Digital Culture & Audiovisual Challenges: Interdisciplinary Creativity In Arts And Technology




       BLOCKCHAIN AND PARATACTIC MEDIA WORKS
                                               Ebru Yetiskin

        Associate Professor, Institute of Social Sciences, Istanbul Technical University



Abstract
This paper is about public understanding of blockchain technology. Having been
integrated to techno-capitalist ideology, blockchain is commonly represented with its
strong attachment with finance. The limited knowledge about blockchain technology in
public domain is managed by its conception as an emerging financial tool. Blockchain
is represented with dualistic oppositions, either as a utopic revolution or as a dystopic
catastrophe. It is also anchored with with crypto currencies and decentralization hype.
The use of blockchain technology in other fields of everyday life obfuscated by such
dominating representations. This paper suggests rethinking of critical uses of blockchain
technology via a funding automaton suggested, designed and performed by a
paratactical media work, “Harvest” (2018) by Julian Oliver.

Keywords: blockchain, media art, paratactic, decentralization

Introduction
Today, financialization emerges as the latest ubiquitous technology. Blockchain
technology is used not only in financial transactions but also in a wide range of social
domains, which are currently regulated and governed by centralized institutions.
      In this paper, first, I will argue that the dominant representation of blockchain
technology is based on a dualistic opposition and this kind of modern representation
operates for the reproduction of techno-capitalist ideology. Second, I will argue that the
construction of a dominant conception of blockchain as a finance technology emerges
as a tactical control apparatus for the sake of super-centralized actors/networks in
platform capitalism. In this part, I will critically analyze the hype of decentralization
and elaborate on the alternative uses of blockchain technology in various fields of
everyday life such as marriage, archiving, ecology, media archeology and real estate. In
the last part, the focus will be given to a paratactical media work, “Harvest” (2018) of
Julian Oliver, which challenges to change this dominant representation of blockchain
technology for the sake of commons.


Copyright © 2018 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative
Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) DCAC 2018.
          Digital Culture & Audiovisual Challenges: Interdisciplinary Creativity In Arts And Technology



     Based on literature review and ethnographic research, which is based on participative
observation and unstructured interviews, the paper aims at becoming another source for
alternative knowledge / power production for the public understanding of blockchain
technology.

1. Public Understanding of Blockchain Technology:
A New Finance Tool
Technology is commonly understood as tools in public domain. It is usually not
acknowledged that technology is also “a way of organization”, as Rudi Volti (1988:4)
suggested. This dominant understanding of technology leads to a problem in which we
would be disconnected from reflexive thinking about technology. With this regard,
public understanding of technology studies demonstrate how technology is used,
ignored, subverted and innovated by a variety of users.
     Public understanding of technology is constructed with social representations.
Social representations consist of constructed images, symbols, ideas, and thoughts that
permeate common sense and everyday thinking (Moscovici, 1984). They particularly
reflect how public makes sense of the unfamiliar via two main processes: ‘anchoring’
and ‘objectification’.
     In anchoring, we see an “attempt to settle a new, and therefore strange, meaning
into the established geography of symbols of a community; and in objectification, we
observe that a new object of knowledge is given a ‘concrete, almost a “natural face”’
(Jovchelovitch, 2001: 173). In this paper, focus is given to the anchoring process of
blockchain technology because public understanding of blockchain technology is
strongly anchored with finance, particularly with money, which has established symbols
in capitalist societies.
     Although blockchain is commonly defined as “an open, distributed ledger that can
record transactions between two parties” (Iansiti and Lakhani, 2017), today blockchain
is commonly represented and understood as a new finance tool. Specifically, it is
strongly anchored with crypto currencies in public. According to Talkwalker, a social
media analytics and social media monitoring tool, for an account of all blockchain
related posts in Twitter between September 15, 2018 and September 8, 2018, %48,6 of
all posts include #crypto and #cryptocurrency, and %19 of all posts include #bitcoin.
     Although the first work on a cryptographically secured chain of blocks was
described in 1991 by Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta, who aimed at designing a
system where documents’ timestamps could not be tampered with or backdated, it is
stated in Wikipedia that “Blockchain was invented by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008 to
serve as the public transaction ledger of the crypto currency Bitcoin”.
     Once we explore how blockchain technology is dominantly represented in public,
we can also highlight minor representations of blockchain technology because today this
technology is not only used for financial transaction. In recent years, it started to be used
in various fields, such as political elections, marriage procedures, divorce contracts, art
sales, real estate operations and notarial acts. Yet the dominant representation of
blockchain, which constructs a common sense in public, obfuscates such uses.
          Digital Culture & Audiovisual Challenges: Interdisciplinary Creativity In Arts And Technology



