High Agency
A characteristic of protocol undergrounds and a core value of extitutional life: the mutual assumption that participants actively shape situations, infrastructures, and outcomes, rather than delegating basic material safety and vigilance to third parties. In underground settings, agency circulates rather than concentrates, taking the form of empowered improvisation, assumed or tacit responsibility, and the capacity to act without delegated authority.
High agency is related to the paradox of the “safe space”: underground, unadministered events are simultaneously more “dangerous” (no institutional guarantees, no lucrative litigation threat against hosts) and more practically safe, because participants take on a heightened sense of responsibility that creates distributed vigilance. Those who seek to delegate safety to a third party “are better off at expensive and highly insured establishments.” (— Sketches Toward a Theory of the Protocol Underground)
High agency is not merely individual self-determination but a mutual assumption — a shared expectation that generates a different kind of social atmosphere, one in which passive consumption is replaced by active participation, and in which the unexpected is treated as invitation rather than threat. Underground cultures — from free parties to S&M scenes to direct action networks — are advanced schools of high agency living.
One of the key hazards of scaling underground practices is the erosion of high-agency culture: institutional behavioral biases, passive consumption dynamics, and cults of personality all tend to withdraw agency from participants and concentrate it in administrators, figureheads, or platforms. Ethereum’s non-coercive infrastructure is proposed as a scaling mechanism for high-agency culture — forkable, permissionless, and structurally hostile to the monopolization of agency.