Blockchain Imperialism in the Pacific
* Article: Blockchain imperialism in the Pacific. By Olivier Jutel. Big Data & Society, 2021 [1]
URL = https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2053951720985249
Abstract
"The rise of blockchain as a techno-solution in the development sector underscores the critical imbalances of data power under ‘computational capitalism’ (Beller, 2018). This article will consider the political economy of techno-solutionist and blockchain discourses in the developing world, using as its object of study blockchain projects in Pacific Island nations. Backed by US State Department soft power initiatives such as Tech Camp, these projects inculcate tech-driven notions of economic and political development, or ICT4D, while opening up new terrains for data accumulation and platform control. Blockchain developers in search of proof of concept have found the development sector a fecund space for tech experimentation as they leverage a desire for tech-development and exploit regulatory weakness. The material implications of blockchain projects and discourse have been to create governance solutions which bypass the developing world state as a largely corrupting intermediary. In the Pacific, this has meant blockchain supply-chain management systems, proprietary financial innovation in humanitarian relief and an Asian Development Bank project to manage indigenous Fijian lands exclusively on the blockchain. In all these instances, discourses of solutionism, innovation and data empowerment have been deployed in aid of blockchain cartographies of control."
Excerpts
Blockchain and Platform Imperialism
Olivier Jutel:
"This article argues that blockchain represents a form of ‘platform imperialism’ (Jin, 2015) that extends both the cultural and economic power of Silicon Valley and American geopolitical interests. Blockchain has emerged as one of the central technologies of the ICT4D paradigm drawing together foreign governments, NGOs, platform developers and corporations in shaping developing world economic policy and governance practices. The US State Department has played a crucial role in coalescing these networks through initiatives such as Civil Society 2.0 which cast Silicon Valley platforms and a culture of techno-solutionism (Morozov, 2014) as universal. What is distinct about blockchain platform imperialism are its claims to algorithmic governance and powers of cartography. As part of ‘Data’s Empire’ (Isin and Ruppert, 2019), blockchain undermines the developing world state’s ability to control its own resources, while mapping new ‘territory as an object of power’ (208). Blockchain complements techno-colonial processes of data extraction and computational capitalism (Beller, 2018) by using code to lock in proprietary relations.
Opening new terrains of data and expanding network technologies does not depend upon imperial coercion but an assemblage of development agencies, foreign governments and platforms all ‘celebrat[ing] the transformative nature of ICTs’ (Ndemo, 2019: 27). Within these contours, there are rival cyber-powers and platforms as well as indeterminacies of connectivity which diffuse the exercise of imperial power. However the ‘spiritual hegemony of American-based entrepreneurship’ (Jin, 2015: 16) pervades these networks. The US has relied on the soaring rhetoric of freedom, democracy and empowerment through connectivity in shaping global communication systems. American hegemony in ICT4D can be explained in political-economic terms as the support of domestic capital and platforms, the leadership of governing bodies such as ICANN and the US State Department’s long-standing interest in tech-centric soft power initiatives. This continuity of soft power and cultural imperialism spans the ‘free flow of information doctrine’ (Schiller, 1975) during the Cold War to the ‘freedom to connect agenda’ (Powers and Jablonski, 2015: 74) in the era of network computing. As articulated by former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, connectivity is the ‘great leveller’ creating ‘a common body of knowledge that benefits and unites us all’ (US Department of State, 2010).
This cultural imperialist portrayal of the internet as a human-centred development tool is epitomized by the State Department’s launch of the ‘Civil Society 2.0’ initiative (US Department of State, 2019). This policy has been enacted through an on-going series of State Department workshops, hackathons and fora that operate under the banner of ‘Tech Camp’ with the aim to ‘[empower] civil society to solve the world’s most pressing challenges through technology’ (Tech Camp, 2019). As a champion of ICT, the State Department has promoted ‘the wider trend toward digital innovation and data practices in the humanitarian field’ (Madianou, 2019a: 582). Similarly, the emergence of the hackathon as a solutionist practice in the development sector represents the performative entrepreneurial style of Silicon Valley. It legitimizes existing platforms and offers participants an opportunity to ‘rehears[e] for future employment, partnerships, or investments’ (Irani, 2019: 225). The role of State Department programmes such as Tech Camp is to facilitate the private/public collaborations between platform developers, the NGO sector and the developing world state.
