---
title: Sketches Toward a Theory of the Protocol Underground
draft: 
tags:
  - article
author: Exeunt, Open Protocol Research Group
date: 2024-07-10
---
### Sketches Toward a Theory of the Protocol Underground
*
By Exeunt & the Open Protocol Research Group*


*The movement Philip groans—­ the undercommons, the underlanguage, underground, underwater, which is the ­ people’s macrophone—­ wants to know/make the relationship between form and instability, when the informal becomes a form of life precisely insofar as it is where forms of life come from.­ There is an ecol­ogy of unaccountable self-­positing, unaccountable­ because what’s more and less than self, disposed and without position or deposition, makes this positing in refusing being bought and sold. The logistics—­ the analogistics, the ecologistics—of the unaccountable population is barely audible, given only in distortion, which is our plain of code.*
	
**Fred Moten (on M. NourbeSe Philip), _Black and Blur_**

### Aesthetics

**A**esthetics, vibes, intersubjective atmosphere may seem like externalities, inconsequential surplus to the “real world” of finance and institutions. But this is only sleight of hand, a distortion of the diffuse, field-like character of power and empowerment. Power (politics), in its relationality, is nothing less than this matter of feeling. The philosopher of technology Bernard Stiegler opens his _Symbolic Misery: vol 1 The Hyperindustrial Epoch_ (2014) with the following: “The question of politics _is a question of aesthetics_… I use the word aesthetics here in its widest sense, where _aisthēsis_ means sensory perception, and where the question of aesthetics is, therefore, that of feeling and sensibility in general.”

The object of this piece is the way that aesthetics relate to regimes of structural violence, and the way crypto might fundamentally intervene in and subvert the hegemony of those regimes. In the distributed ledger, we may have the germ of a culture of aesthetic autonomy and free association without limit, coordinating infrastructure unburdened by the pall of coercive relations. Beyond the feeling of administrative bureaucracy, the atmospheric, oh so-subtle implication of violence that permeates the legally sanctioned institutions, we are on the verge of discovering [legitimacy](https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2021/03/23/legitimacy.html) by other means. And when we get to the party, having climbed the plateaus, to reach the plain of an unaccountable and unadministered population, the protocol underground will be there waiting for us.

### Undergrounds

Undergrounds are political. The first use of the term in the sense of “clandestine cultural behaviors” [1] is attached to the American underground railroad, escape routes from the South. The origins of that phrase are disputed: a 1839 newspaper article quoting a young slave who imagined a magical “railroad that goes underground all the way to Boston,” or words elsewhere, around the same time, referencing slave catchers who, having lost the trail, said that "there must be an underground railroad somewhere.”

It was first used to refer to subcultures in the early 50’s, fresh off of the memories of the underground media and military campaigns of the French Resistance. At the time, of course, obscenity laws and rigid conformity in the United States meant that alternative aesthetic movements faced repression that rivaled that of Vichy France. If the atmospheres of secret queer gathering places, multi-racial jazz shows and beatnik drug dens didn’t quite have a militant air to them, the codes and protocols established to protect them were as elaborate as those used to evade the Sicherheitsdienst.

(Riddle: what kind of knowledge is both freely available and deeply secret?)

Undergrounds are political, and politics is a question of aesthetics - sensible communities, intersubjective atmospheres, _vibes_.

Stiegler will go on to argue that the dominant “sensible community” of today is “entirely fabricated” by technologies of control: “it has become a matter of controlling the technologies of _aisthēsis_ (the audiovisual or the digital, for example) and, in this way, controlling the conscious and unconscious rhythms of bodies and souls; modulating through the control of flows these rhythms of consciousness and life. … **aesthetic conditioning**, the essential feature of enclosure in these zones, has replaced **aesthetic experience**, making it impossible.”

In the typical tenor of old guard cultural critics, Stiegler wants to pose this aesthetic disempowerment as total, offering little evidence to argue the point. While a general attitude of aesthetic disempowerment and consumption is certainly present in the West - their most severe forms within the guts of administrative institutions, what David Graeber has called [“dead zones”](https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.14318/hau2.2.007) -  it is equally true that there are zones of aesthetic self-determination, willfully defiant against administrative or commercial capture, _fucking_ _everywhere_.

