitants of cold houses? For me, it’s a question of aesthetic formalism, the need to practice a gestalt design language, to recognize patterns as language and cognition, even to re-cognize cognition itself. Right? We need to disentangle the colonial view, the Eurocentric vision projected upon the landscape and each other. How do we escape these patterns? What is a decolonized governance modality? It might be an anti-industrialism or an infrastructure that is actively dismantling itself, but this is a negative definition, an inverse dialectic, maybe even a destructive and violent approach in it’s own way. Perhaps a truly decolonized design is constructive, more matriarchal than patriarchal, not rationally dismantling itself, but somehow redirecting that energy to benefit all, to generate more value for everyone, not at the expense of the subaltern or the landscape.

Back to my initial prompt: how do we evaluate the health of our community? There’s a paradox here, the paradox of industry. We desire to be industrious, we want to be productive, but our industries are full of excess and there is no away and someone always suffers from the disposal of the waste. The industry produces violence, waste, and dead houses. How do we build in resonance to local patterns? It requires a cognition of the pattern language; it requires the eye of a sculptor to be able to see the form in the marble and the humility in skill to allow it to reveal itself. The way you describe the construction of houses in Columbia is like an efflorescence, an emergent form, an outcropping that grows out of the specific place. Not an imposition on the land, but an extension of that sense of place, of and from the land quite literally. Harmony — I’m surprised to hear myself admit — might be the perfect way to evaluate the health of a community to the extent that it implies not just balance, but equal distributions of an integral architecture.

This reminds me of Christopher Alexander’s wonderful theories and practices. Alexander is an amazing architect and a very sensitive poetic figure. He taught at UC Berkeley for many years and developed what he calls A Pattern Language, a way of interacting with a landscape to identify the ineffable resonance of unique spaces. He would interact with the landscape firsthand to build up an understanding of what the local site needs. A building shouldn’t be built from blueprints drafted by a distant engineer. You need to go and walk the grounds to feel where the trees are, witness where the birds hang out, hear how the wind moves across the land. The living home will be built in relation to the flows that naturally exist in the place. A traditional house is an alien artifice imposed upon the landscape, disrupting its flows. It doesn’t take into account preexisting conditions; it imposes its own conditions, and so it’s not a harmonious structure.

There’s something that has been appearing in the global conversation about decolonization through the conflicts of the peace process in the internal war in Colombia: the concept of repair. When you’re dealing with the problem of an always-already violent imperative, repair is a very important notion to address the possibility of restitution of these damages. We might consider the Louvre Museum, the British Museum, and how these institutions entangle a structure traced to a colonial root. What to do with the African sculptures in these collections that have become treasures of the queen, but represent a paradigm of stolen artifacts? Similarly, how should we consider the international debt system when all these monetary transactions are built upon colonial standards? For example, there is a town in Bolivia called Potosi, an enormous place with some of the richest silver mines on the continent. Yet, colonization made Potosi one of the poorest areas in Latin America and reveals how these minerals build up the framework of a vampirific monetary system.

Repair and restitution provide a place to consider the responsibility in these extraction industries. The task is immense. Here I would connect Catherine Malabou and Gayatri Spivak in their work considering how the subaltern has been hidden, how this cognitive reality has been present as a secondary actor, hidden through our systems of abstraction, creating a conglomerate of artificiality intertwined with the object. How might we come to think through a sympoietic process, in resonance with Donna Haraway? How to entangle these conversations as conversions towards the base of a political fight? It’s very difficult if it’s just traced through meta-reflections. It’s so encoded in the material articulations that we must resolve the base of those constructions first. How might we inverse the dynamics embedded in all these technological conglomerates that are transversing our quotidianity? From a western perspective, we need to recognize the limits of referring to an outside that will bring a new code.

We might trace this conversation to their architectural relations. This is the exciting part about taking indigenous thought seriously — more than mere metaphor — to our contemporary landscape. It’s about the end of a world that encompasses the artificial we know. It’s not about creating a new complex industrial infrastructure to resolve our environmental catastrophes, to reverse the flow of co2 from our industrial processes; the rainforest was already accomplishing this before we destroyed it.

This brings me to the text that I’m writing called Becoming Jaguar as the Automated Cloud. There’s an anecdote of El Taita Querubin, a traditional healer in the Amazonian forest and part of the Cofanes community. He has worked with Ayahuasca since he was eight years old, studying the technique every week, three times a week, for eight years, to learn to become a jaguar. The shamans in Putumayo keep this as a secret technique, because this comes through the space of dreaming and has repercussions in one’s life. One story describes the community of Los Cofanes in Putumayo that was menaced because a multinational company was interested in mining in the area. There are political structures connected to right wing parties in Colombia that put pressure on communities to leave their territories with illegal armies of paramilitaries, displacing communities from their villages to protect the interests of progress and governmental business. When this menace arrived to El Taita Querubin he decided to have a few Ayahuasca sessions to read the situation and report to the community if they should leave their homes. When he returned he told the community to leave, but he would remain to fight. When the armies arrived, they were attacked by jaguars emerging from the jungle and were forced to leave.

For a rational mind this story of the forest can seem so esoteric, mythical, mystic, metaphorical, and also naive, but it’s important to let those voices emerge, to try to think in those equivocities, to witness the patterns emerging from the forest and through dreams as ways of gathering, forms of making houses, and possibilities to reunite ourselves. This cognitive process towards an emerging artificiality will be the terraformation of synthetic infrastructures, a transhumanist convergence with biological structures. We might pursue the potentiality of myth towards the navigation and position of a critical stand against the artificial we know. In the rural zones of el Cauca, this comes with your life. Our friends there live in a constant struggle with the configurations of power. Climate change in Latin America is accompanied by armies. We must design from a strong ground. I’m not saying that we should close our computers, that we should stop calling ourselves artists, or we should stop going to museums, but the awareness of the hidden worlds present in the subaltern brains are the patterns that we need to signal to reach resolution, to design towards becoming-jaguar rather than making an exhibition about it.

Your notion of the end of a world is so powerful. Your usage is wonderfully peculiar, because it’s not an apocalypse amounting to the end of the planet or the end of ecology, but it’s the end of a worldview, a modality or vision of the world that is deliberately ended with intention as a failed project, a failed stage of collective human imagination that is no longer being in service to a world that we might deliberately and carefully collaborate in manifesting. This has everything to do with autopoiesis, another powerful concept that I’ve been ruminating on for many years. Autopoiesis is used in cybernetic theory to refer to self-creation or self-making within closed systems that can seemingly be be cut off from nature while replicating nature simultaneously, a high ideal of perfected praxis and poiesis in a nutshell, so to speak, in the sense of Derrida referring to conceptual nutshells as so tempting to crack open. Conceived as a cybernetic autopoietic network, we begin to think of nature as an industrial process in itself, constituting a machinic worldview perpetuating the drive for imposing machinic legibility upon the entire landscape. This manifests in our architecture, the information infrastructure of our world, and how it informs our cerebral architecture, inflecting how we envision ourselves in our dynamic relations with each other and to the world, with the world.

Autopoiesis may have been a pivotal concept at one point, but now must be closed. A siloed conception of the world must be actively dismantled. Designing for openings, in this sense, would be to puncture holes, like how a single pin can puncture a water balloon and make a wonderful mess. To design for openings means to allow the outside to come in: outside languages, outside perspectives, outside peoples, outside articulations of outsideness. Sympoiesis moves from siloed cells of automated mechanical reproducibility towards diffused, open, porous, substrates of dynamically exchanging potentials. The problem with autopoiesis is that it replicates itself ad infinitum. How do we end that cycle without ending the model of life, without imposing violence upon natural systems? How do we end the world without destroying the world, allowing the world-image to regenerate into another form?

