UC Santa Barbara

How do distributed ledger technologies, blockchain and post-blockchain systems, shape visions of the future, and how do these visions in turn influence the construction of new technologies? This question is global in nature as technologies and the technologists who create them are working within networks that defy geographic boundaries. Similarly, this research builds upon the work of scholars in several disciplines outside of global studies, including anthropology, sociology, economics, organizational studies, STS, and critical accounting. I make interdisciplinary use of theories of materiality, organization, accounting, agency, innovation, gender, and social movements to comparatively analyze how distributed ledgers are contributing to global political economic change, and toward what end. My research examines the political economy of distributed ledger technologies through ethnographic interviews (Appendix 3), future scenario building and discourse analysis. In the process, I grapple with the methodological challenges posed by studying global socio-technological changes in real time. My dissertation thesis includes chapters on an emergent technological commonwealth, applications of blockchain technology, positive and negative implications for sovereignty in blockchain-based futures, gendered technology, new forms of value accounting, and competing socio-technical imaginaries. Each chapter focuses on an aspect of the complex interaction between emergent technology, infrastructures, human behavior and imagination. A particular contribution of my research shows how technologists, cooperatives, and ordinary people are working together toward the creation of a post-capitalist ‘technological commonwealth’ enacted with advanced exchange, communication, and governance technologies. I identify the affordances of distributed ledger technology that open up new possibilities of organization, cooperation and governance. However, the technologies enable more than one possible future and my research makes clear there are competing versions of the future being constructed at this moment. Which world is birthed will be articulated in the conjuncture of technological agency and social movements. Whether, individuals, nation-states, corporations, technologists or communities are empowered will depend heavily on the design choices that are made in the next few years and on the path dependencies, and political dimensions of the policies, practices, applications, and institutions created surrounding this technology. A strong alliance is necessary between technologists and the commons movement to build the next system beyond capitalism.