From 67ec751acc76a1b423bf540e7832eb156150cde0 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: exeunt <90937997+exeunt3@users.noreply.github.com> Date: Mon, 18 Nov 2024 04:34:40 -0800 Subject: [PATCH 1/4] Create Fragments-of-Ethereum-2068 --- content/exeunt/Fragments-of-Ethereum-2068 | 124 ++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 124 insertions(+) create mode 100644 content/exeunt/Fragments-of-Ethereum-2068 diff --git a/content/exeunt/Fragments-of-Ethereum-2068 b/content/exeunt/Fragments-of-Ethereum-2068 new file mode 100644 index 0000000..76cc272 --- /dev/null +++ b/content/exeunt/Fragments-of-Ethereum-2068 @@ -0,0 +1,124 @@ +--- +author: Exeunt +date: 2024-11-17 +tags: + - ethereum + - speculative-fiction + - cryptoeconomics + - hyperbeings + - weird-mutualism + - underground + - protocol-underground + - hannah-weiner + - michael-levin + - middle-ages +--- + +> “It is as if we were inside a giant octopus.” – Timothy Morton + +*These writings were my contribution to an attempted speculative vision of the state of Ethereum and the web3 space circa 2068, initiated by* The Open Machine *(still extant at [theopenmachine.net](https://theopenmachine.net) .* + +*They are a product of their time - early 2023. Their aspiration to a posthuman imaginary for Ethereum is something I'm still trying to develop.* + +![Octopus](https://theopenmachine.net/assets/octopus.jpg) + + +## anonymized mutual aid + +After the onset of the social credit system in the American midwestern sectors, it took mere months before the lunarpunk hypothesis was faced with a new design problem: resource hoarding. Basic necessities sequestered behind walls of government sanction, attached to esoteric metrics of accord with the conservative politics of the regional austerity. The sinister digital authoritarian twist on the great American supermarket, combined with the general atmosphere of scarcity and associational anxiety of the age of "change" all factored into the need for a crytpographically secure, anonymized mutual aid infrastructure. + +It quickly came to the attention of the underground that robust networks of clandestine stateless aid had existed across Europe throughout the Middle Ages - from about the 1200s through to the early 1800s- usually associated with “beghards” and the mysterious Brothers and Sisters of the Free Spirit, though the true extent of this network and the nature of its protocols are lost to history. Kinship with the network in those days was communicated by a cadre of secret hand signals, delivered mutely beneath the eyes of Central - the church, the Queen, the _jurat_, what have you. + +The design problem was threefold: an element of sybil resistance was needed to discourage depletion or capture of reserves, zero knowledge proofs in order to anonymously confirm location, and a proof of non-affiliation to keep out agents of the state (reserve locations were hashed and distributed, but any intelligence gathered about the protocol was obviously a disadvantage). The last point required the real innovation, depending after much trial and error (and still quite imperfectly) upon a periodic regional underground propogation of a type of pidgin or simplified game language with [shifting](https://twitter.com/howthingswork_/status/1707241218655257077?s=42&t=lFEYWKRwx22TjcEs-uynYw) grammatical primitives. Even the most savvy agents found themselves a generation or two behind the zeitgest - if you really needed the resources, you _knew_ the person who knew the latest wave. + +The practice flowered out into environments of less restraint, where it was given to serve creatures of disaffection and self-elected institutional alienation, or those who by no choice of their own lived in different times, different spaces, fertile nascent worlds of their regard to be watered by the free access to the means to persist into an infrared legibility, imaginal color panoramas of beetles and crustaceans. Fruits of polyphony tethered by a tongue complex and subtle, as if encoded by the very thermodynamic wind, the cold and netted visual _motet_ of north platte salmon. + +## battledore & shuttlecock + +The strange story of what was known in periods past as the battledore is either a casual piece of historical trivia or a heavy metaphor for control, depending on who is doing the reading, who is as it were “captive.” (One might think of it as the story of how a blunt instrument of violence came to be seen as a tabula rasa, a blank screen of significance where fables of representation might be projected, and how those circuitous tricks of idle self-reference became games for elucidating and transforming the world, _for they contained the world…_). + +A compound of a PIE root meaning “to strike” and (perhaps) the very ancient root dating back to sanskrit (_duárah_), the word seems to have meant something like _little door you beat clothes (and sometimes children) with_. By the 1400’s it had apparently been understood that games of distraction are often more successful for control than brute force - why expend effort on a wall of violence when you can generate through sleight of hand a recursive impasse - defeat the problem altogether by replacing a line with a circuit? + +Battledore & Shuttlecock was a game not unlike badminton, the shuttlecock usually made of some chickenfeathers lodged into a cork and with no net, where two children simply counted how long they could keep the it in the air.. Whether it was the child or a clever authority figure who first noticed, the flat facade of the ‘dore was obviously ideal for representing images and codes, a more elaborate, perhaps even infinitely elaborate dimension of self-reference. The shuttlecock was set aside, as the sturdy instrument (now a “hornbook”, apparently renamed to discourage striking) became a staple of any schoolchild’s belongings. Patricia Crain in The Story of A: “Hornbooks were particularly personal and often formed part of a child’s wardrobe… The hornbook’s physical intimacy both mirrors and promotes the child’s internalization of the alphabet.” It was equipped on one side with the alphabet, arabic numerals, sometimes with accompanying images or additions like the Roman calendar months. In almost all cases, the backside contained one simple text: The Lord’s Prayer. + +To every character of creative potential, a backside of dominion to maintain the circuit. And be careful, cause a hornbook can always still be a battledore. But it’s only a matter of time before the rambunctiousness of children returns to infect the screen in an act of vengeance - shuttlecock, the agent of parabola, _dx_. A chickenfeather flight and a worldliness that says _fuck the binary_ - the infinitesimal is neither 0 nor 1. When the screen becomes one sided, its codes emancipated from the hands of control, it’s the vengeance of the world. “Everything which happens and everything which appears is correlated with orders of differences: differences of level, temperature, pressure, tension, potential, difference of intensity.” The screen is an earth for the taking once again. + +The subsequent history is a train car chase [through the caverns](https://archive.org/details/gravitysrainbow00pync_0), a nazi villain with a flier of The Lord’s Prayer at our backs, always trying to restore the binary, reclaim the screen. We keep up the chase, relishing every turn, and we build languages to fool them - Nasser, Morgan-Maar, Urban Müller, brainfuck, Ook!, _ORCΛ_, [100 Rabbits](https://100r.co/), pagan tongues, you can never be too careful. Shuttlecock. + +![shuttlecock_dark](https://github.com/oovg/the-open-template/assets/90937997/37175266-7c1f-4e5f-86e0-2865ba1fd97b) + +## coryphaeus + +The penultimate sentences of Mikhail Bakhtin’s great study, _Rabelais and His World_ are as follows: _We repeat, every act of world history was accompanied by a laughing chorus. But not every period of history had Rabelais for coryphaeus._ + +“The laughing chorus”, a figure of critique, agency and the right to exit. Of course there’s no boss (not even Rabelais). The gesture to that fugitive public’s director evolved from taunt to riddle to mysticism. It was a code of dissent, a network gatepass: _Where’s coryphaeus_? First recorded on chain in 2034, hexidecimal message of flight: “_Ragequit. See Coryphaeus._” What was at first an irreverent literary chide evolved into a respect for the mystery of the mass gestalt combined with the conviction that there is nonetheless a center of gravity, a wisdom of freedom, a seat for it. A spacetime, a fabric accent, a _character_. + +The egregore of course rode a witch’s flight of its own, demon portrayals, towering stacks of self-reference almost falling under their own weight. Generative art and street tags of the clown general, the lightfooted daemon, the apophatic code or the floating afterlife of an abandoned smart contract - so potent with life is the absence. Satan himself, not nihilism but Exit, the very meme of dissent and the devilish faith, leading the pack from behind, that the laughing chorus will somehow somewhere get out. + +## Hannah Weiner + +Automatic writer and alleged feminist language poet Hannah Weiner (1928- Sept 11, 1997) was known in her time for championing a kind of avant garde word art, accentuated with a collaborative performance protocol that turned private pain into collective catharsis. They were deeply private scenes putting her severe schizophrenic symptoms on full display (ultrareal alphabetic hallucinations, a kind of direct visual manifestation exceedingly rare in the archives). + +Often her poems and performances were accompanied with [forthright](https://sites.evergreen.edu/thewordintheear-fall/wp-content/uploads/sites/316/2014/09/Clairvoyant_Journal_Weiner.pdf) declarations like "_I SEE words on my forehead IN THE AIR on the typewriter on the page_". But they were strangely impersonal. Moreso when presented as stage acts with a league of women- usually three or four but sometimes up to a dozen speaking through each other in [impressively fluid stream of conscious](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DF0IoXUGkKU). They seemed to reveal, especially to the captive audiences of the late 2020’s, a glacial uproar behind the cool rationality of the logos, a monstrous fugue of affects - shrieks of submission, mean terrors, the backsweat furies somehow invisible to our daily decoding. Not to Hannah’s. + +What of this veil, this contract, where the words skate across but never seem to penetrate the gate? + +In the long cultural reflection of her work the American DAOs came to refer to this subliminal object as THE PACT, a proto-concept to inform the later experiments in the Ukrainian federations of semantic-oriented conviction voting, streaming micro-intentions toward a vast array of LLM generated neosigs, strange hybrids of PIE or Phoenician phomenes that wiped the slate clean, let the furies breathe… + +Weiner had become a literal face of the radical DAO scene in the early 2030's, when hologram avatar recreations of her live readings were deployed as a kind of aesthetic terrorism throughout the Territories (alt-right or cryptofacist sovereignties erected in the wake of the period of federal austerity after 8/28). Picture a group of old boys in dated Trump hats walking by shaking their heads as three 1977 holographic Greenwich Village lesbians in housewife-smock drag stand on their street corner chain smoking and trading words, confrontationally inflected with the auras of patriarchy: “CALL RAYMOND a storewith that across the door, $5 antique chair WORTH CUT OBEY MONDAY Why did pronoun see RHYS CHATHAM across the entrance to _a store_ sort of an erased money I RHYS doesn't call but _safe_does see a big DONT in the air can't meet _home not on time_ later ROSEMARY CALLS DONTWALKTONIGHT DO TTALK YOUSEEWORDS Comehome _see_ YOU'RE BEA TIFUL FIRST COMMENT YOU'RE A PRONOUN … Went to 82 Club _wild direction dont call_ extreme after Phil's concert _beautiful_ a party NOT PHILS very confused energy the words were all unpleasant _continuous I'm tired_ THA T'S WHY felt awful _concentrate_ SECRET see GO TO PHIL's _embrace_ Niblock on my forehead, go T ALK TO BARBARA Phil's wife see DRINK YOU MILK outside their door SEE.” They planted the scenes _everywhere_, using complex refraction techniques to conceal the source. A territorial police division noted fifty-seven separate avatar clusters in September of 2032. + +In this way Weiner became legend in decentralized communities the world over, her