Political Imaginaries of Blockchain Projects

* Article: Husain, S.O., Franklin, A. & Roep, D. The political imaginaries of blockchain projects: discerning the expressions of an emerging ecosystem. Sustain Sci 15, 379–394 (2020). doi

URL = https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11625-020-00786-x

Contextual Quote

"Blockchain projects personify ‘prefigurative politics’Footnote2 by design—the idea that their technical and organizational forms, to a large extent, embody the political imaginaries and power structures which they want to enable in society. Generally, the themes of decentralization of power, disintermediation from longstanding intermediaries like government and banks, and cryptographically enhanced transparency, dominate the blockchain discourse." [1]

Abstract

"There is an absence of scholarly attention given to identifying and analyzing the political premises and consequences of Blockchain projects. Through digital ethnography and participatory action research, this article shows how blockchain experiments personify ‘prefigurative politics’ by design: they embody the politics and power structures which they want to enable in society. By showing how these prefigurative embodiments are informed and determined by the underlying political imaginaries, the article proposes a basic typology of blockchain projects."

Typology

"Swartz (2016) identifies two types of blockchain projects: radical and incorporative. Simply put, radical projects are oriented towards revolutionary social, economic, and political changes through imagining a new techno-political order. These systems enable users to circumvent the dominant institutional setting—central governments, banks, and corporations—by creating new ones. Contrastingly, incorporative projects innovate within the existing techno-political system not (necessarily) aiming for a reconstruction of the underlying political and social premises, but instead providing, for instance, more transparency and autonomy (Swartz 2016, pp. 86–87). As she clarifies, “the distinction…is not clearly defined and, in practice, there is a continuum between the two ideological modes” (Swartz 2016, p. 87). Often, we see how many radical start-ups which begin with “utopian visions might ‘pivot’ (to use industry parlance) towards business models different from or even in opposition to their original goals” (Swartz 2016, p. 88).

...

Through the analysis of patterns through active participation in the blockchain space, journal reflections at events and literature review (which is expounded upon in the next section), we construct a basic typology of blockchain projects (Table 1) into four clusters based on their imaginaries: (i) crypto-libertarians, (ii) crypto-commonists,(iii) crypto-governmentalists, and (iv) crypto-collaborativists.

We can distinguish the first two from the latter two quite easily because of one simple reason: the first two are parallel projects attempting to create very different worlds, i.e., blockchain as government. Even then, each one of the clusters conceptualizes their imaginaries differently and, hence, enables a different types of socio-political processes and transformations. The first two both fall under the larger umbrella of crypto-anarchists (Peyrouzet García-Siñeriz 2018, p. 7), while the latter two fall under the banner of crypto-institutionalists. While both the crypto-anarchists aim for detachment from the state, the former, crypto-libertarians, is unique for its individualistic market-oriented approach to both economic organization and mode of governance (Golumbia 2016). The latter, crypto-commonists, takes the collectivist approach as advocated by commons activists, and, hence, a collaborative approach to governance (Bauwens 2018; Adams 2019). Amongst the crypto-institutionalists, crypto-governmentalists are usually governmental agencies (national or city) who aim to improve government’s efficiency, transparency, accountability, and security using blockchain (Hancock and Vaizey 2015; Ølnes et al. 2017). Such projects take the approach of using blockchain in government. Crypto-collaborativists are those public–private partnerships or coalitions that aim to collaboratively experiment with blockchain experiment with the existing political infrastructure as well as create new ones. This is the group that either designs projects for government or in collaboration with government. While these clusters are not fixed, they begin to shed light on the prefigurative element of the political imaginaries of these projects.

To highlight the importance of identifying and analyzing these imaginaries, we assert that “technological opportunities do not enter into economic and social life without deliberate efforts and choices” (Archibugi 2017, p. 541). We oppose our frame to Marxian and Deweyan techno-determinism (Smith and Marx 1994), which considers social relations, organizational structures, and cultural practices predominantly a product of a society’s techno-economic infrastructure. Since possible socio-political scenarios will perpetuate the mainstream only with deliberate use, identification of the imaginaries becomes even more important, because our efforts and choices of designing and using particular systems will enable particular socio-political realities."

Excerpts

"Crypto-anarchists projects were usually global, translocal, or local projects, which involved a lot of online collaboration. Contrastingly, crypto-institutionalists were almost always national, regional or local projects which required many traditional techniques such as interviews and workshops."

Defining Political Imaginaries

"In this article, a political imaginary is conceptualized as “a collective structure that organizes the imagination and the symbolism of the political, and therefore, organizes the instituting process of the political as well” (Browne and Diehl 2019, p. 394). This definition follows from Taylor’s work on social imaginaries, expounding how our shared political, economic, and social practices are framed by an exercise in collective imagining regarding their purpose and relevance. This exercise creates a “common understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy” (Taylor 2004, p. 23). According to some, the political is changing shape, and being determined by hybrid combinations of old ideologies (Grant 2014; Nowotny 2014; Wilson and Swyngedouw 2015) and leading to a loss of political agency and repression of the political (Mouffe 2005; Beveridge and Koch 2017). Furthermore, there are emerging technologies like blockchain enabling new forms of political experiences—both online and offline—influencing the collective imagination of the political. Considering the dramatic changes to the nature of the political itself, the traditional concepts from political science, sociology, and related disciplines “have difficulty in explaining how the political is constituted” (Browne and Diehl 2019, p. 393), let alone incorporating an analysis of techno-political innovations like blockchain."

