Social Science Literature Summaries on Money, Crypto, and Blockchain (Part 2)

Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians, and Technologists Who Created Cryptocurrency by Finn Brunton (2019)

Brunton vividly paints a montage of the various projects, experiments, and subcultures that underwrote the pre-history of Bitcoin. From the early Extropians, a group that commits itself to develop knowledge and technology to improve the human condition, to the Cypherpunks, an early digital rights group that advocated for privacy-enhancing technologies for political change, Brunton maps how their visions of the future incited the development of digital cash.

Indeed, Bitcoin’s history is not complete without accounting for how the aspirations of these groups, resembling almost a science-fiction-like character that “made it possible to imagine a nearly inconceivable future and build instance of it now as an extreme investment vehicle” (p. 138). It is through Brunton’s work that we learn how the history of digital cash very much reads like a science fiction tale.

In particular, Brunton wants his readers to understand how money contains both a vision of the future and a theory of social organization. Referring to the concept of, “cosmogram” proposed by historian, John Tresch, Brunton argues that money is a cosmogram: it is “an object that contains a model of the universe and a plan for how to organize life and society accordingly” (p. 10).

A few things stand out about this book. As mentioned, Brunton complicates the history of cryptocurrencies by revisiting how specific branches of philosophical thought and their leading subcultures played a quintessential role in its realization. Take for example Extropianism — a philosophy that is predicated on improving the human condition through science and technology. Its corresponding practice, cryonics, the freezing of human bodies in the hope that scientific advancement will allow their revival in the future, rarely gets mentioned in blockchain literature. But these were the very movements that made it possible for thinking about how money could be transported into the future. Brunton is convincing in this regard. Their ideas animated the dreams and desires feeding into the actualization of cryptocurrency.

Brunton thoroughly explains some of the challenges that confronted the creation of truly autonomous digital cash systems (for instance, coordination, duplication, and adoption).

Overall, the text keeps the reader drawn in and engaged through a creative writing style, making this book a “fun read” for those who are sincerely up for the challenge. I say this because Brunton’s writing style is in spite of the playful style, still quite dense and sometimes challenging to follow. His chapters are peppered with complex philosophical concepts that sometimes divert attention from the historical aspects of the book. For instance, Brunton begins many of his chapters with a historical theme and then later diverts on a philosophical tangent. If you appreciate a text that conjoins philosophical and historical perspectives, then this a great introduction to the history of the subcultures and their visions that helped materialize the success of cryptocurrencies and blockchain.

The invisible politics of Bitcoin: governance crisis of a decentralized infrastructure by De Filippi and Loveluck (2016)

De Filippi and Loveluck examine the case of the Bitcoin block size dispute to argue how in fact, Bitcoin is not a neutral technology. The authors examine one technical dispute that erupted in the Bitcoin community during its earliest days (block-size dispute). In the aftermath of this conflict, the authors illustrate how it resulted in a small group of core developers becoming in charge of the entire Bitcoin protocol. As Bitcoin’s users exploded, a proposal to increase Bitcoin’s scalability emerged. It postulated that bitcoin’s block size needed to be increased in order to raise the number of transactions the network could process. From the start, many members of the community were outraged; increasing the block size inherently meant that Bitcoin would lose out on some of its securitization features. Others saw this as simply offensive because it went against Nakamoto’s vision of Bitcoin.

After a series of many prolonged and heated debates, and when still, no consensus could be reached among the members, a few of Bitcoin’s core developers decided to take charge of the project. This resulted in the introduction of and eventually the crystallization of a technocratic governance model. How is it that — a community which is entirely predicated on decentralization — allowed for a small handful of Bitcoin’s community members to take over the spotlight? What first may have appeared as a technical dispute, proved to be a political one, as power imbalances between different stakeholders eventually started forming. Indeed, this decision went against the entire logic and philosophy of how decentralized payment protocols were imagined operating. Even among those making these systems, rarely lead to producing decentralized much less egalitarian relationships between actors.

This work deserves praise for providing a real-life historical example that shows how technology, no matter how decentralized, “overtime still falls prey to the social, cultural and political pressures of the context in which it operates” (p. 17).

Do artifacts have politics? Winner (1980)

Core argument: This a text that often gets misinterpreted. People have misconstrued Winner’s argument, interpreting it as “ALL artifacts have politics”. This is incorrect; Winner doesn’t say that all artifacts have politics. He argues that the effects/consequences that arise from certain technologies depend on historical conditions. In other words, this means that some technologies will embody a certain kind of “politics” while other technologies have become so naturalized, that in fact it becoems difficult to recognize if there is a politic.

