We conducted an interview with Dr. Paul Dylan-Ennis. Dylan-Ennis is a Lecturer/Assistant Professor in the College of Business, University College Dublin. His research focuses on the cultural and social aspects of the Ethereum blockchain and the wider Web3 ecosystem.
DIFFRACTIONS: Can you reflect on your personal intellectual trajectory and arc? You have been steeped in debates concerning Post-continental philosophy, speculative realism, organizational design in the wake of climate change, the nature of social imaginaries (Taylor) and polycentrism (Ostrom) and now your work focuses heavily on Ethereum, what were some formative moments that led to your current juncture?
PAUL DYLAN-ENNIS: As I get older it gets a little fuzzier. You could divide it between two phases. First, there is a philosophy arc. In those days, I was a quasi-hikkamoro type who spent too much time online and managed to stumble across the early stages of online philosophy blogs. These were mostly oriented around speculative realism, and this meant my fairly tame ecological Heidegger PhD thesis was upended.
Despite this, Heidegger is the most formative thinker for me, since I think it’s through Heidegger that I learnt about the phenomenological method. I am still always interested in what Heidegger was searching for (or perhaps saw), the Augenblick, where you can almost catch a sense of how things hold together, before it zigzags away from you. I also credit Heidegger with giving me a sense of historicity. This went too far in postmodernism, but as a broad frame, I think it’s always important to remember you exist in an age of something. And actually Heidegger named our age quite well: the technical Gestell.
Through Brassier, Meillassoux, Harman, and Land, I was delivered to a new vista. Instead of what withdraws as an ontological question, I got to thinking about the other side of the equation. What is on the ‘other side’ or ‘outside’ or the noumenal? Formative here is the Landian question of the nature of Artificial Intelligence and our supersession as a species on our native territory, whether we call that human intelligence or transcendental subjectivity or Dasein. I actually believe it’s the same question Heidegger had, but he was a little too early for the computer revolution to have driven him to the more occult part of the forest.
These ideas somewhat carry over into my second arc, as a Bitcoin and Ethereum folklorist. “Imaginaries” is just how a non-phenomenologist like Taylor says Husserlian lifeworld or Heideggerian Care. Taylor talks about how imaginaries are not theoretical, how it concerns our background sense of how it goes with others, the expectations to be met, and the like. In Jasonoff’s work on sociotechnical imaginaries, the concept of temporality is present, but instead of focusing on being-toward-death, it emphasizes being-toward-technology. But ultimately what it is like to be a stretched being of past, present, and future who is invested in the world.
In my work on Ethereum, I don’t bring those dimensions in explicitly, but I am trying to avoid theorizing about blockchain communities, as a good phenomenologist knows not to do. Instead, I am interested in the background presumptions, lines of demarcation, and implicit know-how that render certain decisions legitimate or illegitimate. Or help you separate out a Cypherpunk from a Pragmatist or a Lunarpunk.
I would add a newer formative thinker these days, Neil Postman. From Postman, by way of McLuhan by way of Innis, I am interested in the function of the (social) medium in determining the horizon of how blockchain communities operate. Postman says the best way to grasp a community is to look at how they communicate and what tools they prioritize and so for us this would be the question of the Crypto Twitter capture. Or the compact nature of ACD Core Dev calls. Or the EIP process. All reveal something subtle about the culture.
DIFF: I would also like to focus on your interest in organizational studies. First and foremost, can you elaborate on organizational studies? Secondly, can you expand on how, for example, the philosophy of speculative realism, specifically the work of Quentin Meillassoux, offers a compelling framework for facing phenomena such as climate change that compels a new world for which “we do not have categories”? Furthermore, I found your engagement with accelerationism and organizational studies intriguing. Can you explain how you approach Landian accelerationism as well in your framing?
PDE: Actually, I can’t! This is largely due to my limited knowledge of organization studies. It is just a quirk of my job that we publish in that subject area. I’ve tried to figure out what exactly it means, and I’ve come to the conclusion that nobody really knows. I suppose you might say it’s the study of organizations, which means you can study anything, which is pretty clever for a discipline. The Meillassoux and organization studies article is the most successful I have been part of. But for me it’s an awkwardly positioned one, because it sits right at the juncture between when I was still active in philosophy and phasing out of it. It’s a little psychoanalytic; the reader (therapist) knows more than I do. I wouldn’t even know how to speak about it, because I’ve not read Meillassoux for maybe a decade. However, the article is also enjoyable in that it has this life of its own, travelling through organization studies on its own journey, like Voyager 1 on its interstellar trajectory. The article is like a proto-AI agent version trained on my philosophy self; a self-reinforcing alien intelligence that departed from its human host.
