# OMG: Toward an Open Mutualism

“All of us must become more ontologically inventive and sensible.” - Donna Haraway

## Tl;Dr
This document proposes a guild model for institutionally unaffiliated humanities and social science research into mutualist organizational technology. A guild implies that members retain a high level of autonomy over their work while pooling legitimacy in an associative capacity in the hopes of developing a mutual sustainability in their efforts. Though the authors come from a context heavily informs by the DAO form, a guild implies a much lower collaborative overhead than what is typically associated with a DAO.

Open Mutualism Guild proposes support for work in two research tracks: an *economic mutualism* track (referring to strategies of human-to human political economic reciprocity), and a *weird mutualism* track (referring to strategies of political economic reciprocity with greater than human creatures and forces). OMG departs slightly from the strict guild model forerun by Protocol Guild in that it proposes a small portion of resources go to a fund for comparative study between the two, a form of reciprocity in itself that this document argues is necessary to keep an empirical or practical edge to both tracks. Our intention is to aid web3 and other high technological contributions to a mutualist politic while maintaining an open orientation that will keep fidelity to the practical, ideologically ambivalent heart of the engineers' sensibility.

## Introduction
On the Friday of [GFEL 2024](https://etherealforest.org/blog/2024-05-06-gfel-2024/) in Portland, the question was posed to a morning panel: “We are all anarchists here, right?” The question was half joking, since a key element of the technological zeitgeist us web3 regens and localists have generated is ambivalence to overwrought political labels. The response was overall enthusiastic - the panelists mentioning books like Thomas Swann’s [Anarchist Cybernetics](https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/thomas-swann-anarchist-cybernetics), Noam Chomsky's [On Anarchism](https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/noam-chomsky-on-anarchism) and Kevin Carson's [Desktop Regulatory State](https://kevinacarson.org/pdf/drs.pdf). Still, it wasn’t quite right- in our practical orientation, our empirical integrity, our pacifism, parallelism and willingness to work with the state given productive and autonomous outcomes, we are in fact more akin to mutualists. And yes, we are some kind of libertarians.

Being technologists, however, we aren’t and cannot be simple individualists - our empirical and ever design-curious eye sees in ourselves and in the humans around us a deceptive and unsteady unity, beneath which lies a cascading abundance of cells, bacteria, fungi, proteins, enzymes, neurons and hormones. Our personalities present as complex and shifting expressions of biological determinants, entangled relationships, cultural milieus, delusions, sublimations, psychic responses to our proneness before forces greater than ourselves. These are not forsaken, but embraced as our design parameters: We are engineers, and our libertarianism is *explosive* - a fragmented crowd of free multiscale nodes, a billion relationships, operative unities that are sovereign within and because of their embeddedness.

In the same way, us technologists can tolerate no mere mutualism. *Our mutualism must be explosive.*

## Mutualism

Mutualism takes its name both from [biology](https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/mutualism-examples-of-species-that-work-together.html) and [anarchist political economy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_Aid:_A_Factor_of_Evolution), and in that regard has always been a naturalist enterprise. While capitalists and Soviet communists built grand monuments of transcendence above nature, mutualists constructed associations and guilds, unions and cooperatives, biomimetic expressions of a practical realism with no tolerance for ideological capture.

Sara Horowitz has been working in the new economy and cooperative movement adjacent to the crypto space to situate the concept of [mutualism in the modern day](https://ssir.org/books/excerpts/entry/hiding_in_plain_sight). She brings it from its origins in 19th century thinkers like Proudhon and Kropotkin to the current moment, where ideologies of the public or private sphere demonize each other in an increasingly cynical and zero sum game. (Bernard Harcourt writes of this dangerous double bind in which both sides pursue a supermajority that is unavailable to them by democratic means in the first chapter of his 2023 [*Cooperation: A Political, Economic and Social Theory*](https://cup.columbia.edu/book/cooperation/9780231209540).) To this deadlock, Horowitz poses a third option: *the mutualist social sector*.

Being practical rather than messianic or ideological, mutualist social innovation tends to arise parallel to or even symbiotically with existing institutions. Historically, they have tended to arise spontaneously in conditions of insecurity and dissipate when security returns. (Call it the prefigurative safety net.) Horowitz poses crises like COVID-19 and the many future crises promised by the destabilization of the climate as ground to make this third sector legible to the state. After all, these crises represent a major threat to the state’s facade of total power.
> By recognizing the role that religious organizations, mutual aid societies, cooperatives, and unions already play in helping local communities meet their needs, and by putting a regulatory structure around these organizations, governments will give the mutualist sector a ‘job’ in the new economy. That job will transform our notion of what a safety net can be in the twenty first century: place-based, responsive to the environment, gentle on the body and mind - in short, a safety net that will encourage people to connect as a way to thrive. Governments of the future will be measured by the degree to which they help the mutualist sector grow.

