Point of Entry: From Where to Access the Blockchain as a Digital Object?

Blockchain technology presents a methodological challenge due to their multiple readings. Bitcoin in particular, like other digital objects, is not constrained by a single definition. The argumentation I offered in the previous chapter places a reading that stresses these phenomena in relation to how structures and notions of authority are modified by the technical performance and specific affordances of the technological device. However, a field less concerned with the relations between power and technology and more with, for example, the security enhancements that blockchains bring, may offer an entirely dissimilar panorama. Even an observation fixed on Bitcoin can provide a plethora of diverse definitions and narratives of the object, each from a different field. Minimal definitions of Bitcoin been already provided, as diverse as: a digital tool for making payments (de Jong, Tkacz, and Velasco González 2015), a piece of computer software

(Karlstrøm 2014), an informational commodity (Bergstra and Weijland 2014), an egalitarian creation (Boase 2013), or, as Yves Mersch, member of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank, has put it, ‘the regional currency of the Internet’ (Mersch 2014). It can also be easily defined as a distributed public record, an anonymity tool, and a network of machines. These definitions can agglutinate, overlap, and even contrast with each other, depending on the observing field. Because Bitcoin is at the same time a protocol, a currency, software, a network and a cultural phenomenon, it can play the discontinuous role of instrument, method and object of research.

From the researcher’s point of view, Bitcoin is a relatively new digital object. The ‘digital’ has been defined as ‘composed of many different kinds of elements, ranging from computer networks, scanners, algorithms, software and applications to different actors, institutions, regulations and controversies’ (Ruppert, Law, and Savage 2013, 31). Many disciplines from the social sciences like media and communication studies, cultural geography, digital anthropology, science and technology studies, internet studies, digital cultures and digital sociology (Wynn 2009) are heavily involved with digital research and some have even been spawned by it (Lupton 2014, 13). However, as technology surrounds most of our activities, a similar fate of the online-offline division occurs to the digital and non-digital distinction (Berry 2014). Information can be produced, mediated, organized or made digitally available in different degrees, this complicates delineating the fuzzy borders between the digital and the social or between the digital and its counterparts (Cramer 2013). Digital and non-digital entities can take the form of native – forms and materials “born” in, and not migrated to a digital medium (Rogers 2013) – and non-native data, subjectivities, techniques, objects, institutions, methodologies, and so on.

Bitcoin, as a digital object, is framed by its own medium-specific constrains and regimes, and also produces its own kind of data, categories and agencies. Due to its novelty, it stands on a challenging starting position. It was designed to be an oxymoron to close observation: regarding its actual technical functioning, it is transparent and public (certainly not without complexities, since its guts require at least a little notion of how cryptology strategies are enabled in software). Observation for this side of the object is open and the working and results for every transaction made with the device are easily available(‘Bitcoin

Block Explorer - Blockchain.Info’ 2015). Some social aspects of its use are, however, on a nicely crafted dark side. Unlike more traditional research on social networks like Twitter or Facebook, where social content, data and metadata of how these software-enabled platforms are used is gathered and analysed in closed spaces, or even partially available for the non-corporate researcher, the data on cryptocurrencies is democratically scarce. The issues of accessibility are not only in the order of availability of information: the phenomena also posits a general challenge on from which point of view, among the many fields and associated methodologies, should it be accessed.

A creative fiction book by Milorad Pavić, the Kazahar Dictionary, tells different stories in an encyclopedic form. The narrative gets broken or superimposed by the order in which the reader access the text. In fact made of three dictionaries (Christian, Muslim, and Jewish), the same entry may be repeated in each of them, sometimes telling a different story, and sometimes complementing a coherent narrative. The text is challenging and open from the very start, since every entry acts, very much like the name suggests, as a legitimate point of beginning. The path that comes after is not defined either, one can search for the same entry in the other dictionaries, go to one of the suggested hyperlinks to other entries, or even pick a new random word to continue. The form of the text is made so that a narrative is created in the process of accessing it. There is no right point of access or pathway, and order emerges only insofar as the act of reading is taking place. The book exploits this form to delightfully generate an unfamiliar and unprescribed passage.

