[P2P-F] a very important introductory essay on the socio-political impacts of the blockchain

Sun Jul 29 18:32:52 CEST 2018

dear all,

I really very very strongly recommend reading the whole essay here, it is
clearly written and just 12 pages long, which introduces the differential
impact of the blockchain for a future technological commonwealth, see in
particular the five contending scenarios for the future,

Future of Sovereignty in a Blockchain World
<https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Future_of_Sovereignty_in_a_Blockchain_World#mw-head>
<https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Future_of_Sovereignty_in_a_Blockchain_World#p-search>

** Article: No Gods, No Masters, No Coders? The Future of Sovereignty in a
Blockchain World. By Sarah Manski and Ben Manski. Law Critique (2018)
29:151–162*

URL =
https://www.academia.edu/36871389/No_Gods_No_Masters_No_Coders_The_Future_of_Sovereignty_in_a_Blockchain_World
Contents [hide
<https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Future_of_Sovereignty_in_a_Blockchain_World#>
]

   - 1 Contextual Citation
   <https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Future_of_Sovereignty_in_a_Blockchain_World#Contextual_Citation>
   - 2 Abstract
   <https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Future_of_Sovereignty_in_a_Blockchain_World#Abstract>
   - 3 Excerpts
   <https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Future_of_Sovereignty_in_a_Blockchain_World#Excerpts>
      - 3.1 Claims regarding how the Blockchain will affect Sovereignty
      <https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Future_of_Sovereignty_in_a_Blockchain_World#Claims_regarding_how_the_Blockchain_will_affect_Sovereignty>
      - 3.2 Seven tendencies of blockchain technology and the structural
      qualities that produce them
      <https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Future_of_Sovereignty_in_a_Blockchain_World#Seven_tendencies_of_blockchain_technology_and_the_structural_qualities_that_produce_them>
      - 3.3 Five Possible Blockchain Futures
      <https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Future_of_Sovereignty_in_a_Blockchain_World#Five_Possible_Blockchain_Futures>
         - 3.3.1 Individual Sovereignty
         <https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Future_of_Sovereignty_in_a_Blockchain_World#Individual_Sovereignty>
         - 3.3.2 Popular Sovereignty
         <https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Future_of_Sovereignty_in_a_Blockchain_World#Popular_Sovereignty>
         - 3.3.3 Technological Sovereignty
         <https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Future_of_Sovereignty_in_a_Blockchain_World#Technological_Sovereignty>
         - 3.3.4 Corporate Sovereignty
         <https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Future_of_Sovereignty_in_a_Blockchain_World#Corporate_Sovereignty>
         - 3.3.5 Techno-totalitarian State Sovereignty
         <https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Future_of_Sovereignty_in_a_Blockchain_World#Techno-totalitarian_State_Sovereignty>
      - 4 Discussion
   <https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Future_of_Sovereignty_in_a_Blockchain_World#Discussion>

Contextual Citation[edit
<https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/index.php?title=Future_of_Sovereignty_in_a_Blockchain_World&action=edit&section=1>
]

"Technologies in general have tendencies that are materially inherent and
not simply produced by social context. This is because a technology is
itself a structured set of relations that enables or con-strains diﬀerent
sets of possibilities. Thus, while it may be true that the process of
uncovering a technology’s material components becomes increasingly
chal-lenging as one moves to the digital realm (Leonardi et al. 2013), so
too does it becomes easier to discover the intentionality behind digital
materiality: the intended tendencies of blockchain technology are directly
available in block-chain code." (
https://www.academia.edu/36871389/No_Gods_No_Masters_No_Coders_The_Future_of_Sovereignty_in_a_Blockchain_World
)

Abstract[edit
<https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/index.php?title=Future_of_Sovereignty_in_a_Blockchain_World&action=edit&section=2>
]

"The building of the blockchain is predicted to harken the end of the
con-temporary sovereign order. Some go further to claim that as a powerful
decentering technology, blockchain contests the continued functioning of
world capitalism. Are such claims merited? In this paper we consider
sovereignty and blockchain technology theoretically, posing possible
futures for sovereignty in a blockchain world. These possibilities include
various forms of individual, popular, technological, corporate, and
techno-totalitarian state sovereignty. We identify seven structural
tendencies of blockchain technology and give examples as to how these have
manifested in the construction of new forms of sovereignty. We conclude
that the future of sovereignty in a blockchain world will be articulated in
the conjuncture of social struggle and technological agency and we call for
a stronger alliance between technologists and democrats." (
https://www.academia.edu/36871389/No_Gods_No_Masters_No_Coders_The_Future_of_Sovereignty_in_a_Blockchain_World
)