‘Platform Imperialism’ (Jin, 2015) is the material, economic and cultural power that is advanced by disavowing network geopolitics through humanitarianism. Platform Imperialism has allowed FAANG platforms to function as ‘beachheads’ (McChesney, 2013: 131) for American capital. It ensures the flow of data by monopolizing online advertising revenue, intellectual property rights and fees to Tier 1 ISPs. Leveraging a desire for development platforms are able to plan ‘infrastructure in the global south engineered for their own needs…while imposing privatized forms of governance’ (Kwet, 2019: 7).
Blockchain complements and extends existing techno-colonial practices of shaping social life for the extraction of data (Couldry and Mejias, 2019; Thatcher et al., 2016). This cultural and economic power enables digital platforms to ‘produce a new type of “social” for capital’ (Couldry and Mejias, 2019: 341). What is distinct about blockchain however are its pretensions to universality: a singular platform which mediates all data and the social world. Thus blockchain does not simply try to enter the fields of advertising, retail and cloud services but seeks to shape developing world governance systems for data production and platform dependence. It is in this way that blockchain creates a technological frontier with developing world resources as its prized objects.
Blockchain’s role within platform imperialism is in charting a ‘historical and planetary totality’ (Beller, 2018: 5) for computational capitalism. The mediation of all data via blockchain embodies the neoliberal premise of Friedreich Von Hayek that price signals, or in this case encrypted data, advance the prime social good of markets. This surpasses the e-commerce and advertising-based platforms of web 2.0 in incorporating private and public forms of governance. For blockchain developers, the governance systems of the developing world are a frontier ‘empty of other entrepreneurial ideas, histories and claims, but full of potential for new and improved use’ (Howson, 2020: 2). Thus biometric identification, land titles, resource management and cash-aid can all be integrated into this universal governance solution.
The vantage of American platforms and the state over this emerging cartography of control owes to the long-standing imperial vision of computation as the ‘underlying matter of everything in the social world [which can] be brought under state-capitalist military control’ (Golumbia, 2009: 60). While there are more than simply American platforms and agencies active in this space, Palantir is an example of a state-capital platform nexus which bring development agencies like the World Food Program into this orbit (Kintsler, 2019) through data and blockchain governance. Thus as blockchain claims a ‘technical agency separate from the messiness of society and the economy’ (Zook and Blankenship, 2018: 253), it reproduces these North-South asymmetries of power in mapping developing world societies for future exploitation."
(https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2053951720985249)
Conclusion
"Conclusion The emergence of blockchain in the development sector foregrounds its role as a technology and discourse, at the fulcrum of American soft power initiatives, Silicon Valley solutionism and the promises of big data. This is a discourse that inculcates solutionism and a Silicon Valley performative style in the development sector, while materially expanding the purview of computational capitalism. Blockchain promises of disintermediation mask the entrenchment of North–South imbalances of data power, experimentation on developing world societies for proprietary platforms like ConsenSys and the attempt to control developing world resources via blockchain. In this context, blockchain data empowerment resembles Hayekian price mechanisms and digital property law mediating all manner of social practices beyond the purview of the state. The power of blockchain is not the technology itself, which rarely demonstrably satisfies its own terms of success, but its highly ideological notion of data governance. Blockchain imperialism thus functions as a new data cartography of control oscillating between the objectives of state, capital and the solutionist prospecting of developers.
The emergence of a Pacific blockchain frontier is a product of US State Department advocacy, the innovation imperatives of development organizations and the cyber-vanguard’s Oceanic imaginary. The desire for a new world built upon blockchain technology, the fetishization of indigenous peoples and cyber-libertarian island fantasies converge to produce the Pacific blockchain frontier. The most utopian pronouncements and exploitative blockchain projects are inseparable. In the case of PNG, a blockchain SEZ project claims that the subsumption of traditional economies will place indigenous people at the forefront of a blockchain revolution. Vanuatu has simultaneously emerged as a site of cryptocurrency tax avoidance and blockchain innovation for humanitarianism. Oxfam’s partnership with Sempo and ConsenSys in delivering cash assistance has allowed Oxfam to position itself as a blockchain innovator. The self-evident good of blockchain solutionism here skirts the regulatory environment, considerable technological deficits, the failures of disintermediation and a dependence upon for-profit platform developers. For Sempo and ConsenSys, the ability to experiment upon developing world communities is geared towards generating interest in the tech press and Silicon Valley in anticipation of selling proprietary applications and platforms. The substantive outcome of this project is the ability of Oxfam to leverage its humanitarian brand for financial innovation that is geared less towards Ni-Vanuatu than in solidifying solutionist credentials and auditioning as a supplementary platform for blockchain imperialism.