Here at the Open Protocol Research Group, we are most interested in how these zones of defiance, these _undergrounds_, have emergently protocolized, both as a response to legal or extreme cultural prohibition and as a strategy of avoiding institutionalization, with its tendency to dampen or outright restrict the aesthetic autonomy of its participants. When aesthetic practices are outlawed, they respond by protocolizing - one can’t effectively make storefronts or centralized academies for illegal practices. When they protocolize, they become more pluralistic. That pluralism solidifies their resistance or illegibility to institutional capture. [2]

Examples of this **protocol underground** can give us hints as to their plural and creative character. Take for instance, sadomasochism. Originally a diagnostic portmanteau referencing sexual practices from the work of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and Marquis de Sade, sadism and masochism formalized into an underground scene in the 70’s. [3]  In constant legal flight from sodomy and obscenity laws (due especially to association with the gay community), the scene spread by means of clubs and especially handbooks - notably, Larry Townsend’s [The Leatherman’s Handbook](https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Leatherman_s_Handbook.html?id=Fem3PQAACAAJ) (1972) and later, Jay Wiseman’s [SM 101: A Realistic Introduction](https://books.google.com/books/about/SM_101.html?id=qRCrzBqMSX0C) (1992).

In these books, one finds a prioritization and careful negotiation of mood or intersubjective atmosphere with rigorous and elaborately defined considerations of consent. Consider Jay Wiseman’s “two squeezes” technique. A proactive measure meant to supplement safe words and provide active and continual consent, the dominant interrupts a session by squeezing the sub’s body twice.

_The two squeezes ask “are you OK?”_

_The submissive replies that they are OK by giving two squeezes in return. The dominant can learn a lot about the submissive’s state by noting how the submissive returns the squeezes. Two quick, brisk squeezes show that the submissive is alert and “in the room with you.” Two long, slow squeezes show that the submissive is OK but “deep under.”_

No response after a certain time, and the dominant breaks the performance to check in and perhaps end the session. The technique “provides a simple, workable way for both parties to communicate that they are all right without either having to break the mood verbally.”

Another example of an aesthetic scene that protocolized as it fled culturally prejudice legal action is the UK Free Party Movement. Key dates for this scene: 1990, the passing of the ​​Entertainments (Increased Penalties) Bill, “which raised fines for unlicensed parties from £2,000 to £20,000 with the possibility of six months inside for organisers.” Later that year, the formalization of the sound system collective in North London called Spiral Tribe. May 1992, the biggest illegal rave in UK history in Gloucestershire (infamously known among both Thatcherites and pirate teknivalists as “[Castlemorton](https://djmag.com/features/castlemorton-1992-photographing-illegal-rave-changed-uk-dance-music-forever)”). 1994, the [Criminal Justice and Public Order Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_Justice_and_Public_Order_Act_1994)  - which “outlawed people gathering listening to music “predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats.”

![Members of Spiral Tribe with their infamous sound system.](https://images.mirror-media.xyz/publication-images/1rHp0f_Wr1Z59ASYxiVbz.webp)

Members of Spiral Tribe with their infamous sound system.

Free parties dated back to the New Age scene in the eighties (see the 1985 [Battle of the Beanfield](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1doyDQDZtc)) and before, but Spiral Tribe escalated the underground attitude, mainly by insisting that every party they threw fell beyond legal sanction. As member Sebastian Vaughan later wrote,  "The rave scene seemed to be oscillating towards paid parties and clubs again, and we just said: ‘No way! It’s got to be in a warehouse, it’s got to be dirty, it’s got to be illegal and it’s got to be faceless’.” The ecstasy fueled and elaborately vibed out acid house parties were always free, infected by the attitude of generosity seen in so many aesthetic undergrounds.