As you have been pointing out, these other forms don’t need to be invented as they exist already. They have always existed, in a sense, we just haven’t been able to cognize them. As designers, we must be careful with our re-cognitions, to not merely appropriate divergent perspectives into our own dehumanizing autopoietic systems. Maybe it is not possible for the European philosopher, or American artist, or first-world engineer or UX designer to articulate the subaltern dream. We might instead focus upon designing a space to foster the potentiality to come — the artificiality to come, as you say — to open up the museum, to puncture holes in the homogenizing histories of archived artifacts, and to craft porous architecture that allows life to flow through. Restitution certainly must be an orchestrated effort to allow for the voices of the outside to come in and to be heard.

How to pronounce ourselves through the possibility of patterns towards a possible emergence of an outside that has always been inhabiting us? How might we design the potentiality of addressing ourselves as something other than ourselves? How do we construct and trace links from that space?

This series is made possible by a generous grant awarded by MolochDAO. Thank you Moloch!

Do you have any sense of how people are responding so far?

The Death Dialogues crew is loving these conversations. I hope that you would say the same, but it seems like everybody I’m talking to is having a real good time. I’m definitely having a good time. I curated this project because I think these people are all super interesting, you included.

Is this like therapy for Travis?

No, it’s not like I need some kind of therapeutic release, but I need to talk with people that are better qualified than I am to help me think through these ideas. I’m surrounded by experts and it became clear that this was going to be really valuable for the whole community that I’m examining. The first step was to see if, in fact, they would recognize the value in my ideas by putting up some money to support me. That happened with this MolochDAO grant and now we’re going to test the discrepancy between what they were expecting I was going to do and what they end up getting, whether they’re going to embrace this experiment in uncertainty or whether there’s going to be some kind of backlash or pushback. You said you were gonna be producing research reports, but you just had a bunch of unruly conversations with a bunch of people that don’t know anything about Web3, so we’re pissed. I could see it going both ways.

One of the questions here is how people will relate to the idea of what research is, which has been on my mind. I’ve been seeing these memes on Instagram recently where people are really critiquing the loose colloquial use of the word research; just the sentence I did my research and then it was footnoted in a comical way to reveal that the research was watching a video on YouTube. One user wrote:

“Please stop saying you researched it. You didn’t research anything and it’s highly probable that you don’t even know how to do so. Did you compile a literature review and write abstracts on each article? Or better yet, did you collect a random sample of sources and perform independent probability statistics on reported results? No?”

It goes on, but the thing that I find interesting is that there is a very academic argument against the use of research, purporting that if you didn’t do it the academic way then it’s not valid research, which I think we could argue with, but even within academic spaces what it means to do research is highly contested. It will be interesting to see how willing DeathGuild people are to think about something as research based on their preconceived notions of what research is supposed to look like or sound like.

Do you mean the audience that will be reading the articles or the other DeathGuild contributors? I’m thinking of this as potentially a long term project, but that will be up to the community to validate whether that’s possible or not. I have been very explicit and transparent in the proposal that this would be wild and abstract. I didn’t know exactly how this would pan out. Every conversation has been radically idiosyncratic and unique. The main goal here is to expand these conversations into communities that might not be naturally predisposed to thinking this way or to considering these topics. It’s really important for us to continue to remind each other that what’s at stake here is both an experimental method and a deep elaboration on topics that might be easy to take for granted. We’re experimenting with the form as well as the content. We have discussed research as an idea and why we might use that term and if that distracts from the thing that we’re actually doing, but today I really wanted to hear your thoughts on power.

Ok, let’s talk about power. The question of research relates to power, right?

Yes. Er, you tell me.

Or you tell me?

No, I would really prefer in this case if you told me.

The power to evaluate a product and deem it either valid research or not, positions valid research as an operation of power. We might mean that in a sinister way, where somebody in a position of power invalidates something that in other contexts is deemed valid research, because that research challenges some piece of their political agenda, or if it’s a more benign version, like an editorial board of an academic journal that received a submission and decided that submission doesn’t constitute valid research because it doesn’t conform to the conventions of what research looks like for that curatorial body. The connector for me between research and power is the question of evaluation. Who’s in a position to evaluate? Is there an evaluator? How does that look? Are the procedures of evaluation always abided by faithfully or is there inconsistency in how they’re applied? When it comes to this research that you’re assembling for DeathGuild, it will be really interesting to see how it’s evaluated, in a hard or soft way. Even if there isn’t an official review of what you put together, what does the informal evaluation of it look like? Who’s clapping for what?

For my own part, I care to think of myself as an evaluator serving as a steward rather than a God-King judiciary force who validates or invalidates according to an inherent bias, although any evaluation implies a bias. Even an attempt to render a system neutral by removing the human element implies a programmer that imparts their bias into the recognition of data points, to calibrate whether something is valid or not, like facial recognition software developed by predominantly white males having a difficult time recognizing people of color or any face that doesn’t fit within a hypernormative anatomical geometry. As steward, the procedure that I’ve attempted to adopt here is to render these conversations faithfully — a loaded word — to only edit the minimum amount to render the text legible to an audience of readers, because there’s discrepancies between oral and written communication. I don’t write into the texts or elaborate on the ideas beyond the spatial and temporal coordination of this conversation.

I’m contradicting myself from earlier conversations that we’ve had, I recognize that, because it wasn’t so clear that this was important before, but the more I move through the project the more I understand that restraining myself from intervening in the content might support the transparency and the integrity of these conversations in service to the unruliness and diaphanous nature of the concepts and the experimental procedure. I’m trying to edit as little as possible, just enough to make it readable, much to the chagrin of some of the contributors and also of the readers. There has been feedback that these conversations are difficult to read, because they’re transcriptions from spoken language.

The conceptual wrangling is a matter of fostering the conversation to go as far as we can, seemingly so deep into the weeds that we lose ourselves, while also attempting to practice an agility of oscillating back out to the macro scale to remember that the propulsion in this project is built around the triangulation of three key concepts that deserve to be scrutinized: governance modalities, resources becoming treasuries, and privacy as the fulcrum between autonomy and anonymity. If our discussion is not in service to that agenda, then we might evaluate ourselves as failing, because we did not achieve what we set out to do. How does power play into that?

I think that there’s a difficulty that the steward faces in managing the problem of how perspicuous it will immediately be whether a piece of content is relevant or not. There are cases in which irrelevance will be more obvious and indisputable, but if we’re talking about an experimental procedure where there might be a slow or more gradual development into something that feels like a valuable insight, then that poses a problem for certain speeds of evaluation. How can we be sure that you as the evaluator are right to deem something relevant or not relevant? Is that a question of power? The measurement is a certain kind of power, but it also places the evaluator in a position of vulnerability, because those judgments will be taken to task if the experiment is ultimately deemed a failure.

The vulnerability is that there has to be an individual that is held accountable. In this particular case, it is me. I have suggested and encouraged that you remain anonymous in order to alleviate any potential accountability that might come back to negatively reflect upon any other involvement that you might have in the world. I am not dedicated to being a centralized force of evaluation, to determine what will and will not be accepted, but to take up the responsibility of ensuring impactful content. I think there is a way that we might think about this in terms of a curation or coordination, as an active crafting of context. There is a need to focus deeply upon minutiae without confusing the map for the territory. Ideally, we might all take collective accountability for this.