work understood (consciously or not) to represent a potential for solidarity in mysterious new configurations that exhausted the formalizations of the previous age and put up into open sight the very mechanism of domination. The infrared mist of legitimacy, pact, the contract made visible. My name is Hannah Weiner and I SEE WORDS. + +![hologram](https://github.com/oovg/the-open-template/assets/90937997/c1091f07-7846-412b-a6c5-80df3e2ebeaf) + +## nirvanic host + +12 December 2019, in vol. 10 of _Frontiers in Psychology_, the lauded developmental biologist Michael Levin ends a rather dry 17 pages on his ‘cognitive light cone’ framework with an unhinged comment, likely written as an afterthought and under the influence of strong psychedelics: + +“One final comment concerns an interesting intersection of the above model with non-Western views on consciousness. It is striking that the process which Zen practice is meant to reverse – attachment to past memories and high valence for future expectations/fears – is precisely the process suggested to be responsible for the creation of complex Selves. It is unclear whether it is beneficial (or even possible) to truly live in the moment and let go of past memories and future expectations, but anyone who succeeded in doing this would achieve precisely what Zen promises: the dissolution of the self (Flanagan, 2011; Josipovic, 2014, 2019). According to the above model, the Zen ideas of stamping out desire (goal-directed activity, preferences for specific states of affairs) are exactly correct in that this would lead to a dissolution of the ego (Self) and the freedom from the law of cause and effect that governs the Individual’s actions. By turning off memory, anticipation, and striving, the essential glue that creates a cognitive Self is dissolved. By erasing the set point toward which the feedback loop expends energy to accomplish, the higher level integrated Self disappears, leaving nothing but the constituent parts (smaller Selves in their own right). This is completely different from killing the individual components, and it can be asked whether someday we will develop a biochemical path to the Nirvanic Void, which releases the global self by breaking the integrating communication channels but leaves all of the subunits healthy and free to pursue their local goals. _Re-creating the unification into, and liberation from, larger scale unifying Selves would be a true pinnacle of synthetic biology and artificial intelligence engineering_.” + +Was he suggesting that we bio-engineer the emancipation of our skin cells? _Whither thou goest, O Autonomous Liver_? The words seem to have gone unnoticed for decades - Levin retracts the more striking conceits in later formulations of what would become his “Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere,” arguing that some ethical insights from the Buddhist tradition might help color a synthetic biology that recognizes the cogito as a complex, multiscale assemblage in a community of minds. “_The cognitive Self is not an illusion_;” he reassures us, “Our goal,.. should not be to destroy or minimize the Self but to recognize it in all its guises, understand its transitions, and enlarge its cognitive capacity toward the well- being of other Selves.” + +But the little moments of excess and ontological possession often hold more power than their measured or reasoned counterparts. The aesthetic inclination of history is fundamentally radical, and cultural moments develop less by lineage than by chaotic movements of theft and contagion, horizontal gene transfers, _détournement_. Sometime around 2040, Johannesburg or Lisbon, wheatpasted posters appeared of the (by then quite vintage) final page of the article, markered over with the words **ETHEREUM IS A NIRVANIC HOST**. + +Variations on the meme abounded - by 2045 multivalent forms of the image had come to signify public blockchains: a bodhisattva sillhouette with microorganism or basal growths swimming out of it in wild autonomous trajectories. Thomas Hobbes _corpus politicum_ in ego-death. It was a compass for engineers and a provocation for governance design, a new-age thought form of constituent freedom. + +Whether the intention was to raise the stakes to performance art, or that the team simply didn’t understand metaphor - the motivations are unknown - an r&d engineer’s DAO in Copenhagan took the challenge of a technological _corpus transcendecum_ in earnest. 2053 heard the first whisperings of the bioelectric cellular governance technology, advanced neural networks that bypassed the gap junction to revive (and expand) autonomous cognitive abilities of organisms across scales (See: **PIECE initiative**). Now in a phenomenon of interior DAO governance you could see through a mirror darkly all of your selves, little voices crying out in upheaval, awakened from an eon of locked-in syndrome. + +This was the beginning of a new era, discovering (with horror) battlefields of freedom we didn’t know existed. These crowds of our comrades in Being, for so long hidden behind a metaphysical veil, the world hating wall of silence of the cogito. Behind the gentlest meme is the potential burden of revelation. All of history a sleight of hand: contract concealed, agency purloined. The affective fugue of those trapped subjectivities still haunts us. + +## PIECE Initiative + +Insights from this period eventually forked into a decentralized collective interested in outward or extensive applications of the Nirvanic Host Tech (later known simply as Host). Their activities became known as the PIECE Initiative. (PIECE: Posthuman Institute for Embodied Cognitive Exclosures, elsewhere seen as Pacific or Pagan Initiative for Embodied Cognitive Ecology)). + +Being a collection of hackers, neo-alchemists and technological dissidents of all stripes, the group decided to give a nod to the history of witchcraft with their first project. Word was spread, and agents descended from far and wide to the [mythical mountain of Łysa Góra](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCEDfZgDPS8) in Poland. An ad hoc lab was quickly constructed out of the abandoned Benedectine Monastery, and in bad weather and a somewhat frenzied atmosphere the work began. Their task: to cognitively animate Bald Mountain. + +Naked fields of paleozoic boulder (called in that tongue _goloborza_) host crevices of lichen and moss, lichen everywhere too in the stone infrastructure of the monastery walls, the ancient narrow roads and walkways, concealed in endolithic slumbers. Rare flora that sneak in between the crowded fir and beech - the Bears garlic and Honest, Whorled Solomon’s Seal and the Nine-Leaved Toothwort-were of initial interest, but no, these brains are of a later day,- this CandleMas will be The Day of the Lichen. + +The lichen latch to exposed boulder and stone, footpaths and clearings that host a millennial geometry, animated by a biological catastrophe in slow motion. The cybernetic reckonings of all that have chased and fled, prowled and idled, rhythms of habitation that are true isomorphic maps of the brains of deer and shrew, fox and hominid, their fractal interiors radiating out on a witch’s flight of memetic propogation. A mammalian cognitive negotiation painted itself across these hills in a bloody circuit complexity and it _strives to transcend_. + +On top of this hill is a hundred year old, decommissioned analogue television tower and it is swimming with cixiids. Three of our engineers have climbed to the top, and the wind is raucous against them. An electric pall comes over me, for here we stand nearly witness to the advent of a superorganism with ancient depth. A count begins, 60, 59, 58, but it’s too late, the charge has propagated in a brief bioluminsecent shimmer, and a green explosion in the dark of our skulls. Then gone. We stand there in silence and darkness and the wind has stopped. Our feet are on the ground and we are swimming through phase space. + +![lisagora](https://github.com/oovg/the-open-template/assets/90937997/57a3f4d3-ca07-4363-a12f-19a32c4ff544) + +## Pleiades + +The taxonomy of folkloric expression with its weak claims of the “universality” of the Pleiades had de-scholars balking by 2030, as the great field uncoverings of the late 2020’s assured us: beneath the dry river beds of late capitalism, there is no ur-culture, only anthropological event horizons. Apparent zero points that would regress into multivalent bear myths and a million upside down mountains, would you have the greater lens. + +Ironic then that this threshold myth is itself a tale of chase. Seven sisters, and their flight from Orion. Or the Lakota telling: “It’s said that seven girls were traveling through bear territory and were attacked. They fled to a high rock and prayed to the Great Spirit to save them. The Spirit raised the rock under their feet towards the sky, creating the unique rock formation known today as Devil’s Tower. The girls eventually jumped into the sky and became stars, always running from danger.” Chase, escape velocity, the refuge of the virtual. Distance that makes any collapse of sheer potential a glimmering rumor. “In a tale collected in Belknap, attributed to the Assiniboine, seven youths discuss among themselves what they could change into. They decide to transform into stars by climbing a spiderweb.” + +Some claimed the underground DAO network known as The Seven Sisters was just a rumor, a speculative projection or hyperstition, though manifestos and disputed on chain records gave the premise an eerie credibility. It lived on the spectrum from banal small talk (“did you hear that one of the seven sisters had an exploit?”) to shorthand for the far reaches of possibility, interspecies consensus and neurohacked intersubjective prerogatives, Cambrian bedrock of the presocial consensus. A form of time travel. Or the stories of infiltration, sabotage. Siblings fleeing into the deepest depths of Central - the only way out is through. Seven DAOs. What were they doing? What was possible? + +## The Tall Ones + +There's no certain record, but some form of the process was being practiced by at least three different communities by 2026. Common early use cases were recurrent organizational meetings and research forums. The former, searching for a language to give name to the "winds of disposition" that seemed to enact such agency over squads, were perhaps more inspired, but the forums were more rigorous in their creation of protocols to value, engage with and begin to build around ‘the greater forces.’ The common thread: social affects with cryptographic wallets. + +On the third monthly meeting of the year, it was decided by all that the vibes were amazing, a deep and widely felt sense, as if a stray raincloud had visited the group to douse them while the field around remained dry. Pure joy floating in this unimmaculate world. Was it not-, Raffy offered, concerned by the atmosphere of "unwarranted superstiton" - _a simple matter of emergence?_ Surely this visiting entity was only ourselves, masked, disguised, the illusive autogenesis? + +_Listen, you bastard,_ - Carrie, a bit loaded, a bit on edge, and a bit ecstatic: this isn't a church. What, are you afraid of the crowd? _It's no less REAL, for being E_ - just then, Sara interjected wildly, _Look, Raffy! HERE COMES EVERYBODY!_ + +In not much time the auto-generation of "altergenetic wallets," called in some circles altos and eventually the Tall Ones became a matter of protocol in many DAOs. The research forums had advanced the science of "tipping" the gods - gods of intimacy (a long productive chat with less than three participants), pandemonium (a chat with > 2x average participation rate), countervailing gods, providing balance, chaotic good, circuit complexifiers, each with a steward's council (and in some cases an interpretive LLM). Stewards had a duty to visit and consider the wishes of this entity on a seasonal bases. + +By the time the Tall Ones entered the greater DAO scene, the library of potential arrangements was all laid out like ancient D&D lore: blueprints of creatures, their attack modes, their vulnerabilities. + +By the mid 2030s, a burlesque carnival theater of the nonhuman had come into wide convention, elect bodies to bear the weight of emotive disequilibrium and speak the subjectivity of the many things. Upon adhoc stages entered the Tall Ones, mute alien forms on stilts, robed in old bedsheets, their haloed skulls flaming with cybernetic intention. From 974f6805d8d1216bfc4f78207ff24452e2b29246 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: exeunt <90937997+exeunt3@users.noreply.github.com> Date: Mon, 18 Nov 2024 04:35:57 -0800 Subject: [PATCH 2/4] Create Fragments-of-Ethereum-2068.md --- content/exeunt/Fragments-of-Ethereum-2068.md | 124 +++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 124 insertions(+) create mode 100644 content/exeunt/Fragments-of-Ethereum-2068.md diff --git a/content/exeunt/Fragments-of-Ethereum-2068.md b/content/exeunt/Fragments-of-Ethereum-2068.