Toward a Minor Tech:Inte

Blockchains otherwise

Blockchains draw everything they touch into a market logic. Is resistance possible? Activist and artistic engagements with blockchain technology point to (at least) four different sets of tactics that aim to subvert this affordance of the technology. The first is part of an accelerationist logic: riding the waves of capital until capitalism finally crashes, funding alternative values with whatever profit was accrued while it lasted. The artwork Terra0 could be an example of this logic. Connecting a forest to a blockchain, the project gives the forest agency to sell its logs and buy more land to expand itself. Growth logic reappropriated for nature. Or as Jaya Klara Brekke puts it "tap the end of capitalism for those funds you will need in order to imagine new worlds" (2022)

The second are part of prefigurative politics, which David Graeber describes as "the idea that the organizational form that an activist group takes should embody the kind of society we wish to create” (2013). Building alternative blockchain systems, often in the form of decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs, that perform a different kind of politics and social organization, for example cooperativism or self-organized art funding. For example DisCO, a distributed cooperative organisation inspired by feminist economics that thinks about ways of making visible care work among other work in collaborative environments.

Then, there are those that explore how blockchain’s logics can be subverted to make space – however minor – for different ways of relating in non-financial and more-than-human ways. To explore what this might mean, I've been inspired by Patricia de Vries' take on plot work as an artistic praxis (2022) that builds on decolonial theorist Sylvia Wynter's description of “the plot system” that represented small, imperfect corners of relative self-determination within the larger context of colonial plantations (1971, 96). De Vries asks how artistic work, implicated as it is in institutional and capitalist logics, can

However, these tactics hinge on the assumption that the technology is here to stay in a meaningful way in the foreseeable future. If blockchain-based tokenization represents the next phase of global capitalism, these might be life-saving tactics. It is true that no technology ever really goes away, but what can be done before it possibly become the dominant operational mode? There is subversive agency to be claimed in that process, both from within – e.g. how can blockchains tokenize in a way that reflects entanglement – as well as from without – e.g. which areas of life should be protected from tokenization? Right now, blockchain systems are still somewhat niche and there is still time to take a stand from without. Perhaps another tactic should also be explored: how to brace fragile life-sustaining elements against capture by blockchain’s logics?