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: 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.

Then, there are those that explore how blockchain’s logics can be subverted to make space for different ways of relating in non-financial and more-than-human ways. In this short essay I would like to focus on this third tactic by framing it in relation to what Jamaican decolonial theorist Sylvia Wynter described as “the plot system” that represented small corners of relative self-determination within the larger context of colonial plantations (Wynter 1971, 96). First it is important to understand what Wynter understands as the logic of the plantation.

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?