* PhD thesis: Disassembling the Trust Machine, three cuts on the political matter of blockchain. By Jaya Klara Brekke. Geography department of Durham University UK, 2019.

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Description

"Distributing Chains is a PhD research project by Jaya Klara Brekke and was driven by the question of what matters politically in blockchain technology? By “matters” what is meant is literally mattering as in making a material difference in terms of effects of blockchain. By “politically” what is meant is the mediation and resolution of incompatible positions and the process through which the possible and impossible are distributed across spaces and domains."

(http://distributingchains.info/)

Un the next, Chapter 2, I lay out the theoretical foundation for the thesis in more detail, introducing Barad’s onto-epistemology and discuss its merits as a basis for research on blockchain. I describe the theories and thinking informing the three ‘cuts’ I have taken in this thesis, discussing each in relation to debates in the literature. The debates that I address have a relatively wide range, from new materialism and animism to platform economics and political theory, so I briefly describe how and why I draw from such disparate sources and discuss the merits of doing so.

In Chapter 3 I describe and discuss the research methods and methodologies that I have employed in doing this research. The chapter introduces the research design and cases, the reasons for selecting these as well as the reasoning behind a case study approach. I discuss my positionality in the field and ethical issues arising from this particular research and positioning as a ‘critical insider’ in the field. I then describe the research phases and data gathering and the ways in which I went about analysing the data, and the limitations and scope of my particular methodological approach.

Apart from the extensive theoretical discussion in Chapter 2, Chapters 4, 5 and 6 form the main body of the thesis and comprise three empirical chapters that are shaped by my three ‘cuts’ in the field. Each of these is structured in a similar manner: I first introduce the chapter and the particular ‘cut’ to questions of the political. I then address aspects of the Bitcoin case study in the first half and the particular understanding of ‘blockchain’ that comes to matter through this cut. In the second half of the chapter I address aspects of the Ethereum case study as a generalisation of blockchain and the implications of that particular cut. Each of the chapters therefore addresses both case studies, approaching them through the insensible, sensibilities and the dissensible.

The main contribution of Chapter 4, titled A politics for the insensible, is to articulate and address the question limitations of a blockchain mode of determining trust and consensus. I do this firstly through a clarification of the very specific ways that ‘consensus’ is arrived at in Bitcoin through an arrangement of cryptographic proofs. The chapter in this sense looks to make specific what is otherwise framed in general terms, namely concepts of decentralisation, trust, consensus and autonomy. I aim to describe the very particular ways that ‘consensus’ is understood and achieved in blockchain, through what is called ‘proof-ofwork’ and other rules that form the consensus algorithm. I do this in order to be able to discuss how Bitcoin was suggested to have solved the problem of trust by introducing a decentralised architecture based on cryptography proofs. Because the architecture is based on cryptographic proof rather than needing to trust someone, it is claimed to be ‘trustless’. Through this discussion of the Bitcoin protocol, the main aim and achievement is to trace through these claims of trustlessness, and point to their precise limitations, such that it can be made clear for who and what exactly such an architecture can be understood as trustless. The second half of the chapter describes the Ethereum protocol and the ways in which it generalises the Bitcoin architecture, both in terms of the kind of data stored in the blockchain, but also the creation of value tokens as a means to coordinate computational resources. I then discuss the specifics of generalizing the conceptualisation of trust, and how it has informed the development of types of applications determined through algorithms designed to be beyond the control of humans. Here, I articulate limits to algorithmic modes of determinacy on the basis of Barad’s notions of multiple forms of determinacy (Barad, 2007, pp. 132-185) and Yusoff’s notion of the insensible (2014a). The contribution here is to shift the ground of debate and add to the literature that suggests that algorithmic forms of determinacy can be critically addressed without necessarily having to assume or reassert complete control or knowledge by humans (Kitchin, 2014; Seaver, 2014; Burrell, 2015; Amoore, 2016; Amoore and Raley, 2017). It therefore presents a useful ground from which to critically discuss blockchain and algorithms that does not immediately construct a competition for control between humans and machines.