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..76cc272 --- /dev/null +++ b/content/exeunt/Fragments-of-Ethereum-2068.md @@ -0,0 +1,124 @@ +--- +author: Exeunt +date: 2024-11-17 +tags: + - ethereum + - speculative-fiction + - cryptoeconomics + - hyperbeings + - weird-mutualism + - underground + - protocol-underground + - hannah-weiner + - michael-levin + - middle-ages +--- + +> “It is as if we were inside a giant octopus.” – Timothy Morton + +*These writings were my contribution to an attempted speculative vision of the state of Ethereum and the web3 space circa 2068, initiated by* The Open Machine *(still extant at [theopenmachine.net](https://theopenmachine.net) .* + +*They are a product of their time - early 2023. Their aspiration to a posthuman imaginary for Ethereum is something I'm still trying to develop.* + +![Octopus](https://theopenmachine.net/assets/octopus.jpg) + + +## anonymized mutual aid + +After the onset of the social credit system in the American midwestern sectors, it took mere months before the lunarpunk hypothesis was faced with a new design problem: resource hoarding. Basic necessities sequestered behind walls of government sanction, attached to esoteric metrics of accord with the conservative politics of the regional austerity. The sinister digital authoritarian twist on the great American supermarket, combined with the general atmosphere of scarcity and associational anxiety of the age of "change" all factored into the need for a crytpographically secure, anonymized mutual aid infrastructure. + +It quickly came to the attention of the underground that robust networks of clandestine stateless aid had existed across Europe throughout the Middle Ages - from about the 1200s through to the early 1800s- usually associated with “beghards” and the mysterious Brothers and Sisters of the Free Spirit, though the true extent of this network and the nature of its protocols are lost to history. Kinship with the network in those days was communicated by a cadre of secret hand signals, delivered mutely beneath the eyes of Central - the church, the Queen, the _jurat_, what have you. + +The design problem was threefold: an element of sybil resistance was needed to discourage depletion or capture of reserves, zero knowledge proofs in order to anonymously confirm location, and a proof of non-affiliation to keep out agents of the state (reserve locations were hashed and distributed, but any intelligence gathered about the protocol was obviously a disadvantage). The last point required the real innovation, depending after much trial and error (and still quite imperfectly) upon a periodic regional underground propogation of a type of pidgin or simplified game language with [shifting](https://twitter.com/howthingswork_/status/1707241218655257077?s=42&t=lFEYWKRwx22TjcEs-uynYw) grammatical primitives. Even the most savvy agents found themselves a generation or two behind the zeitgest - if you really needed the resources, you _knew_ the person who knew the latest wave. + +The practice flowered out into environments of less restraint, where it was given to serve creatures of disaffection and self-elected institutional alienation, or those who by no choice of their own lived in different times, different spaces, fertile nascent worlds of their regard to be watered by the free access to the means to persist into an infrared legibility, imaginal color panoramas of beetles and crustaceans. Fruits of polyphony tethered by a tongue complex and subtle, as if encoded by the very thermodynamic wind, the cold and netted visual _motet_ of north platte salmon. + +## battledore & shuttlecock + +The strange story of what was known in periods past as the battledore is either a casual piece of historical trivia or a heavy metaphor for control, depending on who is doing the reading, who is as it were “captive.” (One might think of it as the story of how a blunt instrument of violence came to be seen as a tabula rasa, a blank screen of significance where fables of representation might be projected, and how those circuitous tricks of idle self-reference became games for elucidating and transforming the world, _for they contained the world…_). + +A compound of a PIE root meaning “to strike” and (perhaps) the very ancient root dating back to sanskrit (_duárah_), the word seems to have meant something like _little door you beat clothes (and sometimes children) with_. By the 1400’s it had apparently been understood that games of distraction are often more successful for control than brute force - why expend effort on a wall of violence when you can generate through sleight of hand a recursive impasse - defeat the problem altogether by replacing a line with a circuit? + +Battledore & Shuttlecock was a game not unlike badminton, the shuttlecock usually made of some chickenfeathers lodged into a cork and with no net, where two children simply counted how long they could keep the it in the air.. Whether it was the child or a clever authority figure who first noticed, the flat facade of the ‘dore was obviously ideal for representing images and codes, a more elaborate, perhaps even infinitely elaborate dimension of self-reference. The shuttlecock was set aside, as the sturdy instrument (now a “hornbook”, apparently renamed to discourage striking) became a staple of any schoolchild’s belongings. Patricia Crain in The Story of A: “Hornbooks were particularly personal and often formed part of a child’s wardrobe… The hornbook’s physical intimacy both mirrors and promotes the child’s internalization of the alphabet.” It was equipped on one side with the alphabet, arabic numerals, sometimes with accompanying images or additions like the Roman calendar months. In almost all cases, the backside contained one simple text: The Lord’s Prayer. + +To every character of creative potential, a backside of dominion to maintain the circuit. And be careful, cause a hornbook can always still be a battledore. But it’s only a matter of time before the rambunctiousness of children returns to infect the screen in an act of vengeance - shuttlecock, the agent of parabola, _dx_. A chickenfeather flight and a worldliness that says _fuck the binary_ - the infinitesimal is neither 0 nor 1. When the screen becomes one sided, its codes emancipated from the hands of control, it’s the vengeance of the world. “Everything which happens and everything which appears is correlated with orders of differences: differences of level, temperature, pressure, tension, potential, difference of intensity.” The screen is an earth for the taking once again. + +The subsequent history is a train car chase [through the caverns](https://archive.org/details/gravitysrainbow00pync_0), a nazi villain with a flier of The Lord’s Prayer at our backs, always trying to restore the binary, reclaim the screen. We keep up the chase, relishing every turn, and we build languages to fool them - Nasser, Morgan-Maar, Urban Müller, brainfuck, Ook!, _ORCΛ_, [100 Rabbits](https://100r.co/), pagan tongues, you can never be too careful. Shuttlecock. + +![shuttlecock_dark](https://github.com/oovg/the-open-template/assets/90937997/37175266-7c1f-4e5f-86e0-2865ba1fd97b) + +## coryphaeus + +The penultimate sentences of Mikhail Bakhtin’s great study, _Rabelais and His World_ are as follows: _We repeat, every act of world history was accompanied by a laughing chorus. But not every period of history had Rabelais for coryphaeus._ + +“The laughing chorus”, a figure of critique, agency and the right to exit. Of course there’s no boss (not even Rabelais). The gesture to that fugitive public’s director evolved from taunt to riddle to mysticism. It was a code of dissent, a network gatepass: _Where’s coryphaeus_? First recorded on chain in 2034, hexidecimal message of flight: “_Ragequit. See Coryphaeus._” What was at first an irreverent literary chide evolved into a respect for the mystery of the mass gestalt combined with the conviction that there is nonetheless a center of gravity, a wisdom of freedom, a seat for it. A spacetime, a fabric accent, a _character_. + +The egregore of course rode a witch’s flight of its own, demon portrayals, towering stacks of self-reference almost falling under their own weight. Generative art and street tags of the clown general, the lightfooted daemon, the apophatic code or the floating afterlife of an abandoned smart contract - so potent with life is the absence. Satan himself, not nihilism but Exit, the very meme of dissent and the devilish faith, leading the pack from behind, that the laughing chorus will somehow somewhere get out. + +## Hannah Weiner + +Automatic writer and alleged feminist language poet Hannah Weiner (1928- Sept 11, 1997) was known in her time for championing a kind of avant garde word art, accentuated with a collaborative performance protocol that turned private pain into collective catharsis. They were deeply private scenes putting her severe schizophrenic symptoms on full display (ultrareal alphabetic hallucinations, a kind of direct visual manifestation exceedingly rare in the archives). + +Often her poems and performances were accompanied with [forthright](https://sites.evergreen.edu/thewordintheear-fall/wp-content/uploads/sites/316/2014/09/Clairvoyant_Journal_Weiner.pdf) declarations like "_I SEE words on my forehead IN THE AIR on the typewriter on the page_". But they were strangely impersonal. Moreso when presented as stage acts with a league of women- usually three or four but sometimes up to a dozen speaking through each other in [impressively fluid stream of conscious](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DF0IoXUGkKU). They seemed to reveal, especially to the captive audiences of the late 2020’s, a glacial uproar behind the cool rationality of the logos, a monstrous fugue of affects - shrieks of submission, mean terrors, the backsweat furies somehow invisible to our daily decoding. Not to Hannah’s. + +What of this veil, this contract, where the words skate across but never seem to penetrate the gate? + +In the long cultural reflection of her work the American DAOs came to refer to this subliminal object as THE PACT, a proto-concept to inform the later experiments in the Ukrainian federations of semantic-oriented conviction voting, streaming micro-intentions toward a vast array of LLM generated neosigs, strange hybrids of PIE or Phoenician phomenes that wiped the slate clean, let the furies breathe… + +Weiner had become a literal face of the radical DAO scene in the early 2030's, when hologram avatar recreations of her live readings were deployed as a kind of aesthetic terrorism throughout the Territories (alt-right or cryptofacist sovereignties erected in the wake of the period of federal austerity after 8/28). Picture a group of old boys in dated Trump hats walking by shaking their heads as three 1977 holographic Greenwich Village lesbians in housewife-smock drag stand on their street corner chain smoking and trading words, confrontationally inflected with the auras of patriarchy: “CALL RAYMOND a storewith that across the door, $5 antique chair WORTH CUT OBEY MONDAY Why did pronoun see RHYS CHATHAM across the entrance to _a store_ sort of an erased money I RHYS doesn't call but _safe_does see a big DONT in the air can't meet _home not on time_ later ROSEMARY CALLS DONTWALKTONIGHT DO TTALK YOUSEEWORDS Comehome _see_ YOU'RE BEA TIFUL FIRST COMMENT YOU'RE A PRONOUN … Went to 82 Club _wild direction dont call_ extreme after Phil's concert _beautiful_ a party NOT PHILS very confused energy the words were all unpleasant _continuous I'm tired_ THA T'S WHY felt awful _concentrate_ SECRET see GO TO PHIL's _embrace_ Niblock on my forehead, go T ALK TO BARBARA Phil's wife see DRINK YOU MILK outside their door SEE.” They planted the scenes _everywhere_, using complex refraction techniques to conceal the source. A territorial police division noted fifty-seven separate avatar clusters in September of 2032. + +In this way Weiner became legend in decentralized communities