Except for me, because I’m anonymous.

There’s something else at play here in these conversations. I’m not trying to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes and deceive them, presenting this as a private conversation and then suddenly, without them knowing, pushing it into public. There is a need to craft a safe space for a sincere and vulnerable conversation to take place, free of censorship. I have no interest in serving as a censor, but there is an editorial responsibility and accountability. How do we render a metric of the relationship between those two things: steward of the community and editor for an audience?

You’re in a difficult position from a social perspective. You’re working within a project that isn’t benefiting from certain conventions formed around how a person is interpolated by a certain institution or publishing body. You’re inventing conventions. If certain contributors, like myself, are experiencing unease, it relates to the fact that we’re not tapping into a set of conventions that determine how editing and censorship function here.

Can you tell me about your unease?

I’m hung up on this question of transparency and censorship. Transparency is something of a construct. I don’t feel like I have an essential self that can be communicated, conveyed, represented in an uncensored or censored manner. I am always navigating questions of context when I’m making decisions about how to appear. Within that framework, there are instances where I’m muting my desires or my instincts more or less, depending on what the particular situation is. I don’t know what it would mean to have a transparent conversation. There’s always an audience, a way that I would make a particular point to my mom, that differs from how I would make that point to my advisor or other people in my life. I don’t think that one of those modes is more authentic than another. There’s always strategy.

When it comes to my unease with censorship, I don’t think anything terrible will happen as a consequence of publishing these conversations with my name attached to them, but there is a desire to be able to curate my persona to a greater extent than this project allows. A difficulty with the translation of dialogue or conversation into text is that there is a relatively radical freedom in conversations, because I feel like I can have conversations with people where I test out completely ridiculous perspectives and they’re not on the record. I mean, they’re on the record insofar as my interlocutors remember pieces or aspects of the conversation, but they’re not on the record in a way that a piece of writing is, so I’m allowed to evolve or change the perspective that was shared in that moment. In a text it’s more permanent, because a text is crafted for a precisely understood context that gives it a container that feels less risky.

I think that your concerns are important to address. I also find them perplexing. No one else that I’m speaking to in this project has raised such concerns or admitted their inhibition to speaking to me in the context that is being woven here. No one has raised any consideration of a strategy in the crafting of their persona, in considering the possibility of an inauthentic presentation of themselves. I am glad that you are raising this issue and I feel like it is absolutely significant content that we should address. I am wondering if your provocation to consider control and censorship, of context and permanence, of the textual documents and of the strategies of how one orients their persona in relation to an unknown audience on this quivering ground that you locate yourself on, if we might point our attention towards the crux of privacy. I’ve been thinking of privacy as composed of anonymity, one’s ability to wield the control and influence of their constructed persona with intention, and the autonomy of revealing or allowing oneself to be revealed through the performance of a role within a public sphere, that I would purport that we always already are.

I have a background in reporting. I started my newsroom experience on a college newspaper, where there were many ridiculous experiences where an editor chose a headline that didn’t at all fit the piece of writing that I had submitted. There’s an unease in putting together a piece of writing and then feeling like somebody has more power than you in the hierarchical body can have the ultimate say in how that piece is received. There are also cases where editors would make errors like publishing a draft instead of the final piece. There was a particular case where I’d interviewed a politics professor who asked to stay off the record and the editor submitted the draft instead of the final version, causing a great deal of embarrassment and anger. This person felt really betrayed by me. The carelessness of the editor put me in a position of having to be accountable for something that was not my job. As a result of those experiences, I decided to become an editor and then it just wasn’t a problem anymore. If I wanted to write a piece for the paper, I would also be editing it so I could make sure that whatever was being put out wasn’t an embarrassment to me or a betrayal of the sources who had trusted me to tell their stories somehow.

In the academic context, there is a really important distinction between having an idea, an intuition or an instinct, and then subjecting that idea to a process of scrutiny and verification, accessing and connecting with the conversations about a particular idea that have already happened. You talked about certain aspects of this work becoming more clear to you as you went along. For me, it wasn’t clear from the onset how much these texts needed to ventriloquise the kind of rigor that is expected in academic contexts. A person in my subjective position — a woman, a person of color trying to do philosophy — doesn’t have the same wiggle room to say ignorant shit about somebody like Wittgenstein that somebody else might. Maybe the point is that philosophical discourse is so tyrannical that nobody has the right to say bogus shit about Wittgenstein, but I feel quite self conscious about how I appear to be speaking to a philosophical tradition that continues to be hostile to people like me. I don’t have the leeway to speak extemporaneously about things that interest me when it comes to those kinds of topics. All of us are shot through with issues of power. As a person who is trying to cultivate a professional position as a public intellectual and scholar, there are obvious pragmatic questions that I’m faced with.

There’s another piece that I’m recognizing as I move through these thoughts, which is that I really hate tech culture. Some of how this research is proceeding gets to the heart of what I find quite repugnant about tech culture. One of those things is the idea that research is cheap or can be made cheaply and quickly. That’s already happening in academia through adjunctification. There are ways I don’t want to associate myself with a certain kind of tech culture and I’m learning the extent of that through the conversations.

What you hate about tech culture is that it’s built upon a presumption that research can be sourced cheaply and that is a quality that you are locating within the DeathGuild project?

Not quite. What I’m saying is that there is a pre-existing repulsion with tech culture and the utopian schemes that it concocts. When we proceed with assembling research that isn’t fully cooked, undertaken in a spirit of so-called agility or speed, that makes me feel like I’m participating in an unsavory aspect of tech culture. It makes me uncomfortable to think that I might be associating myself with a practice that I’m rabidly opposed to.

This is where I want to throw the ball back in your court and ask you about the value that you are assigning to transparency; where that’s coming from, how you articulate it. I need to hear a robust description of what makes transparency valuable. It seems like the virtue of transparency is part of the justification for a low processing approach. There’s a resemblance for me with the prerogatives of classic captains of industry who want to streamline certain procedures and strip them of the artisanal human touch. I feel like I’m trying to remain an artisan. Pardon the grandiosity or pompousness of that statement. I’m finding myself in a context where an automated set of procedures has been designed. I can imagine you’re thinking that the conversation itself is such an open field and that’s where the artistry happens with the text as a bit of an afterthought. I’m really preoccupied with the text.

This requires delicate handling. Let’s address the justification or the motivation for striving for transparency.

If we want to be fully transparent, why don’t we publish audio of these conversations? Why make any editorial decision? Why make any cuts?

I’m struggling to find an entry point to crafting an answer, because your comments make me feel like you hate everything about what we’re doing, concerning the foundation that the project’s propositions are built upon, that it antagonizes every aspect of your being and your course of action is to antagonize it in turn. I’m struggling with being in a position where I have imposed that upon you, that you’ve been positioned in a way that is the inverse of my intention. Perhaps I should encourage you to continue examining in this way, because it seems like any response that I might offer would be contextualized in defense of a culture that I also don’t want to be associated with, or at least not without some high-fidelity clarification of what you’re leveraging against. It’s not how I am consciously associating with this project.