The main contribution of Chapter 5, titled Blockchain sensibilities, is to articulate the specific sensibilities that hold the blockchain assemblage together and their specific pre-Bitcoin provenance in the political histories of network technologies. Explaining why and from where decentralised network projects came, the specific form of anti-authoritarianism that informs the sensibilities can be foregrounded, which also suggests a slightly different angle from which to understand the ‘disruptive’ potential of blockchain. I draw out this history to address, in particular, criticisms of blockchain as reproducing the logics of capitalism. I do not negate these, but draw on Gibson-Graham’s diverse economies approach (Gibson-Graham, 2008) to open up a space that exceeds questions of capitalism. By doing so, I articulate the specific computational affiliations of a blockchain sensibility which also point to the ways in which in particular Ethereum seeks to become a general platform for any potential economic, political or social system. By placing blockchain in the politicised histories of decentralised network technology rather than in and only in relation to questions of capitalism, the thesis suggests redrawing the political map of blockchain. This repositioning turns out to be hugely informative for understanding the particular aims and intentions of blockchain, in particular the attraction of developing code (Smart Contracts) and types of organisations (Decentralised Autonomous Organisations) that are beyond control. The concerns, I argue, pertain primarily to questions and concerns of network computation and information security practices, the aim being developing systems that cannot be targeted, controlled and shut down by any authority. In this sense, I am to draw out a ground from which to address the merits of blockchain that are not immediately concerned by and that exceed questions of capitalism as a way to carve out some forgotten political space.

The main contribution of Chapter 6, titled Dissensible matters, is to discuss the ways in which incompatible differences are resolved in and around a technology that was supposed to have solved consensus. I do this by tracing two major conflicts in Bitcoin and Ethereum. The socalled Bitcoin scaling conflict was a conflict over a technical issue of how to scale the Bitcoin network without compromising on decentralisation. The conflict brought to the foreground the ways in which protocols are or should be managed in a decentralised system, raising questions of balances of power across different actors and causing significant discussions about protocol governance and scaling that were to last several years. The Ethereum DAO exploit was a hack of the first explicit attempt at developing a Decentralised Autonomous Organisation (DAO) that would be controlled purely on the basis of its Smart Contract code and be beyond human control. A hacker exploited part of the contract code to siphon off large amounts of Ethereum cryptocurrency, ether, causing the Ethereum Foundation to enact what is called a ‘fork’ in the code – essentially creating a new version of Ethereum and records of events in which the hack had not taken place. This caused significant debate about the purpose of decentralised systems and the promise of trustlessness.

In this chapter, I introduce the concept of the dissensible, suggesting that dissensus is never finally resolved; its negotiation merely changes character. Such changes to the ways in which dissensus is resolved nevertheless matter, however, because they determine who or what has the capacity to take part in determining how dissensus is negotiated and resolved. The chapters are to some extent chronological in the sense that Chapter 4 discusses some of the pre-Bitcoin history of peer-to-peer in the ‘90s and early ‘00s, Chapter 5 addresses some of the determinacy that characterised the early years of blockchain in the years 2008 to 2016 while explaining the protocols and the ways in which this determinacy is encoded, and Chapter 6 describes two major crisis that caused rearticulations of such a determinacy in the years 2016 and 2017 and opened up the industry and efforts towards more sophisticated understandings of consensus protocols and the political.

Finally, in the concluding Chapter 7, I recap and reflect on the main contributions of each of the three onto-epistemological ‘cuts’ that I articulated and worked with in Chapters 4, 5 and 6. I outline the limitations of these approaches and further research that they open up. I also pick up on and discuss a thread that carries through each of these three main chapters, namely the question of limits, edges and relationships. If cryptographic proofs can determine trust in a given piece of data and decentralised network, it invites the question of the precise limits of such trust, what happens beyond its edges and how such a form of determinacy relates to other ways of determining things. The Disassembling the Trust Machine thesis is driven by the question of what matters politically in blockchain technology. The aim is to shift the preconditions of debate about the proposed disruption by blockchain for ‘legacy systems’.10 Blockchain technology is in part a proposal to resolve ‘the political’ through technical means: decentralised networks to solve the problem of authority; cryptography to solve the problem of systems integrity; game theory and incentive design to solve the problem of security and malicious behaviour. Involving political and economic dynamics in the protocol design has also opened up computational systems to political and economic dynamics. Without further ado, the in next chapter I describe the theoretical tools I have developed in order to disassemble the blockchain ‘trust machine’ and reassemble it again in three different ways."

(http://distributingchains.info/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/DisassemblingTrustMachine_Brekke2019.pdf)

Excerpts

Introduction

Jaya Klara Brekke:

"In this introduction, I first describe the three main ways I address the political in blockchain in what I describe as ‘cuts’, drawing in particular on philosopher Karen Barad’s ontoepistemology (Barad, 2007) and the political theory of Jacques Rancière (Rancière, 2006, 2010), and describe the main research questions that I look to answer. I then describe the broader context and importance of blockchain and the specific cases that I have worked with in the thesis. I finally give an outline of the thesis chapters and its overall structure before concluding.