the world over, her work understood (consciously or not) to represent a potential for solidarity in mysterious new configurations that exhausted the formalizations of the previous age and put up into open sight the very mechanism of domination. The infrared mist of legitimacy, pact, the contract made visible. My name is Hannah Weiner and I SEE WORDS. + +![hologram](https://github.com/oovg/the-open-template/assets/90937997/c1091f07-7846-412b-a6c5-80df3e2ebeaf) + +## nirvanic host + +12 December 2019, in vol. 10 of _Frontiers in Psychology_, the lauded developmental biologist Michael Levin ends a rather dry 17 pages on his ‘cognitive light cone’ framework with an unhinged comment, likely written as an afterthought and under the influence of strong psychedelics: + +“One final comment concerns an interesting intersection of the above model with non-Western views on consciousness. It is striking that the process which Zen practice is meant to reverse – attachment to past memories and high valence for future expectations/fears – is precisely the process suggested to be responsible for the creation of complex Selves. It is unclear whether it is beneficial (or even possible) to truly live in the moment and let go of past memories and future expectations, but anyone who succeeded in doing this would achieve precisely what Zen promises: the dissolution of the self (Flanagan, 2011; Josipovic, 2014, 2019). According to the above model, the Zen ideas of stamping out desire (goal-directed activity, preferences for specific states of affairs) are exactly correct in that this would lead to a dissolution of the ego (Self) and the freedom from the law of cause and effect that governs the Individual’s actions. By turning off memory, anticipation, and striving, the essential glue that creates a cognitive Self is dissolved. By erasing the set point toward which the feedback loop expends energy to accomplish, the higher level integrated Self disappears, leaving nothing but the constituent parts (smaller Selves in their own right). This is completely different from killing the individual components, and it can be asked whether someday we will develop a biochemical path to the Nirvanic Void, which releases the global self by breaking the integrating communication channels but leaves all of the subunits healthy and free to pursue their local goals. _Re-creating the unification into, and liberation from, larger scale unifying Selves would be a true pinnacle of synthetic biology and artificial intelligence engineering_.” + +Was he suggesting that we bio-engineer the emancipation of our skin cells? _Whither thou goest, O Autonomous Liver_? The words seem to have gone unnoticed for decades - Levin retracts the more striking conceits in later formulations of what would become his “Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere,” arguing that some ethical insights from the Buddhist tradition might help color a synthetic biology that recognizes the cogito as a complex, multiscale assemblage in a community of minds. “_The cognitive Self is not an illusion_;” he reassures us, “Our goal,.. should not be to destroy or minimize the Self but to recognize it in all its guises, understand its transitions, and enlarge its cognitive capacity toward the well- being of other Selves.” + +But the little moments of excess and ontological possession often hold more power than their measured or reasoned counterparts. The aesthetic inclination of history is fundamentally radical, and cultural moments develop less by lineage than by chaotic movements of theft and contagion, horizontal gene transfers, _détournement_. Sometime around 2040, Johannesburg or Lisbon, wheatpasted posters appeared of the (by then quite vintage) final page of the article, markered over with the words **ETHEREUM IS A NIRVANIC HOST**. + +Variations on the meme abounded - by 2045 multivalent forms of the image had come to signify public blockchains: a bodhisattva sillhouette with microorganism or basal growths swimming out of it in wild autonomous trajectories. Thomas Hobbes _corpus politicum_ in ego-death. It was a compass for engineers and a provocation for governance design, a new-age thought form of constituent freedom. + +Whether the intention was to raise the stakes to performance art, or that the team simply didn’t understand metaphor - the motivations are unknown - an r&d engineer’s DAO in Copenhagan took the challenge of a technological _corpus transcendecum_ in earnest. 2053 heard the first whisperings of the bioelectric cellular governance technology, advanced neural networks that bypassed the gap junction to revive (and expand) autonomous cognitive abilities of organisms across scales (See: **PIECE initiative**). Now in a phenomenon of interior DAO governance you could see through a mirror darkly all of your selves, little voices crying out in upheaval, awakened from an eon of locked-in syndrome. + +This was the beginning of a new era, discovering (with horror) battlefields of freedom we didn’t know existed. These crowds of our comrades in Being, for so long hidden behind a metaphysical veil, the world hating wall of silence of the cogito. Behind the gentlest meme is the potential burden of revelation. All of history a sleight of hand: contract concealed, agency purloined. The affective fugue of those trapped subjectivities still haunts us. + +## PIECE Initiative + +Insights from this period eventually forked into a decentralized collective interested in outward or extensive applications of the Nirvanic Host Tech (later known simply as Host). Their activities became known as the PIECE Initiative. (PIECE: Posthuman Institute for Embodied Cognitive Exclosures, elsewhere seen as Pacific or Pagan Initiative for Embodied Cognitive Ecology)). + +Being a collection of hackers, neo-alchemists and technological dissidents of all stripes, the group decided to give a nod to the history of witchcraft with their first project. Word was spread, and agents descended from far and wide to the [mythical mountain of Łysa Góra](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCEDfZgDPS8) in Poland. An ad hoc lab was quickly constructed out of the abandoned Benedectine Monastery, and in bad weather and a somewhat frenzied atmosphere the work began. Their task: to cognitively animate Bald Mountain. + +Naked fields of paleozoic boulder (called in that tongue _goloborza_) host crevices of lichen and moss, lichen everywhere too in the stone infrastructure of the monastery walls, the ancient narrow roads and walkways, concealed in endolithic slumbers. Rare flora that sneak in between the crowded fir and beech - the Bears garlic and Honest, Whorled Solomon’s Seal and the Nine-Leaved Toothwort-were of initial interest, but no, these brains are of a later day,- this CandleMas will be The Day of the Lichen. + +The lichen latch to exposed boulder and stone, footpaths and clearings that host a millennial geometry, animated by a biological catastrophe in slow motion. The cybernetic reckonings of all that have chased and fled, prowled and idled, rhythms of habitation that are true isomorphic maps of the brains of deer and shrew, fox and hominid, their fractal interiors radiating out on a witch’s flight of memetic propogation. A mammalian cognitive negotiation painted itself across these hills in a bloody circuit complexity and it _strives to transcend_. + +On top of this hill is a hundred year old, decommissioned analogue television tower and it is swimming with cixiids. Three of our engineers have climbed to the top, and the wind is raucous against them. An electric pall comes over me, for here we stand nearly witness to the advent of a superorganism with ancient depth. A count begins, 60, 59, 58, but it’s too late, the charge has propagated in a brief bioluminsecent shimmer, and a green explosion in the dark of our skulls. Then gone. We stand there in silence and darkness and the wind has stopped. Our feet are on the ground and we are swimming through phase space. + +![lisagora](https://github.com/oovg/the-open-template/assets/90937997/57a3f4d3-ca07-4363-a12f-19a32c4ff544) + +## Pleiades + +The taxonomy of folkloric expression with its weak claims of the “universality” of the Pleiades had de-scholars balking by 2030, as the great field uncoverings of the late 2020’s assured us: beneath the dry river beds of late capitalism, there is no ur-culture, only anthropological event horizons. Apparent zero points that would regress into multivalent bear myths and a million upside down mountains, would you have the greater lens. + +Ironic then that this threshold myth is itself a tale of chase. Seven sisters, and their flight from Orion. Or the Lakota telling: “It’s said that seven girls were traveling through bear territory and were attacked. They fled to a high rock and prayed to the Great Spirit to save them. The Spirit raised the rock under their feet towards the sky, creating the unique rock formation known today as Devil’s Tower. The girls eventually jumped into the sky and became stars, always running from danger.” Chase, escape velocity, the refuge of the virtual. Distance that makes any collapse of sheer potential a glimmering rumor. “In a tale collected in Belknap, attributed to the Assiniboine, seven youths discuss among themselves what they could change into. They decide to transform into stars by climbing a spiderweb.” + +Some claimed the underground DAO network known as The Seven Sisters was just a rumor, a speculative projection or hyperstition, though manifestos and disputed on chain records gave the premise an eerie credibility. It lived on the spectrum from banal small talk (“did you hear that one of the seven sisters had an exploit?”) to shorthand for the far reaches of possibility, interspecies consensus and neurohacked intersubjective prerogatives, Cambrian bedrock of the presocial consensus. A form of time travel. Or the stories of infiltration, sabotage. Siblings fleeing into the deepest depths of Central - the only way out is through. Seven DAOs. What were they doing? What was possible? + +## The Tall Ones + +There's no certain record, but some form of the process was being practiced by at least three different communities by 2026. Common early use cases were recurrent organizational meetings and research forums. The former, searching for a language to give name to the "winds of disposition" that seemed to enact such agency over squads, were perhaps more inspired, but the forums were more rigorous in their creation of protocols to value, engage with and begin to build around ‘the greater forces.’ The common thread: social affects with cryptographic wallets. + +On the third monthly meeting of the year, it was decided by all that the vibes were amazing, a deep and widely felt sense, as if a stray raincloud had visited the group to douse them while the field around remained dry. Pure joy floating in this unimmaculate world. Was it not-, Raffy offered, concerned by the atmosphere of "unwarranted superstiton" - _a simple matter of emergence?_ Surely this visiting entity was only ourselves, masked, disguised, the illusive autogenesis? + +_Listen, you bastard,_ - Carrie, a bit loaded, a bit on edge, and a bit ecstatic: this isn't a church. What, are you afraid of the crowd? _It's no less REAL, for being E_ - just then, Sara interjected wildly, _Look, Raffy! HERE COMES EVERYBODY!