Tending the infinite garden: organizational culture in the Ethereum ecosystem
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper explores the role social imaginaries play in the organization of the Ethereum blockchain community and its associated economy. Specifically, it focuses on the developers, researchers and organizers responsible for Ethereum’s maintenance and upgrades, known as the Core Devs. Using a Grounded Theory approach, we investigate the decentralized decision-making processes inherent in Ethereum’s governance mechanisms. Through interviews with seven Ethereum Core Devs, we examine the presence of previously known social imaginaries and analyze their function in contemporary governance, including Infrastructural Mutualism. We also discuss a previously unexamined social imaginary, the Infinite Garden, which captures the values-inflected work of maintaining the protocol in light of the pressures of corporate institutionalization and economic pragmatism. We discover how in the absence of a formal centralized hierarchy, these social imaginaries set boundaries on the legitimacy of decision-making in Ethereum protocol governance. Further, we comment on the contemporary understanding of sociotechnical imaginaries as institutionally stabilized, finding in Ethereum’s case that culture is the condition that enables stability, whilst also acting as a bulwark against external institutional capture.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.036 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".