Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has taken aim at the “pretend neutrality” of the corporate world, arguing its creators should not be afraid to voice their own cultural and political principles despite the fact that the protocol is open for all.
One of those principles is a firm belief that “suits and ties should be expunged from our culture.”
Permissionless, not opinionless
Buterin has made it clear that Ethereum’s core value proposition is its “permissionlessness.”
Users do not need to align with his personal views on a plethora of topics to use the blockchain, Buterin says.
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“You do not have to agree with my view that Berlin has the best food in Europe, suits and ties should be expunged from our culture, and YYYY-MM-DD is the best date format to use Ethereum,” Buterin wrote.
He stressed that he does not claim to represent the entire ecosystem, noting that the “whole concept” of censorship resistance is that users are free to ignore him, the Ethereum Foundation, or client developers entirely.
The “grand bargain” of free speech
However, Buterin drew a sharp distinction between the neutrality of the code and the neutrality of the people building it. He has stressed that he can criticize projects he finds objectionable.
“If I say that your application is corposlop, I am not ‘censoring’ you,” Buterin explained. “This has always been the flip side of the grand bargain of free speech: I am not free to shut you down, but I am free to criticize you, much as you are free to criticize me.”
Buterin directed his sharpest critique at the “modern world” and its tendency toward sanitized, corporate neutrality. He argued that true neutrality is for protocols (HTTP, Bitcoin, and Ethereum), but that individuals should have the “courage to clearly state one’s principles.”
He juxtaposed this courage against the image of the corporate executive:
“The modern world does not call out for pretend neutrality, where a person puts on a suit and claims to be equally open to all perspectives from all of humanity and not have their own opinions.”
Instead, Buterin advocated for building a “metaverse” where specific principles are taken as a baseline, arguing that valuing concepts like freedom ultimately requires making technology choices that reflect those values.
“Corposlop is soulless: trend-following homogeneity that is both evil and lame,” Buterin wrote.
The Linux analogy
To illustrate his point, Buterin compared Ethereum to Linux. He noted that Linux is a tool for user empowerment, but it also serves as the “base layer of a lot of the world’s corposlop.”
“If you care about Linux because you care about user empowerment and freedom, it is not enough to just build the kernel, we must also build a full-stack ecosystem compatible with those values,” he wrote.
For Buterin, the goal is to ensure that a values-aligned ecosystem exists as an option.
“Explicitly accept that this is not the only way that people will use Linux, but it is one way that must be built and must be available. Ethereum is similar.”