Excerpts[edit
<https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/index.php?title=Future_of_Sovereignty_in_a_Blockchain_World&action=edit&section=3>
]Claims regarding how the Blockchain
<https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Blockchain> will affect Sovereignty
<https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Sovereignty>[edit
<https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/index.php?title=Future_of_Sovereignty_in_a_Blockchain_World&action=edit&section=4>
]

Sarah and Ben Manski:

"claims regarding the changing structure of sovereignty tend to clus-ter
around three functional qualities of blockchain: ﬁrst, its use as a ledger
of transactions of digital assets; second, its wide distribution among
stakeholders/ maintainers; third, its encryption of the transactions stored
in ‘blocks’ of data linked together chronologically in a chain. Altogether,
these function to facilitate new forms of trustless exchange, speed
information sharing and connectivity, and disintermediate service provision
by central entities. As a powerful decentering technology, it is argued,
blockchain contests the dominant institutions of world capitalism.Are such
claims merited? It is true that blockchain technology is still in its
infancy and that there are signiﬁcant hurdles to widespread commercial
adoption. Pointing to cryptocurrencies’ early problems, it has lately
become fashionable among the punditry to declare the entirety of blockchain
a hoax (Gerard 2017). Yet we cannot help but note the prevalence of
articles that at once predict block-chain to have no major eﬀects while at
the same time castigating the technol-ogy for undermining the power of
regulatory authorities, ﬁnancial institutions, juridical bodies—take your
pick (e.g. Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase; see Gandel 2015). We believe the
claims of blockchain technologists to be worthy of critical attention
because they represent intelligent consideration, resource investment, and
strategic action toward particular ends; they are literally coding the
world they wish to see. The cognitive praxis of agents engaged in social
change activi-ties can be a particularly useful source of empirical data
(Manski 2018). While we do not here provide a thorough evaluation of
claims, we do use them as sign-posts pointing the way forward from
in-process projects toward possible futures." (
https://www.academia.edu/36871389/No_Gods_No_Masters_No_Coders_The_Future_of_Sovereignty_in_a_Blockchain_World
)

Seven tendencies of blockchain technology and the structural qualities that
produce them[edit
<https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/index.php?title=Future_of_Sovereignty_in_a_Blockchain_World&action=edit&section=5>
]

Sarah and Ben Manski:

   - *Veriﬁability*

Transactions are assured through encrypted network consensus mechanisms in
such a form that all transactions from the very ﬁrst to the most recent are
recorded in a ledger open to its maintainers, reducing information
asymmetries2.

   - *Globality*

Digital transactions and cultural information ﬂows transcend geographic
space and national borders3.

   - *Liquidity*

Value liquidity is enhanced as the location of a store of value that does
not depend or is not under the direct control of a sovereign, central bank
or private corporation4.

   - *Permanence*

The ledger of transaction is immutable by design5.

   - Ethereality

Transactions are conducted in a digital medium6.

   - Decentralization

The ledger is widely distributed among many stakeholders and maintainers.

   - *Future Focus*

Found in newer developments of blockchain such as Ethereum, a stored
autonomous self-reinforcing agency (SASRA) is formed in the temporal
displacement of action through the use of smart contracts enabling the
preﬁgurative recording of future transactions."

(
https://www.academia.edu/36871389/No_Gods_No_Masters_No_Coders_The_Future_of_Sovereignty_in_a_Blockchain_World
)

Five Possible Blockchain Futures
<https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Five_Possible_Blockchain_Futures>[edit
<https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/index.php?title=Future_of_Sovereignty_in_a_Blockchain_World&action=edit&section=6>
]

Sarah and Ben Manski:
Individual Sovereignty[edit
<https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/index.php?title=Future_of_Sovereignty_in_a_Blockchain_World&action=edit&section=7>
]

"The technical politics of the Bitcoin blockchain are often described as
libertarian in part because the design choices of this ﬁrst blockchain
emphasize the technology’s tendencies toward liquidity and
decentralization. The builders of blockchain technology emerged from the
self-identiﬁed cypherpunk movement of cryptologists and coders; Satoshi
Nakamoto was a member.

