"Insight Report" Series: External Interview #1 — Phil H.

Mael Roland
Dec 12, 2025
13 min read

Updated: Dec 16, 2025

"At birth, all projects are stillborn. They must be continually given existence so that they take shape and impose their growing coherence on those who questioned or opposed them." (Latour, 1992: 71-72)

I. Introduction — When the First Interview "Fails"… As Expected

As was ultimately predictable, the opening of this interview campaign did not begin as planned. An unspoken rule of fieldwork immediately came back to me after the thesis-writing hiatus: fieldwork always starts with a technical glitch. To take "failure" or "success" "as given in advance [is to] obscure the process [at work], the interplay of actors [...], the difficulties [...] and the way they were or were not overcome"¹. In actor-network theory, the challenge is precisely to understand how these categories are constructed and to "identify where the confrontations took place" (Callon, 2006a, p. 24).

The interview had been booked via Calendly, which generated a Google Meet link. Problem: still on the free version, recording was impossible (the paid version has been subscribed to as I write these lines). As a workaround, I had set up a Zoom session—which does allow local recording—and sent the link to my interlocutor on the same day. New problem: he had deleted his account and did not use the platform. This refusal reminded me of the "hyper-vigilance" of crypto actors in the face of Zoom's tarnished reputation within the ecosystem: an option allowed remote control of users' machines and was used for targeted cyberattacks, resulting in significant financial losses². Caught off guard, I accepted Google Meet, convinced that the video screen capture would serve as a backup (and without taking the time to set up an audio backup recording via my phone, as I usually do... I know, I know...). However, this improvised arrangement only recorded the image, without sound. Here was a literally mute interview, providing me with no usable oral material.

Was this interview already stillborn? No—it would simply need to be "continually given existence so that it takes shape," and that is what we will set out to do. Frustrating as it may be, the incident serves as a methodological reminder and a double ethnographic datum. On the one hand, crypto involves singular risks that demand careful attention to security issues; on the other, the researcher depends on unstable socio-technical arrangements, where "failure" reveals a space of confrontation between human and non-human actants, where alignments and commitments are negotiated.

Ultimately, far from being a false start, this provides an important opening: a reminder that infrastructures shape the very production of data, and that fieldwork requires constantly updated technical competence. This incident inaugurates a campaign and interview reports conceived as narratives of unfinished translation: exemplarily, this first Insight Report draws on my immediate memory of the exchange, the few notes taken, and the references shared, while acknowledging the part of uncertainty—a perfect illustration, in short, of the concrete conditions of knowledge production in a decentralized universe.

II. Introducing the Series: Portraits & External

Interviews

This interview campaign extends the methodological stance I adopted in my thesis: investigating distributed, socio-technically composite objects requires following actors where they are—online and offline—and allowing relevant analytical categories to emerge from their situated narratives. In an emerging field like crypto, Web3 and cooperative worlds escape pre-established frameworks and call for an idiographic and qualitative approach, attentive to local languages, practices, institutional bricolages, and forms of authority circulating between infrastructures, communities, and tools.

The interviews in this series, inaugurated by this first post, follow this logic: the aim is neither to achieve statistical representativeness nor to validate a priori typologies, but to progressively construct, through grounded theorization, an interpretive model of distributed governance. By meeting actors with heterogeneous trajectories and decoding their experiences, tensions, and trade-offs, the objective is to make intelligible, through controlled accumulation of singular cases, the diversity of coordination regimes at the interface of Web3 and the cooperative world.

Concretely, I meet varied profiles—developers, founders, cooperators, social and solidarity economy (SSE) practitioners, hybrid actors—through semi-structured interviews of about an hour, designed as spaces for discussion and narrative construction of their experiences. Each interview will result in a structured analytical Insight Report (executive summary, cross-cutting themes, positioning matrix).

In the background, the entire corpus will be progressively coded thematically, according to a grid that will evolve over the course of the interviews, allowing both dense qualitative reading and some light quantitative processing (trends, profiles, positioning gradients). It is within this framework that interview #1 with Phil H. is situated, of which this report constitutes the first formalization. For example, to ensure minimal comparability between interviews while respecting their singularity, each Insight Report will include a positioning matrix. This does not aim to classify actors, but to make visible the positioning logics they express. It is based on seven general axes, constructed to be broad enough to accommodate varied profiles without confining discourses to pre-established categories. Each axis is a continuum from 1 to 5, representing two opposing poles:

1. Web3 ↔ Cooperative Orientation : 1 = Native Web3 anchoring (crypto-economy, tokens, technical autonomy) ; 5 = Cooperative / SSE anchoring (commons, multi-stakeholders) → Example: An Ethereum maximalist would be close to 1; a SCIC member close to 5.

