Title: Manifesto Roulette
Authors: Mina, Swarm Foundation team - team’s X account @ethswarm
Resources Required: space, power, wifi, curation support
What do you suggest?
I propose to set up a physical and digital interactive installation conceived specifically as a crossover between art, technology, and cultural reflection. It invites visitors to encounter the ideological history beneath Ethereum, Web3, and the broader technological culture from which they emerged, as well as cultural and political stands that might have indirectly influenced many of us.
The installation takes the familiar form of an arcade machine or fairground game. A visitor approaches “the console”, a physical object, and spins a digital wheel. The wheel lands on one of many selected manifestos, which is then presented on screen for the visitor to read and respond to.
The selection moves deliberately across political, artistic, technological, and (counter)cultural traditions: from cypherpunk and hacker culture to effective accelerationism, historical political and artistic manifestos, Ethereum-related foundational texts etc. These texts do not form a coherent canon, and are not presented as equally desirable positions. Their contradictions are the point.
The installation turns these contradictions into an accessible, fun public encounter. The roulette mechanic introduces chance, play, and curiosity into material that might otherwise remain confined to books, panels, or specialist discussions. A visitor does not select the position they already agree with. They are handed one, unexpectedly, and asked to spend time with it, react to it (permissionless comment box & top-up option).
We often speak through a shared vocabulary - decentralization, openness, autonomy, freedom, credible neutrality - but those words can contain very different assumptions about power, ownership, institutions, markets, collective action, technology, and progress.
Manifesto Roulette turns those tensions into a physical, playful encounter, while making decentralized technology and its properties supply the work’s central gestures and meaning.
Motivation & Rationale
- How does this improve the attendee experience?
Manifesto Roulette introduces a different kind of participation into the event.
Something people can encounter casually: they see an unusual physical object, press a button, spin a wheel, and are unexpectedly presented with an “idea”.
The roulette mechanic makes intellectually dense material approachable through chance, play, and curiosity. Someone might arrive because the object looks fun and leave having encountered a political or cultural text they would never otherwise have opened.
It also creates a shared social object in the room. People can compare what they landed on, disagree with it, discuss it with others, or leave a response for the next visitor.
The idea is to create something playful enough to attract people spontaneously, but substantial enough to provoke conversation after they walk away.
- What Ethereum use case does it showcase?
The installation does not only talk about decentralization, its mechanics depend on it.
It is a working demonstration of decentralized publishing, participation, and preservation.
Dogfooding.
The manifesto collection would be stored and served through decentralized infrastructure.
Visitors would be able to leave permissionless comments beneath individual manifestos, creating an accumulating public layer of reactions, annotations, jokes, disagreements, and counterarguments.
They could also activate a real postage-batch top-up, extending the period for which a particular piece is funded to remain available on the network.
This turns a technical storage mechanism into part of the experience itself. Topping up becomes an act of preservation: the visitor is actively extending the life of a body of ideas and the conversation accumulating around it.
Implementation
- Have you done this before at another event? No.
- How will you make it happen?
The installation would consist of a purpose-built physical “console” produced locally with craftspeople, containing a modern display and interaction controls connected to a computer or Raspberry Pi running the kiosk application and local Bee node.
The visitor flow is straightforward:
Spin → land on a manifesto → read → comment → optionally top up → return to the wheel.
The manifesto collection would be uploaded in advance and made available through Swarm. The interface would resolve and display the selected text, provide access to the comment layer, and expose the top-up interaction in a way that makes its meaning understandable to visitors.
The software development, Swarm integration, node setup, and overall technical execution would be handled as a direct contribution from the Swarm Foundation.
As for the curation of the texts, the idea is to make it participatory: we propose an open call to the Ethereum community asking which manifestos should be included - which foundational texts have shaped the way Ethereum ecosystem thinks about freedom, coordination, ownership, technology, or progress?
We would welcome the Ethereum Foundation and Devcon team as curatorial partners in that process.
Operational Requirements & Ownership
- What’s needed to make this work at Devcon/nect?
From the organiser, the installation would require:
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a suitable physical space;
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access to a stable, closed, high-speed Wi-Fi network;
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standard electrical sockets;
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ideally some control over lighting around the object.
I would also welcome the organiser’s consideration of covering or sharing the production costs (physical object production) as part of supporting the installation, optionally.
- Who will be responsible for running it on site?
I would lead the creative direction and coordination in collaboration with the Swarm Foundation. The technical implementation would be handled by the Swarm team.
An on-site technical owner would be in charge of monitoring the installation, troubleshoot if necessary, and making sure the visitor experience remains reliable throughout the event.
- What other projects could this integrate with?
The most obvious integration is with the broader Ethereum community through the open call for manifesto nominations and curation.
It could also connect with other DIPs concerned with identity, participation, proof of attendance, public displays, archives, community-generated content, or decentralized publishing.
The comment layer could potentially become part of a wider event archive, while the manifesto collection itself could remain accessible after the event as a persistent cultural artifact.
Links & Additional Information
As Ethereum enters another stage of technical, institutional and cultural development, it is important not to reduce its future to scaling metrics, market adoption, or product narratives. Ethereum began also as a proposition about how people might coordinate, own, publish, exchange, and build together. The next era should retain the capacity to examine those propositions critically.
we are growing, sort of a shared exploratory journey around our shared (and dissonant) ecologies.
