Substrate
A permissionless, spontaneous, and shifting assemblage of identity affiliation that functions as a locus of reciprocity — the informal social field that animates, sustains, and checks organizational life. Substrates are memetic communities that hold informal protocols of mutual aid; they are the “deterritorialized” counterpart to any control organization; they are social networks composed entirely of soft bonds (memes, lore, storytelling) and arrows of indeterminacy that subsume those bonds.
Crucially, substrates have no walls and continuously build the ground they stand on. They live on edges, identifying any limit as a synthesis, an opportunity of anticapture, and a way to shed dead skin. Unlike organizations, which have selective external operations, a substrate is paved over with exteriority — every bit of its inside is contact. The scientific definition holds: the surface or material on or from which an organism lives, grows, or obtains its nourishment.
Substrates are inherently resistant to Control: the closer an organization’s relationship with a substrate — and the more it becomes aware of and optimizes around this relationship — the more resistant it is to the control function, the mystification of power as internal rather than relational. DAOs occupy a special position in this landscape: because of their fealty to their underlying substrate communities (open-source engineers, degens, radicals), they are structurally anathema to Control. “The DAO form represents, sooner or later, the death of the ban.” (— FRIENDS of the OUTSIDE)
Genre communities (Lovecraftian horror, indie music scenes) and open-source ecosystems are given as examples of substrates in operation. The substrate is Thomas Pynchon’s “We-system” — the antidote to the They-system of power.