<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small">Dear all,<br><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small">A call for papers for a special issue of <br>"Engaging Science, Technology, and Society" (eSTS), a new open access journal of the Society for Social Studies of Science:<b><br></b><b><br></b><b>Demystifying Blockchain Through an STS Lens: Challenges and Opportunities of a New Infrastructure for the Commons.<br></b><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small"><br>“The reward of labour is life. Is that not enough?”<br>William Morris (1834-1896)<br><br>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.<br><br>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).<br><br>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.<br><br>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.<br><br>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.<br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small"><br></div>Read more here: <a href="http://estsjournal.org/announcement/view/6">http://estsjournal.org/announcement/view/6</a></div><br></div><br></div>