Far from the promises of decentralized and transparent data empowering all participants, data production in Pacific blockchain projects redounds to imperial hierarchies. The material impediments to connectivity have meant that Pacific blockchain participants may feed into data production but face hardware deficits, cost barriers and blockchain literacy problems that preclude the use of this data. The failures of data governance are elided by a solutionist faith in the bounty of connectivity still to come; in the case of Oxfam, disintermediation is imagined through crypto exchanges, while for Viant, blockchain growth overcomes data collection problems. While these projects do not demonstrate proof of concept, there is a rhetorical success in opening-up lands to markets, control of supply chains and forms of digital identity which make up blockchain cartographies of control. The coalescence of NGOs, foreign governments and developers around blockchain constitutes a cultural imperialist power to bring the rationalities of big data and blockchain into the Pacific. The height of this extractive North–South relationship is in is reimagining Fijian indigenous lands and customary practices as a blockchain marketplace bringing these assets into the calculus of computational capitalism. Under the guise of humanitarian innovation, blockchain threatens a history of indigenous self-determination and in seeking to bring into being the world it describes necessarily relies upon the mediating institutions of imperial power rather than technological merit."
Cases
Olivier Jutel:
Blockchain and the pacific
Olivier Jutel:
"What follows is an overview of emerging blockchain projects in the Pacific region. In undertaking this analysis, I have assembled technical reports from blockchain projects, policy statements, legislative documents, conference proceedings and media reports. These documents are treated to both discursive and technical analysis, and informed by concepts described above of platform imperialism, solutionism and computational capitalism. This overview is intended as a pilot for a larger qualitative study that will involve interviews and fieldwork with blockchain developers and participants. As part of this pilot, I have included an interview Kenneth Katafono, the region’s key blockchain advocate and developer. His company, TraSeables Solutions has partnered with ConsenSys start-up Viant and the WWF on a tuna supply blockchain that has been the region’s most high-profile project to date based in Fiji. This overview is intended to identify the diffuse actors – from governments, NGOs, financial institutions and entrepreneurs – which constitute Pacific blockchain.
The attractiveness of the Pacific as a tech-frontier for blockchain is a result of development challenges and a regulatory openness based upon imperial power imbalances. Tech experimentation in the developing world has the benefit of connecting companies to aid-funding streams and outsourcing risk ‘to some of the most fragile environments in the world with value extracted for the benefit of stakeholders including private entrepreneurs and large companies’ (Madianou, 2019b: 8). In this space, governments, NGOs, local developers and blockchain evangelists all channel solutionist discourse vying to be the stand-ins for the promise of ICT4D. The varying political economic contours of Pacific nations shape the inflection of blockchain solutionism. What is consistent across these projects is the conflation of Western developers and ConsenSys platforms with Pacific self-determination and tech-development."
(https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2053951720985249)
The pacific ideology and blockchain frontier
Olivier Jutel:
"Before examining Pacific blockchain projects in detail, it is important to consider the techno-colonial histories of the Pacific and Silicon Valley’s frontier culture. The emergence of the Pacific as a blockchain frontier owes to Silicon Valley’s re-tracing of the pathways of Anglo-American imperialism (Keown et al., 2018) and the Pacific articulation of the Californian Ideology (Barbrook and Cameron, 1996). My notion of a Pacific Ideology takes up Barbrook and Cameron’s, as well as Turner’s (2010), cultural analysis of Silicon Valley’s frontier imaginary. Fantasies of open space and a fetishization of indigenous people are reconstituted in the Pacific as the western most frontier and ‘American Oceanic Sublime’ (Geiger, 2018: 112). Anglo-American imperialism has designated the Pacific as a space for military and commercial mobility, with leisure industries created by American military R & R, a synthesis the late Pacific scholar Teresia Teaiwa terms ‘Millitourism’ (1999). American imperial cartographies, leisure and technology are inextricably linked in the Pacific through the launch of the nuclear age and ‘the development of much of the technology that enables continuing Western global hegemony’ Keown et al., 2018: 4) on the atoll bearing the name ‘Bikini’.
