Egregore
A collective psychic or agential entity generated by the focused attention, shared belief, or coordinated activity of a group — an emergent “group mind” that takes on a semi-autonomous existence and exerts influence on the collective that generated it. The term comes from occult and magical traditions but is treated here as a candidate for empirical investigation under the posthuman and flat-ontological framework.
In the context of Ethereum and web3, the egregore becomes relevant as one of the “exotic entities” that a posthuman, ontologically agnostic infrastructure could host and formalize. “If DMT, LSD and the arts are great stages to conceive and experiment with these creatures, Ethereum is the stage where they will be, if at all possible, realized in their productivity as networked agents.” (— ETHEREUM IS POSTHUMAN) The egregore represents the speculative edge of what counts as an agent in a truly open economic system.
Cultural undergrounds are described as generators of scene egregores — collective subjectivities, “crowd consciousnesses, agential vibes and colors out of space” — whose existence is both empirically available (you can feel them at certain parties or events) and dismissed by institutional reality regimes. The underground’s “ontological creativity” consists partly in its willingness to recognize and work with these agential formations.
The “self-transforming machine elves” (McKenna) of open protocol circulation are an adjacent concept — autonomous agents that emerge from the mantic proliferation of open protocols through diverse social contexts, forging new paths through the real.