Horowitz’s vision would be less than radical if it weren’t for its fundamental practicality. Within this OODA loop, government sanction of social production is a necessary step. What comes next? While a “mutualist sector” may find opportunity in the multipolar trap caused by our current political division, the mutualist project is really about expanding the Overton window of both collaborative and competitive economy beyond the taboo enclosure of individualism.

In order to avoid ossifying into the same ideological traps and distance from material conditions that have animated both state socialist style structures in the past and neoliberal political administration today, our mutualism needs to be continually refreshed by an empirical edge. Just as we experiment with coordination patterns and economic forms that bypass the antireal gaze of centralized bureaucracy in its corporate and statist forms for deep democracy and direct economic reciprocity, we need to be experimenting with an open or *field* *ontology* that is willing to take all comers, however alien, as agents in those positive sum mutual exchanges. I call this edge of empirical exploration "**weird mutualism**.""


## Weird Mutualism

Just as the mutualist patterns for economic organization have a rich tradition sovereign from any particular ideological form - church foodbanks and community credit associations arise spontaneously under no banner - liminal experiments in reciprocity with nonhuman or even inorganic agents occur all the time (history has [a great wealth](https://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/fall2016/files/2016/08/The-Masks-of-God.pdf) of these weird empirical systems). The Open Protocol Research Group explored particular instances of this from the twentieth and twenty first century in some detial in our work on cultural undergrounds and the virtual (see the last two sections of [Undercapital](https://gallery.manifold.xyz/optimism/listing?listingId=586)). In those cultural undergrounds we found communities developing detailed, empirically informed protocols for conjuring an intersubjective vibe - a vibe that may have its root in the individuals and objects that make up a scene, but that could not be reduced to them. The field ontology demanded agential privilege be afforded to these scene egregores, who visit and engage the scene on their own volition.

Likewise, Will Szal cites an animist lineage when arguing for an agential status and concept of reciprocity for rivers as “[Hyperbeings](https://medium.com/regen-network/hyperbeings-a6fc3c43ba1d),” one that would help conceptualize the multifaceted reasons that dams are destructive. The ontological proposal is full of operative and realist consequence, not just for humans but for the earth’s climate and the countless ecosystems that are associated with the life of a river. (See Austin Wade Smith's [Undualing](https://mirror.xyz/austinwadesmith.eth/1wdm8BNkLJWnnzwshtYEmHYlHaXxRF3bLEt4y4-9OE8) for a more general framing of this kind of ontologically inventive approach.)

These weird sovereigns have reciprocal relationships with each other that have complex repercussions for us as humans. Seen through this lens, it's clear that the animist impulses of nonwestern cultures were and continue to be open systems for thinking with depth and empirical precision about different kind of agencies that inhabit our world at many scales.

The distributed ledger has great potential to explore reciprocity with these weird sovereignties in ways unavailable to these previous lineages. [Terra0](https://terra0.org) has been a forerunner in designing blockchain applications to the problem of sovereign nature, while regen network and regen foundation works to conceptualize and apply financial reciprocity that embodies conviviality and connection on an equal plane rather than ownership and preservation. Meanwhile, Brian Massumi and others at SenseLab, [3Ecologies](https://3ecologies.org) and the Economic Space Agency have developed frameworks for using the distributed ledger to practically engage creative forms of intersubjective agency.

Closely related, [The Sphere](https://www.thesphere.as) is experimenting with economic organization around the performance arts, exploiting the origin and afterlife of a performance to discover new areas where economic reciprocity may bloom. This involves a taking-after of the rhythms of live art and an identification with the explosively inclusive mode of artmaking: "When you invest in The Sphere's Digital Soul, you not only support the work of artists you love: you become part of the artwork itself." As they write in their [documentation](https://docs.thesphere.as/introducing-the-sphere/what-problem-are-we-addressing): ""*Enough complaining about the creative workers’ structural precarity! This is the age of monetary experimentation - the age of new squad wealth formation.*"" The project is thoroughly weird so long as you understand the sense of "[speculative generosity](https://docs.thesphere.as/introducing-the-sphere/the-sphere-manifesto)" it generates to be that of *the inclusion of the extra-organic flow of the art itself into the squad*.

