Thread by @pboxpj

The paper I co-authored with @katyoj 'Blockchain Imaginaries and Their Metaphors' is available in #openaccess.
tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…
It focuses on the performative role of #blockchain imaginaries and metaphors, which guide technologists, enthusiasts and adopters 🧵

Blockchains instantiate imagined stateless communities, engaging in new modalities of economic relationships, socio-political organizing, and common knowledge production.

The images of such communities require shared understandings of the novel, complex and counter-intuitive technological base of these decentralized technologically mediated spaces.

We analyse three organising principles of blockchain imaginaries: substantial, morphological and structural.

The substantial principle refers to blockchains as substance-bearing technologies, representing technological affordances using familiar materials as metaphors. We illustrate this principle with three metaphors: digital gold, ether, and gas.

This principle supports scarce resource allocation and the emergence of markets, digital currencies, and the incentive mechanisms guaranteeing the abundance of expensive computational hardware and electricity required by these infrastructures.

The morphological principle refers to visions of network forms and dynamics, integrating a mixture between cooperation and competition.

We associate this principle with three metaphors: work, trust and consensus.

The morphological principle refers to visions of open networks without formal participation barriers. It supports the idea of blockchains as reflexive systems, collecting events and projecting them in identical fashion. It also enables the generation of consensus.

The structural principle refers to the affordances of data structures in blockchain - the traces produces and maintain within these infrastructures. Some associated metaphors are block and chain, wallets, and transactions.

These make intelligible the work of cryptographic proofs, signatures and hashes in blockchain. Blockchain’s structural principle refers to cumulative, computationally verifiable and easily communicable (concise) “truths” or “facts".

We conclude by connecting these principles with Luhmann's notion of generalized symbolic media.

The substantial principle can be associated with the money medium, through which the economic system deals with scarcity.

The morphological principle is associated with the power medium, through which the political system deals with consensus.

The structural principle is associated with the truth medium, through which the science system deals with knowledge.

Blockchain substances enable forms of money, its morphology represents an arena for power and politics, and its structure points to the social computation of commonly held ‘truth’.

Blockchain technology expands computation’s universalising logic by laying claim to all those elements, and its protocol was designed to be their technical infrastructure.

This research was carried out as part of our work for the @articonf project, and is now published online in @SocEpistemology.