The primary research question of this thesis draws together work by theoretical physicist and feminist philosopher Karen Barad and political theorist Jacques Rancière in order to ask what matters politically in blockchain? By ‘matters’, I refer to Barad’s understanding of the word as literally mattering as in making a material difference (2007, pp.132-185) and by ‘politically’ and I refer to Rancière’s notion of the political as the contestation and redistribution of sensibilities (Rancière, 2010, pp. 27–44).

The political theory of Rancière describes ‘the political’ as a moment of disruption and redistribution to a given sensibility. By sensibility, he refers to a common sense understanding of what matters, what is right or wrong, who belongs or doesn’t, what is desirable or undesirable and so on. In this sense, the research question addresses the ways that blockchain distributes and redistributes political sensibilities in ways that come to matter also materially.

In this thesis I use these two theorists to also answer this question by articulating three approaches to the political in blockchain: the insensible, the sensible and the dissensible. I elaborate on Rancière’s conception of the political by articulating my own concept of the dissensible, as a disruption to a given sensibility and the question of incompatible sensibilities. I elaborate further, raising the issue of the insensible, drawing on work by geographer of the inhuman, Kathryn Yusoff (Yusoff, 2013a), discussing the necessary limits of any given sensibility, of knowledge of what matters, as a problem for the preconditions of the political.

Here, I briefly describe the more specific sub-questions of my research that have informed these three approaches. Bringing together Barad and Rancière in particular allows for an approach to the political in blockchain that crosses material, technical, social, political and economic distinctions. This is the main contribution of the thesis, but it also presents some limitations. Because significant work goes into analysing and shifting the onto-epistemological terms of debate, there is little scope to address the further implications of such a shift. This means that the thesis is primarily focused on epistemological and ontological questions of the two case studies, and perhaps more straightforward analyses of their immediate political implications are not addressed. For example, the different uses of Bitcoin as a currency and payment system or Ethereum as a protocol and platform, and the effects and implications of specific applications, are beyond the immediate scope of this thesis. Instead, the focus is on the protocols themselves, the communities developing blockchain projects, and the ideas, experiences and contexts that inform them as a means to clarify epistemological and ontological understandings of blockchain and shift the terms of critique, debate and development.

Three sub-questions guided the research and led to this particular theoretical approach and a focus on the protocols themselves and developer communities, histories and contexts:

1. Which are the active ‘mediators’ in the blockchain assemblage, what differences do they produce and what political effects do they have?

With this question, the aim has been to find out which aspects of ‘blockchain’ matter in terms of determining the political effects, and therefore also pointing to sites that might be done differently. Blockchain is positioned as a ‘disintermediating’ technology, meaning eliminating ‘mediation’ such that, for example, in the case of Bitcoin, transactions take place directly between people rather than via a bank or payments company. One of the primary aims is to get rid of the need for ‘trusted third parties’, replacing these with a peer-to-peer network protocol. I have taken a critical approach to such claims of ‘disintermediation’ and instead understand the protocol to be a form of mediation in its own right, organising relationships and determining ways in which such a network might witness, authorise and execute a transaction. And so this question was designed in order to find out the particular forms of mediation taking place through the protocol design. I have also taken a critical perspective on the separation between technical and social concerns, conceptualising blockchain as an ‘assemblage’ comprising code, hardware, people, promotional material, ideas, technical papers and so on, instead of a coherent technical ‘thing’. Retaining a certain openness to what comprises blockchain exactly came to make sense analytically, in particular because of its decentralised nature, where the protocol itself and, for example, what comprises ‘Bitcoin’ exactly, became contested (see Chapter 6). This research question has been informed by science and technology studies, literature and media theory that conceptualise of infrastructure and technologies as enacting an immanent politics, being an expression and continuous execution and enforcement of a politics in its own right, by shaping a priori what is possible or not and for who (Feenberg, 1999; P. N. Edwards, 2003; Galloway, 2004; Latour, 2005). However, there are aspects of network infrastructures and algorithmic operations that exceed intention, control and full oversight (Seaver, 2014; Burrell, 2015; Amoore, 2016). In order to theorise such aspects, I draw on Yusoff’s notion of the insensible. This highlights and helps make sense of blockchain as a proposition for a technology initially beyond control by specific authorities, but eventually also humans and human sensibilities more generally (see Chapter 4). The insensible then forms the first cut on the political of blockchain.

