Presentation delivered at ARNIC USC, January 24th, 2019. Among the digital agoras of the Internet, one in particular defies that pervasive dreamless state of politics. Blockchain enthusiasts not only are eagerly engaged in a lively debate over the future of society, they are also actively pursuing their collective dreams. They seek as much to remake the institutions central to modern society, as to embody a new kind of public digital freedom. However, in the pursuit of their dream, blockchain enthusiasts are constrained by the harsh reality of everyday choices. In those choices, they are forced to interact with current organizations and institutions. A dialogue is already developing between blockchain more radical proposals and traditional government institutions, as less radical visions are more and more also populating the blockchain space. So, despite the naive discourse of disregard of the State that blockchain utopia seems to cling to, their solutions to their everyday legitimacy and due process problems may lead to interesting new ways of organizing representation and dialogue in collective decision-making. We should therefore look carefully into those initiatives and try to evaluate them for what they are: a laboratory for new ways in which political collective action can take place.

1. Blockchain for Policy
A Pragmatic Assessment
Gabriel Laender
at ARNIC USC
January 24th, 2019

2. introduction
the promise
the reality
impact
overview

3. introduction
A Pragmatic Perspective

4. political views are still
framed in the
Procrustean Bed
of left and right
ideology choices that
relate to dilemmas of the
beginning of the
industrial age

5. those choices create a
fictional world
disconnected from real
life dramas

6. that disconnection
disengages
people from politics

7. By adopting new utopias that
replace the outdated left and
right ideologies, blockchain
tinkering is refreshingly
detached of traditional
institutional fetichism

8. But blockchain utopias may have
replaced the old vices for new
kinds of fetichism

9. We should therefore focus
on the tinkering, not on
the utopias, to grasp
true contributions to
modern political dilemmas

10. blockchain projects are a
laboratory of institutions
compatible with XXI century’s
dilemmas
assumption

11. introduction
the promise
the reality
impact
overview

12. the promise
Decentralization Utopia

13. In 2008, a broad scheme to manipulate credit brought
a crisis of trust
that lead to one of the worst economic crisis in history

14. At that same time, a group of digital activists (nicknamed
cypherpunks) deluded with Internet's turn into a
means of command and control by governments and corporations,
received a proposal of
a peer-to-peer electronic cash system, with
"no central authority"

15. Even authorship as an
authority argument was
removed from Bitcoin. The
proposal was written under
the now famous pseudonym
of Satoshi Nakamoto. The
pseudonym account was last
used in 2011.

16. that same idea of
decentralization (absence of
central authority) was
expanded in the so-called
blockchain 2.0
projects, the most prominent
of which is Ethereum

17. decentralization in
blockchain 2.0 projects
is intended to be
not only of value, but of
programmable transactions
known as
smart contracts

18. led to blockchain projects
for decentralized:
• organizations (DAOs)
• property (cryptoassets)
• identity
• commercial applications
(dApps)
• among others
smart contracts

19. introduction
the promise
the reality
impact
overview

20. the reality
Institutional Recombination

21. steam powered factory
factory design is dependent on
the machine

22. electricity
powered factory
factory design is dependent on
the line of production

23. …the true work of
innovation is not
coming up with
something big and
new, but instead
recombining things
that already
exist.
Brynjolfsson, Erik. The Second
Machine Age: Work, Progress, and
Prosperity in a Time of
Brilliant Technologies (p. 78).
W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle.

24. technology -> recombination
innovation
->

25. hold that thought and let’s
talk about this guys ideas…

26. Anthony Giddens

27. 1990

28. symbolic tokens
expert systems
disembedding
mechanisms}

29. “disembedding” means
the “lifting out” of
social relations from
local contexts of
interaction and their
restructuring across
indefinite spans of
time-space.

30. disembedding mechanisms
as time-machines
they remove social relations from
space (location) and time

31. there is room for
innovation by
recombination of space
and time in social
relations

32. let’s see if
blockchain can
give us one
example…

33. • no owner
• no legal entity
• kept by some of the world’s top talent
(who are financially compensated)
• pays things (not people) for infrastructure

34. introduction
the promise
the reality
impact
overview

35. impact
Policy as Recombination of
Space and Time

36. ICT to tinker
with space-time
disembedment

37. digital citizenship
fluid property
algorithmic regulation
…