# Tending the Infinite Garden: Organizational Culture in the Ethereum Ecosystem | Devcon SEA

- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2025-10-07
- Duration: 23:48
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-GAAi4ysKV_c
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAAi4ysKV_c

## Description

This presentation will discuss the findings of the academic paper "Tending the Infinite Garden: Organisational Culture in the Ethereum Ecosystem" by Dr. Paul-Dylan-Ennis and Ann Brody. Our study examines the decision-making processes fundamental to Ethereum's protocol governance, drawing on interviews with Ethereum's core developers. We identify a central worldview in Ethereum known as the "Infinite Garden" and discuss how Ethereum's social layer is crucial for upholding cypherpunk values.

Speaker(s): Ann Brody
Skill level: Intermediate
Track: Cypherpunk & Privacy
Keywords: value

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## Transcript

[Music] hello hello I know it's late and I thank you for being here your presence signifies your support for the social sciences and I appreciate it um so thank you it's such an honor to have the opportunity to return to another Devcon and get to uh present the research finding ings that Dr Paul Dyan Enis and I have been working on in the past year from our latest paper which we've titled tending the infinite Garden organizational culture in the ethereum ecosystem now unfortunately Paul who maybe maybe some of you know him as Polar punk from crypto X he couldn't be here today he's off fulfilling his Noble Professor duties but for anyone who actually knows polar punk I suspect that the real reason is he's probably too busy playing hell diver and I have onchain proof look at that tweet I mean if you've seen his dedication to that game you know it's like practically a second job for him so you're stuck here with me and we're going to talk about the sexiest subject in crypto and we we all know what that is right it's governance governance is sexy come on okay okay so I'm not a governance Guru and I don't claim to be able to provide you with the answers to the most compelling governance questions in ethereum but what this talk is intended for is to provide you with a perspective for thinking about governance in the context of ethereum now before delving into our publication let me briefly introduce who we are we belong to a rare breed we are the social scientists that have chosen to Grapple with the intricacies of the social layer of this weird and wonderful ecosystem and we both published one of the earliest academic papers on the culture of ethereum and then we decided to join forces and this is the result and you're going to get to hear about it now Dr Paul Dylan Enis is a professor at University College Dublin in Ireland his research focuses on E eum culture with an emphasis on the social layer he is the author of absolute Essentials of ethereum I highly recommend buying the book I myself am a doctoral candidate at Mill University in Montreal Canada my background is in anthropology Science and Technology studies and communication studies and my research interests are based on the culture of open- source movements hackers activism Dows governance and crypto ideologies okay so to begin I will give you a brief synopsis on what the paper is about and present the core argument before actually getting into the rest of the content so we focus on the role that culture plays in shaping ethereum's governance by exploring what we refer to as social imaginaries of ethereum core developers now I'll explain what social imaginaries are in a moment but in essence we argue that in the absence of centralized hierarchy such as with the case of etherium these social imaginaries step in to define the boundaries of legitimacy in decision making within eum's protocol governance okay so social imaginaries what are they social imaginaries is this theoretical framework that STDs Science and Tech technology Scholars like to use now without getting too philosophical here as much as I love philosophy uh there is an element of studying subjectivity and people's relationship to technology but to put it more simply it's really just trying to understand the collectively held beliefs um norms and attitudes about a technology deriving its theoretical understanding from thinkers like Charles Taylor and jasenof and and Kim so the way Charles Taylor describes it is quote the ways people imagine their social existence how they fit together with others how things go on between them and their fellows whereas jasenof and Kim they extend on this definition to Encompass more publicly formed visions of desirable technological Futures now why should we even study social imaginaries well studying social imaginaries is crucial I think because it allows us to uncover the dominant ideologies unquestion assumptions that shape our understanding of technology so for instance there is a widespread belief that technology is inherently neutral or that economic efficiency should always be uh prioritized during the design process so studying social imaginaries equips us to Envision alternative technological Futures and Pathways and it Empower empowers us to rethink EX existing directions and avoid perpetuating hegemonic structures