Disassembling the Blockchain Trust Machine

* PhD thesis: Disassembling the Trust Machine, three cuts on the political matter of blockchain. By Jaya Klara Brekke. Geography department of Durham University UK, 2019.

URL = http://distributingchains.info/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/DisassemblingTrustMachine_Brekke2019.pdf

Description

"Distributing Chains is a PhD research project by Jaya Klara Brekke and was driven by the question of what matters politically in blockchain technology? By “matters” what is meant is literally mattering as in making a material difference in terms of effects of blockchain. By “politically” what is meant is the mediation and resolution of incompatible positions and the process through which the possible and impossible are distributed across spaces and domains."

(http://distributingchains.info/)

Excerpts

Introduction

Jaya Klara Brekke:

"In this introduction, I first describe the three main ways I address the political in blockchain in what I describe as ‘cuts’, drawing in particular on philosopher Karen Barad’s ontoepistemology (Barad, 2007) and the political theory of Jacques Rancière (Rancière, 2006, 2010), and describe the main research questions that I look to answer. I then describe the broader context and importance of blockchain and the specific cases that I have worked with in the thesis. I finally give an outline of the thesis chapters and its overall structure before concluding.

The primary research question of this thesis draws together work by theoretical physicist and feminist philosopher Karen Barad and political theorist Jacques Rancière in order to ask what matters politically in blockchain? By ‘matters’, I refer to Barad’s understanding of the word as literally mattering as in making a material difference (2007, pp.132-185) and by ‘politically’ and I refer to Rancière’s notion of the political as the contestation and redistribution of sensibilities (Rancière, 2010, pp. 27–44).

The political theory of Rancière describes ‘the political’ as a moment of disruption and redistribution to a given sensibility. By sensibility, he refers to a common sense understanding of what matters, what is right or wrong, who belongs or doesn’t, what is desirable or undesirable and so on. In this sense, the research question addresses the ways that blockchain distributes and redistributes political sensibilities in ways that come to matter also materially.

In this thesis I use these two theorists to also answer this question by articulating three approaches to the political in blockchain: the insensible, the sensible and the dissensible. I elaborate on Rancière’s conception of the political by articulating my own concept of the dissensible, as a disruption to a given sensibility and the question of incompatible sensibilities. I elaborate further, raising the issue of the insensible, drawing on work by geographer of the inhuman, Kathryn Yusoff (Yusoff, 2013a), discussing the necessary limits of any given sensibility, of knowledge of what matters, as a problem for the preconditions of the political.

Here, I briefly describe the more specific sub-questions of my research that have informed these three approaches. Bringing together Barad and Rancière in particular allows for an approach to the political in blockchain that crosses material, technical, social, political and economic distinctions. This is the main contribution of the thesis, but it also presents some limitations. Because significant work goes into analysing and shifting the onto-epistemological terms of debate, there is little scope to address the further implications of such a shift. This means that the thesis is primarily focused on epistemological and ontological questions of the two case studies, and perhaps more straightforward analyses of their immediate political implications are not addressed. For example, the different uses of Bitcoin as a currency and payment system or Ethereum as a protocol and platform, and the effects and implications of specific applications, are beyond the immediate scope of this thesis. Instead, the focus is on the protocols themselves, the communities developing blockchain projects, and the ideas, experiences and contexts that inform them as a means to clarify epistemological and ontological understandings of blockchain and shift the terms of critique, debate and development.

Three sub-questions guided the research and led to this particular theoretical approach and a focus on the protocols themselves and developer communities, histories and contexts:

1. Which are the active ‘mediators’ in the blockchain assemblage, what differences do they produce and what political effects do they have?

With this question, the aim has been to find out which aspects of ‘blockchain’ matter in terms of determining the political effects, and therefore also pointing to sites that might be done differently. Blockchain is positioned as a ‘disintermediating’ technology, meaning eliminating ‘mediation’ such that, for example, in the case of Bitcoin, transactions take place directly between people rather than via a bank or payments company. One of the primary aims is to get rid of the need for ‘trusted third parties’, replacing these with a peer-to-peer network protocol. I have taken a critical approach to such claims of ‘disintermediation’ and instead understand the protocol to be a form of mediation in its own right, organising relationships and determining ways in which such a network might witness, authorise and execute a transaction. And so this question was designed in order to find out the particular forms of mediation taking place through the protocol design. I have also taken a critical perspective on the separation between technical and social concerns, conceptualising blockchain as an ‘assemblage’ comprising code, hardware, people, promotional material, ideas, technical papers and so on, instead of a coherent technical ‘thing’. Retaining a certain openness to what comprises blockchain exactly came to make sense analytically, in particular because of its decentralised nature, where the protocol itself and, for example, what comprises ‘Bitcoin’ exactly, became contested (see Chapter 6). This research question has been informed by science and technology studies, literature and media theory that conceptualise of infrastructure and technologies as enacting an immanent politics, being an expression and continuous execution and enforcement of a politics in its own right, by shaping a priori what is possible or not and for who (Feenberg, 1999; P. N. Edwards, 2003; Galloway, 2004; Latour, 2005). However, there are aspects of network infrastructures and algorithmic operations that exceed intention, control and full oversight (Seaver, 2014; Burrell, 2015; Amoore, 2016). In order to theorise such aspects, I draw on Yusoff’s notion of the insensible. This highlights and helps make sense of blockchain as a proposition for a technology initially beyond control by specific authorities, but eventually also humans and human sensibilities more generally (see Chapter 4). The insensible then forms the first cut on the political of blockchain.

