ELSIE
A coordination experiment disguised as a toy. A physical protocol for testing how people behave when given tools, asymmetries, and the ability to rewrite the rules together.
Overview
ELSIE is a live installation that produces objects and governs access to them through rules that participants can rewrite together.
It begins with a puppet-making unit, a claw machine, and a set of default rules weighted toward physical presence. It ends — or rather continues — wherever its participants decide to take it.
Essentially, ELSIE is a small, working governance system embedded in a form legible enough to play with.
Grey Walter's Machina speculatrix (1948) was the first cybernetic entity to follow the light — a tortoise-shaped robot that wandered toward it, avoided obstacles, and found its own charging station without explicit programming. Walter named it ELSIE: Electro-mechanical robot, Light-Sensitive, with Internal and External stability. The difference: Walter's ELSIE followed the light alone, while this one assembles light from joint multiplicities.
→ view the governance stackThe Coordination Problem
Coordination, like light, is only visible when it passes through something. Most of the time it moves through us unseen, below the threshold of awareness, while we drown in affective flows, reaching with claws open toward noumena that grew its fangs against us, grasping at rules that happened to be set in stone, not being able to pinpoint the latest version of the OS currently running us.
The result is collective behavior that is neither conscious nor truly collective. People optimise for individual outcomes inside structures they cannot see and therefore cannot change.
ELSIE is a proposal for something different: coordination made legible, and therefore changeable.
The claw machine is almost a perfect metaphor for unconscious coordination; a Markov's chain of pure desire, luck, individual action, absence of communication between players. ELSIE is willing to corrupt this by introducing friction, rules, and collective mechanisms into the frame. It makes the system visible. And once visible, it becomes something participants can argue about, modify, and possess.
The Object
At the center of the installation is a production unit: a machine that makes puppets. Objects produced live, on site, in view.
Production is continuous. The machine generates. The claw machine fills. The loop runs.
Each puppet is unique. Each puppet is assigned a token at the moment of production — a preminted NFT that travels with the object from creation through customisation through ownership.
The puppet, however, is just the starting point.
The Interface
Participants interact with ELSIE through two channels, which are not equal.
Present in the room. Operates the claw machine directly. Can draw on any puppet in the machine. Has priority access by default.
Remote. Draws on puppets through a web application. Subject to waiting lists when physical participants are active. Can participate in collective governance actions unavailable to individual physical players.
The asymmetry is intentional. Physical presence carries default privilege. But that privilege is not permanent — it is a condition that the online community can collectively negotiate away.
Both channels share a drawing interface: participants mark the puppet before it is claimed. The object arrives in the world already bearing traces of collective authorship.
The Rules
ELSIE ships with a default ruleset. These rules are not fixed. They are the opening position in an ongoing negotiation.
01 — Physical participants have priority over online participants.
02 — Online participants enter a waiting list when the physical queue is active.
03 — Online participants can coordinate to override a rule — but only collectively, never individually.
04 — Rule overrides require a threshold of coordinated action (vote, stake, or timed consensus).
05 — Overridden rules are logged. Nothing is deleted — only superseded.
The ruleset is the experiment. The question ELSIE is asking is not "who gets the puppet" but "what kind of coordination do people reach for when given the option to reach at all?"
Do they preserve the default hierarchy? Flatten it? Introduce new asymmetries of their own?
The Token Layer
Each puppet is paired with a preminted NFT at the moment of production. The token is not a speculative asset — it is a record of participation and a key to future governance.
Token holders gain weight in future collective governance actions. The more puppets claimed, the more influence — but influence is only activated through coordination, not individual action.
Participation Mechanics
The online waiting list is friction with purpose. It creates the condition for coordination: people who share a constraint and who are given tools to act on it together. The mechanism for overriding the waiting list — whatever form it takes in each iteration — is the site of the experiment.
Current designs include: timed consensus windows, stake-weighted votes, and asynchronous coordination games that require multiple participants to act without direct communication.
Each mechanism produces different behavior. Each iteration is a new data point.
Roadmap
ELSIE is designed to grow. The claw machine installation is the first protocol instance — a proof of concept for a larger methodology of embedded governance experiments.
Single claw machine, live puppet production, online/offline interface, default ruleset, preminted tokens. One venue, measured participation, documented outcomes.
Second installation with participant-authored ruleset derived from outcomes of the first. Rules evolve from observation, not speculation.
Multiple simultaneous installations in different cities sharing a governance layer. Cross-location collective action. Emergent coordination at scale.
ELSIE as a deployable protocol: documentation, toolkits, and governance templates that other institutions can run and adapt. The experiment becomes infrastructure.
The Larger Argument
Governance is not a technical problem. It is a design problem — and mostly, right now, an imagination problem.
We have inherited coordination mechanisms built for different scales, different information environments, different assumptions about human behavior. We know they are failing. We lack practical sites for testing alternatives.
ELSIE is one such site. Small enough to be safe. Playful enough to attract participation. Rigorous enough to produce transferable insight.
The claw machine is a perfect metaphor for what we want to change: individual desire, chance, no communication, no shared stake. ELSIE adds all the things that are missing.
The installation form is not decorative. It is the mechanism. People learn coordination by coordinating — not by reading about it, not by voting in systems they don't understand. ELSIE creates conditions for the thing itself.
That is what we are building. A place where coordination becomes conscious — and therefore, finally, possible to improve.