Blockchain & data justice. The political culture of technology

Blockchain is a distributed ledger technology arising from the world of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, which has been advocated as a disruptive and revolutionary innovation. Because of the peculiarity of its architectural technicalities, in fact, blockchain technology has seen a growth of its social applications in recent years and has gained the attention of a large variety of actors, interested in its potentiality for entering the social domain and enabling the creation of decentralized, horizontal and peer-to-peer networks. This thesis aims at studying the visions of the world surrounding the implementation of blockchain technology, by analyzing narratives and discourses emerging among those who create and use it. Based on a critical understanding of algorithms and technology as non-neutral and as subject to bias and pitfalls, this work focuses on the sociological and political significance of imagining a technology for the social and public good, posing a particular attention to developers and digital entrepreneurs’ understanding of sociality. Drawing on a one-year multi-sited fieldwork in Milan, London, Tallinn and the online sphere, this work combines a theoretical analysis with ethnographical insights that arise from participant observation and a number of interviews with individuals from the blockchain scene. By relying on a qualitative study that aims at researching the values and aspirations that are encoded in technology, I argue that blockchain social imaginary is embedded in neoliberal, technocratic visions of the world and that blockchainers’ understanding of society and social relations becomes tokenized and subject to mathematical simplifications. My argument develops in three phases: firstly, I show how blockchain works as a floating signifier and thus could be interpreted as a populist buzzword; secondly, I argue that blockchain is surrounded by regimes of truth regarding its disruptive potential that overlooks social dynamics complexity; thirdly, I show that blockchainers’ understanding of social good is based on metrics and competition, thereby reinforcing a number of neoliberal myths associated with the Californian Ideology. By showing the importance of integrating more sociological perspectives to the study of digital technology’s potential, this work exits the financial and informatics domain, merging previous studies on blockchain with a human rights-based approach that ground its roots on social justice theory.