PhD Thesis: Disassembling the Trust Machine, three cuts on the political matter of blockchain by Dr Jaya Klara Brekke, 2019, Durham University Geography Department, UK.
Disassembling the trust machine, three cuts on the political matter of blockchain
Introduction
Blockchain technology is, in part, a proposal to resolve ‘the political’ through technical means: decentralised networks to solve the problem of authority; cryptography to coordinate andsecure the network; and game theory and incentive design to solve network behaviour. This PhD thesis draws on theoretical work by Karen Barad (2007) and Jacques Rancière (Rancière, 2010) to ask the question of what matters politically in blockchain technology – both in the sense of matter as becoming material of a new mediation of the political, but alsomattering in the sense of being of political importance to engineers, developers andcommunities forming around blockchain as a potential.
Rather than treating blockchain as a coherent thing to be either celebrated or criticised, this thesis proposes and attempts to drawout the ways in which the potentials of blockchain are negotiated as part of its political effects, looking towards these negotiations to understand how political differences are made andsought materialised.
Three approaches to the political are articulated to analyse Bitcoin and Ethereum as case studies and shift their terms of debate. Firstly, addressing the question of algorithmic determinacy, an approach is proposed for critically understanding a blockchainproposition that does not immediately revert to a competition of control between ‘human’ and‘machine’ through the notion of the insensible, drawing on work by geographer of the in human Yusoff (2013a). Secondly, drawing on political theorist Rancière (2010) a particular blockchain sensibility is articulated, addressing the question of the particular kind of ‘disruption’ that blockchain presents. Its specific provenance in political histories of decentralised networkcomputation opens up political significance beyond its intersections with financial capitalism. Finally, addressing the question of blockchain as a resolution to the political, the thesis introduces the concept of dissensible as an ongoing potential for incompatible sensibilities and their negotiation.
Table of Contents
1 Introduction
1.1 Three ‘cuts’ on the political in blockchain ............................................3
1.2 A trustless world: context and cases ..................................................6
1.3 Outline of the thesis .............................................................................10
2 The insensible, sensible and dissensible
2.1 Meeting the blockchain halfway ...........................................................18
2.1.1 Onto-epistemological approaches ...................................................19
2.2 The insensible .......................................................................................22
2.2.1 Determinate and emergent.............................................................23
2.2.2 New materialisms .......................................................................... 28
2.3 The sensible...........................................................................................33
2.3.1 Disruption and redistribution..........................................................34
2.3.2 Diverse economies .........................................................................39
2.4 The dissensible......................................................................................42
2.4.1 Dissensus protocol ...........................................................................43
2.5 Conclusion .............................................................................................47
3 Research methods
3.1 Research design and positionality .......................................................52
3.1.1 Research design: case studies .......................................................53
3.1.2 Ethics and positionality ...................................................................56
3.2 Data collection and analysis ................................................................58
3.2.1 Empirical phase 1: sense-checking the cases ..............................59
3.2.2 Empirical phase 2: technical understanding .................................61
3.2.3 Empirical phase 3: verifying descriptions and findings................63
3.2.4 Data analysis ...................................................................................64
3.3 Conclusions and methodological limitations.......................................67
3.3.1 Methodological limitations ...............................................................68
4 A Politics for the Insensible
4.1 Replacing authority with cryptographic proofs...................................73
4.1.1 Cryptographic proofs in Bitcoin ......................................................74
4.1.2 Determinacy – trustless perfection and mushy humans..............83
4.1.3 Emergence – a node is not just a node .........................................88
4.2 Algorithmic animism .............................................................................93
4.2.1 The Ethereum architecture ........................................................... 95
4.2.2 Non-human determinacy ...............................................................102
4.2.3 Non-human affinities .......................................................................110
4.3 Conclusions............................................................................................113
5 Blockchain sensibilities
5.1 Why decentralisation?............................................................................117
5.1.1 Disruption: networks vs. authorities................................................118
5.1.2 What came to matter........................................................................120
5.1.3 From disruption to redistributing the sensible...............................130
5.2 Decentralisation generalised................................................................138
5.2.1 Platformising decentralisation..........................................................140
5.2.2 Tokenised decentralisation..............................................................154
5.3 Conclusion..............................................................................................162
6 Dissensible matters
6.1 Bitcoin and the matter of dissensible decentralisation........................167
6.1.1 Governing open protocols..................................................................168
6.1.2 The Bitcoin scaling conflict................................................................174
6.1.3 Decentralisation politicised................................................................179
6.2 Ethereum and forking as a dissensus mechanism.................................182
6.2.1 Forking as dissensus mechanism.......................................................183
6.2.2 The Ethereum DAO exploit.................................................................185
6.2.3 Integrating social consensus..............................................................191
6.3 Conclusions...............................................................................................197
7 Conclusion: reassembling the trust machine
7.1 Determinacy, trust and autonomy..........................................................203
7.2 Decentralisation and authority...............................................................206
7.3 Dissensus and indeterminacy.................................................................210
7.4 Limits, edges and relationships..............................................................214
7.5 Scope and further research....................................................................217
Bibliography.........................................................................................................221