or political agendas emed embedded in technological choices and this in this way we can build more robust tools that serve the needs of various groups of people now as I mentioned blockchain Scholars really love studying social imaginaries and there's already been some studies done on blockchain community so Lana Schwarz helped popularize the use of social imaginaries in the context of blockchain communities um so according to Schwarz who first started studying Bitcoin she argued that Bitcoin represents an effort to collabora build a monetary system that she refers to as infrastructural mutualism and that is an imaginary in itself and this concept Blends the ideals of open-source collaboration with cyberpunk culture which strongly emphasizes online autonomy and privacy however Schwarz also points out to another more individual aspect of Bitcoin culture which is what she calls digital metalism and this reflects the libertarian values that are held by many bitcoiners now there is also the world computer imaginary as proposed by Yos trui of course I did not coin the term it's from Gavin woods and the world computer imaginary is what distinguishes it from Bitcoin coin and is therefore quite Central to how ethereums view themselves so instead of a money system like its predecessors um Bitcoin ethereum is basically read by its Community as a neutral platform a shared with computer that people can build daps on and experiment in these more expressive and creative ways okay there's also the hacker engineer imaginary by J GA claraa brai and that that one has more of an emphasis is on the hacker culture that embeds the construction of artifacts so yes blockchain does have a neoliberal bent to it but then this imaginary reminds us that in fact there is also a hacker tradition that is part of a broader historical lineage which often gets forgotten but is very much relevant to how these systems are conceived and how they get constructed okay and the productive money imaginary is basically when in Bitcoin you have um the sole focus of the currency is its existential Focus but in ethereum it has more of a prod productive function which is for staking or to pay for transaction fees okay and then today we propose a new imaginary which we refer to as the infinite Garden which refers to ethereum's continuous Evolution alluding to an eventual end game or state of alific now I'm going to talk about the research approach and how we did it so we interviewed key figures from ethereum's core Development Group and what is interesting about ethereum core devs is that they're part of a porous group theoretically anyone can become a core Dev through consistent contributions as there are no formal barriers our interviews weren't limited to Developers we also spoke with researchers and coordinators within the ecosystem and here are some of the people that we interviewed including vitalic himself Danny Puja Tim Alex Ben and Trent um so our interviews were semi-structured meaning that we had a set of open-ended questions that allowed for deeper exploration of topics as they unfolded we then analyzed the discourse using something we call grounded Theory a method where you start with raw data gathered from the field and then gradually buil theoretical insights by identifying patterns and themes in the discourse we began collecting data in February 2023 coinciding with the ethereum all core Dev calls particularly the time of the chaella upgrade our Focus was on the interpersonal Dynamics within the core Dev group and we wanted to understand how decisions were being legitimized in this sort of decentralized environment and through this process we aimed to identify the cultural constructs that shape ethereum's decision-making process now I don't have time to fully dive into how ethereum's governance works but here's a quick overview of the key stakeholders involved we have the core devs the full notes the stakers the media the DB Builders and the end users now this structure forms what we call a polycentric governance system essentially it means that multiple overlapping decision-making centers operate autonomously but interact with each other through cooperation competition and conflict resolution no single entity holds control and governance happens through coordination among these decentralized bodies in ethereum this polycentric governance is distributed across these various stakeholder groups with no Central Authority decision- making is spread out and different actors must work together to manage governance and address conflict and by the way for a really Stellar description on ethereum's governance and all the details I really recommend checking out the work of Kristen Kim okay so now let's talk about the key themes that emerged in the discourse so the first one was cyberpunk values for anyone who doesn't know the cyberpunk movement began in the 1980s emerging from online hacker culture as a protest Against The Growing Power of the state to monitor its citizens through digital networks they are activists who advocate for the widespread use of strong cryptography as a root to nonviolent direct action and political change some of the core values that Define cyberpunks include decentralization permissionless censorship resistance and credible neutrality our research