The Pacific Ideology relies on this imperial mobility and utopian desires for a new world via blockchain tech-experiments. Islands are cast as open spaces where entrepreneurs and self-imagined ‘digital artisans’ (Barbrook and Cameron, 1996: 50) have the freedom to pursue techno-utopian desires. The Pacific frontier is ‘between cyberspace and outer space’ (Thiel, 2009) with visions of free-floating islands offering the ability to model cyber-libertarian ideals of statelessness.7 This rhetoric of tech-transformation and experimentation sits alongside the imperial class politics of tax shelters, tax-free economic development zones and the desire of possessing one’s own private island.8 Brock Pierce, president of the Bitcoin foundation and founder of the stablecoin Tether, has exemplified the imperial politics of this island fantasy in attempting to transform Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria into a ‘crypto-utopia’. As Crandall observes this fantasy of a blank slate contains blithe ignorance of political and colonial histories, privileging blockchain evangelists ‘as futuristic visionaries as opposed to settler colonialists’ (2019: 288).
The blockchain frontier masks this imperial politics by appeals to indigenous peoples as pure embodiments of techno-utopian values. The nomad has long served as the ideal cyber countercultural subject innately connected to nature and technology via cybernetic metaphor (Turner, 2010). The founder of Indigicoin, a Māori cryptocurrency, has explicitly claimed that ‘we [indigenous people] were the original inventors of blockchain’ (Dunn, 2019) with songs and stories as the distributed, collective production of knowledge. Blockchain is held as a return to the authentic mediation of indigenous oral traditions and barter economies, analogous to blockchain’s promises of trust and disintermediation. Indigenous authenticity and blockchain entrepreneurialism would thus forge a frontier synthesis of the universal and particular akin the figure of the ‘cowboy nomad’ (Turner, 2010: 87). Pierce’s crypto-colonialism in Puerto Rico is exemplary of an imperialist appropriation of indigenous values. Central to his blockchain solutionism were appeals to the pseudo-indigenous principles of Burning Man and the ‘decolonization of money’ (White, 2019). McElroy (2019) has written that this fetishization of indigenous people and a nomadic mobility, enabled by new digital frontiers, represents the expansion of property relations with Silicon Valley serving as the ‘techno-imperial centre’ (218).
Narratives of techno-indigeneity and a blockchain imperial mobility in the Pacific have been central to the emergence of blockchain developer Ledger Atlas in Papua New Guinea (PNG). The Delaware registered company signed a MOU with the government of PNG in 2018 to establish a blockchain special economic zone (SEZ) in the Finschhafen region (Malone, 2018). The proposal is backed by Bitcoin billionaire, venture capitalist and Theranos investor Tim Draper, and is being led by ‘Draper University’, DCI alum and PNG national, Shane Ninai. The MOU, signed without local consultation, establishes Ledger Atlas as the governing state-corporate entity able to control migration, enact laws and issue passports (Rarick et al., 2019). The agreement also ‘obligate[s]’ the government of PNG to ‘promote and develop the blockchain and innovative technology…to support the development of Finschaffen district as a centre of excellence for global financial services’ (Papua New Guinea Government, 2018: 25). This speculative land grab and declaration of blockchain state power by fiat is described by Ninai as a chance for PNG to place indigenous practices at the centre of blockchain development. Making reference to existing systems of barter, Ninai claims ‘alternative economies and governance systems are deeply ingrained in our culture and are still alive and well, and blockchain allows us, for the first time, to capture this activity’ (Rollins, 2017). This potential enclosure of an indigenous commons and the freedom of Silicon Valley to use this territory as an experimental ‘sandbox’ (Ninai, 2017) exemplify the material forces of the Pacific Ideology and blockchain frontier."
(https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2053951720985249)
Vanuatu, OXFAM and humanitarian innovation
Olivier Jutel:
"In Vanuatu, the specious distinction between cryptocurrency libertarianism and blockchain solutionism is on display with equal parts tax avoidance and humanitarianism. Vanuatu’s status as a tax haven saw it emerge as a blockchain hotspot while OXFAM has declared its Ethereum disaster relief payment system a ‘game changer’ (Fenton, 2019); more on this below. Vanuatu’s lack of corporate, income, capital gains or estate taxes, as well citizenship by investment laws, has made it an ideal spot for crypto entrepreneurs. Geoffrey Bond, a passport broker for the Vanuatu Information Centre, garnered significant attention in international financial media in claiming Vanuatu as the first country to sell passports in exchange for Bitcoin (Bach, 2017). Not betraying an imperial class politics, Bond has sold Vanuatu as a Pacific escape from a volatile world, offering wealth protection and a government ‘desir[ing] to be at the forefront of adopting new technologies’ (Bach, 2017). Among Bond’s other Vanuatu projects is the purchase and development of resort land in partnership with Sebastian Greenwood (McGarry, 2018a), the now indicted co-founder of Onecoin, a cryptocurrency style Ponzi scheme, which targeted the developing world and defrauded users of billions (Bartlett, 2019). The untoward headlines of Bitcoin passports and pressures to comply with the anti-money laundering efforts of the Financial Action Task Force saw the Reserve Bank of Vanuatu issue a statement ‘strongly advising all corporate, financial institutions, public enterprises, and individual customers and public at large to refrain from involving themselves in Bitcoin’ (2018). Subsequent to this policy intervention, the Republic of Malta, an island tax haven that has declared itself ‘blockchain island’, has vowed to assist in developing Vanuatu’s legal framework for blockchain (McGarry, 2018b).
