Toward a Minor Tech:Gloerich5000
Toward the new mythologies of the DAO-plot. A reading of blockchain through the decolonial thought of Sylvia Wynter
Keywords: blockchain, colonialism, plot, art, DAOs, prefigurative politics
Abstract: 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. The concept of data colonialism offers useful starting points for the theorisation of the way in which blockchain systems renew colonial relations and expand the capitalisation of life. However, I show that the affordances of blockchain technology also call for expansions and nuances to Couldry and Mejias’ concept, particularly on the way colonial orders of knowledge and value are intertwined in the technology. Additionally, I explore Wynter’s description of plots as places where resistance might take root through alternative mythologies about life and by offering a space to practice different social relations. I then show how countercultural DAO practices can be seen as what Patricia de Vries terms “plot work as artistic praxis”.
“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 (Couldry & Mejias ”Data colonialism” 339-343), or what they call the “double process of renewing colonialism and expanding capitalism” in data colonialism (Couldry & 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” (Ibid. 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” (Ibid. 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 Nemus2 and Moss3 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.
The invention of Man and the reinvention of truth
Besides the commodification of life as a colonial process, Wynter also exposes the role of humanistic knowledge systems in the construction of an exploitable less-than-human Other. This knowledge system takes the biological and economic character of Western Man and universalises it to stand in for all of humanity, for Man,4 and Wynter shows that this logic still dominates contemporary societies. To understand how this exclusionary knowledge system emerged, Wynter looks to Renaissance humanism and its invention of Man as a secularised rational Man that is subject to the state primarily, rather than solely to the divine that dominated the middle ages. This newly intellectual and civilized Man was contrasted by the constructed irrational, uncivilized, savageness of the colonial Other (”Unsettling the coloniality of being” 296), who as a result were not included in the category of human. However the secularisation5 that took place as part of the invention of Man was only partial at this point, and the process continued through the centuries. The scientific developments of the Enlightenment evolved and updated Man to understand it in fundamentally biological and economic terms. Here, Man emerges out of the order of nature and the market. Newly discovered universal laws of nature, offered biologically essentialised proofs for the distinctions between Man and Other, and lay the groundwork for the linear and teleological understanding of evolution and eugenicist theories of race established in the 18th and 19th century. Entangled with this history is the unfolding capitalist mode of production, which brought with it eventually the figure of Homo Economicus, i.e. the rational Man in the free market (Wynter ”Unsettling the coloniality of being” 282, 317). This bio-economic version of Man persists until today, Wynter explains: Western knowledge systems still overrepresent Western Man and universalise it, invisiblising and making unworthy of humane treatment those that do not fit this narrow mould (Ibid. 264). This process of colonial power relations reproducing themselves after historical colonialism into contemporary forms of domination and exploitation in the name of capitalism is what Aníbal Quijano calls the “coloniality” of power (Quijano 171).
This interplay between coloniality and the expansion of capitalism into new domains through contemporary datafication practices is a central feature in Couldry and Mejias’ thinking on data colonialism’s “distortions of knowledge through power” (”The decolonial turn” 795). Much work has been done in recent years to uncover the many ways in which algorithmic systems produce very particular kinds of knowledge that actively exclude those deemed Other. Notably, Safiya Noble and Ruha Benjamin show how algorithmic systems and automation reinforce racial categories and social divisions, all while proclaiming neutrality and scientific objectivity (Noble; Benjamin), a move that mirrors directly with Wynter’s theory of the overrepresentation of Western Man. Many more examples of the current technologised functioning of colonialist knowledge systems exist, either explicitly or implicity making the connection to Wynter. For example, tracing the legacy of Carl Lennaeus’ categorisation of nature and humanity in the algorithms we use today (Dzodan 34-43) and how these logics get “made flesh” through machine learning algorithms (Dixon-Román & Parisi 117-18), and the pseudoscientific anthropometric methods of 19th century anthropology that persist in today’s biometrics (Wevers 98). Stating a need to nuance Couldry and Mejias’ definitions, Catriona Gray argues that data colonialism is about “the interaction of orders of knowledge with orders of value” (Gray 10). She emphasises the way that the data about everyday life produced by contemporary platforms “do not appear simply in a pre- or non-commodified form” (Ibid. 14) like nature or human life did for historical colonialism, but are produced always already in relation to economic value. Those that are recognised can participate in the system, in the market, in the processes of everyday life. Those that are not recognised, and are effectively placed outside of the human category, cannot participate. Gray’s observation of the relation between knowledge and value is particularly important in the context of financial technology. In blockchain-based systems, similar logics are recognisable, albeit perhaps more obscure. The climate projects mentioned above, map onto the Amazon rainforest an order of knowledge – what is represented as rainforest, in what way is it hierarchised, and what is not represented and effectively does not exist in the system – that is at the same time an order of value – how are things mapped onto economic value, made tradable, and additionally, but importantly, who are they controlled by?
