Toward a Minor Tech:Gloerich5000
Toward the new mythologies of the DAO-plot. A reading of blockchain through the decolonial thought of Sylvia Wynter
“Human beings are magical.” (Wynter ”The Pope must have been drunk” 35)
How may the unfathomable mystery of life entangled with more-than-human others be centred in activist translocal organising? Specifically, how may this be done while the datafying governance systems – such as blockchains – that permeate contemporary societies continue to gain ground for “the capitalization of life without limit” (Couldry & Mejias ”The cost of connection” 3)? In this article, I propose that reading blockchain affordances, practices, and thought through the decolonial work of Sylvia Wynter can offer a new understanding of the connections between historical colonialism and the data colonialism that researchers identify in blockchain-based systems, as well as shine a light on ways to undermine, resist, decentre, or subvert this predicament.
While scholars like Olivier Jutel, Peter Howson, and Jillian Crandall perform much needed research on the colonial dimensions and effects of blockchain practices, particularly in the Global South (Jutel, Olivier; Howson; Crandall), there is a lack of theoretical exploration of the similarities between historical and blockchain-based data colonialism. Work on blockchain or crypto colonialism – the terms are hard to delineate and are often used interchangeably1 – is often usefully framed through Couldry and Meijas’ theory of data colonialism, which states that data colonialism creates “parallels with historic colonialism’s function within the development of economies on a global scale, its normalization of resource appropriation, and its redefinition of social relations so that dispossession came to seem natural (emphasis in original)” (”Data colonialism” 339). The work on blockchain colonialism shows how it continues fulfilling this function in the process of the capitalisation of life by means of a new technology. However, I propose that laying Sylvia Wynter’s theories, which explain in detail the logics through which historical colonialism functioned, side by side with blockchain projects that can be seen as reproducing data colonialist processes, reveals interesting nuances and expansions to how Couldry and Meijas’s data colonialism takes shape in blockchain technology.
With regards to the theme of this issue, Wynter’s theories also offer inroads to thinking about what a minor tech might be like in the context of blockchain colonialism. Fundamentally, she explains that on plantations, there were also plots: small economically valueless pieces of land with which enslaved people were made to sustain themselves. Beyond sources of food, plots were also relatively autonomous spaces, became practice grounds for alternative social relations and offered the sparks needed to light the flames of hopes and dreams toward a different life. The kind of hopes and dreams that stand at the start of resistance (Wynter ”Novel and history”) against the ongoing legacy of colonialism in the oppressive systems of knowledge and power it produced and fine-tuned throughout the centuries. The dominant narrative of what constitutes human life was produced by the exclusionary categorisations of Western science since the Enlightenment and universalised Western Man. Wynter’s proposal for thinking the human and life differently, starts with the realisation that Western Man is a story that we have been told, and that for human life to be different, we need to develop different stories about the meaning, character, and origin of life: we need different mythologies (Wynter ”Unsettling the coloniality of being”).
To explore what this might mean in the context of artistic and activist blockchain practices, I've been inspired by Patricia de Vries’ idea of “plot work as an artistic praxis” (de Vries n.p.). De Vries asks how artistic work, implicated as it is in capitalist logics, can perform plot work to create space for relating differently in the context of the exploitations of those dominant logics. In the second half of this article, I explore work that aim to subvert blockchain’s colonial affordances to make space for different ways of relating in non-financial and more-than-human ways. Specifically, I look to the work of artists, activists, and theorists Ruth Catlow and Penny Rafferty who explore how DAO’s, or Decentralised Autonomous Organisations, might become tools for resistance in their edited book Radical Friends: Decentralised Autonomous Organisations and the Arts (Catlow & Rafferty). Particularly, I argue that their work can be seen as a response to Wynter’s call for the establishment of new mythologies and auto-instituting practices. Catlow and Rafferty’s DAO-work builds new worlds through magic and prefiguration that bear striking resemblance to Wynter’s plots and, as the quote in the epigraph of this article reminds us, the inconceivability of life.