2. Human ↔ Code Relationship (Authority) : 1 = Primacy of human judgment, deliberation, arbitration ; 5 = Primacy of code, strong automation→ Example: A "full code is law" advocate tends toward 5; a procedural cooperativist toward 1.

3. Centralization ↔ Decentralization : 1 = Centralized, hierarchical organization ; 5 = Distributed, polycentric organization → Example: A traditional startup = 1; a DAO = 5.

4. Relationship to Commons (Weak ↔ Strong) : 1 = Weak user involvement, minimal governance ; 5 = Ostromian regime, shared governance, collective responsibility → Example: A platform extracting value = 1; a SCIC or self-managed collective = 5.

5. Relationship to Market (Weak ↔ Strong) : 1 = Primacy of social or political, framed market ; 5 = Market as central coordination mechanism→ Example: A crypto libertarian = 5; a territorial cooperative = 1.

6. Political Positioning (Left ↔ Right) : 1 = Collective sovereignty, redistribution, market critique ; 5 = Individual sovereignty, market, fiscal autonomy→ Example: A crypto anarcho-capitalist = 5; an SSE activist = 1.

7. Desired Governance Horizon (Deliberative ↔ Algorithmic) : 1 = Ideal of human, adaptive, deliberative governance ; 5 = Ideal of automated, protocolized, algorithmic governance → Note: This axis concerns not the present reality, but the desired future.

These axes offer a means to map trends, identify tensions, and compare very different profiles without reducing them to fixed categories. Each positioning is interpretive and provisional, meant to be refined over the course of interviews and feedback from the individuals concerned.

III. Insight Report — Interview with Phil H.

III.1 — Biography

I am pleased to inaugurate this interview series with an already familiar actor: Phil H. (pseudonym), a recognized figure in the French crypto community—and the Ethereum ecosystem in particular. He was among those profiles I encountered during my thesis fieldwork, noted for his strong interest in distributed governance and the recognized knowledge he has accumulated on the subject. Presenting himself online as a DAOist, commoner, d14n hacker (for decentralization hacker—author's note), but also as an entrepreneur, he claims a position at the crossroads of DAOs, commons, and experimental decentralization practice. He situates his entry into the crypto world in 2015, like me, at the time of Ethereum's launch and the open promises of a Web3 that did not yet bear that name.

An administrator of Ethereum France (formerly Asseth, which I had joined at the time, hence the familiarity) and an active contributor for many years, a specialist in DAOs, he is the author of numerous blog posts published on Ethereum France and Medium, which quickly convinced me to interview him, also following the advice of ZôÖma (Samouraï Coop), with whom he has collaborated. Phil H. immediately clarifies that he has distanced himself from the crypto world, retiring at the beginning of the year, closing a professional career in software engineering and information systems. He began in management software for banking, insurance, and public environments, as a developer, then director or project manager, in direct contact with the socio-technical constraints of large organizations. He then turned to general ergonomics (in the French sense of the term, he specifies—that is, focused on the clinical and holistic approach to work activity, rather than on the development of standards and tools), interested in learning more about the relationship between humans and their technical and organizational environment. Subsequently, and this is crucial for his trajectory, he founded several companies in computer security and advanced infrastructure software, including Skyrecon (behavioral security, now part of Airbus Defence and Space) and Ftopia, a B2B Dropbox-type cloud storage solution, which would be his last company before the Web3 pivot.

Both projects started very well but came to an abrupt halt, largely due to the dynamics of fundraising and the weight investors take in strategic decisions. The episode plays a pivotal role: Phil H. draws from it the conviction that the very structure of startup financing and the hierarchy it imposes make genuine balance between stakeholders difficult. He concludes that he must find other ways to organize a project without reproducing the capital-centered startup model. At the same time, he encounters Bitcoin, Ethereum, and the first projects touted as decentralized. This gives rise to his desire to decentralize Ftopia's infrastructure and open its code as open source: from then on, he becomes interested in how to use new Web3 technologies to "reinvent" startups, moving them "from closed intellectual property to free software," "from a centralized and corporate model to open governance where users and contributors have a say," and "from profitability to a new form of commons, owned by its stakeholders"³.

