Discourses and Imaginaries around Blockchain Technologies

The social construction of technology posits technologies are shaped by social factors and influenced by interpretations of actors involved. Discourses by different actors around blockchain technologies also contribute to depicting the social imaginaries of blockchain, thereby its innovation and novel applications. Imaginaries draw on pre-reflexive parameters, such as shared meanings, ideas, values, institutions, and sensibilities, through which we understand the social whole (Steger & James, 2013:23). Blockchain discourses then refer to specific imaginaries to shape the way that the technology is introduced and understood so that it can be related by new communities (Woodall & Ringel, 2020:2202). In general, discourses dominate blockchain technologies are themes of decentralization of power, disintermediation from governments and banks, and cryptographically enhanced transparency (Tapscott &Tapscott 2016). In line with these discourses seem to appear a bunch of attractive utopian concepts, such as trust, equality, democracy, liberation, and anarchism, which are enabled by the blockchain technologies.

The most persuaded group is the world's techno-libertarians. They believe that the power of nation-states and transnational corporations would wane over time due to the thrive of non-state cryptocurrencies and smart contracts which are seen as means to recreate global society (Garrod, 2016; Karlstrøm, 2014). Discourses among the business press suggest that blockchain is able to solve a number of problems caused by global capitalism: online advertising, financial exclusion, fake news and the existence of monopolistic middle-men tech firms typified by Airbnb and Uber (Tapscott & Tapscott, 2016). For instance, there are proposals such as "trusted social networks with blockchain" to limit the spreads of rumors and to promote freedom, inclusion, and peace (Chen et al., 2018; Ciriello et al., 2018). Discourses can also be identified in growing academic literatures on blockchain generated by economists, computer scientists, business and legal scholars (Garrod, 2019:606). These scholars argue that new peer-to-peer organizations will make possible the "prosperity for the many" through distribution of value creation and value participation (ibid.) At the societal level, the "blockchain for good" and benefits of ESG (environmental, social and corporate governance) discourses have also been widely spread among the votaries. All these discourses are depicting beautiful imaginaries of a future society in which the present problems on the planet will all be solved by a disruptive technology. In fact, it has already encouraged a number of practical use cases to challenge the status quo. Blockchain is indeed a "narrative technology" that tries to configure our understanding of social realities (Reijers & Coeckelbergh, 2018).

While the advocates are imagining a wonderful future society empowered by blockchain technologies, there are also hypothetical critiques and practical failures of blockchain use cases to formulate the other side of discourses. The political imaginaries argue that technology is not neutral but political. Our socio-economic lives can only be restructured by deliberate efforts of techno opportunists and by both individual and collective choices that prefiguratively create the infrastructure of politics (Husain et al., 2020:390). First, the political imaginaries challenge the decentralization and disintermediation characteristics of blockchain technologies by raising several questions such as: who does the system give power to; which actors are most likely to be more powerful by virtual of this decentralized system; what does this "virtual, borderless, block-chained" government entail (ibid.:385-6)? Second, the political imaginaries question blockchain's promises: financially inclusion (Tomlinson et al., 2020), poverty elimination in the global south (Kshetri & Voas, 2018), and empowerment of the poor (Thomason et al., 2018), by pointing out that their diverse actualizations come with some deeply problematic politics and imaginaries (Husain et al., 2020:386). Actual socio-political problems ranging from digital divide, democratic divide, to political ambition of powerful actors will not magically disappear in the blockchain-based world. Expecting a large diverse population to embrace this new technology created mostly by start-ups that attempt to reconfigure daily life oversimplifies the social process of technological system (Lubin et al., 2018:13). In addition, actual practice suggests that technology is primarily used to enhance business and capitalism as usual (Garrod, 2019:607). State and corporate actors that are powerful in the present real world are still those who have the asset and power to play key roles to invest and propel the innovation of "the next big thing" for their interests. This is rather convincing if looking into the names first involved in the R3 consortium, a global payment system that is dedicated to improving cross-border exchange, lowering the auditing cost, and improving interbank fund transfer: Bank of America, Bank of New York Mellon, HSBC, JP Morgan, and Goldman Sachs, Accenture, Amazon, Intel, Microsoft, KPMG, Huawei and Alibaba etc. (Perez, 2015; Garrod, 2019:607)). These powerful players involve in the innovation of this new technology to speed up and secure exchange of assets and data and to reduce labour and overhead costs through automation, which is far from blockchain's initial motivation to dismantle state and corporate power.

Blockchain is still a premature technology. Different social groups, institutions, and powerful players all want to wield power into this block-chained new world by injecting their various imaginaries to bake a predictable future. Yet, both the imaginations and skepticisms need testing by time.

References:

Chen, Y., Li, Q., & Wang, H. (2018). Towards Trusted Social Networks with Blockchain Technology. ArXiv:1801.02796 [Physics]. https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.02796

Ciriello, R. F., Beck, R., & Thatcher, J. (2018). The paradoxical effects of blockchain technology on social networking practices. 17.

Garrod, J. Z. (2016). The Real World of the Decentralized Autonomous Society. TripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society, 14(1). https://doi.org/10.31269/triplec.v14i1.692

Garrod, J. Z. (2019). On the property of blockchains: Comments on an emerging literature. Economy and Society, 48(4), 602-623. https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2019.1678316

Husain, S. O., Franklin, A., & Roep, D. (2020). The political imaginaries of blockchain projects: Discerning the expressions of an emerging ecosystem. Sustainability Science, 15(2), 379-394. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-020-00786-x

Karlstrøm, H. (2014). Do libertarians dream of electric coins? The material embeddedness of Bitcoin. Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory, 15(1), 23-36. https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2013.870083

Kshetri, N., & Voas, J. (2018). Blockchain in developing countries. IT Professional, 20(2), 11-14. https://doi.org/10.1109/MITP.2018.021921645

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Reijers, W., & Coeckelbergh, M. (2018). The blockchain as a narrative technology: Investigating the social ontology and normative configurations of cryptocurrencies. Philosophy & Technology, 31(1), 103-130. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-016-0239-x

Steger, M. B., & James, P. (2013). Levels of Subjective Globalization: Ideologies, Imaginaries, Ontologies. Perspectives on Global Development and Technology, 12(1-2), 17-40. https://doi.org/10.1163/15691497-12341240

Thomason, J., Ahmad, M., Bronder, P., Hoyt, E., Pocock, S., Bouteloupe, J., Donaghy, K., Huysman, D., Willenberg, T., Joakim, B., Joseph, L., Martin, D., & Shrier, D. (2018). Blockchain-Powering and empowering the poor in developing countries. In Transforming Climate Finance and Green Investment with Blockchains (pp. 137-152). Elsevier. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-814447-3.00010-0

Tomlinson, B., Boberg, J., Cranefield, J., Johnstone, D., Luczak-Roesch, M., Patterson, D. J., & Kapoor, S. (2020). Analyzing the sustainability of 28 'Blockchain for Good' projects via affordances and constraints. Information Technology for Development, 1-31. https://doi.org/10.1080/02681102.2020.1828792

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