Reimagining the Truth Machine
Authors:   , Gloerich Inte 
Published: January 2025

This dissertation is about the idea that blockchain is a ‘truth machine.’ This idea captured the collective imagination and framed blockchain as a revolutionary tool for producing indisputable records of truth. Positioned as a solution to the challenges of the post-truth era, blockchain evokes a rationalist ideal: a system of logical, universal, and objective truths free from human bias. Yet, there is more than just rationalism that lurks beneath the surface of this imaginary. Through an exploration of blockchain culture the research uncovers the intricate interplay between rationalism and ‘more-than-rational’ belief. While blockchain is often framed as a purely rational mechanism, its adoption and application are steeped in layers of faith, trust, and ideology that extend beyond logic. By critically examining this dynamic, the dissertation highlights the dangers of equating ‘truth’ with algorithmic processes and emphasises the ongoing power of belief systems, even in societies that pride themselves on their rational foundations. These insights challenge the simplistic narratives surrounding technological progress and invite a deeper consideration of the cultural forces that shape how truth is understood and constructed.

The first case study features a critical investigation of the assumptions and biases that structure the data practices of blockchain-based carbon-credit and forestation projects, revealing that they replicate colonial power dynamics and the modernist myth of a superior, universal way of knowing. These concrete projects are then contextualised in a broader analysis of blockchain culture and its intersections with religion and spirituality. This shows that religious narratives and technological mysticism are important factors that shape the kinds of truth that blockchain is thought to afford and imbue them with a sense of predestination, universality, and timelessness—even if they only represent partial but powerful points of view. Zooming in on the specific dynamics of the cryptocurrency market, two diverging approaches to blockchain truths can be distinguished. First, an analysis of what is known as ‘crypto astrology’ shows that divination and financial speculation are intimately connected. Next, a close reading of cryptocurrency memes reveals that, amid the profound volatility of the crypto market, blockchain turns into an ‘uncertainty machine’ that always offers a new opportunity for speculation. Here it is not truthfulness that counts, but rather the capacity of information (truthful or not) to influence the market in a way that can be capitalised upon. Finally, the research zooms in on blockchain art and activism as spaces in which the technology’s capacity for truthfulness is reimagined. Rather than stable and universal truths, these countercultural communities use blockchain to establish mutable and situated truths that open up important debates about what knowledge is, how it can be produced, and the power dynamics at play in these processes. Ultimately, the findings this dissertation present are generalised to relate to broader technology culture and offer starting points for future explorations of emerging technologies in radically imaginative and transformative ways.