![Sample our Communication Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, 2013 & 2014 volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5927/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Information-Science2.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Often associated with the volatile cryptocurrency Bitcoin, a blockchain is a distributed ledger, an additive record of digitally networked transactions. On the assumption that technologies are cultural practices as much as they are instrumental, this essay contributes to the special issue on big data in communication by examining texts that constitute blockchain in a shared political imaginary and, in so doing, participate in blockchain's future. The essay analyzes how materials produced by IBM orient blockchain within contemporary ideals such as transparent access, immutability, and a single source of truth. Drawing on Sean Phelan's study of neoliberal politics and global media, including the naturalization of ideological values, the essay proposes that public discourses about blockchain evidence fundamental human desires to access truth and establish an infrastructure immune to corruption. The study finds that blockchain's decentralized infrastructure comports with a historical moment in which sociality itself is under intense pressure, and wherein the idea and practice of interconnected yet distrustful nodes make sense in the absence of functional governance. The essay concludes that in the routinized social practices of the blockchain's executive protocols, political potential is undercut by the absence of prospective and fundamental change.
Notes
1 Malcolm R. Parks, “Big Data in Communication Research: Its Contents and Discontents,” Journal of Communication 64 (2014): 357, https://doi.10.1111/jcom.12090.
2 danah boyd and Kate Crawford, “Critical Questions for Big Data,” Information, Communication & Society 15, no. 5 (2012): 662–79, https://doi.10.1080/1369118X.2012.678878. Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier, Big Data: A Revolution that will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013).
3 Steve Lohr, “The Age of Big Data,” New York Times, February 11, 2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/sunday-review/big-datas-impact-in-the-world.html.
4 Seth C. Lewis and Oscar Westlund, “Big Data and Journalism: Epistemology, Expertise, Economics, and Ethics,” Digital Journalism 3, no. 3 (2014): 451, https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2014.976418.
5 E. Johanna Hartelius, “Big Data and Global Knowledge: A Protagorean Analysis of the United Nations’ Global Pulse.” In Ancient Rhetorics, Digital Networks, ed. Michele Kennerly and Damien Smith Pfister (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2018), 69.
6 For an introduction to Bitcoin, see Pedro Franco, Understanding Bitcoin: Cryptography, Engineering, and Economics (Chichester, U.K.: John Wiley & Sons, 2015). P. Carl Mullan, A History of Digital Currency in the United States: New Technology in an Unregulated Market (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
7 Gili Vidan and Vili Lehdonvirta, “Mine the Gap: Bitcoin and the Maintenance of Trustlessness,” New Media & Society 21.1 (2019): 55.
8 Sean Phelan, Neoliberalism, Media and the Political (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 5.
9 My approach is similar to Zoltan P. Majdik's model of how rhetorical concepts might serve as sense-making opportunities for Big Data. Zoltan P. Majdik, “Five Considerations for Engaging with Big Data from a Rhetorical-Humanistic Perspective,” POROI 16, no. 1 (2021): 1–25, https://doi.org/10.13008/2151-2957.1312.
10 Phelan, Neoliberalism, 6. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 2nd ed. (New York: Verso, 2001).
11 Phelan, Neoliberalism, 7.
12 Deborah Maxwell, Chris Speed, and Larissa Pschetz, “Story Blocks: Reimagining Narrative Through the Blockchain,” Convergence: The International Journal of Research Into New Media Technologies 23, no. 1 (2017): 79, https://doi.10.1177/1354856516675263.
13 Maxwell, Speed, and Pschetz, “Story Blocks,” 90, 93.
14 Arvind Narayanan and Jeremy Clark, “Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree,” Communications of the ACM 60 (2017): 42.
15 Rachel O’Dwyer, “Limited Edition: Producing Artificial Scarcity for Digital Art on the Blockchain and Its Implications for the Cultural Industries,” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 26, no. 4 (2020): 881, https://doi.10.1177/1354856518795097.
16 Narayanan and Clark, “Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree,” 38.
17 Maxwell, Speed, and Pschetz, “Story Blocks,” 90.
18 Lana Swartz, “What was Bitcoin, what will it be? The Techno-economic Imaginaries of a New Money Technology,” Cultural Studies 32, no. 4 (2018): 629, https://doi.10.1080/09502386.2017.1416420.