III.2 — Executive Summary

1. Web3 as a Response: Critical Pragmatism

The interview with Phil H. highlights a trajectory where interest in Web3 arises from a negative experience of fundraising and the unbalanced forms of governance they produce. Upon discovering Web3, he "wouldn't say he was completely naive," but he acknowledges, with acquired experience, a form of progressive "sobering" in the face of the gap between initial ideals and the reality of Web3 projects: "very far from the projections we could have had." He participated in The DAO, saw different ideas emerge, assisted projects, and became a recognized figure on governance issues. He notably explored multi-stakeholder governance in the SCIC model, for which he conceived an implementation for a decentralized finance project. From 2022 onwards, he sees DeFi as the most relevant playing field for DAO designers and promoters : it includes the main decentralized applications bringing together numerous stakeholders, economic value is effectively produced there, and the creation and distribution of value can be achieved through “expanded governance via the tokenomics of these projects, which opens up a range of possibilities compared to traditional companies.”

He takes a pragmatic view of decentralization, which he defines less as a political ideal than as a form of resilience engineering aimed at protecting processes from capture. In his view, “what is new is the use of automated infrastructure [to] protect the system from internal or external takeover.” It is not a question of removing humans or eliminating politics, but of locking down certain margins of action in order to avoid capture, manipulation, or blocking: “DAOs protect processes by preventing parties from unilaterally blocking/modifying them.” Far from eliminating humans, blockchain and smart contracts merely shift their action. Code does not replace humans; “replacing humans with code” always presupposes a prior human decision—and therefore ethical, political, and organizational responsibility. As he says, “We delegate? Who do we delegate to? Humans...”

This pragmatic vision culminates in an almost provocative question: “Who really needs a decentralized infrastructure?”. Here we leave marketing discourse to return to the materiality of uses, socio-technical costs, and the heterogeneity of needs. For Phil H., architectural and infrastructural trade-offs never derive from an abstract universal: they always depend on situations, constraints, and concrete collectives.

2. A Central Place for Bugs, Flaws, and Technical Crises

One striking feature of Phil H. is the way he spontaneously approaches crises, bugs, flaws, and breakdowns as the privileged entry point for understanding decentralized systems. He too accepts failure and makes crisis a window onto governance practices!

Far from being regrettable exceptions, these events constitute for him the dynamic core of Web3 governance: it is when the machine jams that trade-offs, social norms, contradictory expectations, and the limits of code are revealed. A smart contract is merely "cooled automation"—it is delegated to in a partial, frozen logic that functions as long as the anticipated conditions remain verified. As soon as something unexpected arises—bug, flaw, attack, design error, friction with the real world—one must "disengage" the system and "take back control": with this human intervention, automation reveals all its limits.

When asked about the idea that "code is law," Phil H. refuses any binary answer. He acknowledges that certain Web3 systems explicitly seek to substitute technical trust for political trust—the famous trustlessness—but he insists: algorithmic authority never exists alone. Crisis then becomes a true socio-technical revealer: it exposes the tension between the ideal of technical autonomy and the social realities that systems attempt to contain. This is precisely what the Merit case shows, which he comments on in a post: the same incident can be read simultaneously according to the four forces identified by Lessig—law, market, social norms, and technical architecture⁴. Code never acts in isolation, but always in interaction with these other forces. This interpretive pluralism makes crises a privileged terrain for observing what governance distributes... and what it can never entirely discipline.

3. No Silver Bullet for Crises: The Radical Heterogeneity of Designs

When I ask him about the possible existence of models or mechanisms more effective than others for managing crises, Phil H. answers that there is no general model. Each project or organization is unique, and each mechanism—on-chain architecture, implicit off-chain rules, social structures, power distribution—generates its own types of fragilities, conflicts, and crises.

Crises can extend well beyond smart contract code, as the Merit case shows—an emblematic episode:

"In summary, Merit Circle, a DAO in the gaming sector, received funding from YGG, a competing platform, as part of its latest funding round. Investors were supposed to provide non-financial value, but YGG allegedly did not honor this part of the agreement. As a result, some DAO members seek to cancel the agreement and return YGG's initial investment. Although a minority opposed this proposal, it appears that general opinion favors it." Phil H., A Case Without Merit

This episode illustrates the collision between formal legal obligations, social expectations, economic incentives, and technical constraints. In other words, an application of Lessig's four forces: law, market, norms, and architecture come into friction, and none alone can resolve the problem. Here, token holders retroactively reinterpret the initial agreement in the name of a community norm of legitimacy—even if it means going back on a contractual commitment. Far from the "code is law" ideal, the community chooses its norms over strict contract compliance.

