Inaugural salon of the Open Salon Series (OSS), held at Bridgespace in Portland, Oregon 2024. Facilitated by Ven Gist and Exeunt.
The Open Salon Series is an ongoing format developed by the Open Machine for convening practitioners, researchers, and thinkers around the conceptual and political terrain of open protocols, decentralized technology, and the protocol underground. Series 0 was the founding event — establishing the format and the community before any official series number.
The session opened with Paul Wackerow walking through Ethereum’s underlying technical properties — not as a technical primer, but as a philosophical one. The goal was to re-describe the architecture from a cypherpunk values perspective: how properties like censorship resistance, permissionlessness, decentralized consensus, and credible neutrality are not incidental features but deliberate expressions of a political stance about who should control infrastructure, who can participate, and on whose terms.
The open conversation that followed explored the emergent properties that arise when these technical features combine: what kinds of coordination, organization, and culture become possible when the infrastructure is genuinely open and anti-capture. Participants discussed whether the Ethereum community was maintaining its founding values as the ecosystem grew and financialized, and what it would mean to keep those values centered in how the technology develops and who it serves.