19 Angela Woodall and Sharon Ringel, “Blockchain Archival Discourse: Trust and the Imaginaries of Digital Preservation,” New Media & Society 22, no. 12 (2020): 2206, https://doi.10.1177/1461444819888756 2206.
20 “The Great Chain of Being Sure about Things; Blockchains” Economist 417 (October 31, 2015), 21–24, http://ezproxy.lib.utexas.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/magazines/great-chain-being-sure-about-things-blockchains/docview/1728728735/se-2?accountid=7118. It is interesting that agreement in the context of corruption and misinformation is known in computing as the “Byzantine Generals Problem.” The mythical generals are charged with producing a battle strategy while communicating only through messages that may be false and messengers that may be traitorous. They, as the following analysis section might lament, had no blockchain at their disposal. See Franco, Understanding Bitcoin, 165.
21 Enforcing Accountability in Media, IBM, produced September 2018 (Armonk, NY), 3, https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/6146Z4JE.
22 The Founder's Handbook: An Introduction to Building a Blockchain Solution, 3rd ed., IBM, produced June 2020 (Armonk, NY), 42, https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/GZPPMWM5.
23 IBM, The Founder's Handbook, 26.
24 IBM, Enforcing Accountability, 4.
25 IBM, The Founder's Handbook, 27.
26 IBM, The Founder's Handbook, 50.
27 IBM, Enforcing Accountability, 5.
28 “Blockchain Overview,” IBM, accessed December 1, 2021, https://www.ibm.com/topics/what-is-blockchain.
29 IBM, The Founder's Handbook, 27.
30 IBM, Enforcing Accountability, 5.
31 IBM, Enforcing Accountability, 5.
32 IBM, Enforcing Accountability, 4.
33 IBM, The Founder's Handbook, 18.
34 IBM, The Founder's Handbook, 3.
35 IBM, The Founder's Handbook, 10.
36 IBM, The Founder's Handbook, 47.
37 IBM, The Founder's Handbook, 10.
38 IBM, The Founder's Handbook, 51.
39 IBM, The Founder's Handbook, 16.
40 IBM, The Founder's Handbook, 17.
41 IBM, The Founder's Handbook, 8.
42 IBM, The Founder's Handbook, 15.
43 IBM, Enforcing Accountability, 3.
44 IBM, Enforcing Accountability, 1.
45 IBM, The Founder's Handbook, 9.
46 “Rising to the Moment with Blockchain; Healthcare and Life Sciences; Section 6: Using a Unique Digital Twin of a Product to Thwart Drug Counterfeiting,” IBM, accessed June 8, 2022, https://www.ibm.com/blockchain/resources/healthcare/#section-6.
47 “Rising to the Moment with Blockchain; Healthcare and Life Sciences; Section 6.”
48 “Rising to the Moment with Blockchain; Healthcare and Life Sciences; Section 6.”
49 “Rising to the Moment with Blockchain; Healthcare and Life Sciences; Section 3: Enable Organizations to Incorporate Verifiable Health Passes into their Business Policies,” IBM, accessed June 8, 2022, https://www.ibm.com/blockchain/resources/healthcare/#section-3.
50 “Rising to the Moment with Blockchain; Healthcare and Life Sciences; Section 4: Connecting New PPE and Ventilator Suppliers with Buyers,” IBM, accessed June 8, 2022, https://www.ibm.com/blockchain/resources/healthcare/#section-4.
51 For a thoughtful critique of how datafication becomes part of initiatives for social good or digital humanitarianism, see João Carlos Magalhães and Nick Couldry, “Giving by Taking Away: Big Tech, Data Colonialism, and the Reconfiguration of Social Good,” International Journal of Communication 15 (2021): 343–62, https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ufh&AN=152907085&site=ehost-live. Magalhães and Couldry argue that, “When ‘doing good’ is rethought as data colonialism—that is, as a reconfiguration of the social terrain so that data can be maximally extracted for economic value—practices that seem benign articulate with more systemic harms,” 344. Similarly critical of how a “civil libertarian […] cryptographic imaginary” perpetuates social injustice (racism, misogyny, etc.), Sarah Myers West proposes “a new imaginary for encryption in formation, one which draws on queer, Black and feminist thought by centering the need to create safe and autonomous spaces for collective survival under conditions of mass surveillance.” Sarah Myers West, “Survival of the Cryptic: Tracing Technological Imaginaries across Ideologies, Infrastructures, and Community Practices,” New Media & Society (2021): 1–21, https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820983017.
