Sanctification

Let’s discuss the Ethereum Foundation Mandate.

I was going to begin by criticizing the term “self-sovereignty” which is an integral part of the mandate. I was going to tell you how the ideas beneath almost all modern discussions that use this term miss relationships, reciprocity, dialogue. How the term assumes a separate self. How it alienates and isolates under the guise of empowering.

I was then going to tell you about the artwork, and how it is not to my taste. How it feels like it was produced by someone for whom love is just another meme. How its hyperbolic, puppy-dog enthusiasm makes a mockery of the very feelings and sense it tries to communicate.

But, then I remembered the badger dance and a host of other moments which made me feel roughly the same, and yet also inspired in a way the cynical part of me just can’t describe. I remembered Nora Bateson and this beautiful section in “Aliving” about language.

Her feelings about “impact” are the same as mine about “self-sovereignty”. I could maybe stomach something like “self-determination”, or “human agency”. The African in me would love to see something less focused on the self, and something more like ubuntu; something that recognises that my coming into full humanity is simultaneous with you doing the same. Our aliveness is uncertain, intertwined, dependent, messy, unpredictable.

When I remember this, then I find the aspects of the mandate that resonate with my heart and remind me why I have given ten years to all these crazy people and ideas. I begin to see that what the Foundation means by “self-sovereignty” is closer to what I would mean with a different word, and so I can forgive the unconscious harms they drag along by choosing this term rather than another.

Reading Closer

The mandate begins to excel when it moves into the technical pillars. Here are some selections which emphasise why I will happily spend another ten years working with crazy people and their crazy ideas, even if I don’t always like the way they choose to talk about it:

“Privacy is not about total concealment of everything. It is about freedom and true consent: to choose what information to disclose to whom, on one’s own terms.”

This rhymes with my own perspective, written out here.

“Security requires simplicity”.

This rhymes with a video that had a significant influence on me in my early days of learning how to program. Governance-minimization and the walk-away test are two powerful additions to this that are fairly unique to Ethereum in terms of how seriously they are taken and tested in practice, which makes me happy.

I find the “Discipline” and “Right Association” subpoints under the Social Pillar truly moving. Seeking truth and beauty, and choosing relevant timing are all incredibly powerful principles.

I especially like the seeming contradiction of seeking to work closely with people who are actively working to achieve independence. This is a profound insight distilled from a lot of hard-won lessons.

Alternatively

These hard-won lessons show up everywhere the further you read. The section on Subtraction is the best example. While it has been difficult to get this right over the years, it is the principle I have always loved most. The fact that the Foundation can now clearly say:

“Subtraction done well is subtractive of the Foundation, but additive for Ethereum.”

Is an indication of growing maturity and insight that I find to be especially positive.

CROPS is an interesting new addition to the Foundation's language. It seems fine to me. The real test will be whether we can enact it in the world truthfully and beautifully. Rather than spending too much time dissecting it now, let’s skip ahead to what is–for me–the core of the mandate:

“Ethereum rejects the idea that there is no alternative.”

This is the seed around which meaningful sanctuaries of many kinds can be built, and populated. It is the critical idea I have been teaching for years. The mandate ends with:

“Alternatives exist. Trust hope, embrace resilience.”

Which is a genuinely poignant rallying cry. It moves me, despite not being a self-sovereign individual. In fact, I am moved precisely because I am not sovereign.

Defending People

Ethereum’s narrative has always excelled, and persuaded me most deeply, when it turns to defender’s advantage.

“We believe that de-totalization - building toward a world in which no organization, system, or moral order has total dominance over any individual life - is the most reliably good aim.”

“In particular, we ensure the presence of a ‘zero option’: for every affordance that has an intermediated path, any intermediary-free path that is possible must be built and must remain credible and accessible.”

“Our work in Ethereum is to prove that the most natural and right way to help users defend themselves from threats they may not even understand is to expose them to empowering defensive tools. We demonstrate our fundamental belief in user-empowerment over paternalism by pioneering this approach.”

That last quote is, to me, one of the most profound of the whole document, and also the one which shows up why “self-sovereignty” is the wrong word choice. To be really empowered, especially psychologically, the key thing I need is to feel that I am not alone. If you are just empowering me with tools, and then walking away, I will still feel isolated and alienated, and therefore remain easy to manipulate in more ways than any tool can ever guard against.

So, it is right on one level: the most natural and right way to help people defend themselves is to give them empowering, defensive tools. But fellowship is the most empowering tool there is. Not sovereignty. Fellowship. There is hope as long as the fellowship remains true.

