Articulating the Political Economies of Blockchain Technology

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This postdoctoral fellowship will allow me to consolidate my PhD work on the politic economy of blockchain with an aim to achieve three main objectives: - develop and publish findings from my PhD in order to further establish my research track record and profile in three papers for world class interdisciplinary, economic and human geography journals;- to develop and prepare two funding applications for further research: Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship, with a focus on developing and expanding my theoretical contributions to the analyses of complex network systems and their social and political impacts; and the UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship, focused on expanding the remit of my expertise to study the emerging political economies of large-scale geo-sensing devices;- to advance the impact of my research, maintain and further established relationships with blockchain/Distributed Ledger Technology business sector and cultural industries; and continue to intervene in important public debates concerning the social, political and ethical implications of complex network technologies.Blockchain is a technology coming out of the controversial digital currency Bitcoin that aims to "decentralize" money, finance, governance and law, proposing to replace any authority with a peer-to-peer network protocol. From the perspectives of the network subcultures it emerged from, blockchain was a technological response to firstly, the political handling of the 2008 financial crisis, and secondly the ways in which internet infrastructures had become a surveillance system for commercial and political targeting. The intention was to get rid of corruptible authorities and develop systems that would operate in a decentralized manner. The hopes were that technological decentralization, and "redecentralizing" the internet, would bring about economic and political autonomy from existing institutional and corporate authorities. And yet, decentralized network protocols can in themselves begin to operate as new forms of authority, serving a select few in the know-how and with very little accountability structures. Furthermore, blockchain is being rapidly adopted by these very authorities and generalized for efficiency and automation purposes. Blockchain is a field that is critiqued for being rife with fraud and scams, facilitating illicit activities, being affiliated with right wing economic and monetary ideas and, in the case of Bitcoin, not being "real money". I argue that there is significantly more to the story and that some important potentials can be recovered by tracing the technical proposition through its pre-Bitcoin histories. My doctoral thesis therefore takes a critical but nuanced approach to "blockchain", tracing what it means for different actors and contexts. In the thesis I articulate where exactly ethical, political and technical issues arise between the claims and vision and actual implementations, while also drawing out what might still be achieved in terms of transforming institutional and infrastructural economic and governance models through such a drive towards decentralization. My thesis makes three overarching contributions: Firstly, it critically assesses the idea of blockchain as a technical solution to "the political" in its particular cryptographic resolutions to authority and decentralized consensus; secondly, it traces the disruptive potential of blockchain through earlier anti-authoritarian histories of network technologies in order to rescue and clarify a distinct politics; and finally, discusses questions and problems of decentralized governance in relation to network infrastructures in the context of blockchain. Indeed, a question of what a political economy of blockchain might entail: 'Political' in the sense of the governance of new economic policies and infrastructures, but also in the sense of the politically diverse and contested economic ideas that are drawn on in these.