---
title: Undercapital
draft: 
tags:
  - article
author: Exeunt, Open Protocol Research Group
date: 2024-09-10
---
### **Undercapital**

*By Exeunt and the Open Protocol Research Group*


*The following essay marks a significant expansion of both the open protocol strand of our research and the archival detour into what we have called “the protocol underground” that precedes it in this pamphlet. In it, we attempt to explain the behavior of the underground through the lens of the virtual, a philosophical concept for the real and materially embedded trace of potential that exists within or perhaps alongside the world of proper things. This trace is articulated in a polyphonic voice, laden with indeterminacy and subtlety. It resists mechanization. To perceive and generatively engage with it requires an atmosphere of nonviolence and open experimentation. For these reasons, it is anathema to institutions.* 

*We propose to understand the behavior and strategic uniformity of the underground as the accumulation of spontaneous tactics for avoiding violent and mechanistic systems in order to approach, in a wide range of cultural forms, the virtual. Once established, we suggest a path forward to formalize economic systems around this underground intuition, proposing virtual capital as an orienting and generative frame for real economic games. Because it is expressed in intersubjective & relational fields rather than classical objects, building economic systems that prioritize virtual capital could require an overhaul of design thinking analogous to the overhaul of classical physics for the indeterminate field-mechanics of quantum physics. To cognize these forms may require an ontological ordeal, a conversion (of which there are many rumors in recent years). Lucky for us, we have the strategic intuition of the underground to follow, a world of intensive value we call undercapital.* 

# **Undercapital: The Extitutional Life of Value**

“*Money institutionalizes a social relation—or, rather, a set of relations of social production and reproduction.*” - Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, ***Assembly***

[Our previous piece](https://mirror.xyz/openprotocolresearch.eth/YuZvCx5ge2nQXo8L2n0iWKN_CflivaCfsoLNMoVTqf4) took us underground, to spaces where direct and participatory access to the aesthetic environment reigned and the injunction was free association within robust contexts of affirmative consent. We went looking for these core underground values, but we discovered along with them living zones where alien forms of capital dwelled: in the 1980’s underground LSD market, the abandoned warehouses and open valleys of the UK free party scene, the bedrooms of deviants and sadomasochists, the two variables from which all the participatory action was shaped seemed to be consent and *atmosphere*.  In a footnote, we were compelled to propose a ninth form of capital: virtual capital, the sense of potential, the empowering penumbra or haze of objects and entities as they verge on the edge of what is to come. 

The philosopher and translator Brian Massumi may be the major contemporary scholar of the virtual, a key concept in the work of Gilles Deleuze and a key proto-concept or theme in work of the natural philosopher Henri Bergson. Consider Massumi on Bergson’s reading of Zeno’s paradox: “*When Zeno shoots his philosophical arrow, he thinks of its flight path in the commonsense way, as a linear trajectory made up of a sequence of points or positions that the arrow occupies one after the other. The problem is that between one point on a line and the next, there is an infinity of intervening points. lf the arrow occupies a first point along its path, it will never reach the next-unless it occupies each of the infinity of points between. Of course, it is the nature of infinity that you can never get to the end of it. The arrow gets swallowed up in the transitional infinity. Its flight path implodes. The arrow is immobilized.*”

Bergson takes Zeno’s paradox as a gesture to a dimension of reality that can’t be understood on the representational plane - an element of immanent continuity or in-itselfness that can’t be broken up into component measurables. For Massumi, these different modes of reality can be thought of as “intensive” and “extensive.” The arrival of the arrow at its target testifies to the intensive nature of its trajectory:

 “*Extensive space, and the arrested objects occupying the positions into which it is divisible, is a back-formation from cessation. The dynamic enabling the back-formation is "intensive" in the sense that movement, in process, cannot be determinately indexed to anything outside of itself. It has withdrawn into an all-encompassing relation with what it will be. lt is in becoming, absorbed in occupying its field of potential.*” [1]  

Elsewhere, we have referred to the prefigurative circle, borrowed from anarchist politics, where means and ends are fused. In the underground web space, we sometimes call this an “infinite game,” a game with no intention of ending, played for the pleasure of itself. In philosophical terms, you could say that the *telos* of such a game is fused with the process, or the process itself is the *telos*. The intensive is like a metaphysical extension of this logic: the world of entities seen as they gesturally embody their potential, beneath any singular embodiment. Bergson thought of it as an object in *duration* rather than linear time; those well-versed in certain spiritual traditions might think of it as the “subtle body” of an object or environment. [2] Practically, this points us in the right direction: perceiving and being affected by this dimension requires a patience or subtlety, and a peace. 

It’s our claim that this “intensive” reality of things in their becoming is the object of the underground, the organizing principle for its many disparate articulations. Of course, to speak of “the underground” is already to assume a unity. In the previous piece, we called it “the protocol underground” to emphasize strategic patterns that come from lack of access to institutional sanction. Here, we look at it from the underside: protocolization as a strategy of flight, avoidance of institutional sanction in pursuit of the thing that institutional presence diminishes or destroys. This thing is anathema to violence, and to mechanization; it requires a patience and willingness to hazard the far reaches of subjectivity. It is only experienced through an *intersubjective ordeal*, attention in a state of withdrawn ego. (What’s it feel like? A transpersonal swell of electricity in your spine.) We call this intensive field or substance “the virtual.”


