Will blockchain technology improve the world or further strengthen existing power relationships?

What is it about?

There is no one term for this new set of social and material relationships emergent from blockchain mediated technology. Blockchains and their companion technology are enabling a general wave of critical infrastructure decentralization within industrial production. The nature of changing flowing through financial, service and governmental infrastructure is yet to be determined. Already, the pace of technological change may have moved beyond what society can healthfully absorb, leaving people extremely disoriented as new social organizational forms rapidly emerge, but before they fully mature as culture, give way to the next set of technocultural formations. Similarly, if the past can be used to just the future, blockchain technology will likely be experienced as an accelerating period of perpetual acceleration, disorientation, and evolution.

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Why is it important?

The pace of change in the technosocial landscape calls urgently for more research, theory building, and re-examination of the canon of technology studies. Instead of falling prey to hype and dramatic prediction, the field is open for the study of the present and the past, with room for modest estimations for the future. The social construction of technology necessitates an expanded critical investigation into the social relations reproduced by the emergent technologies that impact social relations at the base of society, commerce, and labor. In this paper, I attempt to offer a glimpse of the world being built using blockchain technology. I describe the bundle of technologies, of which blockchains form the core, enabling the emergence of a fundamentally new global social, economic and political system. I discuss the problems accompanying automation and conclude that although blockchain technologies tend toward democratization, the establishment of a technological commonwealth may depend on increased politicization and improved global organization of the cooperative movement.

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