I have a question about labeling these sentiments and preoccupations as antagonistic in relation to Chantal Mouffe’s notion of mutual agonism. When does an articulation crossover from shared agonism to rivalrous antagonism? I don’t feel resentful towards you or the scope of the project, though I do think that we’re in different positions. I can be completely on the outside. I don’t have the same investment in these communities. You were recently speaking about the enthusiasm and admiration that you have and I’m on the outside of that. It gives me a certain power, because I can just feel like I don’t give a fuck about this and dip out if I want to. That seems to be a source of alienation for us. The issues that I’m raising are not intended to tell you to stop doing what you’re doing, or to shit on it and say it’s all stupid. I have genuine curiosities. In questioning the virtue of transparency, it’s productive to think about where that comes from, how people are articulating, if there is a stable meaning within these communities or if it’s used in different ways. What does agonism look like? How might we inhabit a space of shared agony?

It begins with an invitation and an understanding that any democratic modality is at the service of some and at a great disservice to others. We operate within a folklore of consensus building that is disadvantageous to some. I am trying to coordinate conversations from the outside to emphasize the importance of a model of reciprocal exchange by inviting in critical voices that are currently poorly represented in the community. I’m risking my own credibility to advocate for the importance of dissensus, the importance of disagreeing in a constructive way.

Antagonism inhibits clear vision of the larger ontological structures that we are all implicated within. Agonism begins with an understanding that we are all embedded within the same structure and you can’t locate yourself outside of it. We are all subject to the architectures that we build collectively. Shared agony begins with humility, by recognizing that we must share the weight of collective accountability, to continue extending an invitation to the other to co-create spaces for dissipating antagonisms, to show up in service of the other, and to carefully render the script collectively. We must agonize-with rather than antagonize-against.

I would like to address your not giving a fuck about the ramifications of the project by associating it with a quick, cheap methodology. I don’t find that to be a generous perspective that acknowledges the vulnerability involved in constructing a platform for new voices to be heard. A prerequisite for transparency might be a cooperative and collaborative culture, to coordinate a reciprocal design that serves all the contributors, rooted in radical conviviality. This project is rooted in friendship and friendship is based on trust and faith. From that foundation we might nurture an explorative curiosity, to play together through a pluriversal performativity that facilitates radical sovereignty while we put on and take off various masks; a fluidity of identity might become possible.

The discomfort that I experience in your description is the rootedness of your own identity construct, which seems to have instilled an inhibition to participate in a genuine manner, because you’re perceiving this context as malicious artifice strategically leveraged against your being, conveying an agenda that you don’t condone. I don’t mean to put words in your mouth.

Perhaps centralizing individuation is precisely the root cause of the alienation that has been imposed upon this conversation in the beginning. Might we somehow cooperate in recognizing the need for a deontological orientation? Not simply disembodied or empirically objective and not a reductive tyranny of rulelessness or some similarly absurd, violent, feigned neutrality of universal language, but a local design that creates openings within the at-hand structure that we are playing in. Might we support each other to exercise agency in shifting the circumstances that are imposed upon us?

I want to extend to you an invitation of convivial exchange, reciprocity, potlatch, not built upon debt, but personal sacrifice. I can’t say that I totally understand your hesitation to extend into the middle, what is precisely at stake that you fear might be lost. It’s not to say that your concerns are not real or significant. You might help me clarify and amplify your perspective, to act in service to whatever audience you might imagine will be reading this, to exercise an existential agility to remain limber to the perceived assault on your sensibilities. It’s the willow that survives the storm, while the rigid oak falls with a strong wind.

I don’t know what it is that you hate about the tech community, but the invitation has been extended for you to think with me, not as my subject but as my peer, as the expert in your own field, to define your own role. This struggle goes well beyond the tech industry, but concerns the industrial drive more generally as a globalized accelerationist hystericism, an absolutely dehumanizing force that we must all agonize together to actively dismantle. It’s a matter of survival, quite literally. That’s where the death of DeathGuild comes in; there’s existential risk. I hope to serve as a conductor for a morbid choir.

I feel like any of those points could open out into lengthy and deliberate conversations. There’s an issue of developing a shared understanding of what these values actually mean, the generation of value being one of the values that is incredibly vague. I think it’s incredibly important to think about the values of potlatch, sacrifice, risk, suppleness, etc., beyond this specific context through a historically and politically informed attention to structures. Who is asked to sacrifice in what kinds of contexts? What counts as sacrifice and who isn’t sacrificing?

To remain at an abstract register is an operation of power. My interest in philosophy is preoccupied with the careful crafting of distinctions. I have an incredible bias against tech culture, but I don’t believe myself to be outside of its grips. I’m completely enmeshed and interpolated by the tools and the values and the discourses of tech culture. That’s a core element of the negative bias that I have. It seems important to me in a way that I don’t yet understand that we continue talking to one another in a genuine, earnest, vulnerable way.

Thinking about David Graeber and his Fragments on an Anarchist Anthropology, he says early in that text that one doesn’t find any anarchists in the academy, perhaps because of an insistence on a consonance between the methods and the values. One of the things that interests me in the conversations that we’re having is something in the spirit of Graeber, where I’m curious about how the procedure is an important part of the radical aspirations here. My point is to bring a great deal of attention to the representational procedures, because they inevitably, necessarily, are inflecting the thing that’s made.

This series is made possible by a generous grant awarded by MolochDAO. Thank you Moloch!

Seven point elk and young bucks munching berries outside the window. It’s been very smoky here. We’ve had a lot of rain and the wind was horrendous. That part wasn’t too fun, but I have spent time working on a couple of articles. I was working on one in particular that I was going to try to send you soon on the issue of how do we know, knowing versus facts, how we use information for decision making and where its vulnerabilities are. If you touch something hot enough to burn, you’re not likely to repeat the experience in your life if you can avoid it. That’s knowing. Everything in nature knows how it works, how it needs to work. It’s only humans that can believe and act on stuff that’s different than that.

What do you mean stuff that’s different than that? To the extent that it’s conceptual abstract knowledge rather than phenomenological or experiential knowledge that we acquire from interacting with the world?

Yes. That’s why you need to get kids out of classrooms and into nature.

Certainly it also goes both ways? The experiential knowledge, to the extent that we’re able to document it, to archive it into a repository, whether it’s through oral tradition or written document, serves to open the imagination of those that encounter those documents and hopefully we can come to conceptually understand not to touch a hot pot without having to learn first-hand (so to speak), by being burned. This allows for collective human advancement through our social sharing of our subjective experiences and is the core technological development of human beings. That’s the technology of imagination.

If somebody says don’t touch that thing, it’s hot, you may still test it. We observe behaviors, agree or disagree with them, and they become integrated into our belief system. They become our facts, but are they really facts? That’s what my article will be addressing. There’s a story that has been told by a number of people, I don’t know where it originated, but the version I heard was that an old Oregon rancher said, there are three kinds of people: there are those that can learn by reading, there’s those that have to see things visually, and there are those that have to urinate on the electric fence for themselves. The last group are those that aren’t willing to take the reading or the visual input from anybody and have to figure out what’s real for themselves.

My experiences illustrate a reality tunnel for me that reveals quite clearly that there isn’t a singular ideal way of knowing. There is no one way of knowing that is somehow better than the others, but each approach to the world might be considered a unique perspectival path to approaching a similar conclusion. If we could somehow collect that diversity of perspectives and unify them by our human coordination, what potential might that unlock for how we could teach each other to see the world differently? With your anecdote, it’s tempting to identify myself as one of those three ways of knowing, but certainly we must allow for the potential of a fourth or fifth way to reveal itself. Where does the artist fit in? Where does the visionary fit in?