showed that these values are very much alive Within ethereum development culture and here's a quote from Ben Edington confirming this he says we are for decentralization we are against political capture and we are for credible neutrality and making ethereum robust against capture in all its aspects now it's no surprise that ethereum devs exhibit cyberpunk values uh but what stood out in our findings is how many of the interviews perceive themselves as part of this broader lineage which directly traces back to bitcoin's cyberpunk inspired ethos and this concept of infrastructural mutualism which I mentioned earlier which embodies open- Source collaboration and decentralization and it resonates deeply with ethereum's core developers today another key theme that emerged during our research was conflict resolution specifically how core devs managed differing perspectives within their group and from The Wider ethereum Community our interviews took place around the time of a major ethereum upgrade known as chappella which went live on April 2023 and this upgrade allowed participants in ethereum staking mechanism to withdraw the E they had locked up during the transition from mining to staking which was a huge milestone for the ecosystem now many of the developers we spoke with emphasized the clarity of the decision-making process reflecting ethereum's collaborative governance approach despite some setbacks back and forth setbacks um on the technical design the considerations were relatively straightforward as Alex Stokes put it the process was quote pretty streamlined and Danny Ryan reinforced that decisions were largely based on rough consensus um which means complete agreement is not required but a general alignment is ideal and here we have a quote from vitalic himself stating sometimes there are disputes and people generally try to you know keep talking until some kind of a fairly reasonable solution can be decided on I feel like it just almost always ends up resolved in some sort of way because it bubbles over before it kind of bubbles over into some really serious horrible conflict okay so this kind of suggests that overall ethereum's decision-making culture has stabilized over time also Ben has highlighted how decisions are generally made through discussions where descending opinions are welcomed and heard in cases of disagreement the direction is determined by the overall sentiment of the all cord devs meetings this speaks to a strong pragmatic ethos that is committed to engineering Excellence but one that is also fundamentally anchored in a mutual trust among the cor c devs as well as the wider confidence within the ethereum ecosystem in their technical proficiency it is within this context that the hacker engineer imaginary is most vividly realized this ethos not only prioritizes practical Solutions but also embodies a deep faith in the specialized expertise of those tasks tasked with ethereum's continual development and so one of the key research questions we had was to understand the extent to which Market pressures influence the decision-making process of coord devs and what we found was that after ethereum's transition uh from staking to staking in September 20122 developers did not initially prioritize enabling withdrawals of staked eth however other participants within ethereum's polycentric ecosystem notably stakers media and end users felt that unlocking Stak eth should be the top priority in response the core devs adjusted their focus deprioritizing other upgrades and shifting their effort to enable withdrawals through the chappella upgrade because they wanted to deliver that promise and Alex Stokes for example emphasized the imperative to quote fulfill that commitment to withdrawals while Danny Ryan pointed to a sense of Duty towards the early community members noting that many stakers were individuals who had taken a leap of faith during the transition to staking we found that this commitment to fulfilling promises to early contributors was a significant factor in prioritizing Chappelle's upgrade and also here's another quote from vitalic basically reaffirming this stating I feel like there weren't really any Social Challenges for chappella because this is one of those examples of something that's purely technical which is just that people wanted to withdraw it was promised that people are going to withdraw and so the biggest challenge is just implementing the withdrawals we specifically found Ben edington's remark important because he emphasized how developers have a degree of autonomy for Market pressures and do not allow it to sway them from their core Mission so as Ben Edington States mercifully we've been free of commercial pressures cevs are pretty resistant to being told what to do and we will make our own minds up we found that cevs appear resistant to immediate Market pressures but are flexible when it comes to protocol Chang Nets that are driven by Fair economic considerations so in this case community members who staked early have contributed to the protocol and therefore should be prioritized in the right context but prioritizing a change just to boost the market price would be out of the question in this case it's clearly the productive money imaginary that appears where eth has an important functional role in