2026 Priorities
This year The Open Machine looks to expand further outside the at times overly technical narratives that have dominated emerging technologies toward a broader coalition united by shared underlying principles: engaging immanence by way of distributed agency, recursive openness, consent-forward coordination, aesthetic self-organization, and processual emergence.
Media grounds the historical and conceptual case, tracing open protocols as a transhistorical movement while collecting diverse voices into anthologies of emerging theory. Events stage encounters between practitioners and technologists across domains—gatherings, salons, film screenings, and traveling installations that bring the protocol underground into tactile form. Research deepens our ethnographic understanding of underground forms, studies emerging and speculative organizational and coordination patterns, and explores how technologies of control might be inverted into technologies of immanence. New digital commons efforts, reading rooms, repositories, and public forums seed the shared infrastructure through which open protocols might circulate and compound autonomously.
Media
Our media is how ideas travel, capturing and presenting our research findings in an engaging, often immersive experience. The media we produce takes many forms from zines and books to posters and interactive digital experiences, always imbued with a high level of design and creativity to generate visceral, engaging translations of the deep concepts that are uncovered.
A History of the Open Protocol Movement — Zine tracing historical predecessors to open source software, situating FOSS, cryptography, and AI within a transhistorical lineage of open protocols extending to proto-medieval information networks.
A Brief History of the Capture and Release of the Internet — Zine mapping the arc from the internet’s founding conditions through enclosure by power and markets, toward possible futures beyond the decentralization/recentralization cycle.
An Anthology of Extitutional Theory and Practice — Collected essays from thinkers working in extitutional space, laying out the case for extitutional dynamics and the new organizational forms they make possible.
Extitutions Rise — Poster visualizing extitutional emergence: conditions of production, differentiation from institutions, and surface manifestations across domains.
Open Protocols Infographic — Visual taxonomy mapping family resemblances, genealogies, and convergence points across technological, social, and cultural open protocols.
Events
Open Machine plays an interstitial role in the emerging technology space, organizing discourse and cultural production around provocative hybrids (e.g., “Ethereum Localism”). We do so in order to build broad coalitions that reflect the diverse embodiments of immanent social strategies. We pay special attention to discourse and cultural schelling points that extend across traditional domains, e.g. builder & thinker, luddite & accelerationist, analogue & digital, high technology & low technology.
Open Protocols Convene — Gathering bringing together builders of technological and social protocols for cross-pollination between practitioners who may not yet recognize their shared project.
Open Machine Mindfuck Movie Club (Ommmc) — Ongoing screening and discussion series investigating affective and cognitive protocols as depicted in film—technologies of control and compliance versus technologies of freedom and empirical openness.
Open Machine Popup Shoppe — Mobile media installation at major conferences: readings, salons, and distribution of publications. The protocol underground made tactile.
Data Art Exhibition — Curated art installation that renders real data of complex systems as immersive, spatial experience. Complex data sets such as ecological, semiotic, or socio-economic.
Cross-Pollinating Discussion Series - Monthly online “Collision” event involving a discussion between contributors to remote fields that nonetheless share the structural and ethical content of immanent technology.
Research
To the end of tracing out the lineage and current frontiers of immanent social organization, Open Machine applies philosophical foundations to cultural history in order to bring insight and ethical clarity to the emerging technology space. We identify diverse parties, including individuals and collective and networked entities, and show how they exert agency and display intelligence in contexts that surpass institutional legibility. Whether it’s in the distributed yet concerted intelligence of cultural undergrounds, the avant garde financial assemblages of DAOs, the anonymous intentionality of LLMs, or the crowd-consciousness of cultural archetypes and memes, sensitivity to these actors yields insights about emerging technologies and the intelligence they harness that will cause sea change in the coming years.
Research Topics
Diverse Intelligence Lens
An extension of ethnographic inquiry inspired by the the Templeton Foundation’s Diverse Intelligence program. Takes analytical frames from new currents in biology to study collective and distributed forms of cognition across organisms and systems, with special attention to the latent spaces they navigate and the coordination patterns they sustain.
Technedelics: Interfaces as Exploratory Media
The use of AR, VR, game engines, and hybrid interfaces as perceptual instruments for exploring new environments and generating new subjectivites, inspired by Michael Levin’s work on “latent spaces” and Felix Guattari’s “ethico-aesthetic paradigm.”
Imaginal & Inversional Technology Studies
An analytic–speculative practice that reimagines existing technologies from within, asking what alternative forms of coordination and agency are already latent inside dominant systems. For example: what would an immanent inversion of Facebook or Palantir look like?
Immanent Pairings & Productive Adjacencies
The exploratory side that more often than not occasions media and events involves identifying potential pairings of immanent technological forms into new discourse communities that can explore the potential for reciprocity and discovery, while giving definition to the broader program of immanent technology itself. The most resonant past example of this is “Ethereum Localism”, which took two social paradigms aligned with the immanent technology thesis and asked questions about how they could be woven together to generate a new space of inquiry. (See the Ethereum Localism book, published by Open Machine in collaboration with Gitcoin and Allo Capital).
Research Frameworks
To the end of maximum applicability of research assets and concepts, we construct usable Frameworks that can be applied to diverse organizations or movements.
Underground Meta-Protocol Scaffold Scores a system on four dimensions (agency, aesthetics, consent, process) to assess whether it can sustain open experimentation without collapsing into enclosure or coercion.
Open vs Control Technology Diagnostic Classifies technologies along two axes—recursion (can users modify the rules?) and agency (does it expand or compress choices?)—to determine whether they liberate or constrain.
Latent Problem Spaces Map Identifies multiscale actors in an organization or network and asks what “space” an actor is actually optimizing in (economic, affective, somatic, etc.) to explain behaviors that look irrational or misaligned when viewed through a narrow lens. Understanding the nature or “umwelt” of actors within a structure then creates the occasion for organic alignment.