The paper I co-authored with @katyoj 'Blockchain Imaginaries and Their Metaphors' is available in #openaccess. It focuses on the performative role of #blockchain imaginaries and metaphors, which guide technologists, enthusiasts and adopters 🧵

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Available to students and staff at the University of Edinburgh.

RT @MGSchmelzer: The material dimensions of capitalism are staggering. In 2020, the amount of human-made mass exceeded for the first time….

This research was carried out as part of our work for the @articonf project, and is now published online in @SocEpistemology.

Blockchain technology expands computation’s universalising logic by laying claim to all those elements, and its protocol was designed to be their technical infrastructure.

Blockchain substances enable forms of money, its morphology represents an arena for power and politics, and its structure points to the social computation of commonly held ‘truth’.

The structural principle is associated with the truth medium, through which the science system deals with knowledge.

The morphological principle is associated with the power medium, through which the political system deals with consensus.

The substantial principle can be associated with the money medium, through which the economic system deals with scarcity.

We conclude by connecting these principles with Luhmann's notion of generalized symbolic media.

These make intelligible the work of cryptographic proofs, signatures and hashes in blockchain. Blockchain’s structural principle refers to cumulative, computationally verifiable and easily communicable (concise) “truths” or “facts".

The structural principle refers to the affordances of data structures in blockchain - the traces produces and maintain within these infrastructures. Some associated metaphors are block and chain, wallets, and transactions.

The morphological principle refers to visions of open networks without formal participation barriers. It supports the idea of blockchains as reflexive systems, collecting events and projecting them in identical fashion. It also enables the generation of consensus.

We associate this principle with three metaphors: work, trust and consensus.

The morphological principle refers to visions of network forms and dynamics, integrating a mixture between cooperation and competition.

This principle supports scarce resource allocation and the emergence of markets, digital currencies, and the incentive mechanisms guaranteeing the abundance of expensive computational hardware and electricity required by these infrastructures.

The substantial principle refers to blockchains as substance-bearing technologies, representing technological affordances using familiar materials as metaphors. We illustrate this principle with three metaphors: digital gold, ether, and gas.

We analyse three organising principles of blockchain imaginaries: substantial, morphological and structural.

The images of such communities require shared understandings of the novel, complex and counter-intuitive technological base of these decentralized technologically mediated spaces.