2. How do the developers and users of blockchain understand, represent and seek to shape the political implications of the technology in terms of decentralisation, trust and consensus? 


With this question, the aim has been to find out the ideas and assumptions informing the design of blockchain protocols. Concepts and terms such as ‘decentralisation’, ‘consensus’ and ‘trust’ are widely used across different blockchain projects – but it is not always clear whether the concepts are referring to a technical architecture, social conditions or beliefs, or intended effects. This question was in part informed by the idea of translation as employed by N. Katherine Hayles (2005, pp. 89-116), focusing my attention towards qualitative changes that happen in the ‘translation of worldviews’ when, for example, technological specifications are rearticulated as socio-political process, or conversely when socio-political ideas are encoded into technical architectures (for example ‘decentralisation’).2 But Hayles’ notion of translation seemed to imply a more linear, linguistically informed, located and deliberate process than seemed to be happening and so I later shifted this theoretical approach towards Barad’s notion of onto-epistemology. Here, concepts are understood as part of assemblages and apparatuses in ways that do not assume a linguistic privilege in determining matters. This has been important in order to make sense of the fact that a given developer’s intentions with a specific protocol design does not fully determine how it played out in any simple, linear transfer of idea to materialisation (discussed in Chapter 4). Concepts of decentralisation, trust and consensus would nevertheless in themselves continue to mobilise efforts to build, maintain and correct – such that, for example, engineers, mathematicians and so on develop new consensus algorithms in order to redress centralising tendencies in a given protocol design. This seemed to point to a more general sensibility in blockchain informing a tacit agreement about some overall desirable characteristics and properties that indeed cut across other distinctions between people and projects. Regardless of the confusion or broadness of the use of concepts like decentralisation, trust and consensus, it was clear that these are powerful in mobilising people and efforts to build, maintain and correct for in blockchain. This second question has led to draw the particular cut of the sensible, understood in the sense of Rancière, to form a distinct blockchain sensibility that holds a ‘blockchain assemblage’ together as a recognisable field despite its broad appeal, explaining more specifically the kinds of ‘disruption’ proposed.

3. What are the political differences between blockchain-based developments, and where and how are these expressed?

(E.g. in the code itself, in the organisational structure of the developer community, amongst the user-base or elsewhere?)

With this research question, the aim has been to find out the ways in which political differentiation takes place within and amongst blockchain-based projects. My intention has been to trace how and through which forms such differentiation is enacted, with the idea that this might explain firstly what matters politically to different projects, thereby giving an overview of the understandings, theories and politics informing blockchain projects, and secondly the ways that such ideas were being materialised – whether in the code, coding process, the company/organisational structure or deployment or otherwise. This question has been informed by political theory defining the political in terms of the possibility of dissensus, (incompatible differences about what matters) and the necessary negotiation and settlement of these drawing on Rancière and Mouffe in particular (Mouffe, 1993, 2005; Rancière, 2006, 2010). These theoretical approaches to the political have suggested that a suitable strategy for understanding ‘the political’ in blockchain would be to look for sites of deliberate differentiation, but also, and in particular, moments of disagreement and incompatible positions and the ways in which these are resolved.

This final question then led me to articulate the concept of the dissensible as the third cut on the political in blockchain, and a way to describe the ongoing potential for incompatible sensibilities to arise. Through Barad, such questions of the insensible, sensibilities and the dissensible gains material weight and becomes part of how things are made to matter – mattering politically, as well as materially. Barad, theorising at the level of quantum physics experimentation, situates ontological dynamics in relation to sensing apparatuses (Barad, 2007, pp. 97–130). Her ontoepistemology describes sensing devices and beings as not only entailing a recognition of some external thing, but in fact is part of determining matters – making determinate what might otherwise be in an indeterminate state of potential (ibid.). She argues that this dynamic takes place by and through all manner of determining sensibilities; that is to say that not only humans determine what matters and how things come to matter (Barad, 2007, pp. 132–186). Barad, then, becomes a means to acknowledge non-human sensibilities in determining matters, such that not only humans are understood to be involved in creating material, nor political realities. This proves effective in particular for approaching the proposition of blockchain as an algorithmic means for determining things, lending some openness to such a proposition, while also giving tools for critically examining it from the perspective that there is nothing necessary, nor inevitable, about algorithmic modes of determination.