2. Decentralization Hype: A Tactical Control in Platform Capitalism
Recent research (Kronberger, Holtz and Wagner, 2012; Courvoisier, Clémence and
Green, 2013) in public understanding of technology studies reveal that the attitudes,
perceptions, opinions and representations of users about novel technologies are being
anchored in existing frames of knowledge / power. That means, public is informed about
novel technologies mostly with a link to the familiar, existing and centralized frames of
knowledge / power.
      In platform capitalism, users make use of the platform (i.e. etherium, Zcash, IOTA)
to link existing systems of knowledge and power to the novel infrastructure. In doing so,
the platform incentivizes the users to incorporate more of their own interests within its
operational layers. The more users the platform has, the more power it gains.
      In case of blockchain, users are integrated to various platforms via their profit-making
interests. In fact digital currencies has been undoubtedly one of the best performing
investments of 2017. Bitcoin, for example, grew by an astounding 1,300% last year. In a
recent article published in The Financial Times, it was stated, “The current hype around
blockchain is partly because of its link to the mania in crypto currencies” (Murphy and
Stafford, 2018). More than 1,500 blockchain startups have been launched in 2017, eight
times the number of recognized government-backed currencies. That means, there is an
emerging way of organization besides central institutions, such as governments.
      Hence in recent years, popularization of blockchain along with the current hype
around crypto currencies has been anchored also with decentralization hype. If this
would be a way of organization to control the use of blockchain, which has been strongly
anchored with crypto currencies, what does decentralization hype obfuscate as a tactical
control in “algorithmic cultures” (Striphas, 2015)?
      We observe that the use of blockchain technology in other domains of everyday
life remained weakly developed. In other words, the use of blockchain technology for
social, economic and political life has been under control by way of the making of a
dominant social representation and public understanding of blockchain technology.

3. Distributed Control and Paratactical Media Works
     However recently popularization and social representation of blockchain began to
change. A recent article in Forbes (Pokrandt, 2018) reveals, “blockchain is more than
just currency”. The article has also emphasis on the advantages of decentralized systems,
 such as “no single point of failure, scalability advantage, democratic decision-making”.
      Blockchain is a power-hungry network since data is the capital of production and
exchange. Although decentralization hype operated to increase the number of users,
 users are now faced with an energy crisis, in which national states are not only actors
to deal with the problem. Crypto currencies are highly energy consuming and that
is costs for users and investors. For the operation of crypto currencies, a cluster of
computers performing cryptographic hashing algorithms around the clock are required
for verifying transactions made on the platform and this process is known as mining.
“These computers can range from massive Bitcoin mining farms in rural China to small
DIY mining rigs you can run out of your own home, but all of these mining operations
          Digital Culture & Audiovisual Challenges: Interdisciplinary Creativity In Arts And Technology



are incredibly energy intensive. The Ethereum network, for instance, already uses more
 energy than the island nation of Cyprus, home to nearly 1.2 million people. The Bitcoin
 network, on the other hand, is on track to consume more electricity than Denmark by
2020” (Oberhaus, 2017).
      In New York in April 2016, decentrally generated energy was sold directly between
neighbors via a blockchain system for the first time. The goal was to establish a fully
decentralized or a distributed energy system, (i.e. not a state or corporation dependent
system) in which energy supply contracts are made directly between energy producers
and energy consumers (without involving a third-party intermediary) and carried out
autonomously.
      Hence central institutions and traditional intermediaries, e.g. a bank, are no longer
required under this model, as the other users in the network act as witnesses to each
transaction carried out between a provider and a customer. As such can afterwards also
provide confirmation of the details of a transaction, because all relevant information is
distributed to the network and stored on the computers of all users.
      Generating supplementary funding for climate-change NGOs in a time where
climate science itself is under siege from the fossil-fuelled interests of governments and
corporations, Julian Oliver’s “Harvest” (2018), a blockchain based work of critical
engineering and computational climate art, uses wind-energy to mine crypto currency.
The earnings are used as a source of funding for climate-change research. To develop a
funding automaton, Oliver transformed “wind energy into the electricity required to
meet the demanding task of mining crypto currency (here Zcash), a decentralised process
where computers are financially rewarded for their work maintaining and verifying a
public transaction ledger known as the blockchain” (Shahan, 2017).
      Acting as a fully functional prototype beyond a media-art context, Julian Oliver’s
“Harvest” (2018) emerges as a paratactical work, in which tactical control (anchoring
with decentralization hype, crypto currencies and finance) in platform capitalism is
reused and subverted for commons.

Conclusion
Within capitalist ideology, technology is mostly represented with binary distinctions
(Roseanu and Singh, 2002). If technology is also a way of organization, then we can
discuss how novel ways of organization are locked and encrypted within dualistic
representations, such as centralized vs. decentralized institutions, hope vs. disaster,
utopia vs. dystopia and so on.
      By introducing the emerging ways of organization via repeating knowledge / power
of the existing and centralized agencies, it also becomes possible to preserve and update
their knowledge / power by the changes and deviations suggested by the novel. This
adjustment process should be in control for the sustainability of the existing actors, such
as the states and the central banks. Hence, the anchoring of blockchain as a decentralized
power against the institutions of central authority becomes a mediator for a kind of
tactical control in platform capitalism. In this way, while central institutions are updating
their knowledge / power along with their organizations and service infrastructures,
          Digital Culture & Audiovisual Challenges: Interdisciplinary Creativity In Arts And Technology



alternative uses of blockchain (especially for commons) are procrastinated via the
tactical control of public understanding of blockchain technology, which is strongly
anchored with decentralization hype and crypto currencies.
      This is also the obfuscation of the knowledge / power about the emerging ways of
organizing hope, disaster, utopia and dystopia. Still one question remains: How can
blockchain be understood as a way of organizing hope and disaster in our societies
today? Paratactical works emerge as a way of organization in which artists explore
using existing infrastructures in alternate ways. They explore and suggest visionary
means of workings for commons.

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