Another way to say this is: we cannot make sanctuaries that are empty. The word itself–sanctuary–means “a container for holy things”. If you make the container, but leave it empty, is it still a sanctuary? What is this “holy thing” which makes a sanctuary a sanctuary, other than life itself?

Making Sanctuaries

There is an African thinker I wish more people in Ethereum would listen to. Bayo Akomolafe has mapped some of the territory here already with his call: “Let Us Make Sanctuary”.

In doing so, Bayo has already reached this Oríta–this crossroad–where we look together at the tension between sanctuary and sovereignty. What he is saying is not in contrast to the mandate, nor in support of my perspective. It moves in a different direction entirely, which is why it is worth reflecting on deeply.

Bayo repeatedly prays: “The times are urgent, let us slow down”. He says, starting at 18:50, that:

"This is an invitation to listen. To queer our bodies. To approach the world in ways we’re not used to. Sanctuary is where slowing down happens.”

The thing that moves me in what Bayo says is his intellectual humility. We are lost, trapped, hasty, tricked. We barely even notice it, especially when we try to make positive statements about who we are and what we really believe in, which just act to trap us in more difficult-to-notice ways.

The program is actually a negative one. Which is precisely why defender’s advantage resonates across all the documents and work produced by the Ethereum Foundation over the years. Defense is a negative program. We can turn to Vaclav Havel to frame this appropriately for us:

“It seems to me that today, this ‘provisional, ‘minimal’, and ‘negative’ programme – the ‘simple’ defence of people – is in a particular sense [...] an optimal and positive programme because it forces politics to return to its only proper starting point, proper, that is, if all the old mistakes are to be avoided: individual people.”

Individual people matter, but they are excessive, trans-contextual, impossible to pin down into boxes that are clearly “sovereign” or “not sovereign”. As Bayo emphasises, you cannot–having heard all this–go out and say:

“I am going to apply [that wise saying] as a tool and take it as my new spiritual tactic. To save myself. To become more woke. To become a better white ally. None of that! It is not about you. It’s not about your individual trajectory to salvation. It is much more about lingering at the crossroads, and it is about the collective, the irreducibly collective, the manifold, the parliament of voices.”

It’s a Loser’s Table

These are the crops I would most like to harvest from Bayo and offer back to the Ethereum Foundation, to imbibe and reflect on over the next 1000 years. Around 21:55, Bayo says:

“The sanctuary I speak about today is not about safety. It is about shape-shifting. About noticing ourselves as if for the first time [...] I’ve found that, in the architecture of medieval sanctuaries, there was almost always a monstrous thing on the door [...] I always wondered, why would the sanctuary put such a repelling figure at the entrance? Why would you not put some cherub or angelic form there, something more inviting, to help people feel safe?

“The way I read it is that sanctuaries are not meant for humans. They are meant for monsters. They are meant for beings who have lost their sense of intelligibility. Sanctuaries are meant for fugitives. Fugitives from the human, colonial order…

“We need a place of deep enquiry which–again–is not about feeling safe. It is about losing and investigating the shapes we are becoming. It is about losing coherence. It is about losing our sense of mastery.”

This is Èṣù’s great trick on us tech-bros. We should not be looking for–even if the artwork encourages us to–people who are out to “win forever”. “I can’t believe we won forever” is the second most stupid statement in the mandate. We must be looking for people who are willing to lose. I don’t mean self-flagellating losers. I’m talking about the sort of getting lost that is a prerequisite to finding real freedom. I’m talking about people willing to lose all the traditional games of power, prestige, and influence because they know that we are playing an infinite game and that it is the ongoingness of the game (the continuity of life) that we serve.

The most stupid statement in the mandate comes next: “PURITY_SPIRALLING_UPWARDS” in the art for the Closing section. There is no purity. There is plurality, sure, but no purity. There is only the illusion of purity for those who think they are sovereign and somehow separate from all the others. It is a particularly dangerous illusion.

Hic Sunt Dracones

Claiming sanctuary, making sanctuary, requires that you become intimate with the monsters on the door handle, not that you pretend to some standard of purity. You must physically touch them to enter here. One such monster is obvious: the casino. The mandate may say:

“We are NOT a Casino: We do not encourage people to take life-changing, and possibly life-wrecking, amounts of risk by going into personal debt hyper-gambling. Ethereum has the potential to be a foundation for a secure and free life; debt promotes the opposite.”