Winner makes a distinction between conditions that are internal to the workings of a given technical system and those that are external to it. He provides examples of various technical systems that initially may not explicitly express any form of political intent, but in reality, have been designed to produce concrete social consequences. This point is demonstrated using the parkways erected around Long Island by Robert Moses in the 1930s and the Introduction of the Mechanical Tomato Harvester in 1949. Namely, he discusses how Robert Moses Bridges is an example of a technology that has political qualities.

“Poor people and blacks, who normally used public transit, were kept off the roads because the twelve-foot tall buses could not get through the overpasses. One consequence was to limit access of racial minorities and low-income groups to Jones Beach, Moses’s widely acclaimed public park. Moses made doubly sure of this result by vetoing a proposed extension of the Long Island Railroad to Jones Beach.” (p. 124)

• Whether Moses actually designed the bridges with the intention to exclude people remains a focal point of contention in Science and Technology Studies (STS) debates.

Winner rejects what he calls “naïve technological determinism,” arguing that “certain technologies in themselves have political properties.” in two ways:

By decision — technology has the capacity to have political arrangements to it, but it doesn’t imply any particular political setup (i.e. automobiles, roads)

by necessity — certain technologies require or be strongly compatible with a particular political arrangement (i.e. nuclear power needs authoritative organization, solar power is more compatible with distributive arrangements)

When we talk about technologies, they mostly fall into “by necessity”, highly compatible with authorized, centralized managerial control. Winner suggests that when we are considering any technologies that we want to adopt we need to ask the following questions:

1) do we even adopt it in the first place?

2) What form should it take?

If the politics of technology are by necessity a certain way, he says that we should first ask ourselves, “should we even adopt it?”

If the technology allows for different ways to manifest it i.e. solar power (can have centralized and distributed) then the question is, “what form should it take?”

While some artifacts are widely believed to require social structures in which those can operate, others are thought to work well in conjunction with specific systems of power and authority. Winner states that certain technologies are inherently autocratic and must require particular social structures for their implementation (for example, the atom bomb).

Technology carries certain properties/effects that cause centralization, but this outcome is not always intended by designers. Winner argues that in the processes by which structuring decisions are made, different people are differently separated and possess unequal degrees of power and unequal levels of awareness. Winner suggests that we have to pay close attention to the properties of technologies and their meaning; technological innovations are similar to legislative acts in that they establish a framework for public order that can endure over many generations (p. 128).

What was Bitcoin, what will it be? The techno-economic imaginaries of a new money technology by Lana Swartz (2018)

Swartz identifies two main ideologies within Bitcoin: infrastructural mutualism and digital metallism.

Closer to libertarianism but also to classic economic liberalism, “digital metallism” is an ideology that believes that money supply should be determined by international currency markets rather than state policies, being free from state control. Swartz writes however that digital metallism does not reflect the diverse imaginaries and interests of Bitcoin.

The other imaginary, “infrastructural mutualism”, conceptualizes cryptocurrencies as a decentralized platform for moving money that can lead to more freedom of information, recognizing its potential use as an alternative to centralized banking. The author explains how these two distinct economic imaginaries influenced Bitcoin and have led to the rise of ideological contentions within the community.

The author concludes the article by identifying two possible visions for virtual currencies:

1) The Vampire Squid: Bitcoin disappearing into the global financial system

2) The Chthulucene: The manifestation and creation of new worlds

The politics of Bitcoin: software as right-wing extremism by David Golumbia (2016)

Golumbia argues that blockchain and cryptocurrencies are premised on extreme right-wing values both in their design and in their ideological constitution: “As they are currently configured, Bitcoin and the blockchain technology on which it rests satisfy needs that make sense only in the context of right-wing politics” (p. 12).

The argument goes that right-extremist ideas are now gaining more traction in the mainstream than before. He argues that their ideas are getting outside of their extremist context which they have traditionally been confined to. For example, he thinks that Bitcoin is being more and more endorsed and promoted by key extreme-right thinkers and figures.

Golumbia states that Bitcoin was created out of a reaction to current monetary policy by the Federal Reserve, Central Bank and fiat money. He argues that historically, critics of the Federal Reserve were far-right extremists such as John Birch Society and therefore any criticism of Central banking or current monetary structure is right-wing extremism. He proceeds to show how Bitcoin ideology is “cyberlibertarian” since its proponents believe that governments should not regulate the Internet. Golumbia is concerned that this ideology in practice serves corporations by empowering them more via deregulation. this is problematic Golumbia contends, since these companies are not accountable to anyone, hence disempowering users.

Golumbia doesn't really talk about blockchain as a data ledger system, but mostly focuses on Bitcoin and its currency aspect, tying it to right-wing extremism politics.