Protocol Underground
Loose, informal communities tethered together only by Open Protocols, in which extitutional dynamics are dominant and institutional dynamics are actively avoided. Protocol undergrounds emerge wherever aesthetic practices face legal prohibition or cultural marginalization — because they cannot build storefronts or centralized academies, they protocolize, becoming more pluralistic and therefore more resistant to institutional capture.
Historical examples include: the California LSD scene of the 1970s (whose pricing ethics and spiritual anarchism resisted cartel capture); the UK Free Party Movement (whose logistics of obscure, illegal locations repelled passive consumerism and cultivated high agency participants); the Bay Area S&M scene (which developed elaborate consent protocols under legal persecution); and the Hong Kong 2019 direct action networks (whose tactical protocols cross-contaminated across continents).
Protocol undergrounds share three rough structural characteristics: (1) high agency — participants actively shape outcomes rather than delegating to administrators; (2) participatory aesthetics — co-creation of the environment itself, rejecting passive consumption; (3) ontological creativity — the discovery and construction of novel agents and forces of presence through aesthetic-material practice. Their illegibility to institutions is a feature, not a failure.
The concept informs a vision of Ethereum as infrastructure capable of “overgrounding” the underground — formalizing these values without standardizing them.