_ + +In not much time the auto-generation of "altergenetic wallets," called in some circles altos and eventually the Tall Ones became a matter of protocol in many DAOs. The research forums had advanced the science of "tipping" the gods - gods of intimacy (a long productive chat with less than three participants), pandemonium (a chat with > 2x average participation rate), countervailing gods, providing balance, chaotic good, circuit complexifiers, each with a steward's council (and in some cases an interpretive LLM). Stewards had a duty to visit and consider the wishes of this entity on a seasonal bases. + +By the time the Tall Ones entered the greater DAO scene, the library of potential arrangements was all laid out like ancient D&D lore: blueprints of creatures, their attack modes, their vulnerabilities. + +By the mid 2030s, a burlesque carnival theater of the nonhuman had come into wide convention, elect bodies to bear the weight of emotive disequilibrium and speak the subjectivity of the many things. Upon adhoc stages entered the Tall Ones, mute alien forms on stilts, robed in old bedsheets, their haloed skulls flaming with cybernetic intention. From d5838a79f0b64862cf702a0eee5504eddd9a0c96 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: exeunt <90937997+exeunt3@users.noreply.github.com> Date: Mon, 18 Nov 2024 04:36:18 -0800 Subject: [PATCH 3/4] Delete content/exeunt/Fragments-of-Ethereum-2068 --- content/exeunt/Fragments-of-Ethereum-2068 | 124 ---------------------- 1 file changed, 124 deletions(-) delete mode 100644 content/exeunt/Fragments-of-Ethereum-2068 diff --git a/content/exeunt/Fragments-of-Ethereum-2068 b/content/exeunt/Fragments-of-Ethereum-2068 deleted file mode 100644 index 76cc272..0000000 --- a/content/exeunt/Fragments-of-Ethereum-2068 +++ /dev/null @@ -1,124 +0,0 @@ ---- -author: Exeunt -date: 2024-11-17 -tags: - - ethereum - - speculative-fiction - - cryptoeconomics - - hyperbeings - - weird-mutualism - - underground - - protocol-underground - - hannah-weiner - - michael-levin - - middle-ages ---- - -> “It is as if we were inside a giant octopus.” – Timothy Morton - -*These writings were my contribution to an attempted speculative vision of the state of Ethereum and the web3 space circa 2068, initiated by* The Open Machine *(still extant at [theopenmachine.net](https://theopenmachine.net) .* - -*They are a product of their time - early 2023. Their aspiration to a posthuman imaginary for Ethereum is something I'm still trying to develop.* - -![Octopus](https://theopenmachine.net/assets/octopus.jpg) - - -## anonymized mutual aid - -After the onset of the social credit system in the American midwestern sectors, it took mere months before the lunarpunk hypothesis was faced with a new design problem: resource hoarding. Basic necessities sequestered behind walls of government sanction, attached to esoteric metrics of accord with the conservative politics of the regional austerity. The sinister digital authoritarian twist on the great American supermarket, combined with the general atmosphere of scarcity and associational anxiety of the age of "change" all factored into the need for a crytpographically secure, anonymized mutual aid infrastructure. - -It quickly came to the attention of the underground that robust networks of clandestine stateless aid had existed across Europe throughout the Middle Ages - from about the 1200s through to the early 1800s- usually associated with “beghards” and the mysterious Brothers and Sisters of the Free Spirit, though the true extent of this network and the nature of its protocols are lost to history. Kinship with the network in those days was communicated by a cadre of secret hand signals, delivered mutely beneath the eyes of Central - the church, the Queen, the _jurat_, what have you. - -The design problem was threefold: an element of sybil resistance was needed to discourage depletion or capture of reserves, zero knowledge proofs in order to anonymously confirm location, and a proof of non-affiliation to keep out agents of the state (reserve locations were hashed and distributed, but any intelligence gathered about the protocol was obviously a disadvantage). The last point required the real innovation, depending after much trial and error (and still quite imperfectly) upon a periodic regional underground propogation of a type of pidgin or simplified game language with [shifting](https://twitter.com/howthingswork_/status/1707241218655257077?s=42&t=lFEYWKRwx22TjcEs-uynYw) grammatical primitives. Even the most savvy agents found themselves a generation or two behind the zeitgest - if you really needed the resources, you _knew_ the person who knew the latest wave. - -The practice flowered out into environments of less restraint, where it was given to serve creatures of disaffection and self-elected institutional alienation, or those who by no choice of their own lived in different times, different spaces, fertile nascent worlds of their regard to be watered by the free access to the means to persist into an infrared legibility, imaginal color panoramas of beetles and crustaceans. Fruits of polyphony tethered by a tongue complex and subtle, as if encoded by the very thermodynamic wind, the cold and netted visual _motet_ of north platte salmon. - -## battledore & shuttlecock - -The strange story of what was known in periods past as the battledore is either a casual piece of historical trivia or a heavy metaphor for control, depending on who is doing the reading, who is as it were “captive.” (One might think of it as the story of how a blunt instrument of violence came to be seen as a tabula rasa, a blank screen of significance where fables of representation might be projected, and how those circuitous tricks of idle self-reference became games for elucidating and transforming the world, _for they contained the world…_). - -A compound of a PIE root meaning “to strike” and (perhaps) the very ancient root dating back to sanskrit (_duárah_), the word seems to have meant something like _little door you beat clothes (and sometimes children) with_. By the 1400’s it had apparently been understood that games of distraction are often more successful for control than brute force - why expend effort on a wall of violence when you can generate through sleight of hand a recursive impasse - defeat the problem altogether by replacing a line with a circuit? - -Battledore & Shuttlecock was a game not unlike badminton, the shuttlecock usually made of some chickenfeathers lodged into a cork and with no net, where two children simply counted how long they could keep the it in the air.. Whether it was the child or a clever authority figure who first noticed, the flat facade of the ‘dore was obviously ideal for representing images and codes, a more elaborate, perhaps even infinitely elaborate dimension of self-reference. The shuttlecock was set aside, as the sturdy instrument (now a “hornbook”, apparently renamed to discourage striking) became a staple of any schoolchild’s belongings. Patricia Crain in The Story of A: “Hornbooks were particularly personal and often formed part of a child’s wardrobe… The hornbook’s physical intimacy both mirrors and promotes the child’s internalization of the alphabet.” It was equipped on one side with the alphabet, arabic numerals, sometimes with accompanying images or additions like the Roman calendar months. In almost all cases, the backside contained one simple text: The Lord’s Prayer. - -To every character of creative potential, a backside of dominion to maintain the circuit. And be careful, cause a hornbook can always still be a battledore. But it’s only a matter of time before the rambunctiousness of children returns to infect the screen in an act of vengeance - shuttlecock, the agent of parabola, _dx_. A chickenfeather flight and a worldliness that says _fuck the binary_ - the infinitesimal is neither 0 nor 1. When the screen becomes one sided, its codes emancipated from the hands of control, it’s the vengeance of the world. “Everything which happens and everything which appears is correlated with orders of differences: differences of level, temperature, pressure, tension, potential, difference of intensity.” The screen is an earth for the taking once again. - -The subsequent history is a train car chase [through the caverns](https://archive.org/details/gravitysrainbow00pync_0), a nazi villain with a flier of The Lord’s Prayer at our backs, always trying to restore the binary, reclaim the screen. We keep up the chase, relishing every turn, and we build languages to fool them - Nasser, Morgan-Maar, Urban Müller, brainfuck, Ook!, _ORCΛ_, [100 Rabbits](https://100r.co/), pagan tongues, you can never be too careful. Shuttlecock. - -![shuttlecock_dark](https://github.com/oovg/the-open-template/assets/90937997/37175266-7c1f-4e5f-86e0-2865ba1fd97b) - -## coryphaeus - -The penultimate sentences of Mikhail Bakhtin’s great study, _Rabelais and His World_ are as follows: _We repeat, every act of world history was accompanied by a laughing chorus. But not every period of history had Rabelais for coryphaeus._ - -“The laughing chorus”, a figure of critique, agency and the right to exit. Of course there’s no boss (not even Rabelais). The gesture to that fugitive public’s director evolved from taunt to riddle to mysticism. It was a code of dissent, a network gatepass: _Where’s coryphaeus_? First recorded on chain in 2034, hexidecimal message of flight: “_Ragequit. See Coryphaeus._” What was at first an irreverent literary chide evolved into a respect for the mystery of the mass gestalt combined with the conviction that there is nonetheless a center of gravity, a wisdom of freedom, a seat for it. A spacetime, a fabric accent, a _character_. - -The egregore of course rode a witch’s flight of its own, demon portrayals, towering stacks of self-reference almost falling under their own weight. Generative art and street tags of the clown general, the lightfooted daemon, the apophatic code or the floating afterlife of an abandoned smart contract - so potent with life is the absence. Satan himself, not nihilism but Exit, the very meme of dissent and the devilish faith, leading the pack from behind, that the laughing chorus will somehow somewhere get out. - -## Hannah Weiner - -Automatic writer and alleged feminist language poet Hannah Weiner (1928- Sept 11, 1997) was known in her time for championing a kind of avant garde word art, accentuated with a collaborative performance protocol that turned private pain into collective catharsis. They were deeply private scenes putting her severe schizophrenic symptoms on full display (ultrareal alphabetic hallucinations, a kind of direct visual manifestation exceedingly rare in the archives). - -Often her poems and performances were accompanied with [forthright](https://sites.evergreen.edu/thewordintheear-fall/wp-content/uploads/sites/316/2014/09/Clairvoyant_Journal_Weiner.pdf) declarations like "_I SEE words on my forehead IN THE AIR on the typewriter on the page_". But they were strangely impersonal. Moreso when presented as stage acts with a league of women- usually three or four but sometimes up to a dozen speaking through each other in [impressively fluid stream of conscious](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DF0IoXUGkKU). They seemed to reveal, especially to the captive audiences of the late 2020’s, a glacial uproar behind the cool rationality of the logos, a monstrous fugue of affects - shrieks of submission, mean terrors, the backsweat furies somehow invisible to our daily decoding. Not to Hannah’s. - -What of this veil, this contract, where the words skate across but never seem to penetrate the gate? - -In the long cultural reflection of her work the American DAOs came to refer to this subliminal object as THE PACT, a proto-concept to inform the later experiments in the Ukrainian federations of semantic-oriented conviction voting, streaming micro-intentions toward a vast array of LLM generated neosigs, strange hybrids of PIE or Phoenician phomenes that wiped the slate clean, let the furies breathe… - -Weiner had become a literal face of the radical DAO scene in the early 2030's, when hologram avatar recreations of her live readings were deployed as a kind of aesthetic terrorism throughout the Territories (alt-right or cryptofacist sovereignties erected in the wake of the period of federal austerity after 8/28). Picture a group of old boys in dated Trump hats walking by shaking their heads as three 1977 holographic Greenwich Village lesbians in housewife-smock drag stand on their street corner chain smoking and trading words, confrontationally inflected with the auras of patriarchy: “CALL RAYMOND a storewith that across the door, $5 antique chair WORTH CUT OBEY MONDAY Why did pronoun see RHYS CHATHAM across the entrance to _a store_ sort of an erased money I RHYS doesn't call but _safe_does see a big DONT in the air can't meet _home not on time_ later ROSEMARY CALLS DONTWALKTONIGHT DO TTALK YOUSEEWORDS Comehome _see_ YOU'RE BEA TIFUL FIRST COMMENT YOU'RE A PRONOUN … Went to 82 Club _wild direction dont call_ extreme after Phil's concert _beautiful_ a party NOT PHILS very confused energy the words were all unpleasant _continuous I'm tired_ THA T'S WHY felt awful _concentrate_ SECRET see GO TO PHIL's _embrace_ Niblock on my forehead, go T ALK TO BARBARA Phil's wife see DRINK YOU MILK outside their door SEE.” They planted the scenes _everywhere_, using complex refraction techniques to conceal the source. A territorial police division noted fifty-seven separate avatar clusters in September of 2032. - -In this way Weiner became legend in decentralized communities the