Let’s consider the shaman as a conduit between worlds, as a person that has positioned themselves between a material empirical knowledge and a transcendental gnosis, as one that speaks between modalities of being to assimilate lessons from the plants directly, to gather behaviors from our animal kin, and who is sensitive and insightful enough to apply those learnings to expand our limited human potentials. Certainly the shaman’s way is experiential, by taking the plant into the body, by interfacing directly with the elk, by following them across the landscape to learn their migration patterns. Such knowledge is conveyed through a profound poetics that I’ve been considering more and more as a kind of transmedial encryption. What kind of person is the rancher telling the anecdote? It sounds like a Buddhist koan. Where is the core of the rancher’s message?

Maybe it inflicts an injustice by saying that we must decipher mystical language back into an empirical scientific language, or the other way around, that everything is shrouded in allegory and requires an expert literary critic to render back into literal images for those of us that have tired and weak imaginations. Could we learn to embrace a perspective where a multiplicity of languages co-exist simultaneously? To allow that each might be appropriate for interacting with a specific level or dimension of reality, but that there is no singular universally true reality to be defined by one singular universally true perspective? Might we at least entertain a multiverse or a pluriversality rather than defending a universality, the necessity to incorporate many perspectives rather than resolving the single perspective? How might we embrace that as a way of knowing, as a way of sharing our anecdotes on knowledge and gnosis?

Lots of ideas there. I absolutely agree with you that there’s no ideal way of knowing; that all of them are important. I use oracles at times and one that I really like is called the Mayan Oracle. I like it because it has information at different levels, expressed in different ways. It’s essentially poetry about each of the star glyphs. If you read it with your left hemisphere it doesn’t make any sense, but if you feel it with your heart it can be very, very powerful. I think there are indeed multiple languages for understanding ourselves and the world. You were talking about the shamans and there are technologists that have done essentially the same thing. Viktor Schauberger was a forester in the Austrian forests and understood more about water, motion, propulsion and a bunch of other things than other people at the time. He was forced to design spacecraft for the Nazis, because they had his family, but anyway your idea of a plurality of knowledge is well taken. We’re creator beings and we’re a little bit different from other parts of nature. We need the laws of ecology to understand our place, whereas it’s automatic for things in nature to do the right thing for the whole system.

The implication there is that nature knows best how to calibrate itself, whether it’s considered to be a finely tuned cybernetic machine network or a well-tuned engine or whether we might embrace the chaos in terms of Brownian motion and entropy, perpetual change, nature as the epitome of a dynamic system that is self-calibrating and inherently non-fragile in that it doesn’t require us to maintain it. The notion of pluriverse signals a potential shift in the modalities that we are crafting to illustrate these systems to each other. We have a way of being in-and-of the world, the throwness of being if you’re into the particularly German delusional procession from Husserl to Hegel to Heidegger. I’m not trying to go down that rabbit hole, per se. The potency for me is that the way we conceive of the world, the way we conceive of ourselves, and the way that we conceive of our relations, becomes the world that we inhabit; the world as the fulcrum of being-becoming.

We actively manifest that existential point of view that positions ourselves at the center with the mind as the instrument that casts the projection that we proceed into, what Thomas Metzinger illustrates as a reality tunnel. But, again, if we are able to shift our perspective, certainly we’re able to shift our narrative modality and iterate on this procession of being-becoming. This certainly has ramifications beyond our poetics, beyond mere metaphor. By adjusting or augmenting this modality we are literally changing the world that we inhabit, literally changing our manifest worlding that we are always-already walking into.

The rubber hand experiment from Thomas Metzinger’s The Ego Tunnel: The Sciene of the Mind and the Myth of the Self

I often think about the Cartesian mind-body problem, that I have a mind that is nested within a body, that the mind is the seat of the self and that the body is the vehicular transport, the mechanism that propels this identity through the world. This is the notion of a homunculus as a little me upstairs that is operating the mechanisms, steering the ship, manipulating the body out here, the salinated meat sack propelling my etheric body through space. This story that we tell, this mind-body problem that we shackle ourselves to, is highly dissociative. The mind is illustrated as a central processing unit of pure cerebral abstractions and the body is reduced to a material substrate that facilitates the mobilization of our conceptual ideals.

What is real? What is the most real? How is that real put into dynamic tension? Is it the conception of the world, the projection that we cast and that we enter into mentally? Or is it the physicality? Is it the corporeal instantiation, the embodied experience? Some people purport that the world should be composed of reasonable ideas, that we live in a holographic projection of meaningless desires, that we should enter into a virtual metaverse of digitized office cubicles because our bodies are the problem. Hook me up to a machine, give me chemically calculated Soylent green nutrient fluids, I want my mind to exist eternally suspended in an ideal state with other minds. Other people say, no, no, no, that’s the illusion, that’s the Matrix, an illusion that becomes a delusion that pulls us away from the experiential world. I feel the pot and it burns me.

What we have to look forward to in Zuckerberg’s metaverse

Is it okay to interrupt here for a moment?

Yes, interrupt, please.

You were talking earlier about one of the options- thinking about the world as a cybernetic machine. Regardless of the label you put on the Earth, whether you call it Earth Systems as the geologists prefer or Mother Earth or Gaia, it doesn’t matter. That system operates to create conditions conducive to more life and it has multiple mechanisms to do that. Some of them are relatively simple, some of them are more complex, but the point is- that is what it has been doing for the last 3.8 billion years. Earth knows what needs to happen for life to continue. What other planets are about I couldn’t say, but Earth definitely is about creating conditions conducive for more life. Everything that is built on the machine analogy performs as a machine, which means it’s running down, it’s wearing out, and it’s dying. I’m not too fond of them for that reason. Machine analogies came out of the early Industrial Revolution. They talked about the body as a machine, but it’s not. The organism is incredibly more complex and functional than any machine humans ever thought of.

I’m right there with you. Maybe this is a good moment to introduce the circumstances of our meeting out on the mesa in the Carson National Forest. You were working on your earthship in the Star community where I live. When we met we immediately began discussing sustainability in architecture and as a state of mind. The reason earthships are so incredible is that they incorporate a systems thinking approach of our natural world and integrate those theories into a design that materially instantiates a sustainable model that supports and proliferates more life. Would you agree? Maybe you could start by explaining how it is that you found your way out there and a little of your history with sustainable architecture.

My journey started way before Star. As a young man, I was quite familiar with 15 or 20 ways that the Earth could go to hell in a hand basket. Changes in the Earth, financial collapse, poles flipping; there were all these things that the people were discussing like they could happen tomorrow, or maybe already started yesterday. As a young husband with a young family to consider, I became quite concerned about all of that and it was driving me nuts. I sat myself down and wrote out everything I could think of about each of those scenarios. If that happens, then what, and how does that affect me? When I finished that exercise I became convinced that I needed to do something very specific, but those big collective actions by humans on Earth and the Earth itself felt like they were beyond anything that I could influence. I needed to figure out how I could respond if any of those catastrophic things happened. That meant I needed to have knowledge in my head and I needed to have basic tools.

There are people that think they will be just fine if they have a pickup truck, a dog, rototiller, and a tank of gas, but the truth is that it takes way more than that. I became very interested in self reliance and self sufficiency. I had a career in aerospace systems engineering and when that was over I decided to see what I could do to add good positive things to the world. Earthships seemed like a good place to start. I had built other buildings and remodeled conventional buildings, so I wasn’t coming into it cold. I took the earthship training program and helped build eight or nine of the earthships in the Star community.