The diplomatic and humanitarian efforts to extol the virtues of blockchain are manifest in Oxfam’s Unblocked Cash pilot project. The project sought to utilize blockchain systems for rapid cash-based disaster aid in parts of Vanuatu highly vulnerable to extreme weather and geophysical events. Unblocked Cash is a product of rising solutionism within the development sector with Oxfam setting up OxLabs as its own ‘innovation hub’ (Rust, 2019). Through the OxLabs initiative ConsenSys and an Australian blockchain start-up Sempo emerged as Oxfam’s development partners through a competitive submission process. This partnership makes evident the power dynamics between the sector and blockchain platform developers. A report from Oxfam Australia’s lead humanitarian described project difficulties that stemmed from ‘a lack of awareness and understanding of what blockchain technology is’ and the differing outcome expectations between developers and aid funders (Carnaby and Hallwright, 2019). While Oxfam’s official report is much more bullish, it acknowledges an imbalance in this relationship as the implementation and technical support for the blockchain was entirely dependent upon one Sempo developer (Rust, 2019).
The Vanuatu project’s complexity was a product of connectivity issues, constraints in the existing financial system and the need to work around the Reserve Bank’s crypto prohibition. The project substituted crypto wallets and currencies with a near field communication (NFC) system, with pre-loaded cards for aid recipients, smart devices for vendors (small shops) and a super-vendor (larger shops functioning as cash intermediaries) working with Sempo to release funds and reduce transaction costs. Vendor smart devices are the medium to the Ethereum blockchain from which the Sempo dashboard allows Oxfam to collect data on purchases and regional variations in coordinating supplies. This system has been credited with ‘modest cost-savings and significant time-savings’ (Rust, 2019: 4) in identifying aid recipients. However, it has failed by its own admission to embody blockchain governance objectives of transparency and disintermediation. Oxfam’s blockchain is a permissioned data management system controlled by a for-profit developer which they acknowledge most participants do not have ‘access or the literacy to comprehend the information stored on the network’ (Rust, 2019: 13). Restrictions upon the use of cryptocurrencies meant the project relies upon the physical transfer of cash to vendors outside of the blockchain with complaints that ‘it took too long to get repaid’ (Rust, 2019: 27). In this context, it is not self-evident what virtues blockchain might have over mobile telephony payment systems such as M-VATU which can operate under existing financial regulations and communications infrastructure.
Where this project fits into the overall platform imperialism of blockchain is in how it perceives the problems of implementation in terms of solutionism as opposed to the cultural and economic suitability of blockchain. The limitations of the project and the need to work around Vanuatu state policy are treated purely as technical issues in need of regulatory openness as opposed to confronting the politics of blockchain in Vanuatu and elsewhere. Oxfam does not attempt to distance itself from Bitcoin, a common gesture in blockchain governance projects, describing the origins of blockchain in transparently cyber-libertarian terms as ‘retaliation’ against the banking sector with a digital currency ‘impervious to unpredictable monetary policies of political influence’ (Rust, 2019: 12). Oxfam attributes their project’s disintermediation failure as a reliance upon cash payments to vendors. Here, fiat currency and the state are posed as problems to be solved through online crypto exchanges which would end ‘the reliance on incumbent financial institutions’ (Rust, 2019: 45). Oxfam’s research report is replete with a tech triumphalism about ‘join[ing] the largest and most active [blockchain] based community in the world’ (15); and in ‘successfully deliver[ing] a first of its kind Distributed Ledger Technology based solution’ (4).