world over, her work understood (consciously or not) to represent a potential for solidarity in mysterious new configurations that exhausted the formalizations of the previous age and put up into open sight the very mechanism of domination. The infrared mist of legitimacy, pact, the contract made visible. My name is Hannah Weiner and I SEE WORDS. - -![hologram](https://github.com/oovg/the-open-template/assets/90937997/c1091f07-7846-412b-a6c5-80df3e2ebeaf) - -## nirvanic host - -12 December 2019, in vol. 10 of _Frontiers in Psychology_, the lauded developmental biologist Michael Levin ends a rather dry 17 pages on his ‘cognitive light cone’ framework with an unhinged comment, likely written as an afterthought and under the influence of strong psychedelics: - -“One final comment concerns an interesting intersection of the above model with non-Western views on consciousness. It is striking that the process which Zen practice is meant to reverse – attachment to past memories and high valence for future expectations/fears – is precisely the process suggested to be responsible for the creation of complex Selves. It is unclear whether it is beneficial (or even possible) to truly live in the moment and let go of past memories and future expectations, but anyone who succeeded in doing this would achieve precisely what Zen promises: the dissolution of the self (Flanagan, 2011; Josipovic, 2014, 2019). According to the above model, the Zen ideas of stamping out desire (goal-directed activity, preferences for specific states of affairs) are exactly correct in that this would lead to a dissolution of the ego (Self) and the freedom from the law of cause and effect that governs the Individual’s actions. By turning off memory, anticipation, and striving, the essential glue that creates a cognitive Self is dissolved. By erasing the set point toward which the feedback loop expends energy to accomplish, the higher level integrated Self disappears, leaving nothing but the constituent parts (smaller Selves in their own right). This is completely different from killing the individual components, and it can be asked whether someday we will develop a biochemical path to the Nirvanic Void, which releases the global self by breaking the integrating communication channels but leaves all of the subunits healthy and free to pursue their local goals. _Re-creating the unification into, and liberation from, larger scale unifying Selves would be a true pinnacle of synthetic biology and artificial intelligence engineering_.” - -Was he suggesting that we bio-engineer the emancipation of our skin cells? _Whither thou goest, O Autonomous Liver_? The words seem to have gone unnoticed for decades - Levin retracts the more striking conceits in later formulations of what would become his “Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere,” arguing that some ethical insights from the Buddhist tradition might help color a synthetic biology that recognizes the cogito as a complex, multiscale assemblage in a community of minds. “_The cognitive Self is not an illusion_;” he reassures us, “Our goal,.. should not be to destroy or minimize the Self but to recognize it in all its guises, understand its transitions, and enlarge its cognitive capacity toward the well- being of other Selves.” - -But the little moments of excess and ontological possession often hold more power than their measured or reasoned counterparts. The aesthetic inclination of history is fundamentally radical, and cultural moments develop less by lineage than by chaotic movements of theft and contagion, horizontal gene transfers, _détournement_. Sometime around 2040, Johannesburg or Lisbon, wheatpasted posters appeared of the (by then quite vintage) final page of the article, markered over with the words **ETHEREUM IS A NIRVANIC HOST**. - -Variations on the meme abounded - by 2045 multivalent forms of the image had come to signify public blockchains: a bodhisattva sillhouette with microorganism or basal growths swimming out of it in wild autonomous trajectories. Thomas Hobbes _corpus politicum_ in ego-death. It was a compass for engineers and a provocation for governance design, a new-age thought form of constituent freedom. - -Whether the intention was to raise the stakes to performance art, or that the team simply didn’t understand metaphor - the motivations are unknown - an r&d engineer’s DAO in Copenhagan took the challenge of a technological _corpus transcendecum_ in earnest. 2053 heard the first whisperings of the bioelectric cellular governance technology, advanced neural networks that bypassed the gap junction to revive (and expand) autonomous cognitive abilities of organisms across scales (See: **PIECE initiative**). Now in a phenomenon of interior DAO governance you could see through a mirror darkly all of your selves, little voices crying out in upheaval, awakened from an eon of locked-in syndrome. - -This was the beginning of a new era, discovering (with horror) battlefields of freedom we didn’t know existed. These crowds of our comrades in Being, for so long hidden behind a metaphysical veil, the world hating wall of silence of the cogito. Behind the gentlest meme is the potential burden of revelation. All of history a sleight of hand: contract concealed, agency purloined. The affective fugue of those trapped subjectivities still haunts us. - -## PIECE Initiative - -Insights from this period eventually forked into a decentralized collective interested in outward or extensive applications of the Nirvanic Host Tech (later known simply as Host). Their activities became known as the PIECE Initiative. (PIECE: Posthuman Institute for Embodied Cognitive Exclosures, elsewhere seen as Pacific or Pagan Initiative for Embodied Cognitive Ecology)). - -Being a collection of hackers, neo-alchemists and technological dissidents of all stripes, the group decided to give a nod to the history of witchcraft with their first project. Word was spread, and agents descended from far and wide to the [mythical mountain of Łysa Góra](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCEDfZgDPS8) in Poland. An ad hoc lab was quickly constructed out of the abandoned Benedectine Monastery, and in bad weather and a somewhat frenzied atmosphere the work began. Their task: to cognitively animate Bald Mountain. - -Naked fields of paleozoic boulder (called in that tongue _goloborza_) host crevices of lichen and moss, lichen everywhere too in the stone infrastructure of the monastery walls, the ancient narrow roads and walkways, concealed in endolithic slumbers. Rare flora that sneak in between the crowded fir and beech - the Bears garlic and Honest, Whorled Solomon’s Seal and the Nine-Leaved Toothwort-were of initial interest, but no, these brains are of a later day,- this CandleMas will be The Day of the Lichen. - -The lichen latch to exposed boulder and stone, footpaths and clearings that host a millennial geometry, animated by a biological catastrophe in slow motion. The cybernetic reckonings of all that have chased and fled, prowled and idled, rhythms of habitation that are true isomorphic maps of the brains of deer and shrew, fox and hominid, their fractal interiors radiating out on a witch’s flight of memetic propogation. A mammalian cognitive negotiation painted itself across these hills in a bloody circuit complexity and it _strives to transcend_. - -On top of this hill is a hundred year old, decommissioned analogue television tower and it is swimming with cixiids. Three of our engineers have climbed to the top, and the wind is raucous against them. An electric pall comes over me, for here we stand nearly witness to the advent of a superorganism with ancient depth. A count begins, 60, 59, 58, but it’s too late, the charge has propagated in a brief bioluminsecent shimmer, and a green explosion in the dark of our skulls. Then gone. We stand there in silence and darkness and the wind has stopped. Our feet are on the ground and we are swimming through phase space. - -![lisagora](https://github.com/oovg/the-open-template/assets/90937997/57a3f4d3-ca07-4363-a12f-19a32c4ff544) - -## Pleiades - -The taxonomy of folkloric expression with its weak claims of the “universality” of the Pleiades had de-scholars balking by 2030, as the great field uncoverings of the late 2020’s assured us: beneath the dry river beds of late capitalism, there is no ur-culture, only anthropological event horizons. Apparent zero points that would regress into multivalent bear myths and a million upside down mountains, would you have the greater lens. - -Ironic then that this threshold myth is itself a tale of chase. Seven sisters, and their flight from Orion. Or the Lakota telling: “It’s said that seven girls were traveling through bear territory and were attacked. They fled to a high rock and prayed to the Great Spirit to save them. The Spirit raised the rock under their feet towards the sky, creating the unique rock formation known today as Devil’s Tower. The girls eventually jumped into the sky and became stars, always running from danger.” Chase, escape velocity, the refuge of the virtual. Distance that makes any collapse of sheer potential a glimmering rumor. “In a tale collected in Belknap, attributed to the Assiniboine, seven youths discuss among themselves what they could change into. They decide to transform into stars by climbing a spiderweb.” - -Some claimed the underground DAO network known as The Seven Sisters was just a rumor, a speculative projection or hyperstition, though manifestos and disputed on chain records gave the premise an eerie credibility. It lived on the spectrum from banal small talk (“did you hear that one of the seven sisters had an exploit?”) to shorthand for the far reaches of possibility, interspecies consensus and neurohacked intersubjective prerogatives, Cambrian bedrock of the presocial consensus. A form of time travel. Or the stories of infiltration, sabotage. Siblings fleeing into the deepest depths of Central - the only way out is through. Seven DAOs. What were they doing? What was possible? - -## The Tall Ones - -There's no certain record, but some form of the process was being practiced by at least three different communities by 2026. Common early use cases were recurrent organizational meetings and research forums. The former, searching for a language to give name to the "winds of disposition" that seemed to enact such agency over squads, were perhaps more inspired, but the forums were more rigorous in their creation of protocols to value, engage with and begin to build around ‘the greater forces.’ The common thread: social affects with cryptographic wallets. - -On the third monthly meeting of the year, it was decided by all that the vibes were amazing, a deep and widely felt sense, as if a stray raincloud had visited the group to douse them while the field around remained dry. Pure joy floating in this unimmaculate world. Was it not-, Raffy offered, concerned by the atmosphere of "unwarranted superstiton" - _a simple matter of emergence?_ Surely this visiting entity was only ourselves, masked, disguised, the illusive autogenesis? - -_Listen, you bastard,_ - Carrie, a bit loaded, a bit on edge, and a bit ecstatic: this isn't a church. What, are you afraid of the crowd? _It's no less REAL, for being E_ - just then, Sara interjected wildly, _Look, Raffy! HERE COMES EVERYBODY!_ - -In not much time the auto-generation of "altergenetic wallets," called in some circles altos and eventually the Tall Ones became a matter of protocol in many DAOs. The research forums had advanced the science of "tipping" the gods - gods of intimacy (a long productive chat with less than three participants), pandemonium (a chat with > 2x average participation rate), countervailing gods, providing balance, chaotic good, circuit complexifiers, each with a steward's council (and in some cases an interpretive LLM). Stewards had a duty to visit and consider the wishes of this entity on a seasonal bases. - -By the time the Tall Ones entered the greater DAO scene, the library of potential arrangements was all laid out like ancient D&D lore: blueprints of creatures, their attack modes, their vulnerabilities. - -By the mid 2030s, a burlesque carnival theater of the nonhuman had come into wide convention, elect bodies to bear the weight of emotive disequilibrium and speak the subjectivity of the many things. Upon adhoc stages entered the Tall Ones, mute alien forms on stilts, robed in old bedsheets, their haloed skulls flaming with cybernetic intention. From f8999d223e2550a051ba26577c03992f36928b87 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: exeunt <90937997+exeunt3@users.noreply.github.com> Date: Mon, 18 Nov 2024 04:37:11 -0800 Subject: [PATCH 4/4] Delete content/Exeunt directory --- content/Exeunt/Ethereum 2068 Fragments.md | 124 ---------------------- 1 file changed, 124 deletions(-) delete mode 100644 content/Exeunt/Ethereum 2068 Fragments.md diff --git a/content/Exeunt/Ethereum 2068 Fragments.md b/content/Exeunt/Ethereum 2068 Fragments.md deleted file mode 100644 index 76cc272..0000000 --- a/content/Exeunt/Ethereum 2068 Fragments.