As Nakamoto wrote in an email to early collaborator Hal Finney, ‘It’s very
attractive to the libertarian viewpoint if we can explain it properly’
(Nakamoto 2008b).

Back when Satoshi had ﬁrst launched the software, his writings were drily
focused on the technical speciﬁcations of the programming. But after the
ﬁrst few weeks, Satoshi began emphasizing the broader ideological
motivations for the software to help win over a broader audience. (Popper
2015 p. 30) Those economic libertarians who identify as ‘Ancap’ (or
‘anarcho-capitalist’) claim society best facilitates individual will in a
free-market economy free from regulation by states or large corporations.
The discourse of Bitcoin enthusiasts is revealing: the use of the term
‘mining’ to describe blockchain maintenance and ‘coin’ to describe a chain
of digital signatures speaks to their fondness for gold. At the same time,
libertarians generally share a faith in progressive technological
determinism, believing that society can be improved and that social
relationships and institutions can function more eﬀectively through the use
of new technological tools. Blockchain forms, such as Bitcoin,
institutionalize this ideal by enabling a form of trustless direct exchange
among individual property owners. Applications such as uPort ID seek to
wrest control of personal data from major corporations and governments, as
well as to provide privacy protections to individuals (ConsenSys 2015).
Evidence is widespread and multiplying of eﬀorts by technologists to use
blockchain technology to challenge existing hierarchical institutional
forms with peer-to-peer networks. It seems questionable, however, whether
large numbers of people — as citizens, consumers, producers, etc. — will
embrace a total shift from regulatory oversight toward a disaggregated
society of autonomous individuals picking and choosing between peer-to-peer
legal codes of arbitration and enforcement of agreements."

Popular Sovereignty[edit
<https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/index.php?title=Future_of_Sovereignty_in_a_Blockchain_World&action=edit&section=8>
]

After more than two centuries of building a world beyond capitalist logics,
the coop-erative movement is well positioned to make the most of
blockchain’s tendencies toward globality, liquidity, permanence,
decentralization and future focus. Through these, blockchain is beginning
to convert the long standing vision of a popular ‘cooperative commonwealth’
into the actual construction of a ‘global technological commonwealth’
enacted through the use of advanced exchange, communication, and governance
technologies (Manski 2017). There are many current examples of applications
that make the global decentralized exercise of a popular sovereignty
possible. Blockchain for Change has developed Fummi, an application that
uses blockchain’s immutability and globality to store digital identities
for those lacking permanent homes (Schiller 2017). Applications that make
use of blockchain’s tendency toward future focus (Aitken 2017)—via the
utility of stored autonomous self-reinforcing agency (SASRA) to handle
contract administration and management — can be found in the development of
AgriLedger for agricultural cooperatives (Hammerich 2018) and of the Pylon
Network for energy cooperatives (Klenergy 2017).

Decentralized commons-based currencies such as Duniter and Faircoin
(Bauwens 2018) are now in use; these have been coded to reduce inequality
via pro-vision of a Universal Dividend (also known as Basic Income) and
other features. And emerging on the horizon are a series of next generation
technology platforms designed to bypass bottlenecks and inequalities
contained within current block-chain architectures; the most notable of
these is Holochain (Brock and Harris-Braun 2017).We think blockchain is a
powerful tool for the cooperative movement in its quest for economic
democracy because many of blockchain’s tendencies toward globality,
permanence, decentralization and future focus move parallel to ongoing
cooperative projects. Additionally, we see in the distributed and secure
structure of block-chain a limited safeguard against suppression should
capitalist states move against blockchain-based pro-democracy initiatives.

Activist use of simple virtual private network (VPN) or Proxy systems to
access blockchain applications is much less vulnerable to state attack than
has proven the case for many centralized and ‘above ground’ social movement
organizations. To the extent that the construction of a global
technological commonwealth faces obstacles, these lie not in the tendencies
of blockchain technology but instead in the somewhat insular path
dependencies of the cooperative movement itself. We are uncertain as to
whether democratizers will prove capable of creating a culture suﬃciently
open, user-friendly, expansionist, and politically ambitious to maximize
the possibilities oﬀered by blockchain.

