There is a wealth of information, hype around, and research into blockchain's 'disruptive' and 'transformative' potential concerning every industry. However, 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. Furthermore, it outlines a frame to question, cluster, and analyze the expressions of political imaginaries intrinsic to the design and operationalization of blockchain projects on three analytic levels: users, intermediaries, and institutions.
Critically engaging with literature on post-politics, blockchain and algorithmic governance, and drawing also on knowledge gained from undertaking a three-year empirical study, the purpose of this article is to better understand the transformative capacity of government-led blockchain projects. Analysis of a diversity of empirical material, which was guided by a digital ethnography approach, is used to support the furthering of the existing debate on the nature of the post-political as a condition and/or strategy. Through these theoretical and empirical explorations, the article concludes that while the post-political represents a contingent political strategy by governmental actors, it could potentially impose an algorithmically enforced post-political 'condition' for the citizen. It is argued that the design, features and mechanisms of government-led projects are deliberately and strategically used to delimit a citizens' political agency. In order to address this scenario, we argue that there is a need not only to analyse and contribute to the algorithmic design of blockchain projects (i.e. the affordances and constraints they set), but also to the metapolitical narrative underpinning them (i.e. the political imaginaries underlying the various government-led projects).
Introduction-Why question the political imaginaries underpinning technical infrastructures? Framing the issue-transformation, creative destruction & prefigurative politics Methods: digital ethnography & immersion in social worlds Results: rethinking blockchain's design principles-equitable design ≠ equitable politics Decentralization & Disintermediation Access, Inclusion & Empowerment Code is Law & Modes of Coercion Discussion: screening blockchain projects-an exercise in political imagination Concluding remarks-the political agency of research on innovation Chapter 5-Prefigurative post-politics as strategy: the case of governmentled blockchain projects Abstract Introduction The prefigurative post-politics of crypto-anarchists and crypto-institutionalists Methods: digital ethnography and experts Discussion: the empirical puzzle of post-political blockchains Shrinking political agency by algorithm Meta-political reduction to economic order building The absence of collaboration in the 'political' The strategy of structures over agency Concluding remarks: can blockchain avoid the "post-political trap"? Chapter 6-Decentralizing geographies of political action: civic tech and place-based municipalism Abstract Introduction Methodology-Beyond the Peer-Reviewed Place-based Civic Tech & Conceptions of Municipalism The Case of Radical Municipalism-An emerging geography of politics and political action? Synthesizing Remarks: Decentralization, Independence & Equitability Conclusion General theoretical findings and insights Geography of politics and political action Collaborative innovation practices in the digital age Hackathons and civic tech Blockchain and geography of political action Political theory and practice Civic tech as a case for post-politics Blockchain-enabled civic tech-learning to research the scale of politics Open-source governance, innovation and political movement Participative, collaborative or direct politics Future technopolitical transformation research Definition of value in technopolitical systems The online-offline dynamic of hybrid social worlds Contributions to algorithmic governance studies Dehumanizing trust Technology and the meta-politics of power (Re)coding a technopolity
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