Protocol Undergrounds
Discussion
Exeunt:
"This touches on a key dimension of open protocols, mainly that they are inextricably linked to cultural undergrounds. In a fruitful foray into a more archival approach to the protocol underground question, we looked at four historical cases: the California LSD scene of the 70s and 80s, the UK Free Party Movement, the West Coast Appropriate Technology Movement of the 70’s and the Bay Area S&M scene of the same time. For each of these scenes, we identified an extitution (the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, Spiral Tribe, RAIN and the Society of Janus, respectively) and a value it distinctly embodied/ helped export to the cultural field.
Notably, all of the above protocols were culturally marginalized and, at one point or another, very illegal - this seems to have been a historical prerequisite for the development of autonomous values. For more on these particular scenes, you can check out my Local DAO Summer talk and our second essay, “Sketches Toward a Theory of the Protocol Underground”, but the crucial point is how they helped us construct a set of characteristics to not just explain the protocol underground, but the nature of the alternative values that keep its inhabitants avoiding institutional scaling at all costs.
Later, in “Undercapital,” we identified three hazards of scaling that inform the intentionality of the underground:
1) Institutional-behavioral bias, a set of regulatory and cultural “multipolar traps” that lead to reflexively policed passive consumption (elsewhere known as the problem of spectacle)
2) Limits to circulation of scene protocols, wherein mutual expectations of high agency and consent are logistically difficult to scale vertically,
3) Cults of personality, for obvious reasons including internal capture, the degrading presence of a figurehead to withdraw agency to, and a target for external capture.
To quote from “Sketches”: “there is no objective vibe, there is no monopoly of the real. Feeling, sense, atmosphere are relational, and without institutions to impose a mystified neutrality - the oppressive, monoculture din of a Walgreens, bank, or a hospital - we are challenged with the responsibility and freedom to constitute for ourselves what the sense of things are, and in so doing, redefine what possibilities exist in them.” Of course members of the underground depart, conform, become institutional subjects through and through, but the underground persists because its forms are innately decentralized, capture resistant, modular, free and open."
(https://www.extitutional.space/Articles/Speculative-P2P-and-the-Urban-Protocol-Underground)