Technological Sovereignty[edit
<https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/index.php?title=Future_of_Sovereignty_in_a_Blockchain_World&action=edit&section=9>
]

Technocracies are characterized by powerful actors and institutions able to
maintain unequal positions of power through their use and control of
technical knowledge. In tending toward ethereality, blockchains favour
those with superior technological knowledge and positionality. Blockchain
coders enjoy a comparative advantage over lay users because in calibrating
blockchain over multiple prototype iterations, coders establish a lasting
frame of reference through which they imagine alternatives and make design
choices. This agency can be used toward diﬀerent ends—as a means of
resistance to capitalism, or as a means to personal proﬁt, or as path to
power consolidation. Notably, the early days of blockchain coding have seen
an organizational com-mitment to open source. Open source code is
co-created in a cooperative manner and appears to be dominating the core
development of blockchain. This may be true because blockchain coding is
more demanding than other types of programming and because group
participation in creating blockchain-based applications is inherently more
purposive than individual participation in development. As blockchain
applications become more lucrative, however, we are wit-nessing a growing
cast of corporate in-house blockchain developers and blockchain developer
billionaires. At least one tendency of blockchain technology — future focus
— may be leading toward a sovereignty not of technologists but of the
technology itself. The development of SASRA could enable the creation of
blockchain businesses that run themselves with distributed and
decentralized proﬁts, management, and services. These independent DAOs
(decentralized autonomous organizations), would automatically leverage
manifold smart contracts, thereby eliminating the lawyers, accountants and
bureaucrats whose job it is to conﬁrm the trustworthiness and legal
standing of contracts between parties (Dew 2015). One example is Colony
(Rea et al. 2018), which is testing a decentralized platform for work
collaboration. Overall — whether in the technology or the technologists, or
in service of democracy, capital, or self — we see little question but that
blockchain technology tends in every way toward some form of technological
sovereignty.

Corporate Sovereignty[edit
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]

With their abilities to mobilize unmatched ﬁnancial resources, major
corporations are exploiting blockchain’s tendencies toward veriﬁability,
globality, liquidity, permanence, and future focus to forcibly adapt the
technology to their own purposes. For example, Kodak, Amazon, Facebook and
other corporations have identiﬁed the potential beneﬁts of creating their
own platform cryptocurrencies. Blockchain cryptocurrencies can include
smart contracts that automatically dole out the company’s currency as a
reward for developers who build apps on its platform or users who engage in
desired behaviour. This kind of corporate ‘token economy’ has the ﬂavour of
a traditional company town; in this case the owner of the online space is
the sovereign. And corporations are extraordinarily bad sover-eigns (Lessig
2006). Indeed, already functioning corporate sovereignties such as Google
claim and expand their exclusive sovereign territory by absorbing existing
spaces (Bratton 2016 p. 144). The introduction of blockchain’s powers of
veriﬁability and perma-nence could further the degree of data granularity
captured and monetized by these corporate platforms. All of this has the
immediate eﬀect of strengthening hierar-chies, centralizing power,
exacerbating inequality, and generally weakening democ-racy. Furthermore,
as some of the most advantaged players in the world system, corporations
enjoy a signiﬁcant head start in the race to program their logics into
mainstream blockchain applications, as well as the capacity to enact state
policies that block new applications threatening future disintermediation.
Where the environ-mental economics literature describes ‘technology
forcing’ as technological devel-opment driven by regulatory pressure, we
see a similar process underway in the cor-poratization of blockchain toward
the ends of corporate sovereignty.

