“So, in the attributes with which I’m not familiar, whose names I can’t even say, since there’s an infinity of them, there are other manners of being. There, there is the whole domain of a broad Spinozist science fiction, of what’s happening in the other attributes that we do not know.” -Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: The Velocities of Thought, December 2, 1980
Open protocols, we whispered. The key is open protocols. Software stacks, bike repair zines, intercropping strategies. Microsolidarity protocols, BDSM rope tying methods; how to throw a rave, how to build a backyard sauna, how to make a vegan peach pie. Protocolize everything.
2023 was the year of protocols, and while Ethereum Foundation’s successful Summer of Protocols project was carrying along, our scene [1] had convergently developed our own interest in a distinct form we called Open Protocols. These protocols were not primarily web-based, though their recognition as a political-economic-epistemic force was certainly occasioned by the free software movement and its descendants. What they staged in their retroactive lineage (going back to the early middle ages and beyond) was a binary, an interpretation of technological affordances under the simple rubric of the underground: Is this a technology of freedom, or a technology of control?
Protocols
By definition, protocols generally share the inherent qualities of being both effective and memetic. They are not, however, immune to context, and the degree and nature of their memeticism is dependent on the web of incentives in which they are situated. This is where the affordances of the open v. control protocols come in.
Institutional protocols compress complex behavior into optimal forms for circulation, but they do this from a top down source. Formally, they miss out on the modularity, fracture, and mischievous creativity of the publics. [2] More crucially, though, they carry ontological baggage of their institution, the often stale and unmoving regime of knowledge which justifies an institution’s existence (and thus becomes a site of unquestioned obedience). Institutional regimes have little capacity for what Chris Kelty once called “recursion,” the ability of a coordinated group to reconstitute the ground it stands on. [3]
For open protocols, this reconstitution is a relentless and perpetual process. They operate with a total lack of fealty to their progenitors, forever remaining memetically open before the surround. Like McKenna’s self-transforming machine elves, they forge splintering paths through the many adventures of the social, operating with a queer and autonomous charisma as they enact new scenarios to extend themselves. The contingencies of memetic circulation give birth to wild new species of application, and the whole time no one is in control. They are creatures of chance, necessity, and ferocious empirical will.
To the latter point, and contrary to their institutional counterparts, open protocols are ontologically open: templates are applied with an empirical inspiration that asks What can be done? What can a system do? (rather than the infantile institutional mantra of “how will this keep operations stable, how will this keep me from getting in trouble?”). These free questions have often led to weird outcomes: in the undergrounds where open protocols reign are known to host conspicuous displays of agency from inanimate systems, autonomous clouds of affect with no clear source; synchronicities have been witnessed, apparent displays of telepathy, the occasional burst of retrocausality. This is what liberty feels like.
Undergrounds
The realm of the free publics is a messy place, and not all freely circulated protocols, in their prolific and renegade self-reproduction, are ethical or desirable. The question arose, how could there be scaffolding that would keep them open, constructed under free conditions and uniformly directed to the physical autonomy and cognitive freedom of their carriers? The machine elves were way ahead of us: in their anonymous creativity we found a meta-protocol, a set of operational values that safekept the empirical openness and harmony of the OPs.
In the past we’ve described open protocols as not only memetically and ontologically open, but culturally inflected. With more understanding, we can now say that they are embedded within a set of tactics, a code or meta-protocol for staving off capture, and that meta-protocol itself acts as minimum scaffolding for a widespread and heterogenous culture that can be simply called the underground (or, if you like, the protocol underground).
What is this meta-protocol, this attractor-state of agential conditions that ensures OPs might go about their business of self-replication in peace and protection? We see four key conditions:
High Agency: Participants in underground protocols actively shape situations, infrastructures, and outcomes; agency circulates rather than concentrates, in the form of empowered improvisation, assumed or tacit responsibility, and the capacity to act without delegated authority.
Open aesthetics: Aesthetic coherence is dynamic, arising and changing with the gestalt of the network. Subjection to an aesthetic condition is forsaken for a challenge to participate and codetermine aesthetic reality.
Consent Forward: Coordination is grounded in explicit, situated agreements that are continuously renegotiated. Boundaries, roles, and intensities remain legible to participants, enabling trust, experimentation, and mutual care under conditions of risk, instability or even danger.
Process Oriented: Attention is directed toward unfolding, qualitative dynamics rather than quantitative, static outcomes. This means emphasis on intensive experience or “qualia” - affect, epiphany, synchronicity, the nondual, and most importantly the experience of dissolution into larger subjectivities that may be determined by social, material, technological dynamics or (more likely) all of the above.