From the Conclusion

Syed Omer Husain, Alex Franklin & Dirk Roep:

"This article has attempted to articulate a critical frame through which to analyze the socio-political underpinnings of blockchain projects. Yet, our intention in this article is not to promote either blockchain utopianism or cynicism; nor is it to advocate for a crypto-anarchist or crypto-institutionalist approach. Rather, it is to articulate a call and research frame to delve deeper into how the political imaginaries behind both the technical design and implementation of projects prefiguratively create the infrastructure of politics. Furthermore, in contrast to many of the articles that were reviewed during this research, we do not make claims that blockchain is suited for socialist or libertarian systems. Rather, we simply encourage practitioners to critically and reflexively analyze the often underdeveloped political underpinnings of their projects. Indeed, it is relevant to mention how little scholars trained in political and social sciences have addressed the imaginaries and corresponding implications mentioned in this paper. Technology is not neutral. However, it is only with considerable, deliberate efforts, and both individual and collective choices that technology restructures and reorients our socio-economic lives.

Concerning various design features that most contemporary projects cite, we advocate a more thorough form of prototyping that could elucidate how they will play out. For instance, instead of decentralizing for the sake of decentralizing, we suggest that it is more appropriate to first ask which aspects of particular systems would function better in a decentralized way? And for who? Would they enable a new form of political reality? Why would that be desirable? When reconfigured in this way, the “measure of a technology should be its capacity to engender more accountable forms of trust” (Schneider 2017).

To conclude, by envisaging new forms of organization, politics, business, and trade associated with emerging technology, we will also, to an extent, be able to guide them. In other words, we become better equipped to paint a picture of the future which we desire, considering blockchains’ capacity to alter the socio-technical landscape through expediting time–space compression. In the words of Vinay Gupta, we must “make a clear image of the future we want, otherwise we are going to get the kind of future that happens by accident”" (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11625-020-00786-x)

Discussion

Code Is Law and Modes of Coercion

Syed Omer Husain, Alex Franklin & Dirk Roep:

“Code is law”, another way of referring to “governance by technologies”, is the idea that software coding can be understood as a form of law. Campbell-Verduyn (2017) explains that certain design features of technologies themselves can “reframe, redefine, and reconstitute the mundane activities of the social actors and social process under-pinning global governance” (Campbell-Verduyn 2017, p. 8). Specific architectures of general-purpose technologies, as described earlier, can be understood as “arrangements of power” (DeNardis 2012, p. 721) which weigh heavily on the conditions of possibility for socio-economic interactions. As Benkler states, the Internet has been coded to allow certain “affordances and constraints” (Benkler 2011, p. 722) around values which we may not be able to identify at first. Building on this idea, Filippi and Hassan (2018) assert that “code has progressively established itself as the predominant way to regulate the behavior of Internet users”. Accordingly, with the advent of blockchain and associated smart contracts, code is assuming such a strong role, that it is possible to identify a shift from ‘code is law’ (code has the effect of law) to ‘law is code’ (law is actively being defined as code) (De Filippi and Hassan 2016).

Contextualizing this shift in terms of political imagination, there is a stark difference in the way which socio-economic interactions will be regulated. The current legal system is enforced “ex-post” (after the event) through state intervention, while in technological systems, it is in-built in the system, and, hence, is enforced “ex ante” (before the event) through code (De Filippi and Hassan 2016). This implies that the designers, owners, and controllers of the system can choose to structurally enable and disable certain types of socio-economic interactions, political action, and processes on their technical systems. Through empirically scanning blockchain projects, decentralization evangelists, and techno-utopians from both the radical and incorporative camps, we identified their shared claim of the possibility to reduce the role of coercive institutions, such as the state and other regulatory bodies, by pre-defining what is and is not allowed (Atzori 2015). Correspondingly, the burgeoning reliance on technology in this regard, signals the urgency of questioning and analyzing the in-built ethical-legal and political features of projects. If we understand that blockchain projects are reducing certain traditionally coercive institutions, we must ask which new forms of coercion emerge within blockchain governance systems—both internally and externally. According to Myers, “reproducing the coercive role of the state in a decentralized yet less constrained manner does not create a more just society” (Myers 2017, p. 246); rather, the same political ideals of libertarian democracy will be implemented in a new and debatably more coercive form.

We are already witnessing government-led pilots experimenting with political rule by algorithm (Calzada 2018). China’s social credit system is a national reputation system which aims to standardize the assessment of citizens’ and businesses’ reputations and grant rewards. Popularly referenced to TV show Black Mirror (Jeferson 2018), it is being described in the media as a politically dystopic shift and another form of surveillance capitalism (Cinnamon 2017; Chorzempa et al. 2018). Similarly, through our research, we ascertained that many blockchain projects prefiguratively implement politicized ideas of incentives to instill certain types of behavior. For instance, the aforementioned example of Colu (Joey 2018) and community cryptocurrencies encourage and incentivizes people to take part in the local economy (Birch 2015; Tarasiewicz and Newman 2015). The imaginaries of such a system share some similarities with the crypto-commonists, circular economy, and politics of local consumption (Mougayar 2016; Circle Economy 2018). There are other exploratory ideas of creating a Co-op Coin which would embody principles of the collaborative economy and use organizational models of cooperatives (Sylvester-Bradley 2018). Design features are highly politicized and have profound implications on the types of activity that can be carried out by civil society. With each project, we must question which values are encoded in the system, who controls it, which organizational structure is present to form consensus, and what are the political visions of the code." (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11625-020-00786-x)

More information

Table 1: Typology of blockchain imaginaries, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11625-020-00786-x/tables/1