## The Virtual

The virtual is a peculiar term, ripe for misinterpretation, especially in the context of the web. The philosopher Levi R. Bryant does as good of a job as any of explaining its nuance, and is worth quoting at length.  

“*…virtual is not to be confused with virtual reality. The latter is generally treated as a simulacrum of reality, as a sort of false or computer generated reality. By contrast, the virtual is entirely real without, for all that, being actual. The term “virtuality” comes from the Latin virtus, which has connotations of potency and efficacy. As such, the virtual, as virtus, refers to powers and capacities belonging to an entity. And in order for an entity to have powers or capacities, it must actually exist. In this connection, while the virtual refers to potentiality, it would be a mistake to conflate this potentiality with the concept of a potential object. A potential object is an object that does not exist but which could come to exist. By contrast, the virtual is strictly a part of a real and existing object. The virtual consists of the volcanic powers coiled within an object.*”   

Let’s take this foundation and continue into some orienting statements, unlocked with some attention to potential areas of resonance with or relevance to the underground: 

#### The virtual is “real but not actual.” 
Deleuze once called himself a “transcendental empiricist,” interested in disruptions to the subject-object paradigm (transcendental moments) only to the extent that they were available to direct sensible experimentation, i.e., that they were real. The virtual is an insistently materialist or physicalist concept: though it may refer to experiential fields that have often been associated with the supernatural, it places them squarely on the plane of nature. Concertgoers, artists, sex lovers or even athletes are familiar with this order of substance that is difficult to talk about, but palpable, there to be encountered by all participants who would hazard to enter into an intersubjective key. [3] When the participants fail to reach the critical mass of this delicate recursion, its absence seems equally palpable, felt independently by all in the room. There are times in history where its assertive reality changes the course of events dramatically (try a quick search of The Mute Girl of Portici, 1830). 

#### The virtual expresses objects and entities in their multiplicity. 
Continuing on with the common notions of this crowd-cognizance of the virtual, consider the refrain heard over and over again to describe such notable events (or scenes, or summers…): “*At that moment, it felt like anything was possible.*” If you asked someone who made this claim what exactly was possible, what would they say? In our reading, the phrase pushes against its own grammar. Its referent is not any given thing, but *anything*, the irreducible multiplicity, the potential expressed in its intensive plurality, not at all in the service of the actual. For both Bergson and Deleuze, it is the submersion in time, the intractable blurriness of duration that affords it this freedom. And duration can’t be abstracted.  *Sorry - you just had to be there.*  

#### Relation to the virtual entails a marriage of means and ends. 
The virtual loathes representation or commercialization, half-baked metaphors or morality tales: because it is prefigurative and intensive in nature, it stands only for itself. Any teenager can tell the difference between the cultural products of focus groups (or the tv series scripts of grad students) and the eccentric or disturbed creativity of those who bothered to turn off the faucet of means and ends; who ventured to listen to the “penumbra” silence of the material world in ordert to create an honest and self-contained impersonal expression that  “cannot be determinately indexed to anything outside of itself.” Outside of the instrumentalizing imperatives of institutions, the actual that is produced can be grounded in the savage and pluralistic vectors of the plane of nature. 

Take the nineteenth century critic John Ruskin’s description of the gothic builders, who he argues must have been “altogether set free” given their rude and obstinate creations, "creations of ungainly shape and rigid limb, but full of wolfish life." [4] He saw in their disturbed, gargoyle eccentricity "a profound sympathy with the fulness and wealth of the material universe." Their imagination appears conjured from the stone, a materialist imagination, gained not by imposition but by a transpersonal ordeal and a negotiation with the material conditions before them. We see it in the psychedelic and nonsymbolic color-codes of Edgar Allen Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death,” the barely melodic screams of Diamanda Galas, Sun Ra’s space outfits, Robert Chamber’s Yellow King: raw visceral expression that is anything but metaphor, a record of a material encounter beyond objects.

#### The virtual is available to strategy and formalization even as it remains resistant to standardization. 
As we have seen in the “two squeezes method” of Jay Wiseman’s s/m manual outlined in the [previous essay](https://www.openmutualism.xyz/Open-Protocol-Research-Group/Sketches-Toward-a-Theory-of-the-Protocol-Underground), undergrounds have been known to generate detailed strategies for attaining access to the virtual. To say that mechanization or instrumentalization by standardized regimes results in harsh diminishment of the virtual is not to say that some manner of repeated protocolization isn’t needed. The protocol underground is nothing but these intergenerational and cultural strategies for engaging the intensive. (As we will see later, these *open protocols* differ from institutional ones insomuch as, rather than dealing with objects and atoms, they are oriented toward a field or phase space, a polyvocal order-of-things full of divergence and indeterminacy.)   