52 IBM, Enforcing Accountability, 18.
53 Nancy Baym, Lana Swartz, and Andrea Alarcon, “Convening Technologies: Blockchain and the Music Industry,” International Journal of Communication 13 (2019): 402.
54 IBM, The Founder's Handbook, 5.
55 IBM, Enforcing Accountability, 1.
56 IBM, Enforcing Accountability, 15.
57 IBM, Enforcing Accountability, 15.
58 Marco Iansiti and Karim R. Lakhani, “The Truth about Blockchain,” Harvard Business Review 95, no. 1 (2017): 120.
59 Don D. H. Shin, “Blockchain: The Emerging Technology of Digital Trust,” Telematics and Informatics 45 (2019): 1–11, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tele.2019.101278. See also Alice Mattoni's study of how grassroots organizations use big data and algorithmic automation to agitate against corruption among local public officials. Her attention to “experiences of datafication” aligns with my call for critical reflection on the meaning of trust and trustlessness in regards to technological governance. Alice Mattoni, “The Grounded Theory Method to Study Data-Enabled Activism against Corruption: Between Global Communicative Infrastructures and Local Activists’ Experiences of Big Data,” European Journal of Communication 35, no. 3 (2020): 265–77, https://doi.org/10.1177/0267323120922086.
60 Drew B. Margolin, “Computational Contributions: A Symbiotic Approach to Integrating Big, Observational Data Studies into the Communication Field,” Communication Methods and Measures 13, no. 4 (2019): 229, https://doi.org/10.1080/19312458.2019.1639144.
61 Rasmus Helles and Jacob Ørmen, “Big Data and Explanation: Reflections on the Uses of Big Data in Media and Communication Research,” European Journal of Communication 35, no. 3 (2020): 290, https://doi.org/10.1177/0267323120922088.
62 Helles and Ørmen, “Big Data and Explanation,” 292.
63 Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future: An Enquiry into the Limits of the Possible (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 21.
64 M. C. Elish and danah boyd, “Situating Methods in the Magic of Big Data and AI,” Communication Monographs 85, no. 1 (2018): 58, https://doi.org/10.1080/03637751.2017.1375130.
65 Elish and boyd, “Situating Methods,” 63.
66 Phelan, Neoliberalism, 194.
67 Phelan, Neoliberalism, 2.
68 Phelan, Neoliberalism, 63–64. Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
69 Baym, Swartz, and Alarcon, “Convening Technologies,” 402, 404.
70 Focusing on Ethereum, the second most popular form of cryptocurrency following Bitcoin, Ann Brody and Stéphane Couture argue that despite the cultural and political imaginaries surrounding blockchain, Ethereum's “cyberlibertarianism” masks the reality that it “seems to be still foremost used as a financialization tool.” Ann Brody and Stéphane Couture, “Ideologies and Imaginaries in Blockchain Communities: The Case of Ethereum,” Canadian Journal of Communication 46, no. 3 (2021): 543–61, https://doi.10.22230/cjc.2021v46n3a3701.
71 IBM, The Founder's Handbook, 27. For clarification, “bigness” is my term, not IBM's.
72 Jessica Baldwin-Philippi, “Data Ops, Objectivity, and Outsiders: Journalistic Coverage of Data Campaigning,” Political Communication 37, no. 4 (2020): 468–87.
73 Phelan, Neoliberalism, 7.
74 Adam Hayes, “The Socio-Technological Lives of Bitcoin,” Theory, Culture & Society 36, no. 4 (2019): 66, https://doi.10.1177/0263276419826218.
75 Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (Boston: MIT Press, 2006).
76 Majdik, “Five Considerations for Engaging with Big Data,” 15.