As for Land, the article was mostly just an excuse to read and write about Land’s ‘Teleoplexy.’ Then I wedged in some process organization studies to anchor it in that world. What I most remember about this article was that I wrote it in and around Covid. I had relapsed into philosophy a little and was reading Whitehead and really going off the deep end. I submitted anoa prestigious journal that was undeniably eccentric, focusing on about reconstructing the sound of Archaeopteryx. A deep-time manic episode. The reviewers liked it but considered it not quite publishable in such venues.
DIFF: How would you say your philosophical disposition intersects with crypto and even cryptography generally? Do you see philosophical questions coursing through the work of the original cypherpunks? I suppose crypto also overlaps with epistemological issues, especially through consensus mechanisms about what we can know regarding truth on the blockchain via decentralized protocols, as well as metaphysical questions concerning the nature of identity, especially with ZKPs circumventing the need for KYC or (Lex Cryptographia). Where do you see crypto as applying philosophy (e.g., Austrian economics, cybernetics) or generating new philosophical problems?
PDE: Readers who are philosophy-oriented have certainly noticed how my Crypto arguments contain some philosophical residue. For example, I often argue that Cypherpunk is the ineliminable core of Ethereum. The term ‘ineliminable’ comes by way of Ray Brassier’s Nihil Unbound! This word is important to me, and I use it repeatedly because in my mind it means that if you eliminate Cypherpunk you undermine the lifeworld, the very context that renders the difference between community and complete sense loss to market / financial dynamics. The Gestell, to us Crypto folk is the bland, grey business school-ification of the blockchain as carried out by the CT-VC Podcast Industrial Complex. It’s not that Cypherpunk is foundational or significant. It is ineliminable.
In terms of philosophical arguments, there is not much to Cypherpunk. I don’t think this is a bad thing. It’s clearly quite productive. I accept the reading of Anderson in Cypherpunk Ethics that there are two flavours: Tim May’s crypto-anarchic negative-free mindset and Julian Assange’s crypto-justice virtue ethics. And from there the question is what Aristotelian list of categories you want to assign the Bitcoin flavour or the Ethereum flavour, based on your readings of the Pre-Socratic fragments of our time: Satoshi’s posts, Vitalik’s blog, the ‘Ethereum Cypherpunk Manifesto’ and so on. There is room then to analyse what decentralisation means, what permissionless means or what censorship resistance means but I have reached a point in my life where I’m happy to let someone else do this!
I don’t tend to engage in blockchain metaphysics, though it’s a term I like to use for what could be a fun area of research for someone. I am surprised nobody has done it much so far, except the Resistance Money crew associated with Bitcoin and Land’s Crypto-Current. At some point we will get a Crypto philosopher but this person probably has to be born a little later so that they have a reverence for it that those around in the beginning can never have.
DIFF: You have written extensively on Ethereum, particularly focusing on the nature of the imaginary. You have contended the community’s commitment to prefiguration is an important engine driving the evolution and dynamism of the ecosystem’s imaginaries. “Rather than developing collective visions of a distant future, prefiguration suggests that multiple and provisional views of the future can be telescoped to the here and now (Reinecke, 2018).” Ethereum is infused with a different set of imaginaries. Can you reflect on how these imaginaries have evolved or morphed since you wrote about them, or if you feel they have regressed in some critical ways? Where do you see the incorporation of science-fiction playing a role in activating social imaginaries, especially as found within your speculative work Slots and Epochs: Ethereum Alignment in the State Machine One (SMO) Gigalopolis?