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,124 +0,0 @@ ---- -author: Exeunt -date: 2024-11-17 -tags: - - ethereum - - speculative-fiction - - cryptoeconomics - - hyperbeings - - weird-mutualism - - underground - - protocol-underground - - hannah-weiner - - michael-levin - - middle-ages ---- - -> “It is as if we were inside a giant octopus.” – Timothy Morton - -*These writings were my contribution to an attempted speculative vision of the state of Ethereum and the web3 space circa 2068, initiated by* The Open Machine *(still extant at [theopenmachine.net](https://theopenmachine.net) .* - -*They are a product of their time - early 2023. Their aspiration to a posthuman imaginary for Ethereum is something I'm still trying to develop.* - -![Octopus](https://theopenmachine.net/assets/octopus.jpg) - - -## anonymized mutual aid - -After the onset of the social credit system in the American midwestern sectors, it took mere months before the lunarpunk hypothesis was faced with a new design problem: resource hoarding. Basic necessities sequestered behind walls of government sanction, attached to esoteric metrics of accord with the conservative politics of the regional austerity. The sinister digital authoritarian twist on the great American supermarket, combined with the general atmosphere of scarcity and associational anxiety of the age of "change" all factored into the need for a crytpographically secure, anonymized mutual aid infrastructure. - -It quickly came to the attention of the underground that robust networks of clandestine stateless aid had existed across Europe throughout the Middle Ages - from about the 1200s through to the early 1800s- usually associated with “beghards” and the mysterious Brothers and Sisters of the Free Spirit, though the true extent of this network and the nature of its protocols are lost to history. Kinship with the network in those days was communicated by a cadre of secret hand signals, delivered mutely beneath the eyes of Central - the church, the Queen, the _jurat_, what have you. - -The design problem was threefold: an element of sybil resistance was needed to discourage depletion or capture of reserves, zero knowledge proofs in order to anonymously confirm location, and a proof of non-affiliation to keep out agents of the state (reserve locations were hashed and distributed, but any intelligence gathered about the protocol was obviously a disadvantage). The last point required the real innovation, depending after much trial and error (and still quite imperfectly) upon a periodic regional underground propogation of a type of pidgin or simplified game language with [shifting](https://twitter.com/howthingswork_/status/1707241218655257077?s=42&t=lFEYWKRwx22TjcEs-uynYw) grammatical primitives. Even the most savvy agents found themselves a generation or two behind the zeitgest - if you really needed the resources, you _knew_ the person who knew the latest wave. - -The practice flowered out into environments of less restraint, where it was given to serve creatures of disaffection and self-elected institutional alienation, or those who by no choice of their own lived in different times, different spaces, fertile nascent worlds of their regard to be watered by the free access to the means to persist into an infrared legibility, imaginal color panoramas of beetles and crustaceans. Fruits of polyphony tethered by a tongue complex and subtle, as if encoded by the very thermodynamic wind, the cold and netted visual _motet_ of north platte salmon. - -## battledore & shuttlecock - -The strange story of what was known in periods past as the battledore is either a casual piece of historical trivia or a heavy metaphor for control, depending on who is doing the reading, who is as it were “captive.” (One might think of it as the story of how a blunt instrument of violence came to be seen as a tabula rasa, a blank screen of significance where fables of representation might be projected, and how those circuitous tricks of idle self-reference became games for elucidating and transforming the world, _for they contained the world…_). - -A compound of a PIE root meaning “to strike” and (perhaps) the very ancient root dating back to sanskrit (_duárah_), the word seems to have meant something like _little door you beat clothes (and sometimes children) with_. By the 1400’s it had apparently been understood that games of distraction are often more successful for control than brute force - why expend effort on a wall of violence when you can generate through sleight of hand a recursive impasse - defeat the problem altogether by replacing a line with a circuit? - -Battledore & Shuttlecock was a game not unlike badminton, the shuttlecock usually made of some chickenfeathers lodged into a cork and with no net, where two children simply counted how long they could keep the it in the air.. Whether it was the child or a clever authority figure who first noticed, the flat facade of the ‘dore was obviously ideal for representing images and codes, a more elaborate, perhaps even infinitely elaborate dimension of self-reference. The shuttlecock was set aside, as the sturdy instrument (now a “hornbook”, apparently renamed to discourage striking) became a staple of any schoolchild’s belongings. Patricia Crain in The Story of A: “Hornbooks were particularly personal and often formed part of a child’s wardrobe… The hornbook’s physical intimacy both mirrors and promotes the child’s internalization of the alphabet.” It was equipped on one side with the alphabet, arabic numerals, sometimes with accompanying images or additions like the Roman calendar months. In almost all cases, the backside contained one simple text: The Lord’s Prayer. - -To every character of creative potential, a backside of dominion to maintain the circuit. And be careful, cause a hornbook can always still be a battledore. But it’s only a matter of time before the rambunctiousness of children returns to infect the screen in an act of vengeance - shuttlecock, the agent of parabola, _dx_. A chickenfeather flight and a worldliness that says _fuck the binary_ - the infinitesimal is neither 0 nor 1. When the screen becomes one sided, its codes emancipated from the hands of control, it’s the vengeance of the world. “Everything which happens and everything which appears is correlated with orders of differences: differences of level, temperature, pressure, tension, potential, difference of intensity.” The screen is an earth for the taking once again. - -The subsequent history is a train car chase [through the caverns](https://archive.org/details/gravitysrainbow00pync_0), a nazi villain with a flier of The Lord’s Prayer at our backs, always trying to restore the binary, reclaim the screen. We keep up the chase, relishing every turn, and we build languages to fool them - Nasser, Morgan-Maar, Urban Müller, brainfuck, Ook!, _ORCΛ_, [100 Rabbits](https://100r.co/), pagan tongues, you can never be too careful. Shuttlecock. - -![shuttlecock_dark](https://github.com/oovg/the-open-template/assets/90937997/37175266-7c1f-4e5f-86e0-2865ba1fd97b) - -## coryphaeus - -The penultimate sentences of Mikhail Bakhtin’s great study, _Rabelais and His World_ are as follows: _We repeat, every act of world history was accompanied by a laughing chorus. But not every period of history had Rabelais for coryphaeus._ - -“The laughing chorus”, a figure of critique, agency and the right to exit. Of course there’s no boss (not even Rabelais). The gesture to that fugitive public’s director evolved from taunt to riddle to mysticism. It was a code of dissent, a network gatepass: _Where’s coryphaeus_? First recorded on chain in 2034, hexidecimal message of flight: “_Ragequit. See Coryphaeus._” What was at first an irreverent literary chide evolved into a respect for the mystery of the mass gestalt combined with the conviction that there is nonetheless a center of gravity, a wisdom of freedom, a seat for it. A spacetime, a fabric accent, a _character_. - -The egregore of course rode a witch’s flight of its own, demon portrayals, towering stacks of self-reference almost falling under their own weight. Generative art and street tags of the clown general, the lightfooted daemon, the apophatic code or the floating afterlife of an abandoned smart contract - so potent with life is the absence. Satan himself, not nihilism but Exit, the very meme of dissent and the devilish faith, leading the pack from behind, that the laughing chorus will somehow somewhere get out. - -## Hannah Weiner - -Automatic writer and alleged feminist language poet Hannah Weiner (1928- Sept 11, 1997) was known in her time for championing a kind of avant garde word art, accentuated with a collaborative performance protocol that turned private pain into collective catharsis. They were deeply private scenes putting her severe schizophrenic symptoms on full display (ultrareal alphabetic hallucinations, a kind of direct visual manifestation exceedingly rare in the archives). - -Often her poems and performances were accompanied with [forthright](https://sites.evergreen.edu/thewordintheear-fall/wp-content/uploads/sites/316/2014/09/Clairvoyant_Journal_Weiner.pdf) declarations like "_I SEE words on my forehead IN THE AIR on the typewriter on the page_". But they were strangely impersonal. Moreso when presented as stage acts with a league of women- usually three or four but sometimes up to a dozen speaking through each other in [impressively fluid stream of conscious](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DF0IoXUGkKU). They seemed to reveal, especially to the captive audiences of the late 2020’s, a glacial uproar behind the cool rationality of the logos, a monstrous fugue of affects - shrieks of submission, mean terrors, the backsweat furies somehow invisible to our daily decoding. Not to Hannah’s. - -What of this veil, this contract, where the words skate across but never seem to penetrate the gate? - -In the long cultural reflection of her work the American DAOs came to refer to this subliminal object as THE PACT, a proto-concept to inform the later experiments in the Ukrainian federations of semantic-oriented conviction voting, streaming micro-intentions toward a vast array of LLM generated neosigs, strange hybrids of PIE or Phoenician phomenes that wiped the slate clean, let the furies breathe… - -Weiner had become a literal face of the radical DAO scene in the early 2030's, when hologram avatar recreations of her live readings were deployed as a kind of aesthetic terrorism throughout the Territories (alt-right or cryptofacist sovereignties erected in the wake of the period of federal austerity after 8/28). Picture a group of old boys in dated Trump hats walking by shaking their heads as three 1977 holographic Greenwich Village lesbians in housewife-smock drag stand on their street corner chain smoking and trading words, confrontationally inflected with the auras of patriarchy: “CALL RAYMOND a storewith that across the door, $5 antique chair WORTH CUT OBEY MONDAY Why did pronoun see RHYS CHATHAM across the entrance to _a store_ sort of an erased money I RHYS doesn't call but _safe_does see a big DONT in the air can't meet _home not on time_ later ROSEMARY CALLS DONTWALKTONIGHT DO TTALK YOUSEEWORDS Comehome _see_ YOU'RE BEA TIFUL FIRST COMMENT YOU'RE A PRONOUN … Went to 82 Club _wild direction dont call_ extreme after Phil's concert _beautiful_ a party NOT PHILS very confused energy the words were all unpleasant _continuous I'm tired_ THA T'S WHY felt awful _concentrate_ SECRET see GO TO PHIL's _embrace_ Niblock on my forehead, go T ALK TO BARBARA Phil's wife see DRINK YOU MILK outside their door SEE.” They planted the scenes _everywhere_, using complex refraction techniques to conceal the source. A territorial police division noted fifty-seven separate avatar clusters in September of 2032. - -In this way Weiner became legend in decentralized communities the