Formalization Without Standardization
A design principle for scaling underground values without destroying them — achieving sufficient organizational coherence and memetic circulation without imposing the hegemonic claim, centralized logic, or foundational violence that characterizes “standardization” in the institutional sense. The phrase captures the core challenge: how do you make practices repeatable, shareable, and durable, while preserving their intrinsic openness, pluralism, and context-sensitivity?
This principle is the central aspiration of the Open Protocol Research Group’s project. It distinguishes between:
- Formalization: the achievement of shared standards for mutual coherence — protocols, practices, and vocabularies sufficient for coordination without requiring ideological uniformity or institutional authority.
- Standardization: the hegemonic claim that one form, one protocol, one interpretation is correct or universal — which requires enforcing and policing deviation, leading inevitably to the dampening of aesthetic autonomy and high agency.
Protocols can be formalized (recorded, circulated, iterated, given names and structures) without being standardized (made into the only acceptable form, backed by institutional authority). The S&M scene’s handbooks are an example: SM 101 formalizes safety protocols without standardizing what S&M should look, feel, or mean. The FOSS movement formalizes sharing norms without standardizing what software should do.
In the Ethereum context, smart contracts, DAOs, and token protocols are proposed as tools for formalization without standardization — infrastructure that enables coordination while remaining agnostic about the content of that coordination.