What Kind of Subjectivity Does the Blockchain Support

Discussion

Rachel O'Dwyer:

"First of all, What Kind of Subjectivity Does the Blockchain Support? In the development of consensus algorithms and monetary incentives, there’s an assumption that we can delegate much of the messiness of human relations to algorithmic governance, anticipate the motivations of individual actors and foreclose destructive behaviours. This comes back to this question of trust, something I’ve already written about in relation to Bitcoin. The claim being made is not that we can engineer trust in friends, institutions or governments, but that we might dispense with them altogether in favour of what Bill Maurer, Taylor C. Nelms and Lana Swartz refer to as ‘trust in the code.’ As outlined in the Bitcoin whitepaper, proof-of-work is not a new form of trust, but the abdication of trust altogether as social confidence in favour of an algorithmic regulation. In other words, it doesn’t matter whether I believe in my fellow peers just so long as I believe in the technical efficiency of the blockchain protocol. What kinds of subjectivity do we want to algorithmically inscribe into our systems? Blockchain start-ups begin from the assumption that there is no trust and no community, only individual economic agents acting in self-interest. Fair enough, you might think, it’s precisely the fact that projects like Ethereum engineer confidence and provide economic incentives for contribution that may distinguish it from other services like Freenet. But it also proceeds from a perspective that already presumes a neoliberal subject and an economic mode of governance in the face of social and/or political problems. ‘How do we manage and incentivise individual competitive economic agents?’ In doing so, it not only codes for that subject, we might argue that it also reproduces that subject." (https://www.academia.edu/11627298/The_Revolution_Will_not_be_Decentralised_Blockchain-based_Technologies_and_the_Commons)