[P2P-F] CfP: Demystifying Blockchain Through an STS Lens

Sun Nov 22 09:22:06 CET 2015

Dear all,

A call for papers for a special issue of
"Engaging Science, Technology, and Society" (eSTS), a new open access
journal of the Society for Social Studies of Science:

*Demystifying Blockchain Through an STS Lens: Challenges and Opportunities
of a New Infrastructure for the Commons.*

“The reward of labour is life. Is that not enough?”
William Morris (1834-1896)

In News from Nowhere (Morris 1890/2008), the narrator, William Guest, finds
himself in a future society based on common ownership and democratic
control of the means of production. Morris’s utopian society has no
authority, no monetary system and functions in an autonomous way because
individuals find pleasure in their collaborative work.

Now let’s fast forward into the beginning of the 21st century, and reflect
upon the emergence of digital commons of knowledge, software and design
which celebrates human collaboration and recreates commons-oriented modes
of production. In these new systems, value is created through contributions
and not labor per se, with the output being commons, not commodities.
Initiatives such as myriad of free/open source software projects or the
free encyclopedia Wikipedia, have highlighted the emergence of new
“technological-economic feasibility spaces” for a new type of social
practice (Benkler 2006: 31). These feasibility spaces include different
social and economic arrangements, where profit, power and control seem to
decrease in importance and be replaced by a commons-oriented process at the
core of value creation (Benkler 2006; Kostakis et al. 2013).

However, for a long time, commons-oriented communities have been
institutionalized around centralized or federated structures, which might
bring a series of trade-offs in terms of democratic governance,
flexibility, and ability to evolve. These institutions were mainly built to
facilitate the coordination of disparate groups of people that would
otherwise have had a hard time coordinating themselves, because of either
scale or lack of proper coordination mechanisms. They also served the
purpose of establishing trust among groups that did not engage into
sufficiently frequent and repeated interactions. Nevertheless, today
traditional issues related to shared common-pool resources could be
addressed with the implementation of an arguably pervasive open source
technology, called “blockchain”. In short, blockchain is a type of a
distributed database which is maintained by a network of user and
eliminates the need for a trusted third party. The most widely known
application of a blockchain is the public ledger of transactions for
digital currencies first used in Bitcoin. The transparent and distributed
nature of the blockchain makes it easier for small and large communities to
reach consensus and implement innovative forms of self-governance. The
possibility to record every interaction on an incorruptible public ledger
and the ability to encode a particular set rules linking these interactions
to a specific transactions makes it possible to design new sophisticated
incentive systems, which might significantly differ from traditional
market-based mechanisms.

Thanks to these new technologies, alternative value systems based on
reputation, merit or other type of metrics might emerge, as an alternative
to traditional market based mechanisms which only focus on economic value.
In the near future, centralized intermediaries coordinating the action of a
large number of individuals might be replaced by peer-to-peer transactions
performed in a trustless environment, without the need for any intermediary
entity to manage the flow of contributions. Disintermediation and
independent value production might promote a greater degree of individual
autonomy and emancipation, but at what cost? In Down and Out in the Magic
Kingdom (2003), Cory Doctorow describes a society based on a post-scarcity
economy, where money has progressively been replaced by a reputation-based
currency, as a new expression of wealth. In spite of the apparent benefits,
the drawback of such a reputation-based system is that every human
interaction can potentially be evaluated, virtual turning any social
interaction into an economic transaction —something that could be highly
disruptive to the commons-oriented ecosystem, which is for the most part
driven by social and ideological values.

The aim of this special issue is to deepen our knowledge about the
potential challenges and opportunities of blockchain technologies, from an
STS perspective. We welcome reflective, imaginative and critical scholarly
articles and commentaries that address any of the following themes and
beyond.

Read more here: http://estsjournal.org/announcement/view/6
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