This desire to present unblocked cash as a ‘game changer’ marks Oxfam as part of the community of innovators open to tech partnerships in the race to plant the blockchain flag. At its most ambitious, Oxfam envisions a partnership with Sempo in a ‘proprietary system’ that leverages Oxfam’s ‘global reach and considerable brand recognition’ (Rust, 2019: 46) to issue Oxfam tokens. An Oxfam blockchain of this description would have less to do with the virtues of data governance then becoming the cash-aid platform of the Ethereum constellation that can be parachuted into any context regardless of cultural and political suitability. As the winner of the EU’s ‘Blockchains for Social Good’ €1 million prize (Cole, 2020), Oxfam presented Unblocked Cash as a universal solution with the sales pitch ‘we have the market, we have the network, we have the partners, we have the expertise’ (Next Generation Internet, 2020). For Sempo, the upshot of Unblocked Cash is the ability to wield humanitarian and solutionist bona fides in search of larger, for-profit projects. These credentials were strengthened by Wired who called on the US government ‘to take cues from global humanitarian agencies’ (Adinolfi, 2020) and implement Sempo as a solution in distributing economic stimulus payments following Covid-19. Here the hollowing out of the state’s welfare capacity necessitates blockchain solutions as ‘efficient, secure, and resilient systems [that] are overdue in America’s federal and financial infrastructure’ (Adinolfi, 2020). What blockchain experimentation in Vanuatu has yielded is a potent humanitarian narrative of platform innovation, the primary political and economic benefits of which exclude developing world subjects."
(https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2053951720985249)
Tech camp and blockchain tuna
Olivier Jutel:
"The emergence of blockchain solutionism in the Pacific development sector is a result of the US State Department’s evangelism. In 2018, under the banners of Tech Camp and Blockchain@State, the American embassy held a blockchain conference at the University of the South Pacific (USP) in Fiji. USP is a university of 12 Pacific member countries and one of the most important multilateral organizations in the region. USP has previously hosted Civil Society 2.0 initiatives such as social media and digital journalism workshops, and ‘Fishackathon’ (US Embassy Suva, 2016), the progenitor of Tuna supply blockchain. This conference featured leaders in the region’s ICT sector, blockchain entrepreneurs, the leader of Unblocked Cash Sandra Hart, Fiji’s Permanent Secretary of Education and local developers (Traseable Solutions, 2018). The panels at Tech Camp covered a range of blockchain solutions from elections, electricity grids, sustainable fisheries to the WWF’s presentation ‘Can Blockchain Save the Planet?’ (Traseable Solutions, 2018). Local media coverage portrayed the event as a means for Fiji to become competitive in the global labour market (Movono, 2018b) and were exuberant about the ‘first-ever blockchain Tech Camp’ (Movono, 2018a) leading one news headline to claim; ‘Fiji chosen as first to have blockchain technology’ (Vucago, 2018).
The staging of the State Department’s Blockchain Tech Camp in Fiji owes to the tuna supply blockchain pilot project which partners the WWF, Viant and TraSeable Solutions. Viant is one of the 40-plus blockchain start-ups under the ConsenSys umbrella and has assumed a media prominence by virtue of its ‘bait to plate’ (Cook, 2018) tuna storytelling. The tracking of tuna from Fiji fisheries, onshore processing, regulatory compliance, distribution and appearance as sushi has become a regular proof of concept and augmented reality spectacle at Ethereum conferences (ConseSys Media, 2018). Key to this story of blockchain development is Kenneth Katafono (2019, Personal Communication, 12 July), a ConsenSys academy developer, prominent Pacific blockchain advocate, founder and managing director of TraSeable Solutions. Tyler Mulvihill, director of Viant, has described Katafono as ‘the product of an education and interest in technology…paving the way for this new technology…from a small island in Fiji’ (Katafono, 2019, Personal Communication, 12 July). Katafono functions as a stand-in for the promise of blockchain, ICT4D and the region’s creative potential, an idea Mulvihill lays on thick as he mistakes Suva, Fiji’s capital and a regional hub with population of over 300,000, with a ‘small island’.
The partnership of WWF, Viant and TraSeable blockchain is premised upon eliminating ‘unethically or illegally sourced products’, adding value to ethically sourced tuna ‘through informed purchasing’ and providing ‘a single source of truth for traceability’ (Cook, 2018: 12). This would be achieved through the participation of tuna vessels, processors, importers, retailers and consumers on the Viant blockchain platform. The blockchain authenticates supply chain information via a proof of authority consensus mechanism. Facing cost and connectivity issues similar to Vanuatu, data from Fijian fleets (fish weight, variety and location) are recorded off the blockchain via NFC tags on fish. Implementing this blockchain workaround [is] not straight forward as the project report notes that ‘no industry exists in Fiji to support the supply, implementation and maintenance of the RFID [and NFC] equipment’ (Cook, 2018: 24). The human and material realities that prevent a fully integrated blockchain and the problem of ‘garbage-in, garbage-out’ are elided by the pretence to real-time auditing allowing ‘fraudulent information [to] eventually be flagged’ (Cook, 2018: 25). Here, the suitability and promises of blockchain rest upon assumptions of big data’s inevitability. Where the value proposition lies is the consumer experience of a blockchain ethical certitude with QR codes capturing a product’s origin via an augmented reality interface. While ‘blockchain tuna’ may potentially add value to Fijian exports the notion of data transparency at the heart of blockchain does not demystify or transcend commodity relations; rather they are obscured through platform claims of absolute truth for the blockchain-empowered consumer.