Archives
Our scene began work to catalog these self-transforming machine elves (or rather, protocolize a catalog) into structures that would amplify rather than diminish their capacities: the working premise was a modular, open access swarm of markdown files on github bundled together by a YAML standard. The infinite fragmentation and repurposing of OPs could be roughly reflected in open access versioning and forking of a cloud of repositories. We couldn’t quite realize that, all the while, data centers across the world were smashing trillions of tokens together in a monstrous apparatus of knowledge circulation the likes of which the world had never seen. [4]
The LLMs presented problems, being inherently centralized in their genesis and extractive in their aims. But with the genie out of the bottle, reproductions flourished, sans corporate surveillance or shameless commons profiteering, and in algorithms with orders of magnitude greater energy efficiency. Provably private, locally hosted, models now had the potential for community ownership, for training or fine tuning in local lore or dead languages or process metaphysics. They had mutated into values-first embodiments that would impress the most strict cosmolocalist.
These forms called into question the whole premise of a wiki, injecting an entire library of knowledge with self-reflexivity, plasticity and modularity, sheer compute aimed at the rapid generalization and cross-purposing of thousands of years of knowledge. Just as had happened previously in the rise of cybernetics and cryptography before it, the institutions of enclosure and control had stumbled into the production of a genuinely subversive technology. Open protocols had become algorithmic and autonomous.
So we had been relieved of our labors. Or almost - the key tasks remained of onboarding publics to community owned models and advocating for the introduction of underrepresented knowledge into training sets (though projects aimed at these issues were quick to sprout up). But the greater task would become considering the implications and second order effects of open protocols in an epoch when the problem of circulation and access is largely solved. One thing would be clear: when knowledge receives an upgrade in it’s ability to circulate freely and without institutional intermediation, the weirdness meter tends to go up to ten.
Terra Incognita
To some extent, the premise of an open protocol library in the first place was a performative act; that is, it’s value was less in conveying these practical knowledge sets (the majority of which could be found on wikihows or youtube videos) than in cultivating through curation what Guattari called transversality: the linking of elements of different domains or conceptual genres in order to produce a new domain. What does it mean to place a cargo bike design side by side with a detailed manual for tantric sex techniques? What does it suggest?
The trivial accessibility of a wide range of practical knowledge sets and the empowerment of those knowledge sets with the capacity for recombination and reapplication already partially answers the question: Autonomy, the self-sovereignty and freedom to explore a body’s modes of existence and capacities for persistence. And yet these systems can only answer questions they are asked; they can only afford the publics degrees of freedom in spaces that they know are navigable.
What do we mean by spaces here? Let’s turn to Michael Levin, whose lab work in cancer research probably has more to say about the future of technology than all the tech billionaires a presidential inauguration could fit put together:
[An] important invariant for comparing diverse intelligences is that they are all solving problems, in some space. It is proposed that the traditional problem-solving behavior we see in standard animals in 3D space is just a variant of evolutionarily more ancient capacity to solve problems in metabolic, physiological, transcriptional, and morphogenetic spaces (as one possible sequential timeline along which evolution pivoted some of the same strategies to solve problems in new spaces).
Intelligence and agency operate in a diverse set of “problem spaces” - spaces that are physically real, but exist in aspects of reality occluded by normative expectations of cognition or volition. Levin often decries the institutional human chauvinism that leads to a cruel and empirically invalid mind-blindness, limiting our sense of just how accompanied we are (both within ourselves and in distant peripheries) by thinking creatures. Internal elaboration of some doctrine or ideology get along fine, but when one is confronting the limits of knowledge, it becomes clear how institutional enclosure depends on an epistemic captivity, a blindness to whole territories of empirical possibility.
To go just one step further, consider this synopsis of the lost or never-written final novel of Philip K Dick:
The novel dealt with one Ed Firmley, a composer of scores for B-movie grade sci-fi films, and a race of alien humanoids that had evolved without the development of sound as a basis of communication. The shamans of this alien race would on occasion have visions of Earth and its many sounds. Due to their unique evolution without sound the holy men were incapable of describing these experiences to the rest of their race. They just knew that the place they saw was their heaven. Meanwhile their race was modeled around sight and light, encompassing much more of the electromagnetic spectrum than the limited human vision. In fact, from their perspective, humans were capable of sight but nearly blind, such as a mole appears to a human. Their language involved the telepathic projection of color patterns in precise gradations and following mathematical formulas.