The virtual, in brief, is a real and powerful dimension of the material world, but it appears phantom to many because it does not correlate with naked subjects. To relate to it and be empowered by it depends on a porousness in one’s individuality, an unthought, known as much to craftsmen and athletes as to religious mystics and artists. In the realm of institutions, whether nationalist, commercial, religious, we see its power captured and chained to brands, figureheads, flags, sentimental imaginals far removed from the eccentricity and in-itselfness of the plane of nature. It is beholden to a *telos*, always something or someone else’s end: mystified, antireal, rooted in domination. The underground, in the accumulated, impersonal intentionality of its designs, asserts the autonomy, ubiquity, and democracy of the virtual.

An underground value-accounting of the virtual as a ninth form of capital would need to somehow follow this prefigurative circle. It would seek to expand rather than reduce and control. As we have learned from the underground, this means asserting a savage and uncaptured pacifism, defiance of the tendency of violence (especially hidden or implied, Graeber’s ‘structural violence’) to drain the atmosphere, divorce means from ends and fill the room with anti-aura of rigid persons and things. Take us literally when we say that the objects in a space withdrawal their power when supremacy is in the room. “Anything will give up its secrets if you love it enough” [5] - the inverse is true. The underground long since moved this knowledge from poetic insight to actionable process. The decentralized web can iterate into this mode, join forces, become underground. But, in the tradition of design pragmatism - the rational inspiration that informed the eight forms framework in Gregory Landua and Ethan Roland’s ***Regenerative Enterprise*** - it must do so in unsuperstitious aspect.

The prefigurative virtual: its stakes are no less real for being “vague”. [6] Establish peace, find an impersonal attention, die a little, and watch the room awaken around you. Deep roots sprouting. This is intersubjective power. How to formalize it?

## Open Protocols & Peaceful Money

The Open Protocol Research Group and Ethereal Forest have, across our work and investigations, hinted at a generalized autonomism (independence from structures of legitimate violence) and toward legitimacy by other means. In the case of crypto, this takes the form of thermodynamically or mathematically secured cryptographic “hardness.” [7] In the analogue realm, communities of intersubjective trust (what Austin Wade Smith once called “epi-consent”) fill this same role. It is the underground thesis of web3 adoption that the two could be weaved together by the protocolized structures of decentralized and emergent legitimacy - strategies that both have discovered, as a matter of prefigurative necessity. Open protocolization is the structural bridge, peaceful autonomy is the deep value that buttresses it. 

What becomes clear from the investigation into the underground, the realm of open protocols, is that it is the very process of relating to the virtual that makes the open protocol thesis work. Recall the definition: open protocols are “social and technical protocols woven together into a compound cultural protocol of improvisational, empirical imagination.” This “atmosphere” of divergence and open empiricism, the enthusiasm for the intersubjective field, is what lends open protocols the viral memetic power to circulate in the underground. They are programmed with its real effects. If, as Massumi writes, “the surplus of reality that constitutes the virtual guarantees the gift of freedom granted to the actual,” open protocols are empowered by the freedom of actualization. 

And yet, there remains this final boss of institutionalization, virally decentralized and free floating, that aspires to enter into every relationship and divorce means and ends. “Money designates and reproduces a specific social structure,” write Hardt & Negri. “Money *institutionalizes* a social relation—or, rather, a set of relations of social production and reproduction.” The underground finds itself in a double bind inasmuch as the resources needed for social relations to reproduce themselves are tethered to a mechanism for divorcing means and ends. The capacities of money - the unit of account, the means of exchange, the store of value - are not institutional in and of themselves, but their particular configuration in the arbitrary and violently conditioned order of *fiat*. 

In no way is this group endorsing the abolition of money, even in its current form; fiat, or something that looks like it, will continue to have important use cases, especially as an “exit value” from the geographical and contextual locales invoked below. In the outside and interstitial spaces of these locales, there is room for a non-institutional form of it. But as as long as the whole index of value forms is systematically subjugated to the rule of financial capital - as long as the circulation of resources is directed toward the supernaturalist myopia of profit-in-itself - autonomist relationships will be systematically diminished and marginalized. What is needed, if we are reading the landscape correctly, is an extitutional or underground account of capital that could think both autonomy and the virtual that autonomy affords access to. 

Massumi himself, along with colleague Erin Manning, took a shot at an expression of extitutional capital in their collaborations with the Economic Space Agency. [8] We encourage any reader to explore the Three Ecologies Institute and the 3E Process Seed Bank. It’s our feeling that these efforts were partially compromised by the institutional conditions of their emergence. (Consider the title of this article on SenseLab, of which 3EI is an outgrowth: “Philosophy Can Be  a Living Process: Inside Senselab’s Radically Interdisciplinary Graduate Research Culture.”) We’ll let the graduate students enjoy their Temporary Autonomous Zones within the university walls. But the highest stake projects in the “revaluation of value” are not to be found, in our opinion, in the isolation of art projects funded by university endowment funds. 

