After today's @platformcoop community hangout, I've been pondering whether blockchain's ideologies (decentralization, trustlessness, economicism) are really convivial (in the Illichian sense) to the aims of cooperativism and collective social change...
Counter-intuitively, I think decentralization actually produces new, more subtle forms of centralization. They're the same, when we think them in binary. This co-production is often marked by the idea that communities are homogeneous—that there's one goal, one shared perspective.
But communities are incredibly diverse, and are strong when they can effectively negotiate roles and position, share contingent commonalities, find consensus, and draw new relations with other communities—within this difference.
Ironically, it seems that developers of new blockchain platforms may well the most pronounced "platform monopolists," as they race for control over the enabling infrastructure—one platform, one programming language, one model of social relations.
Instead of "a platform cooperative," we need "cooperative platforms," plural. Many platforms, perhaps very different from each other, designed not for universals and generalizations but for specific situations, contexts, and communities—yet never isolated or disconnected.
Judith Butler: "The point isn't to stay marginal... but to participate in whatever network of marginal zones... which, together, constitute a multiple displacement of authorities."
As the pacifist theorist of technology Ursula Franklin reminds us, technology is always a practice. So the question, then, is what modes of practices should platforms designed to support localized, connected collectivities enact?
There's something deeply conservative about most blockchain practice. This idea that deeply historical and social processes can be solved via the values of decentralization, trustlessness, and the encoding of interactions as economic transactions, reified as program code.
Yet the concept of a single "platform" (decentralized or not)—especially one which is coupled with a conventional programming language—is already profoundly entangled in the hierarchies and asymmetries that we're trying to address. It's a very centralized way of thinking.
Today, only certain people have access to the powers of programming, and it's a field mired in class, gender, and racial inequalities. So we have to consider, who do we want to have the power to express and reify our communities' social relations?
Who, on a blockchain platform, has the power to undo a mistake, a misunderstanding, a revelatory change of mind or perspective?
We need platforms that enable new forms of trust and more nuanced forms of mediated social relations. Platforms where creative expression isn't limited solely to a technological elite. Platforms that support change—of mind, of position, of perspective.
