A doctor and a teenager are waiting on a subway platform, late on a very hot evening. The subway is majorly delayed, and, given the combination between unusual weather and the extra time, they strike a conversation. Minutes turn into an hour. As the conversation deepens, the doctor is surprised: the teenager’s problems, admitted in an unguarded moment, map perfectly onto her own. A sense of feeling trapped, a burden of guilt, an unfulfilled responsibility: they aren’t so different; in fact, they are very much the same. When the doctor’s train arrives, they laugh, even hug, and part ways with a new perspective.
But what if they didn’t part ways? What if they saw in their shared problems an opportunity for collusion, even conspiracy? What if they left the platform, went down to the diner for a cup of coffee instead, got to work? After all, the doctor has money, resources, a car; the teenager knows people, has access to a network far removed from the doctor’s grasp. What if their relationship went beyond the symbolic world of empathy and comparison, the analogous relation? What if they used the unexpected sameness as a launchpad to enter into a material alliance, a place where they can engage and exploit the generative difference that the analogy has occasioned?
—
It’s late July, and we are taking an informal tour around North Portland’s Green Anchors, one of us for the first time. Previously a naval shipyard, Green Anchors is now a multifaceted open air industrial park for.. people that know how to do shit. Outrageous, stories-tall welded steel sculptures, some half finished, scatter the property; a team of carpenters are actively working on small portable homes on wheels that cleverly circumvent city regulations to aid the housing crisis. A guy in a shipping container-turned-workspace runs a CNC plasma cutter, bought cheap and repaired using instructions from a manual he had to translate from Japanese.
On the hill overlooking the water are a dozen hives of bees in what look like beach coolers; they sit on top of somewhat loose soil and mulch piled a clear foot over the former ground, shipyard soil toxic with PCBs and heavy metals that is being slowly rehabilitated by the seasons. Herbs dry nearby in a makeshift shed. Back toward the welding shop, a well-maintained greenhouse full of herbs and vegetables. When we were here in the dead of winter, the sheet plastic walls protected a barely surviving banana tree - now it’s thriving.
As we leave the property, Josh points across the railroad tracks: “Dude, these are just more sheds where people build shit. This is where we come when things shut down. The whole area is just makers.”
As we crossed the St. John’s bridge and drove back to our neck of the woods in SE Portland, we talked about all the ways that the efforts we saw embodied web3 values. The land rehabilitation had a cybernetic edge, using integrated complexity to restore poisoned soil. The same land hosts a permaculture garden, making use of principles of decentralization and security through redundancy on multiple scales. The rolling homes were slightly altered versions of a model used by many organizations, tweaked in each strategic iteration; the product of their labor embodied the frank generosity of open protocols and the sensibility that sees mutual aid as a feature of sovereignty. In the very DIY ethic of the area is a resonance with the can-do, tweak until you make it, extra-institutional ethos of the hacker. Squares use prefab furniture and google chrome apps: just build it yourself.
We smoked a little bit of weed and spent the evening elaborating romantically on the shared ethos, the analogy - we’re not so different, you and I…
—
If the strange sociopolitical orientation of the crypto space maps onto these other spaces so well, it’s because the hacker and the programmer are the ultimate empiricists - they do what works. When Eric Raymond named the bazaar, it wasn’t a facet of ideology, but a point of fact of the developer space: bugs are best found by an iterating public, this is what worked.
Being the uncompromised dream of these materialists, these realists, web3 shouldn’t be surprised to find common cause with those whose day to day strategies are animated by the mechanical or material realities of their work, and the no bullshit attitude that comes natural when you do that work. In every large city is a diverse tribe of these experimentalists.
We’ve reflected; we’ve found common cause. The sameness is great, it’s cute. But it’s immaterial to the issue at hand. Sameness is just the prologue to difference. Analogy is just the prologue to the power of alliance. All of this work is nothing if it doesn’t enter into synergy with these radically different efforts, efforts that are nonetheless just the same in their realism, their experimentalism. The city is where we find the million strategies and generative contingencies of this coalition of realists. It’s where ethos becomes action.
Join us for three days this October as we discuss the urban surround; the different types of groups that animate it, the common cause we share with them, and the many possibilities for alliance that they hold. In the panorama of decentralization analogies is an opportunity for conspiracy. This Friday the 13th, the city is for realists.
Interested in attending? Sign up here!
Read more about the gathering here...