The division of labor vs disintermediation
I was talking with Sangwoo the other day and we got into the topic of philosophy. Back in his university days, he took the time to dig into Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. In his reading, he became captivated with one of Smith’s key concepts: the division of labor. This idea would lead him to see that we, and all the things with which we surround ourselves, are part of the same process. Sangwoo elaborated with a mundane yet pertinent example, his coffee mug. “How many people do you think put in effort to make this cup?” he asked. “I don’t know, pffff, thousands?” I answered, unsure of myself. Sangwoo’s guess? “At least a few million.” We would eventually settle that if one followed the production process for any object, the sequences and connections are virtually limitless.
I think the division of labor brings us to a good place because it gets us away from the commodity fetish and the attendant assumption that the thing itself bears the fruit of its own profit. This way, we remain cognizant that profit originates in the concealed labor process of the commodity’s production. Reification — the act of changing a process into a thing — appears in different forms however.
One of the central tenets of blockchain technology, as Lana Swartz (2018) explains, is disintermediation, or direct communication. The blockchain is intended to cut out the middle people in the process between the producer and the consumer. For example, if you write a book, the blockchain should presumably enable you to send it directly to a reader without having to go through the editor, publisher, distributor, book store, etc. In disintermediation, space seems to have been completely collapsed between the producer and the consumer: both engage one another directly [I’ve observed that in blockchain, scalability, while primarily a property of space, seems strictly related to temporal factors].
The division of labor reminds us that disintermediation does not entail a simplification of the labor process but rather a differently structured division of labor. While the blockchain disintermediates, it is not itself disintermediated from the process of its own production and ongoing maintenance. As Sangwoo pointed out, we cannot overlook the ongoing efforts and contributions of those making and sustaining the blockchain. The blockchain represents a restructuring of the division of labor, not its elision.
The division of labor is an interesting concept to play with because it can bring us towards other, perhaps more far-fetched conceptions of technology. I’m thinking here of the standard view that technologies advances and become increasingly complex, as though they were on a teleological — though always asymptotic — trajectory towards perfection. If we define technology as a socio-technical assemblage of objects, skills, and knowledges, we can then begin to demonstrate that in fact blockchain and, say, stone age technologies are not that different from one another in terms of complexity. Both technologies have dramatically different divisions of labor, while each will exhibit their own respective complexities. What separates these two technological eras is a long history not of advancement, but of restructuring.
