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)."

Excerpts

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."

More information

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