2. How do the developers and users of blockchain understand, represent and seek to shape the political implications of the technology in terms of decentralisation, trust and consensus?  

With this question, the aim has been to find out the ideas and assumptions informing the design of blockchain protocols. Concepts and terms such as ‘decentralisation’, ‘consensus’ and ‘trust’ are widely used across different blockchain projects – but it is not always clear whether the concepts are referring to a technical architecture, social conditions or beliefs, or intended effects. This question was in part informed by the idea of translation as employed by N. Katherine Hayles (2005, pp. 89-116), focusing my attention towards qualitative changes that happen in the ‘translation of worldviews’ when, for example, technological specifications are rearticulated as socio-political process, or conversely when socio-political ideas are encoded into technical architectures (for example ‘decentralisation’).2 But Hayles’ notion of translation seemed to imply a more linear, linguistically informed, located and deliberate process than seemed to be happening and so I later shifted this theoretical approach towards Barad’s notion of onto-epistemology. Here, concepts are understood as part of assemblages and apparatuses in ways that do not assume a linguistic privilege in determining matters. This has been important in order to make sense of the fact that a given developer’s intentions with a specific protocol design does not fully determine how it played out in any simple, linear transfer of idea to materialisation (discussed in Chapter 4). Concepts of decentralisation, trust and consensus would nevertheless in themselves continue to mobilise efforts to build, maintain and correct – such that, for example, engineers, mathematicians and so on develop new consensus algorithms in order to redress centralising tendencies in a given protocol design. This seemed to point to a more general sensibility in blockchain informing a tacit agreement about some overall desirable characteristics and properties that indeed cut across other distinctions between people and projects. Regardless of the confusion or broadness of the use of concepts like decentralisation, trust and consensus, it was clear that these are powerful in mobilising people and efforts to build, maintain and correct for in blockchain. This second question has led to draw the particular cut of the sensible, understood in the sense of Rancière, to form a distinct blockchain sensibility that holds a ‘blockchain assemblage’ together as a recognisable field despite its broad appeal, explaining more specifically the kinds of ‘disruption’ proposed.

3. What are the political differences between blockchain-based developments, and where and how are these expressed?

(E.g. in the code itself, in the organisational structure of the developer community, amongst the user-base or elsewhere?)

With this research question, the aim has been to find out the ways in which political differentiation takes place within and amongst blockchain-based projects. My intention has been to trace how and through which forms such differentiation is enacted, with the idea that this might explain firstly what matters politically to different projects, thereby giving an overview of the understandings, theories and politics informing blockchain projects, and secondly the ways that such ideas were being materialised – whether in the code, coding process, the company/organisational structure or deployment or otherwise. This question has been informed by political theory defining the political in terms of the possibility of dissensus, (incompatible differences about what matters) and the necessary negotiation and settlement of these drawing on Rancière and Mouffe in particular (Mouffe, 1993, 2005; Rancière, 2006, 2010). These theoretical approaches to the political have suggested that a suitable strategy for understanding ‘the political’ in blockchain would be to look for sites of deliberate differentiation, but also, and in particular, moments of disagreement and incompatible positions and the ways in which these are resolved.

This final question then led me to articulate the concept of the dissensible as the third cut on the political in blockchain, and a way to describe the ongoing potential for incompatible sensibilities to arise. Through Barad, such questions of the insensible, sensibilities and the dissensible gains material weight and becomes part of how things are made to matter – mattering politically, as well as materially. Barad, theorising at the level of quantum physics experimentation, situates ontological dynamics in relation to sensing apparatuses (Barad, 2007, pp. 97–130). Her ontoepistemology describes sensing devices and beings as not only entailing a recognition of some external thing, but in fact is part of determining matters – making determinate what might otherwise be in an indeterminate state of potential (ibid.). She argues that this dynamic takes place by and through all manner of determining sensibilities; that is to say that not only humans determine what matters and how things come to matter (Barad, 2007, pp. 132–186). Barad, then, becomes a means to acknowledge non-human sensibilities in determining matters, such that not only humans are understood to be involved in creating material, nor political realities. This proves effective in particular for approaching the proposition of blockchain as an algorithmic means for determining things, lending some openness to such a proposition, while also giving tools for critically examining it from the perspective that there is nothing necessary, nor inevitable, about algorithmic modes of determination.

Disassembling the Blockchain Trust Machine

Contents

Description

Contents

Excerpts

Introduction

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