However, I argue that there is a more abstract way in which blockchain logics reproduce the order of knowledge Wynter described as well. Moving from medieval religious understandings of reality through to versions of reality that are increasingly based on ideological Western humanism (Erasmus 50) that operate under the guise of neutrality and objectivity, the invention of Man presents itself as truth. The medieval divinely ordered world in which humans, which were thought to be sinful by nature, could redeem themselves through pious behaviour, was a truth upheld by religious authorities. The subsequent version of truth ordered the world into the rationality of civilised Man or the irrational savageness of Others. The truth that is dominant until today orders the world through biological essentialism and economic logics. Thus, the inventions of Man were in effect the inventions of truth upheld through colonial power relations (Wynter ”Unsettling the coloniality of being” 291). Blockchains are often also thought of in relation to truth because their distributed consensus algorithms produce an immutable and publicly accessible history of events. When Ethereum made possible the distributed execution of smart contracts, applications of the technology exploded into countless new domains promising a blockchain revolution through transparency, trustlessness, and immutability (See e.g. Tapscott & Tapscott). Blockchain’s capacity to establish truth in the context of the post-truth era has led to much work being done to explore it’s applicability in diverse fields such as journalism, healthcare, and e-commerce (See e.g. Qayyum et al; Mamun; Qi et al.). In the process, blockchain technology came to be seen as a “truth machine” – which is also the title of an influential book published around this time – “a record-keeping method that brings us to a commonly accepted version of the truth that’s more reliable than any truth we’ve ever seen” (Vigna & Casey 20). Blockchains do not communicate a universal truth, they render a truth universal, just like Enlightenment humanism rendered Western Man universal. They makes rational action in the face of a complex reality possible by presenting a singular authoritative version of it. Nonetheless, in this overrepresentation, “[w]hat’s been agreed upon as the truth is the truth. There is no room for debate [emphasis in original]” (Ibid. 65). Blockchains provide a computationally established working-truth-cum-universal-Truth in the face of declining trust after the financial crisis and the post-truth era, capable of facilitating exchange between individuals that don’t know each other. Blockchain technology thus reinvents truth in a post-truth context. The knowledge logics of blockchains perform a similar move to Wynter’s critique of humanism in overrepresenting Western Man, this time overrepresenting a market-based view on what it means to be valuable and act in accordance, invisiblizing and making unworthy of attention those things that are not deemed of value. At the same time, the works cited above on the data colonialism of blockchain systems serve as a reminder that this reinvention of the truth is subject to power relations embedded in coloniality and reproduce existing North-South power and economic imbalances.
Data colonialism and data-based coloniality of knowledge and power are affordances of blockchain technology, but it is important at this point to refrain from determinism. Use of the technology does not automatically follow colonial patterns. There are for example individuals and communities that explore how blockchain’s affordances can be subverted to make space for different ways of relating in non-financial and more-than-human ways. Here, I want to take De Vries’ cue to explore what “plot work as an artistic praxis” (de Vries n.p.) might mean. The artistic praxis De Vries has in mind builds on Sylvia Wynter description of “the plot system”: small, imperfect corners of relative self-determination within the larger context of colonial plantations (”Novel and history” 96). De Vries asks how artistic work, implicated as it is in institutional and capitalist logics, can perform plot work to create space for relating outside of those logics. In the second half of this article I will propose blockchain-based examples to contribute to answering this question.
What is the plot?
