Ethereum Localism
A strategy of reciprocal mimesis between open, protocol-based cultures of the internet and the open pragmatist cultures of cities and bioregions. It holds that the structural resonances between the open-source protocols of web3 and the informal, ever-disowned protocols of the urban underworld are not a passive analogy for academic interest but an invitation to encounter — to change and be changed.
Ethereum localism identifies cities, bioregions, and neighborhood-scale production as natural allies and mirrors of the Ethereum project. Both are defined not by what they are but by what they can do; both judge structures against the pragmatism of the terrain; both share an attitude of immediacy, pirate empiricism, and dread of coercive authority. The renegade technologists of city makerspaces, the musicians gathering weekly at pizza shops, the permaculturists — these are protocol undergroundists practicing adequate technology under different names.
The greatest gifts the Ethereum community can offer to the open protocol underground are: low overhead organizations, scale-agnostic organizational models, “revenue evil” hacks, and a structural framework for a protocolized coup of a proprietary knowledge-sector. Ethereum localism is not about offering tokenized mirrors of existing infrastructure or platforms that would solve everything with network effects — it is about a mutual, embedded culture of adequate technology versus extractive technology.
Ethereum localism rejects the binary of “low tech” and “high tech” in favor of adequate technology versus anti-technology (planned obsolescence, extraction, passive consumption). It situates blockchain within a long history of city-as-anticapture-device: too complex to control, too many corridors of guerrilla resistance and flight.