Techno-totalitarian State Sovereignty[edit
<https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/index.php?title=Future_of_Sovereignty_in_a_Blockchain_World&action=edit&section=11>
]

Many have claimed that blockchain technology will inevitably weaken the
nation state, and in the ﬁnal analysis, it may. Yet at the moment, national
and transnational state institutions are actively working to support and
regulate favoured types of block-chain activity and otherwise, where
blockchain applications are disfavoured, ‘to regu-late it out of existence’
(Nicolaci da Costa 2018). They are going about this by crimi-nally
investigating initial coin oﬀering (or ‘ICOs’) (De 2018), demanding
currency exchanges turn over user information (Paul 2018), enacting capital
gains taxes on cryp-tocurrency trades (Bernard 2018), criminalizing
non-state cryptocurrencies (Iyer and Anand 2018), and more. At the same
time, major powers such as China, Russia, Japan, and the United States, as
well as regional technology leaders like Uruguay, Estonia, Slovenia, and
Kenya—as well as subsidiary states—are all jockeying for comparative
strategic advantage in the development and deployment of new blockchain
technolo-gies (Tapscott and Tapscott 2016).Such interventions signal the
possibilities for states to expand their reach. In block-chain’s tendencies
toward veriﬁability, globality, permanence, and future focus, state actors
are ﬁnding greater capacities to intervene globally in the daily lives of
individu-als. These expanded capacities are making possible the emergence
of new technologi-cal totalitarian forms of state sovereignty. To begin
with, states cannot easily control what they cannot measure, and a
blockchain-enabled Internet of Things (IoT) ampliﬁed by artiﬁcial
intelligence furthers the degree with which states can monitor the material
and social world. The rapidly expanding IoT is expected to more than triple
in size by 2020 to nearly 21 billion devices (Stravridis and Weinstein
2016). When there is a tiny blockchain-connected chip embedded in each
material object with which we interact, state institutions will assuredly
seek to monitor and discipline the personal, political, and economic
activities of the many. This prediction should not be controversial.
Political parties in power regularly use targeted voter suppression
technologies to gain partisan political advantage (Palast 2000; Norris
2014; Simon 2016). Police forces use technology to engage in ‘predictive
policing’ that disproportionately targets communities of colour (Jouvenal
2016; Winston 2018). State welfare agencies use technology to track and
restrict how food assistance money is spent or pension fraud or error
(Templeton 2016; UK Govern-ment Chief Scientiﬁc Adviser 2016). The Chinese
state is moving to a whole new level of state control with the creation of
a national reputation system ranking individuals based on their economic
and social status (Chinese State Council 2014). Altogether, recent history
gives us reason to expect that state interventions into the development of
blockchain technology are more likely to lead in a totalitarian rather than
democratizing direction." (
https://www.academia.edu/36871389/No_Gods_No_Masters_No_Coders_The_Future_of_Sovereignty_in_a_Blockchain_World
)

Discussion[edit
<https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/index.php?title=Future_of_Sovereignty_in_a_Blockchain_World&action=edit&section=12>
]

>From the conclusion, by Sarah and Ben Manski:

"Earlier we stated that as a still young technology, blockchain oﬀers
interpretive ﬂexibility. Yet as proposals become institutions,
interpretation comes under the inﬂuence of structural forces. Structures
possess within them powers that lean in some directions and not others. The
structures of blockchain technology, we have found, tend more toward more
distributed, democratized, and technologized sov-ereignties. Yet many of
these same tendencies can be—and are being—channelled and recast both by
corporate capital and states; actors that are well prepared and highly
incentivized to take advantage. Corporations in particular have both a
tem-poral advantage as early movers as well as the resources to hire
technologists and rent state oﬃcials in attempts to both code and regulate
the blockchain world of the near future. Against such advantages, we see
little likelihood of eﬀective dis-aggregated resistance by libertarian
proponents of individual sovereignty.Popular sovereignty, on the other
hand, may have a future. Cooperatives and democracy activists may ﬁnd
themselves capable of overcoming their early struc-tural disadvantages by
building a coalition of technologies and broader publics. As we have
repeatedly pointed out, much of the motivating ideology and daily practice
of blockchain coders is idealistic, utopian, decentralist, and cooperative.
Furthermore, many blockchain technologists became wealthy through early
investments in cryptocurrencies and are thus free of the dictates of wage
slavery. As the proximate constitutionalizers of the new blockchain world,
technologists are in a potentially determinative position and their
aﬃnities matter. Add in the strong desire for the kind of world society
that cooperatives are programming into their blockchain applications that
was articulated in the global democracy wave of 2008-2014, and we see that
a rising of global popular sovereignty may not be so improbable after all."

-- 
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