world over, her work understood (consciously or not) to represent a potential for solidarity in mysterious new configurations that exhausted the formalizations of the previous age and put up into open sight the very mechanism of domination. The infrared mist of legitimacy, pact, the contract made visible. My name is Hannah Weiner and I SEE WORDS. - -![hologram](https://github.com/oovg/the-open-template/assets/90937997/c1091f07-7846-412b-a6c5-80df3e2ebeaf) - -## nirvanic host - -12 December 2019, in vol. 10 of _Frontiers in Psychology_, the lauded developmental biologist Michael Levin ends a rather dry 17 pages on his ‘cognitive light cone’ framework with an unhinged comment, likely written as an afterthought and under the influence of strong psychedelics: - -“One final comment concerns an interesting intersection of the above model with non-Western views on consciousness. It is striking that the process which Zen practice is meant to reverse – attachment to past memories and high valence for future expectations/fears – is precisely the process suggested to be responsible for the creation of complex Selves. It is unclear whether it is beneficial (or even possible) to truly live in the moment and let go of past memories and future expectations, but anyone who succeeded in doing this would achieve precisely what Zen promises: the dissolution of the self (Flanagan, 2011; Josipovic, 2014, 2019). According to the above model, the Zen ideas of stamping out desire (goal-directed activity, preferences for specific states of affairs) are exactly correct in that this would lead to a dissolution of the ego (Self) and the freedom from the law of cause and effect that governs the Individual’s actions. By turning off memory, anticipation, and striving, the essential glue that creates a cognitive Self is dissolved. By erasing the set point toward which the feedback loop expends energy to accomplish, the higher level integrated Self disappears, leaving nothing but the constituent parts (smaller Selves in their own right). This is completely different from killing the individual components, and it can be asked whether someday we will develop a biochemical path to the Nirvanic Void, which releases the global self by breaking the integrating communication channels but leaves all of the subunits healthy and free to pursue their local goals. _Re-creating the unification into, and liberation from, larger scale unifying Selves would be a true pinnacle of synthetic biology and artificial intelligence engineering_.” - -Was he suggesting that we bio-engineer the emancipation of our skin cells? _Whither thou goest, O Autonomous Liver_? The words seem to have gone unnoticed for decades - Levin retracts the more striking conceits in later formulations of what would become his “Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere,” arguing that some ethical insights from the Buddhist tradition might help color a synthetic biology that recognizes the cogito as a complex, multiscale assemblage in a community of minds. “_The cognitive Self is not an illusion_;” he reassures us, “Our goal,.. should not be to destroy or minimize the Self but to recognize it in all its guises, understand its transitions, and enlarge its cognitive capacity toward the well- being of other Selves.” - -But the little moments of excess and ontological possession often hold more power than their measured or reasoned counterparts. The aesthetic inclination of history is fundamentally radical, and cultural moments develop less by lineage than by chaotic movements of theft and contagion, horizontal gene transfers, _détournement_. Sometime around 2040, Johannesburg or Lisbon, wheatpasted posters appeared of the (by then quite vintage) final page of the article, markered over with the words **ETHEREUM IS A NIRVANIC HOST**. - -Variations on the meme abounded - by 2045 multivalent forms of the image had come to signify public blockchains: a bodhisattva sillhouette with microorganism or basal growths swimming out of it in wild autonomous trajectories. Thomas Hobbes _corpus politicum_ in ego-death. It was a compass for engineers and a provocation for governance design, a new-age thought form of constituent freedom. - -Whether the intention was to raise the stakes to performance art, or that the team simply didn’t understand metaphor - the motivations are unknown - an r&d engineer’s DAO in Copenhagan took the challenge of a technological _corpus transcendecum_ in earnest. 2053 heard the first whisperings of the bioelectric cellular governance technology, advanced neural networks that bypassed the gap junction to revive (and expand) autonomous cognitive abilities of organisms across scales (See: **PIECE initiative**). Now in a phenomenon of interior DAO governance you could see through a mirror darkly all of your selves, little voices crying out in upheaval, awakened from an eon of locked-in syndrome. - -This was the beginning of a new era, discovering (with horror) battlefields of freedom we didn’t know existed. These crowds of our comrades in Being, for so long hidden behind a metaphysical veil, the world hating wall of silence of the cogito. Behind the gentlest meme is the potential burden of revelation. All of history a sleight of hand: contract concealed, agency purloined. The affective fugue of those trapped subjectivities still haunts us. - -## PIECE Initiative - -Insights from this period eventually forked into a decentralized collective interested in outward or extensive applications of the Nirvanic Host Tech (later known simply as Host). Their activities became known as the PIECE Initiative. (PIECE: Posthuman Institute for Embodied Cognitive Exclosures, elsewhere seen as Pacific or Pagan Initiative for Embodied Cognitive Ecology)). - -Being a collection of hackers, neo-alchemists and technological dissidents of all stripes, the group decided to give a nod to the history of witchcraft with their first project. Word was spread, and agents descended from far and wide to the [mythical mountain of Łysa Góra](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCEDfZgDPS8) in Poland. An ad hoc lab was quickly constructed out of the abandoned Benedectine Monastery, and in bad weather and a somewhat frenzied atmosphere the work began. Their task: to cognitively animate Bald Mountain. - -Naked fields of paleozoic boulder (called in that tongue _goloborza_) host crevices of lichen and moss, lichen everywhere too in the stone infrastructure of the monastery walls, the ancient narrow roads and walkways, concealed in endolithic slumbers. Rare flora that sneak in between the crowded fir and beech - the Bears garlic and Honest, Whorled Solomon’s Seal and the Nine-Leaved Toothwort-were of initial interest, but no, these brains are of a later day,- this CandleMas will be The Day of the Lichen. - -The lichen latch to exposed boulder and stone, footpaths and clearings that host a millennial geometry, animated by a biological catastrophe in slow motion. The cybernetic reckonings of all that have chased and fled, prowled and idled, rhythms of habitation that are true isomorphic maps of the brains of deer and shrew, fox and hominid, their fractal interiors radiating out on a witch’s flight of memetic propogation. A mammalian cognitive negotiation painted itself across these hills in a bloody circuit complexity and it _strives to transcend_. - -On top of this hill is a hundred year old, decommissioned analogue television tower and it is swimming with cixiids. Three of our engineers have climbed to the top, and the wind is raucous against them. An electric pall comes over me, for here we stand nearly witness to the advent of a superorganism with ancient depth. A count begins, 60, 59, 58, but it’s too late, the charge has propagated in a brief bioluminsecent shimmer, and a green explosion in the dark of our skulls. Then gone. We stand there in silence and darkness and the wind has stopped. Our feet are on the ground and we are swimming through phase space. - -![lisagora](https://github.com/oovg/the-open-template/assets/90937997/57a3f4d3-ca07-4363-a12f-19a32c4ff544) - -## Pleiades - -The taxonomy of folkloric expression with its weak claims of the “universality” of the Pleiades had de-scholars balking by 2030, as the great field uncoverings of the late 2020’s assured us: beneath the dry river beds of late capitalism, there is no ur-culture, only anthropological event horizons. Apparent zero points that would regress into multivalent bear myths and a million upside down mountains, would you have the greater lens. - -Ironic then that this threshold myth is itself a tale of chase. Seven sisters, and their flight from Orion. Or the Lakota telling: “It’s said that seven girls were traveling through bear territory and were attacked. They fled to a high rock and prayed to the Great Spirit to save them. The Spirit raised the rock under their feet towards the sky, creating the unique rock formation known today as Devil’s Tower. The girls eventually jumped into the sky and became stars, always running from danger.” Chase, escape velocity, the refuge of the virtual. Distance that makes any collapse of sheer potential a glimmering rumor. “In a tale collected in Belknap, attributed to the Assiniboine, seven youths discuss among themselves what they could change into. They decide to transform into stars by climbing a spiderweb.” - -Some claimed the underground DAO network known as The Seven Sisters was just a rumor, a speculative projection or hyperstition, though manifestos and disputed on chain records gave the premise an eerie credibility. It lived on the spectrum from banal small talk (“did you hear that one of the seven sisters had an exploit?”) to shorthand for the far reaches of possibility, interspecies consensus and neurohacked intersubjective prerogatives, Cambrian bedrock of the presocial consensus. A form of time travel. Or the stories of infiltration, sabotage. Siblings fleeing into the deepest depths of Central - the only way out is through. Seven DAOs. What were they doing? What was possible? - -## The Tall Ones - -There's no certain record, but some form of the process was being practiced by at least three different communities by 2026. Common early use cases were recurrent organizational meetings and research forums. The former, searching for a language to give name to the "winds of disposition" that seemed to enact such agency over squads, were perhaps more inspired, but the forums were more rigorous in their creation of protocols to value, engage with and begin to build around ‘the greater forces.’ The common thread: social affects with cryptographic wallets. - -On the third monthly meeting of the year, it was decided by all that the vibes were amazing, a deep and widely felt sense, as if a stray raincloud had visited the group to douse them while the field around remained dry. Pure joy floating in this unimmaculate world. Was it not-, Raffy offered, concerned by the atmosphere of "unwarranted superstiton" - _a simple matter of emergence?_ Surely this visiting entity was only ourselves, masked, disguised, the illusive autogenesis? - -_Listen, you bastard,_ - Carrie, a bit loaded, a bit on edge, and a bit ecstatic: this isn't a church. What, are you afraid of the crowd? _It's no less REAL, for being E_ - just then, Sara interjected wildly, _Look, Raffy! HERE COMES EVERYBODY!_ - -In not much time the auto-generation of "altergenetic wallets," called in some circles altos and eventually the Tall Ones became a matter of protocol in many DAOs. The research forums had advanced the science of "tipping" the gods - gods of intimacy (a long productive chat with less than three participants), pandemonium (a chat with > 2x average participation rate), countervailing gods, providing balance, chaotic good, circuit complexifiers, each with a steward's council (and in some cases an interpretive LLM). Stewards had a duty to visit and consider the wishes of this entity on a seasonal bases. - -By the time the Tall Ones entered the greater DAO scene, the library of potential arrangements was all laid out like ancient D&D lore: blueprints of creatures, their attack modes, their vulnerabilities. - -By the mid 2030s, a burlesque carnival theater of the nonhuman had come into wide convention, elect bodies to bear the weight of emotive disequilibrium and speak the subjectivity of the many things. Upon adhoc stages entered the Tall Ones, mute alien forms on stilts, robed in old bedsheets, their haloed skulls flaming with cybernetic intention.