In an interview with the author TraSeables founder Katafono is clear about the North–South politics that blockchain discourse effaces. He describes his company’s work in far less grandiose terms; ‘we try not to associate ourselves too much with blockchain, at the heart we are traceability technology company’ (2019, Personal Communication, 12 July). TraSeables participation in this project relied upon the NFC tagging system functioning both within and outside the Viant platform as Viant was too expensive for Fijian operators; as Katafono states ‘we certainly couldn’t afford the tech that they were offering’ (Katafono, 2019, Personal Communication, 12 July). Incidentally, the WWF’s report on the pilot project lists every cost except Viant’s software charges which are described as variable and case specific. Given ConsenSys’ losses and the common Silicon Valley tactics of growth before profit in search of monopoly rents, the ‘true’ economic cost of the platform may be hard to determine. For Katafono, it is essential that Fijian exporters be engaged with this technology as ‘the US FDA are already looking at blockchain for goods coming in and they could mandate it’ (Katafono, 2019, Personal Communication, 12 July). As described by Katafono, blockchain would function as a prerequisite for market entry and a cost born by developing countries. Techcamp’s flagship blockchain project thus represents a mechanism to intensify neoliberal export-driven models of growth. A blockchain asset management regime for Fiji fisheries would represent a significant economic imposition and a platform monopolization of the supply chain for a product that accounted for 13% of Fiji’s foreign currency earnings in 2018 (OEC, 2019). Also given the prohibitive barriers to entry for the full Viant platform and a disparity in permissioned access, it is reasonable to assume that whatever the value of immutable supply chain information it will not be evenly distributed. Additionally, there is nothing in this blockchain solution to redress the power imbalances of the global tuna trade which sees domestic consumers priced out from their natural resource and Fijian companies unable to compete with behemoth Chinese longline fleets."
(https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2053951720985249)
Cartographies of control
Olivier Jutel:
"This amalgam of developers and NGOs brought together by the US State Department do not merely acculturate the development sector to a hegemonic techno-solutionism, but help construct the imperial geography of blockchain. In his launching address of Tech Camp, US Chargé d’Affaires Michael Goldman underscored the State Department’s role in fostering blockchain as a means by which they could advance US development goals (2018). Goldman referenced the department’s ‘Blockchain@State Forum’ co-sponsored by ConsenSys which sought to develop blockchain solutions for aid programs and the internal workings of the department (Stanley, 2017). At the heart of the Washington DC forum was self-sovereign identity as a technology of the state. The seeming paradox of this cyber-libertarian language of statelessness as a means of US statecraft is explicated by Joe Lubin as a platform for developing world subjects:
Once people own their own identity [via blockchain], then they’re less enthralled to their governments and less subject to adverse situations like natural disasters and wars. So, if someone is ejected from their country, if they’ve already established self-sovereign identity they can reconstitute their life. (Stanley, 2017)
Blockchain would thus serve to liberate subjects from the developing world state and replaces universal rights and citizenship with a fragmented blockchain subjectivity.
Lubin is pitching ConsenSys applications and the blockchain as part of an emerging platform architecture of digital identity for imperial resource management (Kintsler, 2019). The American state may ration resources or determine migration rights though the combination of biometrics, proof of reputation and social media data secured on the blockchain. This blockchain infrastructure of what Madianou terms ‘biometric assemblage’ (2019a), justified on governance principles of accountability and transparent auditing, can be interchangeably utilized under imperialist logics of border security, capitalism and solutionism. The utility of blockchain governance projects and the role of national security contractors like Palantir in managing developing world data is in filling out this emerging infrastructure of control and mapping the developing world for threats and resources.