To forge a new direction, we propose an encounter with the extant models of altereconomic creativity, circulating open protocols of the underground that orbit the virtual as both the memetic fuel for their reproduction and the end goal of their operations. They work at a different level of extitutional clarity, being “located” in ephemeral pop up efforts, occasional excitations of what is properly a field of pluralistic and technological improvisation. Insomuch as the Open Protocol Research Group and our extitutional affiliates remain without institutional affiliation - inasmuch as DAOs are mere excitations of an ecosystem substrate with always porous boundaries and prefigurative ends - we may have the right eyes to develop practical concepts from this clarity. And potentially, given enough patience and receptivity, to weave those concepts into the field. 


## undercapital

What’s ultimately at play in this research vector is the distinction between enumerating the virtual -  instrumentalizing it to the end of indexed quantity - and extracting or “expressing” from it operational passages that can expand or formalize prefiguration. We must, as we say, *formalize without standardizing*.

**Undercapital** is the combinatorial problem space - the sum of operational passages - of the eight forms of capital and the three faculties of money when deployed toward the expansion of the virtual field. This takes the form of a literal matrix of possible combinations of these forms, but it does so in a peculiar way: because the virtual field expands under prefigurative conditions, the submersion of the various forms into themselves, even individually, produces the virtual as a positive externality (just as a swordmaker, in the transpersonal process of gaining artful expertise in the craft, discovers an instance of the virtual animating his steels). When realist conditions are present - peace in the absence of institutional regimes, consent, fluency in intersubjective physics - the virtual is abundant. 

And if undercapital is oriented by the wealth of the virtual that accompanies it, we know which way the ship sails: This is the same wealth that give substance and reproductive capacity to open protocols, inasmuch as they diminish the need for institutions. Encoded in their strategies of open use and propagation is an assertion of the open field of (empirical) possibility as an end in itself. To this extent, the stakes of undercapital are entangled with a structural attitude of p2p and stigmeric coordination, and protocolization as a free formalization of any would be “standard.”  

Still, the question remains of value flow: if open protocols are the path forward, what kind of economic games could push toward a tipping of the scale in the direction of protocolization? If extitutions (defined in previous work as outposts of open protocols that feign institutional legibility but whose behavior is only understood in an open protocol framework) are needed to expand the reach of open protocols, how can they be integrated into systems of multicapital provisioning that avoid financialization?

Experimental efforts to multiply the forms of capital that people organize themselves around have an accomplished history that we can learn from. Every city has their local coups. For our town of Portland, one of the most significant coups is the decades-old initiative the Rebuilding Center. They followed the following steps to scale to surprising influence and persistence in the urban bazaar:  

1. **Develop a concept of multicapital wealth.** Practical necessity, circulated frameworks or a stroke of community inspiration leads to a concept on the community level of collaboratively produced or commonly-held wealth and a concept of community autonomy is formed.
    
2. **Accumulation of multicapital resources** by way of unlocking latent stores - of which, because of impoverished frameworks that ignore the holism of the eight forms, there are many.  In the case of Rebuilding Center, this was simple stores of imperfect or difficult to resell housing materials including cabinets, fixtures, structural components. Once recognized, those who possess them tend to be empowered and energized by the realization of their direct autonomous access to important stores of wealth, and step 1 is emboldened.
    
3. **Develop a protocol of sustainable and effective resource allocation.** This involves everything from community governance (esp. when the resource being allocated is based in living capital, i.e. cultural and social) to navigating the revenue evil curve. Rebuilding Center was able to reach a “flow state” of legitimacy that allowed it to receive enough consistent volunteer labor to be sustainable.
    
4. **Institutional legitimacy and state subsidies.** Because of the networked nature of multicapital initiatives, siloed departments of “environmental protection” and “racial equity” often flock to aid the autonomous initiative, once it is up and running. (The second order effects are intersectional because the direct access to multicapital wealth cuts across multiple systems of exploitation.) Most important to the formula is the way in which the autonomous capacity of the initiative allows for an expansion of the Overton Window of what constitutes acceptable public action. [9]
    
This playbook (a common roadmap for the most extitutionally oriented nonprofits) constitutes a field-tested strategy for staving off the worst elements of standardization and scaling more or less on the community’s own terms and within patterns that light the way to autonomy from the instrumental reign of financial profit. Being a large, multiple city block-sized brick and mortar outfit, the rigorous correspondence to a range of regulatory and financial standards was an unavoidable need for RC. But it may be the case that undercapital initiatives can’t follow this path.

It seems uncontroversial to those familiar with underground communities that undergrounds simply do not scale. This insight is usually delivered with a superstitious air or a veteran’s cynicism: “nothing good in this world can last.” It’s important to internalize this field knowledge, but it is for us realists to reject any tendency to quietism and supernaturalism: as Massumi and Deleuze show us, the virtual is *real* if not actual. It’s expression is akin to the probabilistic fields of post-Newtonian physics: we can design around these real elements so long as we consider them not as particles, quantities, objects, but as the distributed likelihood of a visitation. And we know - or rather we can learn - what increases the likelihood.

