By Giulio Quarta, Director of the Commons Economy Roadmap
The art of weaving together different perspectives toward a common goal is nothing new. Political movements have long practiced the hard work of reformulating diverse viewpoints into unifying powerful narratives. Corporate marketing departments invest billions in understanding and influencing collective narratives to keep the profits machine going.
We live in an age where flows of meaning have become as vital as those of material resources. We all generate value in a Memetic Economy, where the whole complex of perceptions, affections and interactions which is our collective life has become the new frontier and substrate of capitalist extraction. We are semiotic beings, more than ever and every day more, living on meaning and memes as much as we live on food and water.
Both of these two dimensions of our survival are in great danger or already compromised for billions of people right now. It is from this growing awareness that the Commons Economy Roadmap project has emerged over the last few years, as an experiment in collective sensemaking around Commons-oriented economic systems. What we here call “semiotic bridging” can be useful in the context of Ethereum Localism – the ambitious quest of connecting global protocols with local realities, across the world’s cultural spectrum, ideally with an Ethereum core developer in every bioregion, to paraphrase Trent VanEpp.
What is Semiotic Bridging?
Semiotic bridging is the intentional process of mediating between different narratives and frameworks to reveal their underlying compatibility. It demonstrates how diverse cultural, economic, and ideological perspectives often align in their goals and actions, even when their language and framing differ significantly.
An example of successful semiotic bridging can be found in the history of climate activism. Before the term “environmentalism” or the “environmental movement” gained traction, many of the efforts to address issues like species conservation, pollution, and atmospheric science were fragmented, with groups focusing on specific causes without much overlap. This super narrative of environmentalism – which is now fully established and naturalized in our common sense – acted as a unifying framework that brought together these diverse efforts under a broader understanding of human impact on the natural world.
This approach becomes particularly relevant in the context of Ethereum Localism, where a bridging strategy can reconcile different scenarios and needs: global protocols and local implementation, socio-technical networks and natural ecosystems, in the context of an always evolving political plurality of the crypto industry and movement(s) social base.
Advancements in the information revolution have significantly reduced the marginal cost of “semiotic bridging work,” and recent developments in large language models have only further amplified the effectiveness and potential of this approach. If I had to rewrite this piece in three versions for it to be understandable by a Syrian farmer, a Mexican environmental activist and an audience of young artists, while also creating a fourth piece that combines – semiotically bridges – all three perspectives it would have taken me weeks before generative AI, while now it would be a matter of days, with the most time consuming parts of the process performed by a computer while the human effort can be moved to where it’s more needed, like proofreading or actually interacting with the people involved.
The Commons Economy Roadmap: a sensemaking protocol
The Commons Economy Roadmap (CER) represents our experimental attempt at building a collective sensemaking protocol around the emerging Commons Economy. At its core, it’s a knowledge base and promotion mechanism for infrastructure projects working toward societal regeneration. More fundamentally, it is an exercise in semiotic bridging at scale.
We identify and feature projects that combine viable alternative business models with strong ethical values – initiatives building open infrastructures for citizen empowerment, ecological regeneration, and community resilience. Importantly, the selection is based on their potential contribution to the commons economy, through a set of evolving criteria which we invite you to read in greater detail on the project’s website.
Once selected, projects can amplify their reach by funding the production of “Knowledge Elements” – articles, videos, and other media created by our network of research partners. These aren’t simple promotional materials: they are curated pieces that situate each project within broader narratives of systemic change, revealing natural alignments with other movements and approaches.
Collectively, Knowledge Elements form a growing network of meaning that connects different vocabularies, frameworks, and communities. They facilitate translation between sectors – showing how ReFi projects align with mutual aid networks, how privacy protocols complement cooperative principles, and how traditional commons governance informs blockchain-based systems, just to name a few examples. Through these connections, projects discover new audiences beyond their niches, while building a richer understanding of how different pieces of the Commons Economy reinforce each other.
Speaking of the current memes and trends involved in this broad umbrella of the Commons Economy, CER also deals with ReFi and CoFi as they emerged out of DeFi – respectively regenerative, collaborative and decentralized finance –- as well as traditional movements such as cooperativism and mutual aid, together with the variety of privacy-oriented communities like cypherpunks, lunarpunks and the meme of post-web, just to name a few.
The protocol emerged in the context of the Crypto Commons Association events and community, which was specifically initiated in 2021 by Felix Fritsch and myself with the exact aim of bridging these two worlds – blockchain and the Commons – which, until then, were mostly unlinked. The strong convergence around the Commons meme that we observed in the last four years convinced us that this could have been a more effective “supernarrative” than the “Post-Capitalism” one, for a variety of interesting reasons that we can’t delve on here for lack of space.
The core CER belief is that all of these networks are working on different dimensions and components of the same emerging system, assembling and expanding the same dense web of connected social and technical infrastructures. While each sector uses its own language and emphasizes different aspects, they share a fundamental vision which, as we suggest, might be expressed as:
“We all aspire to a global, distributed, open-source economic infrastructure – one that is resilient, nearly impossible to shut down or monopolize by a powerful few, and capable of bringing about global peace and abundance.”
Semiotic Bridging and Ethereum Localism
It will be clear at this point that our work is very much aligned with the vision and strategy of Ethereum Localism, which itself has been a strong influence in the development of the CER protocol. We want to support the great work that has been carried out by the thousands of tech workers worldwide, animated by the supernarrative of decentralization, so that these important infrastructures can be developed in alliance and symbiosis with the broader movements for social and ecological regeneration.
For such new narrative layers to be successful, all these meaning building blocks should be assembled and recombined through an endogenous process, driven by the continuous bridging of existing stakeholders narratives, revealing and strengthening what the Ethereum Localism framework calls cosmolocal patterns. Just as Ethereum and blockchains in general provide technical protocols to enable decentralized coordination of economic resources, semiotic bridging can be used to design sensemaking protocols that accelerate the emergence of effective system-wide narratives.
The future of Ethereum Localism and the Commons depends on our ability to bridge multiple worlds: the technical and the social, the global and the local, the digital and the ecological. Organizing plurality without leaving anybody behind is the most demanding mode of existence one can choose in general, and much more so when fascism is coming back on the global stage with the precise goal of exterminating such diversity. We are convinced the semiotic bridging practices introduced in this piece can better equip us all in this struggle, helping us to appreciate both the wonderful variety of our efforts and their fundamental unity, as well as the deep beauty of this tension.
For updates on this work and to join the conversation, subscribe to the Commons Economy Roadmap newsletter or contact giulioquarta@protonmail.com
Back to Table of Contents | Next: Second Interlude | Previous: The Inverted City