Imaginal Sovereignty
A practice of selfhood and reality-creation that transgresses the administrative taboo on constructing novel relations with “entities at the edge” — the beings and forces that exist at the threshold of institutional legibility, in the space where art and statecraft collide. Throughout history, the “magical persona” has embodied this: constructing games of relation beyond the Overton Window, inhabiting an open-ended terrain where the real is constituted rather than merely administered.
The concept arises from the observation that states are double-edged: by offloading cognitive function into administrative dependency (memory and implied violence), civil subjects ostensibly gain space for exotic relations. But the taboo on reality-creation restricts those relations to within the state’s “regime of coherence.” Those who pursue exotic relations with entities at the edge — occultists, artists, psychonauts, animists — compromise their access to the cognitive and material benefits of civil subjecthood. The choice has generally been: cooptation (relegation to the disciplined category of art), insanity, or death.
Ethereum is proposed as a potential “regime of imaginal sovereignty” — an open State with all the hardness and cognitive-offload benefits of the administrative state, but with infrastructure that facilitates creative legibility on the threshold of the real. Rather than a closed regime of coherence, Ethereum’s permissionless substrate invites the general population into the burden and adventure of active participation in the pluriverse. Art and statecraft become democratized, unenclosed.