Consider the three major elements of undergrounds identified in the previous essay: The mutual assumption of high agency. A robust culture of informed and affirmative consent. A participatory and pluralistic aesthetic. In a word, the charge of the virtual, the *stuff* of the underground, depends upon conditions of inter-agency, whereas the modes of consumption common to institutional spaces depend upon a learned passivity or complacency and a commercially or administratively driven taste for homogeneity. For scaling undergrounds, this makes for (at least) three specific barriers:

1. **Institutional-behavioral bias.** In the United States, we have a complex and multilayered bureaucratic regime of licensed specialization, as well as a deeply cynical culture of litigious opportunism bolstered by a professional class of legal professionals. This puts consumers and owners in what Slate Star Codex famously called a “multipolar trap,” a downward spiral of paralysis before mutually interwoven elements that are, in their sum, oppressive.  Participatory patterns of high agency and active rather than consumptive aesthetic creation suffocate under standards optimized - or regulatorily disciplined into - a low agency logic.
    
2. **Limits to circulation of underground protocols.** Similarly, large scale operations attract low agency participants, and in particular participants who are not sophisticated enough in strategies of affirmative consent and negotiated intersubjectivity to be able to attend to the needs of the atmosphere. Underground activities require cultural or placed-based specificity, what Ven calls “the contextual/geographical local” i.e. a scene or a neighborhood - in order to meaningfully develop and sustain the characteristics of a high agency public. When it sees a scene scale beyond this local specificity, the virtual flees with both feet.
    
3. **Cult of personality.** Perhaps the most delicate feature of undergrounds, the one that breaks the most quickly when scaling, are their headlessness. The specter of a cult of personality is wonderfully destructive in two senses: the ability of outsiders to identify a literal or figurative locus of liability, a scapegoat, which it can “coopt, kill or imprison” (in the case of artistic movements, this is almost always cooptation or self-destruction); the tendency for elements in the community to elevate a locus of energy that they can *withdraw agency* to (in this way, the cult of personality reflects in one breath the worst tendencies of problem 1 & 2).
    
There’s a contradiction latent in the question of scaling communities of the virtual insomuch as the virtual is a facet of material contingency. Think of it as a moving image of potential manifestations produced by a given material to show, for the benefit of those who have bothered to encounter it, its singularity. For a shopping complex, an acre of land is an acre of land: the environments of communities of the virtual enjoy no such fungibility. In a passage of some of his earliest reflections on the virtual from Difference and Repetition (1968), Deleuze writes: 

*For the nature of the virtual is such that, for it, to be actualised is to be differenciated. Each differenciation is a local integration or a local solution which then connects with others in the overall solution or the global integration. This is how, in the case of the organic, the process of actualisation appears simultaneously as the local differenciation of parts, the global formation of an internal milieu, and the solution of a problem posed within the field of constitution of an organism. An organism is nothing if not the solution to a problem, as are each of its differenciated organs, such as the eye which solves a light 'problem'; but nothing within the organism, no organ, would be differenciated without the internal milieu endowed with a general effectivity or integrating power of regulation.* 

Note that the organism is not a metaphor here: this divergent actualization occurs across scales, and is as true of organisms as well as geographies, languages, cultures. The nuance between actualization and the virtual itself is admittedly a difficult one, but we can note that organisms, languages, geographies, enrich and intensify the field of real possibles: the stakes, then, of the need for the local to “connect with others” is the persistence and expansion of the material trace which creates more intensity, more dense potential. They become an organism so they can persist in difference. 

Already in "[Sketches](https://www.openmutualism.xyz/Open-Protocol-Research-Group/Sketches-Toward-a-Theory-of-the-Protocol-Underground)” we’ve seen the illicit underground discover, out of necessity, a strategy of open protocolization resistant to the three barriers to scaling. To preserve underground values and subvert the key mechanistic depressions of the virtual field, they scaled horizontally in a way that was culturally and technically headless. But their rebuttal to the supernaturalists comes at a cost: with each instance of horizontal scaling comes a fracturing of coherence, a *difference*: to persist, they sacrifice a body, diffusing like a mist (or hardening into cooptations, *giving up the ghost* as it were). 

The strategic problem space of undercapital, of the formalizable potential systems of an overground society of the virtual, is how to take advantage of this drift, how to alchemize it from “local” degradation to global enrichment: a “*general effectivity*” or integrating power. In the case of Deleuze’s body, “*no organ would be differenciated without the internal milieu endowed with a general effectivity*.” Are the disparate cells capable of operation totally separate from the milieu? Only insofar as they can survive without resources (not very far). They’re viable difference is contingent on their relation to the unity of the body. If undergrounds die - or if we often offer experience undergrounds in their fleetingness, in a persistent dying - it would seem to be because they lack a concept of *general effectivity*, a notion of commonness with the autonomous and horizontally scaling “differenciations”. So what would be the contours of this “general effectivity,” this body?