PDE: In recent times Ethereum culture has morphed substantively. The populist revolt against the Ethereum Foundation (EF) was effectively a call for help from Ethereum’s Pragmatist imaginary. These are the folks interested in ETH the asset, the builders, and the institutionally-minded (who I am minded to put in institutions!). They are the folks who wage battle on CT against the threats to Ethereum. Solana is the young guy on a skateboard doing fancy tricks and here we are in Ethereum with our walking sticks! From a blockchain governance perspective, the interesting aspect is that this revolt was ‘bloodless.’ There was no demand for a hard fork, so nothing existential. Instead, it worked through the proper channels of a noisy social layer that makes its demand, and then the other stakeholders in the polycentric stakeholder system agreed (slowly) that something should be done, which saw the EF shake up its leadership to effectively install some Pragmatists into power (Tomasz, Dankrad, etc.). I also note here that the quirk of their demands was that this was not a call to eliminate the EF but to make the EF more hands on, more of a central decision-maker.
The question then becomes, what is the nature of imaginaries in Ethereum today? To my eye, we have perhaps a hybrid-culture of near-term Pragmatism and long-term Cypherpunk, with each influencing the other. For example, Vitalik’s discussion of low-risk DeFi is clearly a little bit Pragmatist-coded. In turn, the Pragmatists are always careful to include some Cypherpunk terminology in their updates. It is too early to tell how this plays out, but for culture watchers, the next two years should be quite instructive as to what blockchain governance actually means.
Regarding Slots and Epochs: Ethereum Alignment in the State Machine One (SMO) Gigalopolis I think this work is more of a personal impulse or experiment in theory, fiction, or hyperstition on my part. I don’t know whether it would ever be considered important to any Etherean. But I do think it is interesting how Ethereans don’t have a Social Endgame analogous to Bitcoin’s Hyperbitcoinization. It is unclear what the Ethereum society is supposed to look like or whether we are even in the business of society at all. Or are we some background infrastructure. At heart, I have an apocalyptic vision of how the world plays out, and I see our venture in all this as unconscious preparation for societal collapse, where we then discover we are a transglobal culture of the hash function. A set of people with a certain nous for hacking around things, which should come in handy in the decades to come.
DIFF: What is your feeling on the real-world impact of DAOs so far? Are you optimistic that they can disrupt traditional political structures, or do you believe their inherent limitations will prevent them from becoming mainstream?
PDE: There are two ways to see this. First, we tend to forget just how radical an achievement it is that we created DAOs. This is an entirely new organisational form. It’s part of the counter-economy that Crypto has carved out for itself. Whatever the failings of DAOs to reach their potential, they are some weird new hybrid entity. We made those!
Second, we tend to always want more in Crypto and this is a flaw in our subculture. We are aware that DAOs can be quite complex and challenging to manage. Therefore, it seems unwise to want to transpose this structure outward into the messiness of politics or any other part of the mainstream. I am not even sure why we want to export to the mainstream or where this impulse comes from. Perhaps it’s some kind of secret colonial impulse we have.
Third, the truth is nobody believes in the mythology of DAOs much anymore. There are no starry-eyed decentralists to be found. And any encounter with actually-existing DAOism will reveal to you the presence, the remainder, of the centralised creator, whether through the whale-founder or the Foundation. In some cases, we see a direct re-assertion of control over a DAO by the creators. In others, it is just a direct acceptance that some core entity works best. In other places it’s more subtle, where foundations are simply packaging votes to be signed off on. Really what we have today are Decentralised Autonomous Companies (DAC), so Dan Larimer was right all along.
REFERENCES
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Brassier, R. (2007). Nihil unbound: Enlightenment and extinction. Palgrave Macmillan.
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Buterin, V. (2016, December 30). A proof of stake design philosophy. https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/a-proof-of-stake-design-philosophy-506585978d51
Dylan-Ennis P (2021), “The vitalist disjuncture between process organization studies and accelerationism”. Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 34 No. 6 pp. 1165–1174, doi: https://doi.org/10.1108/JOCM-08-2019-0266
Dylan-Ennis, P., Kavanagh, D., & Araujo, L. (2022). The dynamic imaginaries of the Ethereum project. Economy and Society, 52(1), 87–109. https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2022.2131280
Dylan-Ennis, P. (2025). Slots and epochs: Ethereum alignment in the State Machine One (SMO) gigalopolis. Digital Creativity, 36(2), 140–152. https://doi.org/10.1080/14626268.2025.2508972
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