The Open Protocol Research Group is Ven Gist, MacksWolf and Exeunt. We are a research initiative of Portland’s Ethereal Forest DAO, and currently conducting interviews in the Portland region to gain insight on the informal structures that animate our present - and the promise they hold for our future.
Last year, Portland’s crypto localist initiative Ethereal Forest - which had already been concerned with intersections of web3 and urban resilience strategies - went a step further in its research practice to establish the Open Protocol Research Group. This group aimed to explore a formal isomorphism between open-source web protocols and the informal, culturally inflected, and freely propagated knowledge sets and practices that seem to animate a large dimension of urban life.
Open source social protocols aren’t necessarily compelling in themselves - handwashing as a practice, for example, is powerful but (for us at least) ultimately banal. The sort of open protocols we’re concerned with have cultural accompaniment, emergent practices and evolving norms meant to preserve a twin commitment to divergent exploration and material grounding. In short, open protocols are social and technical protocols woven together into a compound cultural protocol of improvisational, empirical imagination.
Open protocols gain their energy from a "prefigurative circle" - reminiscent of Chris Kelty’s “recursive publics” - wherein empirical imagination leads to technical improvisation, which further encourages empirical imagination. To the extent that these investigations depart from normative boundaries (Overton windows), they do so only to assert room for more empiricism, and never to argue for complete or replacement "values."
Thought in this way, the practical inspiration of an Eric Raymond, who discovered open source "values" by way of an empirical imagination ("what works"), can find mutual legibility with the psychonauts (Terence McKenna, Peter J.Carroll) whose open chemical and psychic experiments are refined only to permit more creativity… so as not to be stuck. The plain injunction to empiricism endorses hardware hackers, musicians, permaculturalists the same - those who have abandoned conversations about values to refine protocols of open experimentation that foreground material wisdom over ideals. Digital, material, chemical or psychic, open protocols are flywheels of open-ended empirically grounded practice.
If participation in these open protocols often has a tribal character and ontological significance - shared discovery and belief in the ability to mutually constitute new material realities - that tribal knowledge often has to do with the immensely fragile nature of the “open” side of the equation. Cooptation and capture is a constant threat to open protocols - and as participants seem innately aware, they must be nursed and protected. Where attitudes of enclosure are ubiquitous, this takes creativity and even audacity.
Of particular interest (and relevance to the web3 analogy) is a strategy of propagation and self-preservation that open protocols nearly universally adopt - the use of an array of traditional institutional forms to purposes other than they were intended. Open protocols are secured and supported by businesses that actively sabotage their own opportunities for profit, by nonprofits that do not seek funders, sector dominance or brand recognition, by small government offices that quietly act in practical accordance with the needs of a community in defiance of state directives. They hijack instruments of enclosure and repurpose them to alternative ends. We call these forms - borrowing from the work of Primavera di Filippi and Jessy Kate Schingler - extitutions in order to emphasize their subjugation of traditional institutional objectives to the ownerless, stateless, extitutional form of the open protocol. (1)
To the extent that we include “socio-technics” in our definition of empirical exercises, extitutions are the some of most profound vectors of imaginative desire for open protocols.(2) They exist on the front lines, finding quiet ways to violate the prohibitions that make up the overton window of social and extrasocial organization. These prohibitions are weak or indirect in nature, enforced by way of standards of organizational legibility that make too much experimentation unviable or even illegal.
The stakes of legibility are ultimately whether an organization or institution can sustain and reproduce itself over time; the possibility space is always determined by a curve of resource dependency. Because of this, extitutions often wear institutional masks, forever negotiating the demands of standardization with the desire for experimentation. Some succeed in this balance; some become captured, some simply fail (as we’ll see in later bulletins, failure from an institutional perspective is often an effective strategy of success for extitutions as they support).
For the Open Protocol Research Group, this is where the usefulness of the web3 analogy really comes in. The story of web3 - colored as it may be by scams and ponzis, by extractive actors and zero sum games - is nonetheless the story of self-constituted resource environments. It is the story of a discovery of mutual legibility forged outside of the compulsions of dominant bodies, outside of the enforced legibility of coercive institutions. It is the story of formalization without standardization.
The conviction of the Open Protocol Research Group is that the open protocols that thrive in urban spaces have much to gain from the self-constituted resource environments of web3, strategies of mutually determined formalization that largely bypass or ignore the standards of dominant, coerciviely grounded institutions. More importantly, though, the web3 space has a great deal to learn from the open protocols themselves, hybrid forms that have found strategies for survival and propagation of commons-oriented actions within standardized forms (or at least forms that have appeared standardized at face). The collision of these two strategies in a broadly viable extitutional mirror of our current society is, for us, inevitable. (3)
In our next posts, we hope to delve further into the two creative modes, using examples from our initial field research to distinguish social production (IRL) from peer production (web), as well as reflecting on our own impulses in building the network enterprises (or extitutions) in which we ourselves work. In the meantime, check out a glimpse of our living glossary, which defines the key concepts that currently frame our research.
Notes
(1) While this usage of the term departs somewhat from the foundational texts of extitutional theory, we think (after much debate) that it maintains the spirit of the project: extitutions are organizations where the institutional dynamics and determinants are actively subjugated (within practical constraints) to extitutional concerns.
(2) Benjamin Life proposed this as an important dimension of the term, and we heartily agree. In fact, the inclusion of technologies of self-governance and social coordination in the dominant sense of “technology” - a battle fought by Ursula LeGuin, Arturo Escobar, the Black Panthers, and many of the counterculture movements of the 1970’s - has been near and dear to our crew from the start.
(3) At the time of writing, Rithikha Rajamohan’s wonderful Dispatches From Cascadia had just been published, a work of speculative fiction about protocolized governance in Cascadia.