To develop an answer to this question, more insight into Wynter’s understanding of the plot is necessary. She writes that plantation owners provided enslaved people with little plots of land to take care of for themselves. However, this should not be mistaken for compassion: plots were given to drive costs down, to force slaves to produce their own food on hardly fertile ground that was useless to the plantation. But the plot also offered space for ways of being together that were not possible on the plantation, reinvigorating the values and traditions of African cultures in which earth and people are to be cared for in a spiritual and communal sense. While the plantation represents the institutions that order and control society, the plot is where “the roots of culture” can be found (Ibid. ”Novel and history” 100). The plot offers room for alternative social systems, but Wynter is clear: the plantation and its exploitative market logics are strong and will endure, at least for the time being. The plot engages with the same raw materials – ground, crops, etc – but in a fundamentally different way. It can provide “a focus of criticism against the impossible reality in which we are enmeshed” (Ibid. 100). Everyone is undeniably involved in that which is critiqued, but participating in the plot means that there is ambiguity in that involvement. This is where resistance, however marginal, finds its breeding ground (Ibid. 100-01).
If blockchain is like the plantation, are there ways of existing in its context that constitute a plot? Bits of the blockchain space that represent culture rather than control? The abstractions of tokenisation invisibilise the care that is needed to sustain that which is represented, and indeed, the logics of care and capitalism oppose each other (Lynch 203). Care could be a possible chisel for blockchain-based plot work to carve a space that offers an alternative to its surroundings. For example, artist Sarah Friend undermines the speculative financial alienation of many NFT projects by programing her Lifeforms NFTs in such a way that they ‘die’ if they are not cared for. In her operationalisation of care, this means that the NFT has to be given away for free to someone else, who then takes over the caring responsibilities (Friend). Lifeforms offers up a different way of relating, not only to the NFT, but also to those around you, calling on them to care for instead of capitalise on something. Another example is the Corn Council, a DAO imagined as part of a speculative design research project (Heitlinger et al.). Central in it is the wish to undo the alienation that plantation capitalism produces (nature as land, human as labour). This DAO rewards “spending time with plants, [...] caring for them, kindling new care-taking relationships” (Ibid. 11). Although they are tokenised, these rewards are not exchangeable and can only be used in the community in ways that support the commons. The Corn Council creates a multi-species community in which crops are stakeholders rather than commodities (Ibid. 12). These are two budding examples of how blockchain’s plot might be thought of as places in which care can take root and grow, while also always being embedded in larger systems of extraction. However, Wynter’s theory offers more details that can help understand the practices plot work might consists of.
The mythologies of the plot
Above, I have shown the analogies between Wynter’s understanding of the co-constitution of colonialism and capitalism and the processes at work in blockchain colonialism, and how, based on Wynter’s thought, we might start to find alternatives to these processes while their ubiquity remains undeniable. With the plot, Wynter shows that it is possible to create space for different social relations within larger contexts of exploitation and extraction. Essentially, she explains that Man as we have come to understand the human – an understanding which is fundamental in the operationalisation of the extraction of value in colonial relations – is just one of many possible stories we are told about reality. She also offers thoughts on how to go about establishing its alternatives by creating new origin stories. De Vries explains: the plot is “a conceptual tool and historic reality. It is figurative language and a challenge to current spatial arrangements. It is a verb and a narrative device (emphasis in original)” (de Vries 12). In what follows, I will explore what Wynter wrote about envisioning alternative narratives as a tool against the overrepresentation of Man. Then I will dive deeper into an exploration of what the mythologies of blockchain-based plots might be.