The developing world blockchain governance initiative most consistent with ICT4D rhetoric and imperial cartographies of control are land registries. The Global Blockchain Business Council (GBBC), whose CEO was scheduled to attend Tech Camp but prevented last minute due to a tropical cyclone, demonstrates how blockchain land registries are the apogee of the neoliberal development model. The GBBC describes its work as blockchain ‘education, advocacy and partnership’ in ‘developing the next trillion-dollar industry’ (2020). In a seeming caricature of neoliberal cosmopolitanism and imperial philanthropy, the council boasts of having been conceived on Richard Branson’s private island and launched at Davos (GBBC, 2020). Oxfam’s Sandra Hart is a regional ambassador for the GBBC and its board of directors includes Hernando de Soto as its chief economist. The pre-eminent theorist of neoliberalism in the developing world known as the ‘Friedrich Von Hayek of Latin America’ (Ames and Levine, 2013) de Soto’s central preoccupation has been formalizing private property rights. In a Wall Street Journal editorial entitled ‘How Blockchain Can End Poverty’, de Soto and his co-author envision developing world resources of $170 trillion governed under ‘a single computer platform [that], can share the blessings of private-property registration with the whole world’ (Gramm and de Soto, 2018). Encoding property rights beyond the purview of the developing world state, coupled with ‘satellite technology’ and the ‘organized knowledge about the location of every visible asset on earth’ (Gramm and de Soto, 2018) approaches something like a planetary totality for computational capitalism.
In Fiji, this process has begun under the auspices of the Japanese- and American-led ADB and the consultancy firm KPMG in developing a prototype to manage the leasing and registration of indigenous Fijian lands. Ninety percent of land in Fiji is owned by indigenous (iTaukei) communal groups and administered by the government’s iTaukei Land Trust Board (TLTB) which overseas lease tenders and the payment of dividends to iTaukei all the way down to the tokatoka or family unit. The TLTB CEO describes the project as a ‘digitized land strategy’ which includes ‘data cleansing…digitizing processes…[and] a blockchain prototype for TLTB to have an online service platform’ (Reece, 2019). The ADB’s proposed prototype boasts the usual governance efficiencies of immutable digitization as a protection against corruption and a lack of transparency (Roño et al., 2018).9 Katafono, having been approached to develop this prototype, has expressed scepticism of the utility of blockchain for land registration in Fiji as opposed to ‘a centralized database…lot[s] of countries do that it’s not difficult’ (Katafono, 2019, Personal Communication, July 12). He cites examples such as Dubai where the intention is ‘to transact land titles on the blockchain, allowing for buying selling with cryptocurrencies in the future…In the Pacific or in Fiji I am not sure why they would use blockchain’ (Katafono, 2019, Personal Communication, July 12).
The undergirding principle is of efficiency gains made through Hayekian notions of real-time price-signals via the recording of transactions on a blockchain ‘decentralized marketplace’ (Roño et al., 2018). The ADB envision that blockchain linked SMS messaging will be the ultimate decision-making mechanism to manage and bring communal lands to market. The ‘permissioned members’ of the TLTB blockchain app are the ‘core public agencies’ (TLTB), ‘auxiliary public agencies’ (other government departments) and ‘private organizations’ such as banks, insurance and investment companies (Roño et al., 2018). Building private investors into the core governance structure of the TLTB through smart contracts represents a prizing open of opaque customary lands into global capital flows. The production of immutable data presages the ability of capital to map resources and leverage informational imbalances. Further to de Soto’s vision of intensively cataloguing developing world assets, the ability to appraise the previously unknown land and encode this information as tradeable property rights logically brings with it the drive to collect indigenous knowledge for bioprospecting and genetic patent development (Rose, 2016).
Fiji is not the first developing nation to experiment with blockchain land registration, but what is at stake is a history of resistance to the imperialist calculus of quantification for exploitation and profit. The British Native Lands Commission of 1880 sought to ‘define and register all native lands so that a clear system might be established to delineate properties that could be bought and sold’ (Nicole, 2016: 1). The threat of data production was well understood:
Surveyors and the instruments by which they named, marked and mapped the land, were regular targets of retribution. They represented the means by which colonization advanced physically on the ground. (Nicole, 2016: 2)
In addition to attacking surveying equipment resistance tactics included the constant modification of oral accounts of land possession and non-compliance with the commission under threat of perjury (Nicole, 2016). It is this history of struggle which protected native lands and has guided the TLTB’s notion of land usage and ownership as being ‘held by iTaukei in according to iTaukei custom as evidenced by usage and traditions’ (Native Lands Act, 1978). To put it in the terms of blockchain, a mutable truth was key to preserving these lands for future generations. The ‘problem’ of land registration in need of a rational ‘techno-solution’ is the legacy of human resistance to colonial expropriation which has preserved indigenous lands."
(https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2053951720985249)