ethereum to pay transaction fees to reward stakers but core devs do not see their mission as holding up an assets price okay so now the new imaginary we sense the presence of an unspoken social imaginary guiding ethereum's Evolution which refer to as the infinite garden now this term was coined by aamia guchi who's the executive director of um the ethereum foundation and it perfectly captures the essence of ethereum's ethos in A's words quote ethereum is a protocol for human coordination coordination is a game but not that one not one that is played to win coordination is more like attending Garden where one works only so that the garden continues to thrive and this analogy reflects a temporal Dimension to the thinking of ethereum's core devs where social imaginaries provide a way of understanding our place in time and space among others and within history so beginning in 2020 ethereum's co-founder vitalic buaran introduced what is often referred to as the ethereum road map however it's important to note that the road map is not an official or formal document Rec commend everyone must follow rather it collates various long-term research strands on ethereum's protocol development so it suggests that there is maintenance work to be done on ethereum but that these seeds are being planted for the long term where eventually you know the garden will thrive on its own and it will achieve a state of alific so that's how we basically present the imaginary of the infinite Garden so why do we think the social imaginary is important we think it's important because while there are clear structures or processes and practices such as eips all core Dev calls and research forums we found this social imaginary significant because Beyond EIP 1 and read me text ethereum lacks a formal Constitution or governance document so these social imaginaries serve as the essential enabling conditions for ethereum's governance to function seamlessly in the absence of for guidelines for offchain governance these imaginaries play a vital role in defining the boundaries of acceptable actions and behaviors as a result core devs lean heavily on these implicit imaginaries to ensure cohesion within the ethereum community and to push its Collective goals forward they guide core developers by fostering a shared sense of foundational values long-term alignment and Nuance understanding of the ecosystem Collective expectations without a formal hierarchy these social imaginaries become crucial for maintaining legitimacy and keeping ethereum's development on track they might be the only mechanism in fact that core devs can truly rely on since making unilateral decisions risks alienating other stakeholders so this infinite Garden imaginary suggests a dynamic ever evolving ecosystem where growth and transformation are ongoing but a key challenge we discovered was for cevs in maintaining cyberpunk values as the ecosystem grows as Ben Edington put it how do we incorporate the interest of these stakeholders into protocol development without compromising our cyberpunk ideals I don't think it will be easy similarly Alex Stokes reflected you'll get less alignment as the community grows these things have gotten bigger and I expect they'll keep getting bigger in some form of fashion as it happens it's harder to maintain alignment these concerns reflect an underlying anxiety as ethereum grows the original cyberpunk ethos could become diluted for the core devs this signals success but it also invites the possibility of New Visions of ethereum that may diverge from the foundational values they aimed to embed into the protocol so the term cyberpunk is becoming endangered despite of this its ethers burns brighter than ever to remain relevant in it changing world the cyberpunk ideology must evolve Beyond its historical Origins embracing radical inclusivity that acknowledges the diverse ways that people contribute to its ideals cyberp punks are not only coders but also researchers educators curators of digital spaces Community organizers and writers and there are organizations actively working to preserve this Legacy through privacy education and advocacy so web 3 privacy now is a leading Think Tank they are creating invaluable educational resources while women in web 3 privacy is championing privacy specifically tailored for women in the space this is a crucial moment to safeguard ethereum's future and preserve cyberpunk values in a world where control and influence Loom large your privacy is the foundation of your freedom the key to resisting coercion from dominant actors now more than ever protecting your privacy is not just a choice but a vital Act of defiance that ensures your voice remains your own and we invite you to get involved support these efforts and explore how you contribute to the future of privacy together we can ensure that the principle of the cyberpunk ethos not only remains relevant but also evolves alongside the infinite garden thank you so much for your attention I appreciate you being here I hope you got some value out of this talk and this paper is currently in publication but it will be public soon if you want to continue the conversation feel free to hit us up on cryptox we are pretty active either myself or Paul and thank you again enjoy the rest of your Defcon [Applause]