I had a vision for what I wanted to do there. We would have our house, part of it would be a clean art studio and office, one building would be efficiency apartments for people to live in while they were building and attending the training program, and another structure was going to be a research and development laboratory and shop for developing technologies for off-grid homes. When Michael Reynolds pulled out of Star and took all that stuff out to The Greater World community, it was like somebody pulling the Safeway store out of a small shopping center. The entire locus of activity was relocated so I couldn’t get any of the trainees to come out to help me build my place. That killed the idea and it has been dragging on since. I was still hoping I could do something useful down there, maybe a writers retreat or simply a place to regenerate and enjoy the skyscapes. Reynolds had a problem with not doing what he said he was going to do. We had 20–25 families out there at Star and we were forming a community to work together to solve our common problems, but every time we needed Reynolds permission to do something, he stopped it cold.

Why did that happen? Why do you think Michael Reynolds would choose to do that? Such a powerful dream with so many people organizing behind it and then it comes down to the decision of one man? What motivates the centralized force to squash the potential of the decentralized community? Can you identify specific motivations for wanting to do that? Was the Star Community antagonistic to something that he was building?

His idea that an earthship creates community is absolute nonsense. Mike deserves credit for integrating a lot of technologies and ideas about housing that had never been integrated, not necessarily that he invented the ideas. Having a house that rides natural energy cycles is wonderful and it can be a very good piece of community development, but more than that is necessary. After I abandoned my dream at Star, I joined other companies that were helping people design and build off-grid homes. Some of those were earthships, some were hybrid, some were straw bale, and other alternative construction technologies.

I was the chief engineer and the systems guy. We’ve always tried to find out what customers wanted from their house. Frequently, it would be low acquisition costs and low operational maintenance costs and you can design to those requirements. Part of my role was periodic reviews of where the design was going. If the customer wanted to make changes that would drive up operational expense and acquisition costs I would gently bring everybody back to the table and ask the customer again what they really wanted to do and the design would have to be changed. My point was to avoid embarrassing anybody to get the design done right.

I have a very direct question for you that you can interpret and answer however you see fit. How do you build community?

Big question! It has to be all about relationships between people and the ecosystems in the living earth around them. When you get that part right, then that community has a chance of being successful indefinitely. I think it would be fair to say that if a community focuses on becoming sustainable, designing strategies to survive for 1000s of years, then thinking short term doesn’t cut it. If you want to be around for a long time, then you have to bring your relationship to the earth into harmony. It forms a very powerful co-creative place with nature and all of the humans that are part of the community. Sustainability is all about relationships.

How do we evaluate or measure the health of a community? How do we identify and design the potential of a community to become sustainable and remain viable through the long-now? I’m interested in your experience with the Star Community and it’s failure, but I would also like to think about this with you in terms of digital communities.

I’ve spent decades thinking about that question. What specific actions can people take that would help them be more sustainable? Wherever that member of the digital community is, they need to be part of a real community that’s functioning and thriving and surviving in the larger ecological image. Otherwise, there’s no basis for the relationships. There has to be a foundation under any virtual relationality. At least that’s my take. With the Star Community, it was the underlying ideas of expanding development that failed. The community did everything they could to become viable, but the centralized force had absolute control over the collective resources.

I’ve read over the old community code of conduct and it’s quite substantial. There is a long list of rules, so many things that are forbidden. If you were able to go back and do it again, do you believe that you would be able to design a decentralized solution that would somehow be able to combat this centralizing force and regain collective autonomy? How could it be designed differently? Would the community be able to sustain itself without Michael Reynolds?

Yes, it would have figured out the pieces that were missing, such as the economic basis. We were thinking about ways we could operate businesses that could be successful in the community. I believe that the answer lies in the reality that if you don’t own something, you can’t develop it, right? Elinor Ostrom and other people have talked about this. Part of the original premise and promise of the Star Community was that every bit of land would be owned by the people that owned memberships and there would never be a transfer of ownership. That failed promise more than anything else killed the whole thing.

I want to ask you about the roles of members collaborating in this dynamic. How would you identify the necessary roles in a community for it to thrive? There’s a lot of talk about roles in the decentralized autonomous organizations that I work with. There are technical and non-technical roles. Some focus on infrastructure while others focus on the social and cultural narratives that facilitate alignment of the collective vision. There’s an integral tethering between these roles. Building earthships is a huge coordination effort. Sustainable community building, either physical or virtual, is a huge coordination effort. Can you identify some of the key roles that you’ve encountered and identify the role you have taken on?

Sisyphus

I’ll have to think about that. Part of my experience includes interacting with co-housing communities and intentional communities. There’s a body of knowledge within intentional communities that would address some of these questions about roles and leadership and how we should deal with people that really aren’t contributing anything while riding on what everybody else is doing.

The free rider problem, right? What is an intentional community in a nutshell?

It’s a group of people who decide they want to be in community, they want to be in relationship, and they work together to organize that vision. Rather than moving to a commercially developed suburban district and having essentially a virtual community between the inhabitants, intentional communities deliberately want to live together. Living together is a big piece of it. Sometimes the intentions are religious or spiritual, sometimes it’s environmental, or many other things, but it’s always people choosing to be together and live together by their own design. It’s almost always about the social value that is generated there. Let’s return to your question about roles at our next conversation.

This series is made possible by a generous grant awarded by MolochDAO. Thank you Moloch!

It’s interesting that the two women contributors of this project are both choosing to remain anonymous, but maybe it makes sense in relation to the sensitive content we have been discussing. There’s some really nice food for thought in our first conversation about the importance of maintaining the flow of resources and how the Myanmar government is exerting control over people through these flows. You only briefly mentioned the music compilation project and there was no mention of the coordination efforts that are in place to distribute those funds through a global network of people that are cooperating based on trust. You described it as “you trust someone with your life” kind of trust, with money changing hands through many strangers to get it where it needs to be. Maybe you can tell me a little bit more about your compilation and how that evolved as an idea. I want to hear as much as you’re willing to reveal about the creative side of that, who the artists are and how you curated them and how that’s going. I’m also hoping that you can describe the network of people that are coordinating with you to distribute the funds, where it’s going and who it’s going to and what they’re using it for. You’re leveraging your creative productions to resistance value, mobilizing a creative human network to get essential supplies — like oxygen — through government firewalls.

In February, I started seeing some of my friends from Myanmar posting videos of protests, mostly in Yangon, because that’s where most of them live. I had heard about the election in December. It’s not surprising that Aung San Suu Kyi’s party would win the election, because who would vote for fascism? The military decided that the election was fraudulent, taking a cue from what Trump had done with the US election that same year, with the difference being that, as a political entity, they still controlled the military. They are the military. Aung San Suu Kyi and the political members of her party that held positions in the cabinet were arrested and taken to Insein, a really large prison complex, without any explanation as to what was going on.

There was a ton of response on the streets of Yangon and Mandalay. The protests were very lively and creative, with lots of things happening within the contemporary arts spheres. The museums and galleries were participating by hosting artistic interventions. I was perplexed, because I understood the history of Myanmar and I had a gut feeling that this wasn’t going to be a short term thing. My partner runs an experimental record label, and he was like, maybe we should make a music compilation and invite a bunch of people that we know to try to get some money to the artist-activist groups. We sat on the idea for a couple of weeks and in the meantime, a Lebanese person living in Berlin, who had also been to Myanmar, put up a compilation. We bought the compilation and supported this person. Seeing them do it made us feel like we were ready and it felt like we really needed to do it fast, because things were escalating in Myanmar really quickly.