## A note on the category of art

So far much of our reflection on the underground has been reduced to the so-called “arts” It strikes us that the label “art” is a strategy for compartmentalizing and mollifying what should rightfully be a primary tension in our society, even greater than that of class. A common refrain, “She makes it into an *art form*,” would seem to signal both deference and mild condescension: she goes too far, aestheticizes it too much, *she's an accountant for Christ’s sake*. This signals to us that many fields are pregnant with the stilted excess of deep material engagement. Beyond logistical comprehension is material knowledge, and deep material knowledge is (again) an intersubjective and ontologically challenging ordeal. 

If the arts provide countless examples of rhizomatic free association indexed against dynamic and locally contingent material and technical conditions, they are only a prefiguration of a material inspiration that might consume all sectors. *Art is a fallacy, we all must become artists.* Or rather, the underground is ubiquitous inasmuch as many of us are all already artists, engaging with local virtuals, seeing through (or more accurately, seeing *with*) the garden or the refurbished bookshelf, whatever we have cared to deeply know in its own expression, to the multiplicity it contains.


## Actualizing Undercapital

The question of undercapital, the mobilization of the eight forms of capital and the three faculties of money to the expansion of the virtual field, is also the question of constructing a body from these pluralistic and multiscale social forms through which nutritive resources can be circulated: what Spinoza calls “a common notion.”   

One could argue that the virtual, by virtue of its immeasurability, is anathema to design, planning or global conceptualization. It seems to be the general opinion of the zeitgeist, for the moment. As materialists, we can’t help call this out as fallacy: we are merely entering the era where relational fields must be privileged over objects/particles, where a new type of planning needs to be conceptualized in reference to a probabilistic rather than quantitative index. Fields are real, they are just of a different order of causality. Undercapital asks: *How can we develop economic games that relate to intersubjective fields?*  

For a first target, the low-hanging fruit is open protocolization itself. Undercapital enthusiasts can fund pop-up think tanks that work to solve, in a given context (any given context, at any scale), problems like the following:  
  
#### How can a protocol be employed to intensive ends? 
Consider the work done to adapt LSD from a DoD mind control initiative to a tool for exploring the intersubjective field (“Turn on, Tune in, Drop out”). We have discussed at length how certain technologies of reuse and repair or small scale food production have been honed in the direction of autonomy from centralized systems. What manner of creative divergence comes from those who go to their garden rather than the CVS, who depend on their knowledge in a craft over their appetite for consumerism to fix a problem of sustenance? 

Like the free parties discussed in the first post, in some cases the journey might be greater than the destination. The labor intensive nature of autonomous action generates the positive externality of deep material engagement, just as deep material engagement often generates the positive externality of autonomy. Other practices at the level of the individual and below might be encoded that could add further positive externalities, ones which the individuals themselves could benefit form. The virtual takes care of its own. 

#### How can protocols stack to maximize each other’s capacities?  
The multiscale character of the virtual is a rich design vector: open protocols for seeding ubiquitous local gardens, results themselves of a caring transpersonal ordeal, could scale the viability of autonomous pharmaceutical experiments that lead to new horizons of non-normal states. A renaissance of garage manufacturing and hardware hacking could develop into regional or even neighborhood aesthetic vernaculars, communities erupting in swells of participatory agency over their environment. As in the case of the multi-capital initiatives mentioned earlier, formalized strategies for encountering the virtual generate second order effects that diminish institutions and encourage material curiosity, open empiricism, intersubjectvie games. The virtual is the subliminal means by which a general autonomism could go viral. 
    
#### What are the contours of Minimal Viable Evasion? 
The regulatory authority of the state acts on always shifting ground, push and pull regimes of emphasis and favor. Undergrounds, especially urban undergrounds are well aware of the many areas where non-enforcement is a de facto policy. Despite stereotypes, it would appear to us that law enforcement in underfunded urban locales are often willing to ignore a peaceful good time so long as the participants have done due diligence with neighbors and other local stakeholders. The problem comes when large scale commercial or public interests are significantly threatened, especially when it comes to legal liability. Kyle Smith at LexDAO has invoked “inverted precedent,” potential legal engineering tactics for establishing autonomous contracts that would be recognized by the state. How can these be combined with known underground tactics for staying under the radar of enforcement to generate passable strategies for the kind of participatory and experimental gatherings needed for group encounters with the virtual?  

Ephemeral open protocol DAOs might pop up for six weeks or six months to accomplish deep research in the extant tactics and the new technological strategies available, contribute it to the strategic lexicon (an open protocol library like the one being established at Open Civics), and dissolve. Members of our community are already working on forking Protocol Guilds self-curated registries in order to establish vehicles for flowing resources to researchers who prioritize protocolization as a means of supporting and maintaining the extitutional clarity of the underground.


## Token Engineering

Inasmuch as communities that are oriented toward the virtual field take the shape of this fragmented milieu, the clearest path for formalizing value flows in their direction is to establish network effects by way of an economic grammar for common cause. Can reputation tokens be deployed to solve scaling problem number two, the circulation of protocols and etiquette for high agency participation? Individuals could establish peer legitimacy in one scene and use it as entry to another - no need for one standard, they could be pluralistic - but in our view the dynamics of surveillance and implications of “social credit score” would do more harm to the prospect of intersubjective ordeals than it would benefit the scaling problem.   