The use of the term *weird* here is borrowed from Erik Davis, author of *TechGnosis* and [*High Weirdness*](https://mitpress.mit.edu/9781907222870/high-weirdness/). In the latter book, he notes the origin of the term *weird* in Scottish *bard* accounts of the Fates, "weird sisters" who personified the ultimate entanglement of disparate webs in the course of time. If Shakespeare, in the process of modernizing the term, fused it by spelling inconsistency with the modern term "Wayward" - "the capricious and willful refusal to follow rule or reason," (Davis) - it would seem to be a gesture to the double sided nature of our fundamental entanglement. The weird cause, the weird future, the weird *present*.. our empirical awareness of the interchangeable nature of our embodiment is also a nod to our creative capacity - our liberty - to name our lineage of embodiment. (We are, after all, libertarians).

Weird mutualism is the political economic exercise of that imaginative liberty - a warp in things, as Davis writes - in a passage we'll close the section with: "I emphasize the twisting immanence of the weird here because, though we will be meeting some wild visions ahead, including gnostic downloads and alien visions, i want to understand these extraordinary experiences not as signs of a "separate reality" but as manifestations or mutations of this one... Our experience of the weird - as aesthetic encounter, as deviation from social norm, as inexplicable *factum* - may *point* beyond, but they are perhaps better seen as an unnerving and enigmatic warp or wiggle in the web of reality itself.""

## Open Mutualism Guild (OMG)

With [recent work from the crew at MCON](https://paragraph.xyz/@guildguild/guild-guild) and long latent plans to fork the [Protocol Guild](https://protocol-guild.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) model to a research initiative, the purpose of this piece is to propose the Open Mutualism Guild (OMG), a loose association to help fund and collate work from the wide breadth of research into the Open Mutualism mentioned above. This would involve two tracks - an **Economic Mutualism** track to encapsulate mutualist experimentation within the humanist paradigm (with its special urgency and immediatist compass), and a **Weird Mutualism** track, involving research and exploration into the problem space of reciprocity with nonhuman creatures and forces. This split operates under the hope that the latter speculative work continually injects an atmosphere of open empiricism to the immediatist work of the Economic Mutualist researchers, an aspiration that would be ensured by the Open Mutualism **Comparative Study** Track (detailed below).


An eligibility framework will be the prerogative of the initial membership to outline, but rough guidelines developed so far include:
- participants work in the fields of political economy, cultural anthropology and practical philosophy with a focus foregrounding strategies of horizontal reciprocity on a free associative basis.
- participants have no "primary" institutional affiliation.
- participants have substantial past work in these fields that addresses web3 or other open technologies on a practical, design-oriented basis

Unlike a DAO, the guild model emphasizes autonomy of its participants to pursue their own projects and simply receive funds within the logic of a plainly defined, binary "active" versus "passive" status. Members can opt in and out of this status on a voluntary basis by means of the [Mutable Splits](https://splits.org/blog/protocol-guild/) feature of the Splits protocol. To quote the recent Guild Guild [doc](https://paragraph.xyz/@guildguild/guild-guild), "The guilds create a legible group-level identity which can be relied upon to reliably produce high quality work in a particular specialization, while also offering members more time to focus in their specialization." The form minimizes collective decision making and other overhead while emphasizing the pooled legitimacy of its members.

Open Mutualism Guild does intend to depart from this strict guild form in two ways, which we think represent acceptable compromises to its intentional austerity: first, members would be asked to mirror their published work whenever possible into a Knowledge Commons by way of a Obsidian > Quartz > Arweave open publishing flow developed by Clinamenic and other friends at Open Civics. Second, while funds fed into the treasury will be provisioned on an equal split basis regardless of which research track is contributed to, a small percentage of the treasury will be set aside to instigate research in the **Comparative Study** track.

The **Comparative Study** track is intended to provoke and inspire practical application of the more exotic research of **Weird Mutualism** while simultaneously asking what design possibilities are unlocked by a weird vantage on **Economic Mutualism**. Comparative efforts could include research tracks from within the Guild's membership as well as external sources - consider a history of DeFi read in a comparative capacity with Jeff VanderMeer's *Southern Reach Trilogy.* (An example of this sort of comparative work can be found in Bogna Konior's BigThink article ["How the philosophy of sci-fi legend Stanislaw Lem can help us understand AI"](https://bigthink.com/high-culture/how-the-philosophy-of-sci-fi-legend-stanislaw-lem-can-help-us-understand-ai/). The Comparative Study track envisions an operatively rigorous proliferation of these kinds of projects applied to the mutualist economic potential of the web3 space.)

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If you are interested in joining this experiment or would like to participate as a funder, you can email Clinamenic <[e-mail]> or find Exeunt or Clinamenic on twitter or telegram. Watch as we populate our library and find other updates at openmutualism.xyz