It’s a little underground miracle that the eccentrically religious PK Dick was inclined to such naturalistic blasphemies, showing one organism’s vision of heaven as the transgression of just one umwelt-boundary in a rich plurality of alien vantages. Moreover, it scales Levin’s spaces up to a level of experiential consequence. (Important to note that these two orders of spaces are not a metaphor for each other, but exist on a gradient: in the attributes with which I’m not familiar, whose names I can’t even say, since there’s an infinity of them, there are more manners of being still.)
Many of the underground, on the community and individual level, have discovered these spaces, these occluded modes, esoterically or clandestinely. They have understood territories of high agency living, removed from the need for institutional assistance beyond what many of the complacent could conceive. They have understood existential territories, psychoactive, sexual, artistic and experiential realms, lands beyond which many of us could imagine. While the wide availability of LLMs expands our autonomy through access, it says nothing of the epistemic walls that contain us.
The alien sounds and sights of a greater world await; through our technology we can build eyes to see them, ears to hear them, but first we have to learn the curiosity and openness to know them. In order to scale not just the protocolizing dimension (the memetic openness) of OPs but their ontological & empirical openness, we need to build an ambitious cultural accompaniment to the communications revolution LLms represent. We need to embolden the new protocol technologies with the latent freedom of the spaces we didn’t even know we could explore. We need to scale the underground.
Ethnography & Phenomenology
Claim #1: Open protocols take us to territories far beyond the institutional imagination. We need to map those spaces.
There is a dearth of literature on intensive, non-normal experiences and the material and technological protocols for attaining them. [5] When GPT and other dominant LLMs address these dimensions of protocolized experience, they often collapse into repetitive platitudes (illustrating that circulated literature on this topic is limited and, in most cases, low quality and mysterion). We can use ethnographic and phenomenological reporting to generate high fidelity renderings of ontologically divergent practices that work mechanistically - that is work to produce real, repeatable effects - but that work in empirical spaces that are restricted by or unavailable to institutions.
Religions have their own mapping of transcendental realms, their own closed protocols for accessing them, heavy with the metaphysics of control and obedience. Underground maps would demystify these spaces in the same way S/M demystified sexual power dynamics: Where before they had stood as the forbidden understory of a regional manager’s anger issues, or the opaque animating force behind a charismatic dictator’s success, they were now made available to mutual and consensual exploration, to experiential inquiry and play. They were made real. With the technology available to us, open protocols can be widely shared for ethically and rationally accessing realms of experience that control institutions habitually kept concealed.
The urgency to map these experiences (what spaces can be accessed through immersion in a classic rock band ensemble, through breathwork, through sigil gazing, sensory deprivation or dérive?) is great as the technological revolutions around Brain Computer Interface (BCI), gaming, algorithmic media consumption, VR/AR are augmented into hockey stick curves by machine learning. The control protocols for these technologies are elaborate and widespread: picture the perverse lab research behind the discovery of conspiracy and rage as dependable algorithmic tropes for hacking user attention.
A counter-mapping campaign, experimentation with and documentation of those technologies that increase the material, epistemic or aesthetic autonomy of their users can provide an underground answer to these control mechanisms. The language and precedent to meet the demands of open protocolization in the new epoch will come from looking at the past, exploring the cognitive and phenomenological modes of more traditional underground protocols and recognizing them as powerful technologies in their own rights (to which the new suite of tools can be added so as to amplify and grow free experience).
The control protocols are visionary; the open publics can only counter by being equally visionary. [6]
Claim #2 The proliferation of protocols means that complex organized behavior can be deployed in new and surprising forms (while also restoring the conditions for forgotten ones). These can fuse into a recursive relationship with logistical demands of the new territories.
There is another latent space for ethnographic and phenomenological discovery: the space of possible social configurations, heretofore discouraged by institutional incentives or complacency dynamics. This space is considerably more advanced in terms of mapping, with such texts as Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything, Graeber’s earlier ethnography on Direct Action, Elinor Ostrom’s prolific fieldwork and others who have made use of her IAD model, the work of anarchist researchers and cultural outposts like c4ss and Crimethinc as well as Nathan Schneider and the Media Economies Design Lab, Metagov, and mor. They represent new avenues of collective experience, new subjectivities with experiential horizons of their own.
They also represent new organisms with new ways of navigating (and enacting) resource environments. These new social configurations will find themselves native to a landscape of abundant open protocols, both digital and social, and the accumulation of them, like the nutrient rich canopy-floor of a rainforest, make for an entirely alien economic habitat.