Community reputation tokens would invert the logic - they could be used to solicit resources, encouraging high agency participants to engage new scenes while leaving it to the scenes themselves to maintain a vertical limit to scaling (an important engine of horizontal differenciation) corresponding to the physics of underground etiquette or ‘epi-consent.’ These may, however, be contradictory inputs: generally, the key strategy for preserving epi-consent is to remain opaque to the general public. The design game amounts to a rivalrous balance between social capital and virtual capital, the hazards of public legibility to the maintenance of the vibe.

The desired path would seem to require a negotiation between the two: some level of minimum viable reputation token to allow trusted participants to signal that a locale meets a given rubric of the underground - most of all robust consent protocols and institutional disaffiliation - mixed with a zero knowledge architecture for dispersing funds to a burner address for a scene without requiring public visibility of that scene.  Guerilla funders could send fleets of high trust auditors into the global underground to jumpstart resource flows, signaling across months to generate a registry in which _something_ cool is happening, who knows what?(This would require fairly elaborate legal engineering that we think are nonetheless viable.) A side effect of this scene-anonymous resource share is a collective underconsciousness of the underground, a knowledge that a tide is rising, and access to resources are no longer contingent on institutional legibility.  

Still, these designs are trapped within a logic of *financial capital allocation* between *discrete entities*. Undercapital design gets much more savage when tracing multicapital and multifunctional allocation techniques across horizontally expanding threads of the underground, defined not in terms of discrete entities - not even primarily extitutions - but protocols and fields. When material labor becomes de-institutionalized, tinged with affect and virtual life, are its products scarce in the same way? Cultural, experiential and intellectual capital, the key substances of (socio-)technical open protocols, may have the power to render the other forms abundant in a way that deemphasizes traditional economic scarcity. What then?  

It’s hard to say what is science fiction and what is a direct material path forward - that is the work of an undercapital analysis that could take years to unfold. Yet open protocolization and the viral adoption of virtually grounded autonomous labor could unfold into a runaway complementarity at any time. Our engineering efforts should occupy that gap. What can dynamic issuance, bonding curves, self-curated registries and on-chain mutual credit mean for a first breath of an inverted city or cultural economy? As supermodular network effects outside of institutions grow into a common wealth, is some economic activity supplanted by a highly engaged tokenized commons governance that mirrors the polycentric and ever-forking structure of the open protocols? 


## A memetic frame for a ‘general effectivity’ of the virtual

Many cultures have a festival of the liminal - All Hallows Eve, Fet Gede, Día de los muertos, Gaelic Samhain, Walpurgis Night, the Hungry Ghost festival, days where the boundary between earth and the underworld is thin. They are at once utterly populist, but charged with gothic indulgences - spectors of “inorganic life”, atmospheric disorientation, a sense of coextensive realities - auric joys within a kind of folk mysticism of the earth. The literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin writes of the carnivalesque aura commonly associated with the folk underworld, as opposed to the solemn and guilt-ridden portrayals of institutional regimes. We'll quote him at length, from his *Problems of Dosteovsky’s Poetics*: what constitutes the carnivalesque? 

*Carnival is a pageant without footlights and without a division into performers and spectators. In carnival everyone is an active participant, everyone communes in the carnival act. Carnival is not contemplated and, strictly speaking, not even performed; its participants live in it, they live by its laws as long as those laws are in effect; that is, they live a carnivalistic life. Because carnivalistic life is life drawn out of its usual rut, it is to some extent "life turned inside out," "the reverse side of the world" ("monde al'envers").*

*The laws, prohibitions, and restrictions that determine the structure and order of ordinary, that is noncarnival, life are suspended during carnival: what is suspended first of all is hierarchical structure and all the forms of terror, reverence, piety, and etiquette connected with it ….*

*Carnival is the place for working out, in a concretely sensuous, half-real and half-play-acted form, a new mode of interrelationship between individuals, counterposed to the all-powerful socio-hierarchical relationships of noncarnival life. The behavior, gesture, and discourse of a person are freed from the authority of all hierarchical positions (social estate, rank, age, property) defining them totally in noncarnival life, and thus from the vantage point of noncarnival life become eccentric and inappropriate. Eccentricity is a special category of the carnival sense of the world, organically connected with the category of familiar contact; it permits - in concretely sensuous form - the latent sides of human nature to reveal and express themselves.*

*Linked with familiarization is a third category of the carnival sense of the world: carnivalistic mésalliances. A free and familiar attitude spreads over everything: over all values, thoughts, phenomena, and things. All things that were once self-enclosed, disunified, distanced from one another by a noncarnivalistic hierarchical worldview are drawn into carnivalistic contacts and combinations. Carnival brings together, unifies, weds, and combines the sacred with the profane, the lofty with the low, the great with the insignificant, the wise with the stupid.*