This diversity reinforces Phil H.'s thesis: crises are lodged in the details, hence an inability to find an "ideal" governance to transpose from one project to another. Web3 systems present radical heterogeneity, both in their on-chain architectures and in their off-chain coordination mechanisms (reputation, private channels, informal role of developers, implicit deliberation), as well as in their community characteristics. Therefore, no silver bullet: Web3 governance is inscribed in a multiplicity of trajectories and compromises—far from ideological simplifications, and as close as possible to the situated arrangements that communities produce.

4. Soft vs. Hard Decentralization: Two distinct Logics

Extending his analysis of decentralization as protection, Phil H. proposes a distinction—acknowledged as analogical and not formalized—between "soft" and "hard" decentralization, which illuminates two very different uses of decentralization in Web3. Soft decentralization follows a defensive logic: it aims to prevent capture, deter attacks, and distribute power to avoid its monopolization, using tokens, smart contracts, and validation networks as technical "checks and balances" playing a role similar to classic legal counter-powers. This type of decentralization is particularly useful and applicable to protocols involving a large number of participants handling large funds.

Hard decentralization, conversely, follows a positive and creative logic: relying on collective intelligence to produce an organization more effective than centralized hierarchy, echoing sociocratic and holacratic experiments or cases like Haier and its networked micro-teams, sometimes coordinated via Ethereum. This distinction feeds a recurring skepticism in him toward the widespread narrative in crypto projects that highly centralized governance at the outset could progressively "decentralize": power, once acquired, is rarely relinquished, and founding teams, in his view, greatly underestimate the technical, institutional, and political scope of this transition.

IV. Phil H.'s Positioning Matrix

Positional Radar (ASCII version) (● = Phil H.'s position / ○ = continuum 1→5)

Web3 ↔ Coop Orientation     			○──●──○──○──○
Humain ↔ Code Relationship   		○──○──●──○──○
Centralization ↔ Décentral.			○──○──○──●──○
Weak ↔ Strong Commons 		    	○──○──○──●──○
Weak ↔ Strong Market					○──○──●──○──○
Left ↔ Right Political Pos.  		○──○──●──○──○
Deliberative ↔ Algo. Gov.     		○──○──●──○──○

Axe	Score	Justification
Web3 ↔ Coop Orientation	2	Phil occupies a hybrid position: his culture remains crypto and technical, but he is very sensitive to organizational and multi-stakeholder issues.
Relationship to Code	3	He values code as an organizational framework, but not as the exclusive source of authority. For him, code structures action, but humans remain indispensable—hence the importance of being able to "disengage the system."
Vision of Decentralization	3-4	He conceives decentralization both as process protection (soft) and as a driver of collective efficiency (hard). This nuance clearly orients him toward a form of "strong," active decentralization, focused on distributed coordination.
Relationship to Commons	3-4	Phil is genuinely interested in commons: multi-stakeholding, SCIC, collective intelligence. But he is neither militant nor doctrinaire: he defends pragmatic uses of commons rather than an ideology.
Relationship to Market	3-4	The slightly left-leaning position indicates this: he recognizes market efficiency but never places markets at the center. He defends a framed market, combined with social and technical mechanisms—consistent with what he says about Haier, Merit, or DeFi.
Perceived Political Positioning	3-4	Does not easily affiliate with a political community, neither right nor left, and criticizes the technical incompetence of politics, but does not subscribe to any doctrine. → Central, moderate, techno-critical position.
Horizon de gouvernance souhaité	3	He believes in hybrid systems: minimal automation, collective coordination, evolving rules. A combinatorial model rather than a pure model.

Phil H. is situated in a hybrid organizational space: Web3 enough to think in terms of distributed infrastructures, cooperative enough to refuse technicist imaginaries. He values code as a framework without absolutizing it—"disengaging" remains necessary. His conception of decentralization is oriented toward collective efficiency rather than ideology. Sensitive to commons, attentive to markets without fetishism, he defends combinatorial forms of governance where human practices and technical devices co-evolve.

V. Conclusion

This first interview—despite its methodological accident—constituted a particularly stimulating opening. What is striking in his testimony is the proximity to my own analyses: the centrality of crises as institutional revealer, the critique of purist imaginaries of decentralization, attention to real organizational trade-offs rather than slogans, and a certain pragmatism (there is no good governance per se, only situated arrangements).

The final opening of our exchange resonates particularly with broader political issues. What concerns him today is not so much the ideological polarization of Web3 as the emergence of a generation of users who behave more like "customers" than citizens, seeking the most advantageous jurisdictions rather than places to contribute. A concern that, ultimately, brings the discussion back to one of our central questions: what forms of collective coordination do we really want, in service of what rights and what communities?