Wynter’s history of the invention of Man shows how social ordering of life, and the real experiences that are a consequence of this ordering, are wrapped up with the ontological question of what (human) life is, and the coloniality of the powers at play in answering this question (”Unsettling the coloniality of being” 313-314). In this process, Man constitutes the human first and foremost in biological terms, and pushes those that do not fit these terms into spaces of Otherness. However, Wynter adds, humans are always a hybrid, natural and cultural, “biological/organic and symbolic/myth-making” (Erasmus 48; Wynter ”Unsettling the coloniality of being” 295), and the invention of Man is but one myth that is told about the character of life. Reflecting on these ideas, Katherine McKittrick concisely summarises humans, in the universalised form of Man, as “storytellers who now storytellingly invent themselves as being purely biological (emphasis in original)” (McKittrick in Wynter & McKittrick 11). And exactly this realisation is what offers potential for a different future. Wynter writes that as hybrid beings, we have a “uniquely auto-instituting mode of living being, we humans cannot pre-exist our cosmogonies or origin myths/stories/narratives anymore than a bee, at the purely biological level of life, can pre-exist its beehive” (”The ceremony found” 213). The stories humans tell have the capacity to institute new communities around new conceptions of life, new plots for future generations to inhabit. On the plot, new myths about life and sociality can be told, that allow for the practicing of different ways of being, living together, and relating to more-than-human others. At this point it is useful to expand the quote in the epigraph of this article. Wynter writes: “Human beings are magical. Bios and Logos. Words made flesh, muscle and bone animated by hope and desire, belief materialized in deeds, deeds which crystallize our actualities” (”The Pope must have been drunk” 35). Hopes, deeds, and embodiment all work together in the new mythologies of the plot in which the human is saved from the extractive practices of colonial capitalism and the unfathomable mystery of life is redeemed.
Building plots with DAOs through prefiguration and magic
While historically, plots were made available for reasons of efficiency by plantation owners, DAOs can be built by any community themselves. The idea of DAOs as countercultural placemaking practices is a recurring theme in Radical Friends: Decentralised Autonomous Organisations and the Arts, a book edited by Ruth Catlow and Penny Rafferty, two prominent thinkers, artists, and organisers in the countercultural DAO field (Catlow & Rafferty). In the book, they write that to get out of the havoc wreaked by centuries of colonial capitalism, the technology must be used to “terraform a myriad tiny worlds; and smuggle out lively and strange cultural forms into more consensual realities in the world at large” (”Introduction” 40). By playful engagement with DAOs, Catlow explains that “participants can sensitise themselves to the behaviours that might accompany new social relations that emerge in peer-to-peer, translocal networks” (”To Larp a DAO” 307). Catlow and Rafferty often refer to DAOs as having the capacity to build worlds alternative to the social relations handed down the centuries by colonial capitalism, while being aware of their historical and ongoing exploitations:
Crucial to this project is an acknowledgement of the multiple layers of devastating losses that are the result of colonial extractivist petrocapitalism upon which this webbed mechanosphere6 is built: the mass dispossession, destruction and loss of human lives, the loss of species biodiversity and habitats and the impoverishment of futurity that is the aftermath. (Catlow ”Translocal Belonging” 177-178)
To be good ancestors we must learn from the elders of place-based cultures about “worlding” processes that preserve and transmit their heritages and the modalities of all the human and more-than-human communities that inhabit them. (Ibid. 189)
I assert the value of Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) in an experimental practice for moving towards a different way of living together. (Rafferty 107)
This can be done if we begin to put cultures before structures, and recognise how the entangled injustices of our world are connected. If we allow for pluralistic translocal flights then familiar-looking, but radically new worlds can appear. (Ibid. 110)
Catlow and Rafferty’s thoughts on the potential of DAO’s are framed in relation to those historical and ongoing exploitative power relations and propose that we need to build new worlds that share a striking resemblance to plots, in order to make new futures possible again. Catlow and Rafferty refer to this capacity of DAOs to bring about new worlds as prefiguration (”Introduction” 46; Catlow ”To larp a DAO” 307), a term defined as “the embodiment, within the ongoing political practice of a movement, of those forms of social relations, decision-making, culture, and human experience that are the ultimate goal” (Boggs 7). The DAO-plot offers a space for this prefigurative embodiment and relating, a space for creating the cosmogonies that future generations can embody. But how to begin telling different myths before the social relations in them can be lived to their full extent? This is where the magic comes in, where the de-supernaturalising processes of humanism might start to unravel. To Rafferty, DAOs are like magical sigils, that express intentions by making explicit what kind of world is worked towards, and