*Connected with this is yet a fourth carnivalistic category, profanation: carnivalistic blasphemies, a whole system of carnivalistic debasings and bringings down to earth, carnivalistic obscenities linked with the reproductive power of the earth and the body, carnivalistic parodies on sacred texts and sayings, etc.*

Later:

*Carnival is past millennia's way of sensing the world as one great communal performance. This sense of the world, liberating one from fear, bringing the world maximally close to a person and bringing one person maximally close to another (everything is drawn into the zone of free familiar contact), with its joy at change and its joyful relativity, is opposed to that one-sided and gloomy official seriousness which is dogmatic and hostile to evolution and change, which seeks to absolutize a given condition of existence or a given social order.*

As we have seen, our undergrounds have far advanced from the folk wisdom of the crowd, adopting a design consciousness proper not to a common tourist but a seasoned traveller - and yet the germ of a cultural knowledge of the power of the virtual and the implications of contacting it is here in these age old features of the carnivalesque. They are a deep psychic heritage. 

Crypto has always carried with it a strange inversion, even paranoia: the integrity and immutability of the blockchain calls into question the integrity of all else, making the world a cauldron of potential relativity, propaganda, statecraft. The culture at large is at an extreme saturation of distrust for institutions, making for a living global carnival of AI infections, UFOs, snake oil salesmen of all types: the unipolar integrity of the post-Cold War period has fragmented into a million pieces. To the perspectival disorientation of the carnivalesque, the populous is well-initiated. Now they need to find orientation in that new cosmology.

We have long considered solidity devs, musicians, party alchemists, woodworkers, guerilla chemists, etc. to be kindred spirits in their dedication to “the craft.” The layer of psychonautic inquiry added to all of these material enterprises when one considers the _virtual field_ that flanks them gives the term “craft” a different sense entirely. A concept of the wisdom of astrology, tarot and witchcraft has passed over into the mainstream and is on the tip of everyone’s tongue.The folk underworld revival in our culture - significant since at least the seventies, but resurgent in the post-covid era - points to a desire for agency in the virtual field. What would it mean to extitutionalize this impulse, bring it over the material threshold, to circulate the notion that the spirits have always spoken most to experi- mentalists, makers and pirate empiricists who derive their mysticism not from the stars but from grounded expertise in the stone and the loom?

If crypto has a major cultural export, it’s the conviction we find in our international community that, by peaceful means, with tools won by careful attention and the seeking out of patterns of hardness in our ephemeral world, we can collectively design reality. What are the infrared colors
and agencies of that coming real? Could the institutions even withstand a hypernaturalism, a mass awakening to an age of intensive or gothic materialism, where the only thing standing between us and a legion of alien agencies is our own autonomous labor?

***

 [1] Bergson takes this impression of the intensive as far as an imperative in Creative Evolution: “We should no longer be asking where a moving body will be, what shape a system will take, through what state a change will pass at a given moment: the moments of time, which are only arrests of our attention, would no longer exist; it is the flow of time, it is the very flux of the real that we should be trying to follow.”

[2] “An object is obviously not subjective. But if atmosphere is the elemental reality of the envelopment of potential surrounding and suffusing a locus of occurrent becoming, then objects have atmosphere. … This object, in addition to its sharpened functions, obscurely influences through the manner in which it carries a penumbra of alternatives whose edges will never be exhaustively charted. The feeling of the inexhaustibility of the object, in process and as propensity, is its aura: that by which it outdoes its utility and, more generally, exceeds intentionality…” (Massumi)

[3] The [psychedelic sex scene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7a1AccLPeDk&pp=ygUbYmxhZGUgcnVubmVyIDIwNDkgc2V4IHNjZW5l) between K, Mariette and the disembodied Joi in Blade Runner 2049 seems to us to be an important visual or visceral approximation of the perception of the virtual.

[4] John Ruskin, “[The Nature of the Gothic](https://homes.izmirekonomi.edu.tr/arch204/READINGS/02_RUSKIN.pdf)” in The Stones of Venice, Vol. II.

[5] George Washington Carver.

[6] “In any case, if the State always finds it necessary to repress the nomad and minor sciences, if it opposes vague essences and the operative geometry of the trait, it does so not because the content of these sciences is inexact or imperfect, or because of their magic or initiatory character, but because they imply a division of labor opposed to the norms of the State.” _A Thousand Plateaus_, 369.

[7] See Josh Stark, “[Atoms, Institutions, Blockchains](https://stark.mirror.xyz/n2UpRqwdf7yjuiPKVICPpGoUNeDhlWxGqjulrlpyYi0)”

[8] Find a profile on Massumi and Manning in Uriah Marc Todoroff, “[A Cryptoeconomy of Affect](https://thenewinquiry.com/a-cryptoeconomy-of-affect/)” in _The New Inquiry_.

[9] Other radical multi-capital initiatives have taken the provocation of Overton as one of their main ends. See our [interview with Mark Lakeman of City Repair](https://www.openmutualism.xyz/Open-Protocol-Research-Group/Sketches-Toward-a-Theory-of-the-Protocol-Underground) for a detailed recounting of one such alter-economic coup that greatly informed this work.