I am not suggesting that this playful lack of (previously determined) order is a methodological technique to be extrapolated to social sciences research. The entertaining reading of this fictional dictionary, despite any analogy, is not equivalent to academic research of a technological device. However, it is true that blockchains are a good example, and certainly not the only one, of research objects that have different readings depending on the point of entry or the path of inquiries chosen to observe them. What is more, the question on how to access a research object is methodologically relevant. Moor and Uprichard (2014) underline the materiality of the method itself when accessing a complex research object, taking the Mass Observation Archive (MOA) as a case study. The MOA, a database of the everyday life in Britain, is a project based on a nonsystematic

design of samples coming out of self-motivated participation: “The 'Observers' do not constitute a statistically representative sample of the population but can be seen as reporters or “citizen journalists” who provide a window on their world.” (massobs.org.uk 2015). The project has been ongoing since the beginning of the eighties (with a first iteration from 1937 to 1950). While the majority of the archive consists of writings from the observers, it also gathers other kinds of data, such as recorded interviews. Moor and Uprichard highlight the materiality not only of the archive, but also of the act of “getting dirty” with data that the researcher accessing the archive makes. Since there is no digital version of the archive, the researching is confronted with a number of boxes to be opened and explored. Moor and Uprichard stress that even thought the data is there, the way to access it has material consequences: “We cannot get around this problem, regardless of what kind of data we are accessing, whatever the research, whichever methods are used, problems of access are intrinsic to empirical social research” (Moor and Uprichard 2014, 36).

Digital phenomena may appear to have fewer constraints of access and fewer issues related to materiality due to its virtual format. Given its mathematical enclosure and software-based boxes, a notion of neutral access is commonly associated with the digital landscape. An extreme of this deterministic position, can be found in Kevin Kelly’s descriptions of technology. For Kelly (2011), technology offers a degree of objectivity that even allows for a level of agency independent from the human interactions with it. He sees technology not as a set of particular objects, but as a whole; a large “out of control” autonomous being. He proposes the use of the term “technium”, arguing that both “technology” and “culture” fail to describe this entity: technium includes “culture, art, social institutions, and intellectual creations of all types. It includes intangibles like software, law, and philosophical concepts. And most important, it includes the impulses of our inventions to encourage more tool making, more technology invention and more self-enhancing connections” (Kelly 2011, 11). In Kelly’s view the technium is starting to exercise autonomy. For autonomy, he specifically refers to an enhancing of the self in many areas (except self-consciousness, for which Kelly believes has not happened “at this point”): self-repair, self-defence, self- maintenance, self-control, self-improvement. While he acknowledges that there is no single example of technological device holding all the former characteristics, he argues that there are particular examples that perform one or the other. Since his

reading of technology is holistic, and refers to a planetary system, he argues that the technium, as a whole, has a sort of agency. Not only does it want what humans design and command it to do, but also its possesses its own drives.

Kelly’s view is controversial: technology is neither completely independent, nor autonomous. It is built by specific humans, travels in specific cables, executes specific algorithms (even if more and more fed by randomness and blackboxed [cf. deep learning, google’s AI encrypted language]), and its growth and failures are moulded by chance and the bureaucracy surrounding it (Latour 1996). Hence, while the complexity of the object allows for multiple readings and points of entry, I don’t understand blockchains as utterly relativist objects, neither as independent objects such as Kelly’s technium.

Instead, my research point of view benefits from the Science and Technology Studies (STS) tradition that understands objects as nodes with its own agency and social weight within networked assemblages (Latour 2007a). This position allows me to anchor my perspective of the object in a middle point in between a technological determinism and social constructivism. While my position is closer to the latter, I do not consider blockchains as a completely designed object, and allow room to discuss a mode of thought befitting to the machine/algorithm and alien to social phenomena (see the notions of randomness and superabundance discussed in Chapter One), but never independent of a network of relations. While the Latourian approach is based on relations between asymmetrical actants, it does not have claims of an overall objectivity. It is closer to the specific objectivity of Donna Haraway’s (1988) situated knowledges, which distances from transcendental claims of the individual, objective, neutral and rational observer (Code 2014) —such as Kelly’s Technium— and upholds a specific- embodiment objectivity. For Haraway, situated knowledges are about communities made of active meaning-generating material-semiotic actors part of a dynamic apparatus.

However, this research should not be considered a contribution to STS or Actor Network Theory (ANT), since my main interest is not to focus on identifying relevant relations in a network of humans and non-humans. Alternatively, this work is a close analysis of the machine logic of production and the behaviour of its network, closer to the field of Software Studies; a historical dissection of the technologies that preceded it, closer to the field of Media Archaeology; and an

observation of some internal discussion of governance, closer to a digital ethnography. I will elaborate on how the chapters of this study relate to these fields in a moment, but I want to stress that while this work is not an explicit heir of ANT, it does share the particular ontology of partial, locatable objects made in their relations, and the epistemological concerns of such ontological stance.