Historical colonialism and blockchain colonialism
Sylvia Wynter writes that the West’s colonisation of the Caribbean lays at the foundations of the emergence of capitalism. Western colonisers reduced the people they enslaved to labour and the nature they encountered to arable land (Wynter ”Novel and history” 99). The places they reached were seen as nothing more than a blank slate easily capturable by a system of private ownership unfamiliar to the indigenous communities living off the land. At the same time, enslaved people were reduced to a dehumanised asset functioning as a cog in the machinery of early global capitalism. Both human and nature were integral in the process of extraction of value back to the West, but both were treated without regard for their survival except in their one-dimensional purpose as an individually replaceable resource for profit on the market in the form of labour and land. As nature and indigenous people made way for plantations, the value of harvested crops turned from something that could be eaten by the people that cultivated it – use value – to something that could be exchanged for money on the market – exchange value. To Wynter the emporium and the imperium come together on the plantation: domination through marketisation, marketisation through domination (Ibid. 96).
Mirroring the role of historical colonialism in the establishment of early capitalism, data colonialism is the process through which data readies that which it represents for capitalist appropriation and extraction. By facilitating and naturalising the production and capture of ever-newer forms of data, data colonialism is able to find corners of of life that have not yet been capitalised upon (Nick Couldry & Ulises A Mejias ”Data colonialism” 339-343), or what they call the “double process of renewing colonialism and expanding capitalism” in data colonialism (Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias ”The cost of connection” 188). Couldry and Mejias warn against the role of data colonialism in the emergence of a new form of capitalism, one characterised by “the capitalization of life without limit” (Nick Couldry & Ulises A Mejias ”The cost of connection” 3). The appropriation of nature and people that Wynter described in historical colonialism are renewed in the appropriation of “human life through extracting value from data” (Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias ”The cost of connection” 188). By focussing on the quantification of social life and the role of this datafication in the renewal of colonialism and the expansion of capitalism, Couldry and Mejias show the devastating effects for the possibility of just social relations and self-determination (Ibid. 188-91).
Blockchain-based systems have been shown to proliferate the logics of data colonialism. They ready uncaptured territories of life for continuously expanding value extraction – a form of “digital frontierism” (Thatcher, O’Sullivan, & Mahmoudi 992) that in the early days of the technology spawned goldrush metaphors and analogies, such as the ‘mining’ of Bitcoin in the unregulated ‘Wild West’ (Maurer, Nelms, & Swartz 262; Maurer & Swartz 222) that can be seen as politically revealing. The various forms of tokenisation that take place on blockchains can turn the things they represent or contain in their metadata – votes, stakes, access rights, personal data, etc – into trade-able items that can be controlled in new ways through distributed governance structures. While this is seen by many as an opportunity to democratise, it does not necessarily have this effect. For example, blockchain technology has been forced onto vulnerable communities such as refugees who have no real choice but to give away their personal data to be stored in immutable systems in exchange for basic necessities – data which may be capitalised upon in unforeseeable ways in the future (Howson ”Climate crises” 4-5; Howson ”Crypto-giving” 814-815). Through its proposed and real use in (social) governance systems – in places often deemed underdeveloped from a Western perspective (Crandall 286-88), but also more generally, for example in blockchain-based ID systems, supply chain transparency systems, or dating and consent apps – blockchain technology represents an “emerging cartography of control” that is always looking for a new frontier to map (Jutel 3). This often happens under the guise of lofty societal goals, such as the development of solutions against climate change that have led to projects like Nemus*1* and Moss*2* that tokenise pieces of, for example, the Amazon rainforest to be sold as NFTs. They continue the rarity economy that NFT collectibles propagated, in which rare characteristics such as caves or waterfalls might increase the value of a piece of land, and are governed from afar by stakeholders in a DAO. Just like land and labour in historical colonialism, these tokenized representations of the world are abstracted assets that promise a future stream of income that care little about the survival of the thing they represent (Juárez). Despite claims about solving climate change, the rainforests themselves only become meaningful in those DAOs if they produce monetary value for their stakeholders. These projects exemplify the way in which blockchain colonialism expands on data colonialism by introducing novel governance systems that are embedded even more intrinsically in the logics of economic exchange, making possible further alienation from the nature and life at hand.
*1*https://nemus.earth/.
*2*https://nft.moss.earth/.
Footnotes
1 I will use ‘blockchain colonialism’ here because it is the broadest term, and for the purposes and scope of this article, I will not go into detail with regards to how different applications of the technology – cryptocurrencies, NFTs, DAOs, DeFi, ReFi, etc – relate to the term differently.