That is understandable. The Foundation definitely should not encourage gambling. But it must also recognise that, in some contexts, Ethereum very much is a casino, and that we need to touch that, intimately, so that Ethereum can become a genuine sanctuary. In fact, the old stories suggest that, if done truthfully–with humility–the casino may become the very door handle itself¹. Isn’t that fascinating (and horrifying) to consider?

Making sanctuary is not about safety. It is also, importantly, not about comfort, or making others comfortable. As Bayo says around 35:40 in the video,

“Let us make sanctuary is the invitation of a slave ship [...] The places we have avoided, the places modernity has pathologised, are the sanctuary sites, the libated grounds, the fertile grounds where we can actually make sanctuary. [... The slave ship] is a way of losing shape, of losing our sense of being human and it is there that, I feel, that a different sense of freedom can emerge.

"Making sanctuary is, in some sense, to reframe modernity with the realisation that none of us disembarked those slave ships, that we’re still perpetuating this hierarchical kind of society.”

This particular monster may be almost impossible for most of us to touch. Take a moment, breathe deeply, and reflect on what Bayo is saying here. Maybe the slave ship is a better aesthetic for what the mandate is trying to communicate, rather than a few memes floating in abstract space? A slave ship finally run aground with a few fugitives using whatever they can to rappel down the side and disappear into new and unexplored ground?

Sanctuaries are best created on grounds already libated, fertilised, prepared by our pain and our awareness. The casino is the monstrous door handle we must touch to claim sanctuary. Put this together and we see that our work to create sanctuaries with Ethereum revolves around ensuring that the house doesn't always win: that ordinary people have a more than fair chance of gaining what they need, so that they begin reflecting on what money really is. Is money what I accumulate, what I win if and only if someone else loses²?

Once I can begin investigating these kinds of questions, then I can actually enter the sanctuary: the libated ground of my attention, already fragmented and super-stimulated by social media; and the increasingly fertilized ground of my attachment, already hacked by large language models. And when I say "more than fair chance", I don't mean that the odds are now just stacked in "the user's" favour. I mean that there is the chance to experience programmable money and all it can be made to mean first-hand.

Do the casinos which are the doors to our sanctuaries hold the seeds of a different psychology of money, or do they encourage us to try and profit from war and loss and trauma? They'll likely continue to do both, but how can the EF help make the former more profitable, persuasive, engaging, fun? There are no easy answers; only the willingness to go on asking questions good enough to keep us uncomfortable.

No Safety, No Slaves

Sanctuary technologies are about something different, something weird. They help us shape-shift, because the gangplank of the ship is still up and there is no way out, regardless of what words or tools you might choose. At 47:30, Bayo asks:

“When we lose hope, what are the resources we have then?”

This complicates the poignant rallying cry in the Closing section, doesn’t it? Can hope be trusted, totally? Or is there something beyond that too? Something unnamed and perhaps unnameable, which yet calls us on?

“This is the idea of excess: that when we come to a place where power seems to defeat us, there is a way to frame engagement and responsibility and responsivity and ethical practice that is not in the power or epistemology of our oppression. That there is a way we can conduct our bodies, together, that hides and proliferates and germinates and fertilizes other worlds, other wisdoms. That’s what I think [the sanctuary] does to us. It shape-shifts us, it defeats us; but it allows us to be aware, to be alive, to be attuned to other wisdoms around us that are lurking, that are present, but that are not accessible because we perform this ‘human’ body, this ‘human’ ritual so seriously that we forget the others around us.”

Let us not forget. Let us touch the monsters of our own creation and thereby turn them into the door handles of the sanctuaries we hope to inhabit. Let us be the sorts of humans who are humble, uncertain, uncomfortable, excessive, connected; who honour the ground and all that feeds us, which we in turn feed.

Let us not try to enclose the holy, to contain it; but rather keep the invitation ever open in hearts that honour the actual sovereignty that reigns once the self has been truly seen through.

If we are successful in this, then we may just come to a shared state where we choose to quote the closing words of Paradiso rather than Inferno.

E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle (“And then we emerged to see the stars again”)

Can evolve into:

L'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle (“The Love that moves the sun and the other stars”)

Because it is no longer just about seeing the stars which were always here, above us, or desperately searching for love through cheap memes and clickable buttons. It is about living in the love which moves everything, including those majestic stars, as weird and uncomfortable and unsafe as this kind of life truly is.

Footnotes

1. Does debt only "promotes the opposite" in all cases, or can it have other uses? Consider, for instance, that David Graeber defines "community" as "a group of people, all of whom are a little bit in debt to one another". ↩

2. Vitalik does this best when in conversation with other people, which is unsurprising once you drop self-sovereignty as the primary aim. ↩