More importantly, they were sometimes extremely hard to find. Listening to Seana Gavin [discuss her time in Spiral Tribe](https://www.ravetothegrave.org/episodes/episode-22-seana-gavin-on-spiral-tribe-and-tekno-adventures), it seems to have been a decade long, transcontinental exercise in getting lost. This was a feature, not a bug. A party, it turns out, takes on a radically different character- an enchantment, even - when everyone present had to go through an ordeal to get there. _12 kms from that pub in poolbrook. Once you make it to Welland, follow the lights_. The obscure and illegal nature of the locations constructed an artifice that repelled complacency and consumption, instead attracting high agency, participation, festive enthusiasm. _If you’ve hit Rye Cross you’ve gone too far._

### Overgrounding

The underground scenes worthy of investigation are many - consider the libertarian generosity of the price suppression agreed upon by LSD production families in the 70’s, or the manic [protocol creation](https://www.reuters.com/graphics/HONGKONG-EXTRADITIONS-TACTICS/0100B0790FL/index.html) of direct action groups in 2019 Hong Kong or New York as hybrid strategies cross contaminated through continents and different authoritarian atmospheres. Think of the technological détournement in the Bronx that turned drum breaks into a vehicle for a whole [minor poetry](https://books.google.com/books/about/Kafka.html?id=H4XWdN4u4OgC). We intend to do that work. But in these introductory remarks, we can outline a couple key features of the protocol underground, in the hopes that by defining them, we might - in an action as magical as a visionary underground railroad - _**overground**_ them, make of them repeatable and memeable practices, formalized without being standardized.

What are the exact qualities that we are attempting to “overground” here?

a). Mutual assumption of **high agency**. Undergrounds make play of peril, finding just-sufficient safety in the decentralized ingenuity and practical sense of crowds. The unadministered, it’s been observed, take on a heightened sense of responsibility that paradoxically made pirate events “safe spaces” in multiple senses of the term. (Those who would seek to delegate basic material safety and vigilance to a third party are better off at expensive and highly insured establishments, nested within the promise of lucrative litigation should host guardians misstep.)

b.)  Robust culture of **informed** **consent**. The twentieth century patriarchal establishment was defined by its ambivalence to this term, and it’s a horror-comedy watching institutions try to work through their embedded contradictions to service its supposed cultural vogueness. As an elaboration of the sense of responsibility and presence mentioned above, undergrounds have been avant gardes of mutually affirmed consent. Vibes are network forms, and supremacy is a dead ecology.

c.) **Participatory** and **pluralistic** **aesthetic**. San Francisco, the year is 1977. Do you go see Star Wars: A New Hope opening at The Coronet, or a replay of Rocky Horror Picture Show at a dirty theater in the Tenderloin, where the crowd is raucous with participation, and every night is different? Undergrounds loath passive consumption. The divinity of the scene is always won by the blood of an aesthetic monarch, whether that be a politician or a film director. Given robust enough conditions of the two described above, an emergent [social production](https://mirror.xyz/openprotocolresearch.eth/nrEc6i8pWzo0YxC0-vwfVYlirTD6_FAmBHjoiNwLbQ4) is always on the table.  (_Buy an umbrella, you cheap bitch_.)

The latter point, to return to Stiegler’s sense of aesthetics as the question of “feeling and sensibility in general,” signals that **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. [4]

Why are standardized institutions a threat to the above qualities?

- embedded hierarchy and bureaucracy
    
- compartmentalization and specialization
    
- “[interpretive labor](https://www.rethinkingpower.info/how-interpretive-labor-straddles-the-gap-between-rules-and-reality/)” and the opacity of structural violence
    
- commercialization, spectacle, passive consumption
    

Most crucial of all to the creative possibility described in the above pages, and most singularly characteristic of the underground, is the ever-maintained and rigorously exercised and protected consensuality of relations. It’s the ground everything else rests on. It may be said that, once such an atmosphere is established, the rest of the underground qualities will inevitably follow. The fact that we see them so rarely in so much of our lives points to the most damning and prohibitive dimension of institutional regimes - the structural and implicit violence they weld, they’re ultimate foundation in an atmosphere of force and imposition - “[the dead zone](https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.14318/hau2.2.007).”

