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How a community scales yet retains its fundamental character is a perennial puzzle - doubly so for a decentralized technology-mediated community. Based on our longitudinal case study of Ethereum, we argue that scaling can be done via a set of co-constitutive change processes called prefigurative enrolling. Our historical assessment of this case was assisted by structural topic modeling (STM) of blogs, crypto media, and news outlets. This revealed three phases in prefigurative enrolling. The first was around roadmaps for community imaginaries, shock events (a major hack), and reactive technology and governance adjustments. The second involved distributed experimentation, staking as anting-in, and anticipation of security and regulatory requirements in platform protocols. The third was the emotional reframing of field issues (such as sustainability), building a new tech-mediated community language and philosophy, and elaborating roles and interdependencies. These phases allowed for the democratic community logic to be gradually combined with a more market one in a blended configuration of responsible crypto finance. This paper contributes to work on technology community scaling, institutional co-constitution, and structural topic modeling. • The Ethereum community shifted their technology architecture and this altered social and cultural dynamics on the platform • This shift took place over several years and was the result of ongoing distributed efforts • Changes in institutional logics and technology affordances were co-constituted • Senior members of Ethereum engaged in prefigurative enrolling, conceptualized here as a form of cultural entrepreneurship
Pak et al. (Mon,) studied this question.
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