We reached out to everyone that we could think of, the first 50 people who came into our minds, musicians of varying sorts, and said we need their contribution back in 10 days. Pretty much everyone who we asked said yes. It was a quick scramble. Some people gave us music that they had already made. Some people wanted to make new tracks. I had been collating a folder of sound files that I was pulling from videos that my friends were posting on the internet. About 10 of the tracks are made from these local sound sources that I created, so people were feeling very inspired to consider intentional ways of working with the sound clips to create compositions that reflected hope for something better or to convey the intensity of the moment. It went really fast. Within 10 days we had the comp on Bandcamp. It was an incredible effort from everyone who participated in the compilation. We made a substantial amount of money, several thousand dollars in the first weekend, and that continued to roll in for a while. A few artists reached out to apologize that they couldn’t get their tracks submitted on time and asked if there would be a second release, and we were like, a second one? Really? Okay. We can pull that off.

It’s almost impossible to get money into Myanmar directly. Most people don’t have PayPal accounts, because most people simply don’t have bank accounts and there are so many restrictions on how to transfer money. I asked my friend in Myanmar where I should send all this money and he connected me with a professor who had lived in Myanmar for a really long time and was trusted, even though they’ve never met. I contacted this professor and we had to feel each other out a little bit to figure out the trust. It’s tricky when it’s a faceless and unverifiable connection. The only person we had in common at the time was my friend.

This is a very important point. How do you create that sense of trust? You met this professor under the auspices that you are very strongly aligned on this ideological goal and you had one person in common. Time was of the essence, but it was also absolutely essential to build trust without really having the time to properly vet this person. Trust is typically organically generated through an accumulation of experiences where individuals prove themselves to be reliable. There’s a sensitivity to this scenario, a certain weight to not revealing too much, an inverse tension where you don’t want to reveal so much to remain aloof from political persecution, while also wanting to reveal as much as you can in order to solidify a trust network. Is that right, or how do you see it?

Let me explain a little bit about this person. The professor had a publicly accessible fundraiser focused on supporting the ethnic minorities in Myanmar, because they have been historically the most persecuted and they are also the most likely to fight back. Even in the most peaceful times, the ethnic minorities along the eastern border with Thailand are in constant conflict with the military for a variety of different reasons. He posted his donation spreadsheets to provide transparency, which helped, because we live in an era where anyone could concoct this entire thing.

You mean there is a possibility that someone could be weaving an elaborate scheme for malicious purposes to steal this money?

That definitely seemed possible. He published his spreadsheet of organizations that have benefitted from the donated money and there was a large number of Burmese Americans who have supported this fundraiser. I have a deep level of trust with our mutual friend, so that helped. There’s a point where one has to choose whether to release the skepticism to move forward or to hold on to the skepticism and not move forward. In that moment, there were enough indicators for me to feel like any skepticism that I had could hinder the potential of what we were trying to do. I sent a third of our profits at first and shortly after that he asked me to join him on Signal to talk more about some of the other aspects that he was dealing with. He wanted to be really upfront to say his fundraiser was legitimate, but he also had another project that directed the money to support the training and arming of people who wanted to form a people’s army.

Not exactly safe-for-work Facebook content.

Yes. There was a small group that he selected to discuss the ramifications of being involved in such an endeavor. Could we potentially be charged with war crimes? Could it actually go that far? Do we care? We tried to hash out exactly what we were doing and if we were willing to move forward with those ideas. That project continues to exist to this day. A few different groups are funded, such as the Free Burma Rangers who are very open about what they are doing, along with many smaller coalitions who remain completely anonymous.

In the Signal group, none of us were using our real names. I told the professor that I would continue sending money to support these efforts, but I couldn’t be a part of that conversation anymore. I realized that my ability to gauge safety is more loose than many people, but I have a kid and I needed to be aware of her safety and well-being. There is also a punk rock band called The Rebel Riot, that has two tracks on the second compilation that we put out. The lead singer, Kyaw Kyaw, is a very vocal and visually available person. He has a Swiss girlfriend and there is some level of protection there, or he just doesn’t care, because he’s so adamant about his position. He runs the Food Not Bombs in Yangon and another large percentage of the money generated from the compilation goes to him through his girlfriend’s Swiss bank account. They spread it out through the community of punks and anarchists. That kind of trust is different. We know each other and I understand what he’s doing and he understands why I’m helping. It’s embodied trust.

A graphic designer in that scene designed posters that he wanted to get out of Myanmar to fundraise and gather awareness. His original idea was to print the posters in Myanmar and then mail them out, but there was no fucking way that was going to work. The likelihood of them ever making it out of Myanmar — because of the scrutiny of the mail system and the chaos of COVID — was very low. We had money in the shared account attached to the compilation, so I suggested we buy the JPEGs and put them up on Bandcamp as prints. As we sold the prints they became a rolling income for the people on street level. There was another artist I was working with that wanted me to sell her performance art photography in the way she typically sold to museums, and I was like, Oh, I’m sorry, that’s not my world. It was very unlikely that I would be able to sell one of her photographs for a couple grand, but if we made them smaller she could have a rolling income, so I offered her that. The way that we’ve been working is very decentralized and rhizomatic. The art world gallery system doesn’t work for these purposes.

The gallery world is more of a closed system. It is operated by centralized authority, so to speak. There’s a gallery proprietor, an in-house curator, an in-house family of artists, and there’s a closed economic loop with a service being offered to connect the clients to the work. There are barriers of access for artists to engage with the market directly. The art may be evaluated by its merit, but it’s not like anybody can bring art to have the opportunity to connect to buyers, as opposed to a decentralized system that might be open by design.

My partner and I were having conversations about gallery representation. He has a rep for his photography. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s not, but I distrust that world. I worked in galleries for a while and I don’t believe in that world, because of how closed it is to revolutionary or radical ideas. I don’t believe that world is the place for real action to occur. It cannot connect to revolutionary radical movements. It is in direct opposition to the intention of revolutionary radical movements, generally speaking.

On all sides! On behalf of the proprietor, the gallery owner and the curator, it is built upon a model of exclusivity and scarcity. On the side of the artist, regarding accessibility and the potential to include a diverse chorus of voices, it is closed to all but the chosen few. Most importantly, the audience is barred access. Most people off the street can’t afford a painting off the wall of a white cube, fluorescent lit, Chelsea District art gallery. If you’re a normal working person living in America, where the average salary is something like $40,000 a year, one artwork might be a quarter of your annual income and is often quite more expensive than that. There’s a classist hierarchy, a hegemony built upon a perverse aristocratic tradition that enforces the rarity of the art objects. It’s wrapped up in the 20th century conversation about the sacredness of an artwork due to its uniqueness embedded within the material. It proliferates inaccessibility, an impossibly high barrier of entry, that only those that are initiated into the inner economic circle have access to.

We all know that system is not for the benefit of the artists, regardless of how financially well off they might seem to end up in their lifetime. Those works of art are basically stocks, cold calculated investments.

I want to go back to a couple of things that you brought up earlier. I had a question about the account that the money for the compilation goes into. You are serving as a custodian to an account and then you send that money to the professor and he passes it along to Kyaw Kyaw? It’s an account that you are overseeing or is this an account that numerous people have access to?

PayPal is the first step of this flow of income. I send it to Kyaw Kyaw or to the professor or to a couple of other different places. Once it’s in the account of someone in Myanmar, it’s converted back into local material currency that is used to procure whatever resources are needed at that moment.

What’s the final step? The music compilation generates money through sales, people pay you through PayPal, you transfer that to Kyaw Kyaw’s Swiss girlfriend, and how does the girlfriend extract it? She pulls out Swiss francs and they trade it at a local currency exchange in Myanmar?