get realised through rituals (112-13). She takes this idea from Chaos Magick, a cultist subculture from the 70s that – heavily influenced by the work of postmodern theorists – believes that truth is subject to belief, and thus by changing ones beliefs through the use of sigils, reality can be changed (Otto 765). For Rafferty, DAOs are sigils that make explicit what kind of new world a community wants to establish, and through the rituals of proposals and votes actualise these new realities. Rafferty’s DAOs are a way to establish the new mythologies of the plot. For her, the new origin story starts from a reappreciation of chaos as an “early genesis hole, this empty yet full state [that] was once akin to a babbling spring, oozing life and creativity” (103), a source for new mythologies, instead of the dangerous element that it has been made out to be by neoliberal capitalism. Rafferty proposes DAOs as “an experimental practice for moving towards a different way of living together” that “could allow us to collectively set up these void states together, and through the act of proposal making and voting, harness intention to regulate new reality making devices” (Ibid. 107). Rafferty’s DAO-plots allow for a new mythological beginning out of a void state, alternative to the exploitations of colonial capitalism. This void is made together with others, it is the result of bottom-up processes, that resist the urge to universalise or become unalterable. Although these processes are collective, those collectives don’t have to stay cohesive: they can mutate, fork, and become kaleidoscopic resulting from changing priorities, beliefs, or urgencies. DAO-plots offer a new starting point from which to rethink what constitutes life in all its unquantifiable dimensions and how living together could be organised differently. Plotting on a DAO is a process that will never be perfect, but can always be iterated upon:
The creation of any DAO is a psychospiritual quest for an open-ended micro reality machine. You create this small reality machine with a number of others and let it run, fail, rebuild and evolve. (Ibid. 112)
In her unpublished but influential manuscript titled Black Metamorphosis: New Natives in a New World, Wynter writes that “decentralized groups” working in relation to a “framework of belief” have the capacity to “create a counter world” in which participants are involved “creatively in their destiny” (”Black metamorphosis” 183-184). The “principle of organization” of these decentralised groups are what gives Wynter hope. The way in which they allow members to shape their own futures through collaboration and spiritual practices that “attain a more authentic order of being” than coloniality provides (Ibid. 184). The reality machines of DAO-plots are a way for this decentralised work toward new mythologies and new futures to take shape.
Conclusion
In this article, I have traced the parallels between historical colonialism and blockchain colonialism according to the work of Sylvia Wynter. The concept of data colonialism offers useful starting points for the theorisation of these parallel functions in the renewal of colonial relations and the expanding of the capitalisation of life. However, I showed that the affordances of blockchain technology also call for expansions and nuances to Couldry and Mejias’ concept, particularly on the way colonial orders of knowledge and value are intertwined in the technology. I contribute a reading of colonial blockchain practices through the immeasurably illuminating theory of Sylvia Wynter toward this end. However, my contribution is intended as the start of more extensive future work toward the establishment of a comprehensive definition of blockchain colonialism in the context of a broader array of decolonial theory.
Additionally, I have argued to understand the countercultural thought by Catlow and Rafferty on the prefigurative capacities of DAOs as a form of the artistic plot work that De Vries is looking for. These DAO-plots explore alternative social relations through decentralised collaborative work that rethinks what it means to live together with others in more-than-human entanglements. They offer a place to practice these new relations so that they may slowly start to take root and gain ground. Wynter’s critique of the colonial order of knowledge that persists until today asks for tactics that counter their biological and economic essentialism, and calls for ways of understanding life that revolve around its irreducible plurality and magic. DAOs as sigils are tools for futures based on these intentions. Now that the plot is no longer made available through the selfish logics of the plantation owner, but might be established by communities at their own will, their worlds might find new ways to flourish.
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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.
2 https://nemus.earth/.
3 https://nft.moss.earth/.
4 Wynter uses the terms Man1 and Man2 in her work, a nuance that I am omitting here for brevity. Fundamentally, by using these terms, Wynter aims to contrast with Michel Foucault’s theory of the invention of Man (Foucault), and emphasise the coloniality of the way Man evolved throughout the centuries.
5 Wynter also uses non Christian-centric terms like “degodding” and “de-supernaturalising” (Ibid. ”Unsettling the coloniality of being” 273; Wynter; Ibid. ”The ceremony found” 190-191). Particularly the second term will become significant later on in this article.
6 The phrase ‘webbed mechanosphere’ is used in reference to the networked infrastructures of the web, including Web3.