Distributed Ledger Technologies may offer a chance to do the impossible, to scale the underground, embolden communities everywhere with participatory agency over the aesthetic environments they inhabit - the feeling and sensibility that shapes the structure of the possible; to make of a complacent mass of consumers and bureaucratic subjects high agency and active participants of reality; and most importantly, to coordinate at scale in an absolutely non-coercive context. The sensibility of the underground echoes in crypto culture in the [open protocolization](https://mirror.xyz/openprotocolresearch.eth/nrEc6i8pWzo0YxC0-vwfVYlirTD6_FAmBHjoiNwLbQ4) of its innovations, the plural and unpoliced divergence of its aesthetics, the persistent and uncompromising “sovereignty” of its participants.

What will it look like to send a wave back, providing the culture with the tools needed to [formalize without standardizing](https://mirror.xyz/openprotocolresearch.eth/nrEc6i8pWzo0YxC0-vwfVYlirTD6_FAmBHjoiNwLbQ4), to _overground_ the high agency, consent-based, aesthetically empowered worlds of the underground?

DLTs cannot instill in the population a desire for agency. Where complacency abounds, it will continue to; where passivity reigns, it will continue to reign. What we can do is provide substrates for consent-based social organization and social production - infrastructure that relies on mathematics and thermodynamics rather than weapons and terror to maintain its [hardness](https://stark.mirror.xyz/n2UpRqwdf7yjuiPKVICPpGoUNeDhlWxGqjulrlpyYi0). We can provide forkable code that encourages pluralistic adaptation, especially of the programmable regimes of value (tokens) and instances of alignment (DAOs) that allow high agency participants to coordinate.

This is true of the technology - but if we are to successfully continue it ourselves under these underground values, we have to look at our own culture in the mirror and consider deeply its complacency. How is the culture of personal sovereignty and the generous protocolization we take for granted in our space animated by relative access to VC wealth which is ultimately sourced from deeply coercive regimes? How can we design in the direction of revenue won from positive sum interventions in extant extractive industries rather than the zero-sum game of price speculation?

A potentially more fraught area is the onboarding problem - letting institutions like Coinbase lead the charge on scaling means we’ll be left with castes of individuals that relinquish custody or other types of agency for convenience while technocrats enjoy supposed self-determination, even though we know that when some are in bondage no one is free. But, typical of the prefigurative circle, the ends are also the means: identifying undergrounds that correspond to these values, that persist in rhythms of [open protocolization](https://mirror.xyz/openprotocolresearch.eth/nrEc6i8pWzo0YxC0-vwfVYlirTD6_FAmBHjoiNwLbQ4) rather than brands and institutions will mean finding those that are practiced in the peril and labor of high agency, that take their freedom seriously. If the mainstream conversation on crypto is finally initiated by its association with the most aesthetically autonomous and high agency elements of our culture, the true implications of its non-coercive ground will be appreciated. If it's introduced by way of extraction and consumerism, it will be eaten up.

(_and forked, and birthed again, renewed under conditions of peace & free association, and in even more ridiculous garb , - wait, which way is it to Castlemorton?_)

_________

Notes

[1] I don’t believe there were pre-modern uses of the term to refer to cultural or political dissidence; if otherwise, I’d love to hear it.

[2] What happens next is a research question. It would seem that pluralism tends to evolve into a mature fragmentation that eventually restages the question of institutional legibility, but the assumption begs the question of what exactly you are tracking - an aesthetic or an underground? Aesthetics congeal and face cooptation, undergrounds protocolize, fork, positioned as they are on a “cutting edge.” When considering the terms, the noun “aesthetics” feels passive and descriptive, the dominion of the conditioned. But “underground”? It rolls off the tongue quite nicely as a verb, doesn’t it?

[3] Though existence of a disparate “scene” likely goes back to at least the 19th century; check [these](https://courtauld.ac.uk/research/research-resources/publications/immeditations-postgraduate-journal/immediations-online/2020-2/audrey-warne-staging-sadomasochism-images-of-bondage-in-man-rays-surrealist-photography-1929-1932/) scandalous photographs from 1930’s Paris.

[4] This “sense of possibility” is a discrete and profound type of currency, a ninth form of capital to be sure - call it “**virtual capital**.”

_________

**This work was made possible with a generous grant from the [Arbitrum Minigrants](https://forum.arbitrum.foundation/t/plurality-labs-our-biggest-minigrants-yet-jokerace/20040) program.**