It’s converted from USD to Swiss francs through PayPal and then people extract it from Burmese ATM machines. It is dispensed as Burmese kyat.

It comes out as cash and then people at street level pay for the materials that they might need for the resistance efforts there?

Yes, within their small group of people. On the other hand, when we’re talking about the money going to the professor, that gets a little more complicated. What’s happening through that route is that money is being sent to somebody who has a Thai bank account, someone in Thailand who lives on the border. There’s a couple of different apps that can be used to transfer money, kind of like PayPal but more localized and specific to those governments. The specifics are a little unclear to me, but the professor is able to get physical cash to people within 24 hours, even if he’s never met them before and without knowing exactly where they’re located.

Let me explain. The graphic designer I mentioned earlier contacted me on Signal one night. You know when you can feel emotion in a text message when a situation is really intense? He was telling me he was in really big trouble and needed help. There was some fighting with police or military officers in the street and now they were being pursued. They didn’t take the license plates off of the car that they escaped in, so he was worried that they were gonna find him. He also has kids; he’s a parent, and I could definitely feel his stress. I contacted the professor and told him I had some friends who were in really big trouble and needed help forming a safe house outside of Yangon. They needed $300–500 to procure a car, food and medical supplies, and secure some sort of shelter that nobody knew about. This is where the trust gets really deep. The graphic designer was contacting me, because I’m the only person he could think of who could potentially help him in this situation. I contacted the professor, who said he thought he could get it to my friend within 24 hours. Whatever clandestine channels that dude has got on the ground were able to deliver the physical cash to this person without a bank account.

There’s definitely some serious on-the-ground coordination efforts that were happening there! The hand to hand efforts are mind boggling to contemplate. There has to be some serious physical coordination across country lines, cultural and linguistic barriers, and military jurisdictions. It’s really incredible to hear about.

There’s a deep level of trust among young people who may or may not know each other. We’re talking about very large sums of money for Myanmar. $500 is a shit ton over there. We were previously discussing the snitch culture, the plain-clothed informant culture, that makes one double down on the need for deep trust. It’s partly a leap of faith.

Yes, we were discussing how the government is flexing control over all of the resources, such as electricity, but what about data? These people don’t have bank accounts, but they have cell phones? They’re able to reliably connect to networks that are not being shut down? What about GPS tracking, for example, or the data trail that the transaction history is creating between your PayPal account and the Swiss girlfriend’s PayPal account, or the professor’s accounts? Based on this conversation, all of these transactions seem to be happening on centralized networks that could be scrutinized by authorities. This is where the flow of resources as a meditation on currency meets the issues of privacy and anonymity. This money is really not being mobilized in a secure way, but the risk is being justified because of the time sensitivity and the desperation — these people need it now — and this is the infrastructure that exists for getting it there. Do you hear of instances of the government persecuting people based on transaction history or communications being shut down?

I will not hear from people for a week sometimes and it could be because they’re in the jungle training or because they have COVID or somebody close to them has COVID or it could be because they lack safe or reliable internet access. People rely on VPNs and use encrypted chat apps like Signal or Telegram for all of their communication.

What you’re describing seems like a perfect use case for a radical implementation of cryptocurrency. Anyone can set up a crypto wallet without obligatory KYC verification. KYC means know your customer and it’s the standard identity verification that you have to go through to set up a bank account or a PayPal account. You could bypass the centralized banks to send and receive funds across borders and its processed on decentralized infrastructure. Now, crypto is not completely decentralized or non-custodial, nor is it completely free of regulation and this is a rapidly unfolding global conversation. How would someone on street level in Myanmar turn crypto into food, medical supplies, or local services? It’s still necessary to interface with centralized infrastructure, but maybe this is where that amazing meat-space human peer-to-peer network comes in.

This still sounds like a weird closed system that assumes a certain level of initiation into nested closed systems. I can’t make the conceptual bridge between cryptocurrency and oxygen tanks. I know how difficult it is to find a place in Myanmar where you can use an ATM or VISA card to buy breakfast. It just doesn’t work that way. It’s all cash because nobody has bank accounts. It’s a person to person flow of paper and coin.

I first heard about cryptocurrency in 2011. There was a network called the Silk Road, where people were buying and selling drugs online using Bitcoin. Any substance from anywhere in the world could be purchased while maintaining the complete anonymity of the participants. I never used the service myself, but I remember thinking it was so profound that virtual currency was facilitating the exchange of physical goods. I also thought it was punk as fuck ideologically, even if it remain somehow disgustingly capitalist. These days cryptocurrency ATMs for Bitcoin and Ethereum are becoming more and more prevalent. These might be considered weak implementations in the context of the struggles of people in Myanmar, but it feels important to continue to contemplate this tethering of our virtual and physical — even if illicit — economies. I’m continuously intrigued with how legacy systems of surveillance and control are evaded by encrypted networks of radical human coordination. Where’s the Silk Road of COVID vaccinations and oxygen tanks?

This series is made possible by a generous grant awarded by MolochDAO. Thank you Moloch!

Perhaps you want to talk about the content of your thesis. You said you’re in the last 1000 words of the document and that you’re in the process of connecting a few difficult points. I would also love to hear you provide an overview of your orchestration of the indigenous University and to talk a bit about your process with your performances and your exhibitions, to your artistic practice, and how they create a bridge between the modern art world and the local indigenous communities. We might emphasize the coordination of these groups of people and the curation of exhibitions as a coordination effort between many different kinds of people. I remember that one of your exhibitions concerns the coca plant, which has a notorious reputation as a controlled narcotic substance while also being a sacred plant for indigenous people. Maybe this would tie in to a conversation about resource flows and resource management.

I think both directions can meet at some point and this will be a good way to start the conversation, with the articulation and coordination of the relationship with the Nasa Indigenous Communities that we’ve been working with. Let’s start straight away with that matrix.

I’ll follow your lead.

Perfect. It’s very important to highlight that the possibility to work with the Nasa indigenous communities — which has opened a constellation of work with the Yanakuna, with the Kokonuko, with the Misak communities, and with the Nasa communities in the region of Cauca in the southwestern area of Colombia — that the possibility was opened through a relationship based on trust and friendship. That’s a very important point. This provided the solid ground to coordinate the very difficult and complex constant translations that became the core project. The initial conversation was with Luis Yunda, a member of the Nasa indigenous community who has become one of my best friends. I’m in France and he’s in the rural areas of Colombia, but we talk every two or three days. That’s something very important to highlight for me.

The initial conversation that I had with Luis was through a ceremony of harmonization; the traditional doctors of the Nasa community call it a ritual for cleansing the body. This was in 2010 and at that moment I had been experiencing health complications. My body and my feeling of being in the world was in a very chaotic state. My partner at the time was working on a thesis on the relationship between her Western citizenship and her roots in indigenous cosmogony. She connected me with Luis and we went to the mountains, to one of the spaces that the Indigenous university had at the time, and that night I experienced a very resonant system of perception of the world that I had been contemplating through my installation practice and sculpture and from my classes on contemporary art practice at the universities. It was the first time that I felt that this constellation of rethinking our relationship with space and our relationship with objects was understood by someone that had a completely different code and references for understanding space. He was talking to me like one of my professors of installation art; he was making connections that resonated with very complex spatial theories, like Rosalind Krauss with her text The Sculpture in the Expanded Field. At the time I was obsessed with that text.

Ohhh, me too! The notion of the expanded field really expanded my mind. That essay was very influential for me as well.