MANIFESTO:
AGAINST THE CENTRALIZED MACHINE
We live under a regime of invisible hands and inhuman clocks. The platforms meant to connect us now predict us. The tools that once liberated us now mine us. Culture has been captured.
Centralized systems of algorithmic control have reduced creativity to content, labor to clicks, stories to streams.
They reward sameness, accelerate burnout, and hoard value at the top. These are not infrastructures of expression — they are extractive engines.
They promise scale, but deliver surveillance.
They offer access, but obscure authorship.
They whisper opportunity, but enforce dependence.
This is not the future we were promised.
And it is not the future we will accept.
We reject the feed.
We reject the opaque protocol.We reject the flattening of nuance, the devaluation of the handmade, the erasure of the collective.
Instead, we choose to build in the open.
To co-create tools, protocols, and platforms that reflect our values—not exploit them.
We believe creative infrastructure must be:
- Decentralized — not governed by monopolies, but shaped by communities.
- Participatory — not designed by elites, but co-authored by the many.
- Transparent — not locked in black boxes, but legible, forkable, remixable.
- Plural — not optimized for frictionless consensus, but designed to hold difference and dissent.
- Care-driven — not addicted to growth, but accountable to human and ecological futures.
This is a distributed mesh of cultural imagination — node to node, story to system, art to algorithm.
We are Decentralized Futures.
We are artists, storytellers, creative technologists, engineers, and builders - and anyone interested in open, experimental creativity.
We are prototyping new myths, new models, and new modes of making.
We are unbuilding the machine from within — and planting the seeds of many futures.
This is not a trend.
This is a refusal.
This is an experiment.
This is a beginning.
✳︎
Join us.
Build what’s next.
Decentralized Futures
is a collaboration between
Columbia DSL & the Solana Foundation