Introduction to the Inverted City
a journal of ethereum localism — 28.2.24
We initiated this publication series partially as an extension of last year’s General Forum on Ethereum Localism. That conference involved members of the web3 ecosystem from three continents coming together to discuss bioregionalism, strategies of monetary localism like mutual credit and credit clearing, impact funding, the cosmolocal thesis and the particular beast of pluralistic social production that is the city. The global - local feedback loop is an area of research and design, it turns out, that spans legal theory, mycelial ecologies, biomimetics, placemaking strategies, organization theory, Slovenian economics, quadratic functions, all elements of a postcapitalist horizon that seems at the same time far away and right here.
In light of that abundance - that reflected, after all, the abundance of characters and conceptual paradigms brought to bear in the work of the open web and the promise of the distributed ledger - we decided to pose this question of the inverted city. The premise could mean many things - the city understood cybernetically as entangled systems rather than structures and properties, as a place for encounter and connection with the earth rather than alienation from it, as a battleground for capture and flight, as a zone potent with world-upending experiments - but most of all for this ongoing publication it means the city as a haven of open endedness.
Crossing territories, resisting definition, the Inverted City rolls along with death defying indeterminacy, a wave function of too-many possibilities, a thousand and one stories seeking to locate the one adequate to the renaissance of experimentalism and revisioning of value that we have ahead of us. These are just the first few.