In {code, math, crypto} we trust: blockchain and dreams of perfect programmability
Creators: name: Jacobetty, Pedro
name: Orton-Johnson, Kate
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2020
Subjects: blockchain
sociology
digital culture
myth
mythology
digital technology

description: Abstract


Blockchain is a distributed ledger technology that is increasingly being heralded as a revolutionary technology that can offer verified records of information and value, namely property registration and cryptocurrencies. Its distributed quality makes it easier for individuals to jointly create, control and maintain information records. Blockchain is increasingly underpinning utopian visions of a digitally connected global society, in which frictionless interpersonal interaction and exchange take place without trusted intermediaries such as central banks and property registers. It adds democratic and participatory undertones to what is already a dominant mythology related to the valuation of digital data.


Blockchain technology has fueled contemporary imaginaries about digital technologies. Wendy Chun identified "dreams of superhuman digital programmability" as the causal mechanisms behind a contemporary conflation between memory and storage: using digital technologies to combine the transitory and the permanent, and thus arrest the degeneration of memory. Blockchain expands these dreams from perfect memory to interpersonal processual programmability through the usage of smart contracts. These contracts are programs that are inscribed in the blockchain - which may be automatically triggered once certain conditions are met - that inspire a proliferation of utopian discourses about the possibilities associated with algorithmically regulated, blockchain-based forms of interpersonal exchange (known as token economics) and its expansion into unforeseen domains of sociality.


Like all ideologies that compete for a hegemonic status, those ideologies which relate to technological solutionism require the effacement of their own self-perpetuating logic - and blockchain is the perfect example of a digital technology that seeks to provide solutions for the pitfalls of the previous "untrusted" and "insecure" digital technologies. Little attention is paid to the uncertainty surrounding blockchain technology, which is exacerbated by the proliferation of protocols and the lack of standardisation. Thus, the discursive construction of such myths is supported by trust in the record-keeping and archival practices performed through blockchain technologies.


In this paper, we provide an analysis of blockchain as an archive and of online discourses about trust and blockchain. We first offer a critical presentation of the social role of (digital) archives, and their implication for discourse production and power relations. We present data from the analysis of around 150 blog posts from the three major blogging platforms (WordPress, Blogspot, and Medium) to understand how trust in blockchain technology is conceptualized and discursively operationalized. We argue that global social forms such as blockchain-based forms of exchange are as much the result of networked hardware and software - the reflexive, “scopic” apparatuses that focus and project geographically distributed social practices - as they are both the product and the origin of discursive constructions. Our critical conceptualization of blockchain as archive ties these two analytical dimensions together. Our goal is to position blockchain in the proliferation of discourses and myths that shift agency in complex domains of social life (e.g. governance, decision making, cooperation, trust, accounting) away from political participation to digital technology.


This research has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the grant agreement 825134 (ARTICONF - smART socIal media eCOsytstem in a blockchaiN Federated environment).
description: ARTICONF - smART socIal media eCOsytstem in a blockchaiN Federated environment (825134)