A General Forum on Ethereum Localism 2024

May 6, 2024

TL;DR: GFEL is taking place from Friday, September 13th to Sunday, September 15th in Portland, Oregon, with pre- and post-conference days on Thursday, September 12th and Monday, September 16th.

Apply to attend(opens in a new tab)

Attention anons, regens, neotechnics alike. GFEL 2024 nears. Once again we chose Friday the 13th as the date because, why shouldn’t we? The odds are against us. For the regenerative systems we work for to succeed, some entrenched power interests are going to need to have some very bad luck. (Besides, we are pronoiacs(opens in a new tab)).

Following influence from Summer of Protocols(opens in a new tab) (especially Rithikha Rajamohan’s wonderful Dispatches from Cascadia(opens in a new tab)) and our own Open Protocol Research Group(opens in a new tab), the theme of this year is Open Protocols.

The term “open protocol” is our shorthand for the informal codes, analogous to open source web protocols, that guide extra-institutional behavior, particularly in cities - rich sites of experimentation where new ways of organizing our relationships with ourselves and the world around us are forged outside of any compulsion, discipline or force of coercion. Examples include mutual aid protocols, urban permaculture, open hardware and reuse and repair, street medicine, street art, civil disobedience, informed drug use, self-care. The genre protocols of a local creative scene, the anonymous art on LSD blotter paper, the boxing routine your AA sponsor shows you at the sober gym. These aren’t just codes, they are institutionally ambivalent knowledge sets informed by shared cultures of defiant, autonomous, fuck it energy.

We mean to convey a few things with this theme. First, the conviction that a widespread and pluralistic array of open protocols combined with an (extremely) robust and strongly asserted culture of consent could eventually do away with the need for most closed institutions, and those that remain would be more functional, efficient and just as a result. The defiance we pick up on isn’t just blind rebellion, its creative power, and the patient persistence of these protocols weaves our political economic future (this isn’t us against them - it’s just us).

Second, that the crypto ecosystem, to the extent that it still accords with cypherpunk values(opens in a new tab) - is both analogous to(opens in a new tab) and allies of(opens in a new tab) our favorite open protocols. The informal practices of resilience, autonomy and creativity we see in our city and bioregion have decades(opens in a new tab) of(opens in a new tab) strategic(opens in a new tab) victories(opens in a new tab) that web3 can learn from. Likewise, the impasses that many of them have arrived at in the process of scaling, especially in the extitutional outposts(opens in a new tab) that represent their greatest areas of friction, have so much to gain from DAOs, ReFi, CoFi, MycoFi, the commons-oriented revenue allocation of certain DeFi institutions, and the participatory resource allocation strategies the web3 ecosystem has been continually developing.

Third, we want to give space for the shared culture of imaginative desire we see in our friends and collaborators, to lend some smoke circle chaos magick to the memes, to help each other imagine that the world we wish to live in - more empathic, less coercive, more creatively permissive, more empirically grounded (empirical in both the sense of the instrumental sciences and the experiential ones), more ecologically embedded and systems oriented, more realist, less extractive & mystified and nihilistic, less stupid - to mutually imagine that that world is already here. To quote one of those friends, crypto is just durable prefiguration.

Similar to last year, this event will be made up of a few talks, a lot of unconference and workshop time, and an array of pre- and post-conference events to see in urban forests, workshops and art collectives what it is we’re all talking about when we talk about the crypto-kindred experimentalism and pirate-level systems technology of the city. Expect two full days of conference time (Friday and Saturday, September 13 and 14th), a more exploratory day ending with a party on Sunday the 15th, and the aforementioned pre- and post-conference events occurring on Thursday the 12th and Monday the 16th. Tickets will be available on a needs based sliding scale by the end of May. In the meantime, save the date!