An obvious example is the ill reputed but nonetheless wildly practical infrastructure of cryptographic token protocols associated with Ethereum. Whatever the cultural associations, Ethereum is clearly an underground technology when fed through the rubric established above. Economic and organizational models that depend on cryptography rather than the hardness of legitimate violence or ideological lindy open up the foundation for the whole realm of sustainable extitutional inquiry.
Open source intent-based architectures can provide micro-economies that sidestep the unidimensionality of fiat money and make multilateral mutual credit exchanges trivial, making for Temporary Autonomous Zones free from the individualizing assumptions of privatized store of value. Tokens can be programmably fused into the macro economy by way of liquidity routes while locally hosting exotic values (a vision beyond speculation-centric tokens called scale-free money).
Most appropriate for the immediate project of underground ethnography and phenomenology mentioned above is the DeSci model. In order to foster and build ground around the radical, experiential empiricism of the underground, we need to collectively build a landscape of methodologies or rubrics for assessing the kind of research that is worthy and instructive to open protocolization. The memetic success of a protocol may be enough of a rubric itself, given a Retroactive Funding paradigm, but the possibility space for mirroring and amplifying the immanent process of circulation through the underground is large.
On-chain community resource allocation protocols (whether for geographic or memetic communities) can act as bridges to the many extitutional models we know work from the long 1970’s: consciousness raising circles, sex clubs, sound system collectives, maker and hacker spaces. Pluralistic extitutional rubrics that take new territories of experience seriously can generate the legibility needed for sustainable funding landscapes for these bodies. More subversively, the protocols themselves might become hyperstitional egregores, the self-transforming machine elves using autonomous technologies to forge and express their own sovereign paths of reality exploration with the resource aid and facilitation of council-DAOs populated by those who have been transformed by them.
Conclusion
The communications revolution we’re undergoing means that protocols will be ubiquitous. This will make for unprecedented access to freedom and reality exploration, but only if we learn from the protocol undergrounds of the past.
Establishing and maintaining the protocols of the new world as open - materially, epistemically, aesthetically - and resistant to control and capture requires a robust cultural accompaniment in the form of mutual reinforcement of the free values of the underground : consent, mutual expectation of high agency, aesthetic and ontological co-determinacy and renewed engagement with process-reality [7]. Years of social history teach us that without this scaffolding, protocols will degrade into enclosure and nihilism. With their accompaniment - which is the very lifeblood of open protocols’ openness - we have the canopy-foundation for a new era of reality exploration, a scaling into dominance of the radical experiential empiricism of the underground (and the pagan milieus of intensive knowledge that predated it).
Reality is expansive and meaningfully structured beyond our wildest suspicions. Those structured spaces are without known limit and plausibly inhabited to the point of a cognitive plenum (Levin himself argues for far out worlds of cognitively animated triangles and folk songs). On the eve of this technological and communications revolution, its critical that we awaken from the self-imposed complacency of institutional life in all of its opiate guises and into the adventure of exploring reality in all of its modes. Despite the great man theories, the relational nature of reality production means we can only do it together. The protocol underground has shown us the path. Are we mature enough to rise to it’s challenge?
Notes
[1] This roughly refers to an unholy alliance of Portland and Boulder radicals and technological optimists - best reflected at the moment in collaborations between the Open Machine and Open Civics.
[2] If you think Shakespeare actually came up with all of those idioms, you might be due an epiphany in social production and emergence
[3] “Geeks argue about technology, but they also argue through it. They express ideas, but they also express infrastructures through which ideas can be expressed in new ways.”
[4] If you think that OpenAI actually came up with all of those tokens…
[5] With the important exception of drugs and certain areas in the purview of psychonautwiki, both of which are crucial extitutions and inspirational for this essay.
[6] Given a rich enough volume of phenomenomenological or group-subjective ethnographic reports, one could imagine the production of a library of data rich, immersive 3d visualizations of psychonautic or experiential apparati, like blueprints for forging into and normalizing the forbidden lands of the institutional epoch.
[7] This last node is in fact situational; process reality is really just shorthand for that which is occluded by the institutions of the day. Whether or not centralized institutions are inherently “extensive” or related to discrete measure and stability is a research question; Brian Massumi’s recent Personality of Power points to the shifting and indiscrete character of the current figurehead, raising the specter of a process-fascism.
This essay was written under the influence of Burial’s Streetlands EP.