Imagineering a new way of governing: the blockchain and res publica

ABSTRACT

Blockchain technologies loom large among the controversial topics of public debate. Like any technology, blockchain offers various ways to imagine alternative models of politics and society. Arguably, the most common interpretation treats it as the technology for techno-anarchism and a tool for total decentralization. This paper focuses on an overlooked genealogy of the politics of the blockchain – the classic republican theory. We consider whether republican practices could shed light on certain aspects of blockchain communities and understand their governance better. Our paper offers a historical analysis of governance visions inscribed in Bitcoin and Ethereum, arguably the most influential applications.

KEYWORDS:

• Blockchain
• governance
• republicanism
• decentralized associations

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. As Yli-Huumo, Ko, Chid, Park, and Smolander (2016) demonstrate, until 2016, up to 80% of papers on the subject discuss the potential and technical applications of the blockchain with no direct relation to political institutions.

2. Such a resemblance between a public ledger and Roman stones is not direct. Unlike the stone tablets, the public ledger could be updated with code. It is not inherently static.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (RFBR) within the framework of the project “Network contracts (smart contracts) as a way of regulation and organization of scientific activity” [no. 18-29-16184].

Notes on contributors

Olga Bychkova

Olga Bychkova holds a Candidate of Sciences (Economic Sociology) degree from the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, Russia and PhD (Public Policy and Management) from the John Glenn College of Public Affairs at Ohio State University, USA. She joined the European University at St. Petersburg as a Professor of Governance in February 2011, after a three-year teaching public policy and sociology classes at the Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg, Russia. She was also a post-doc at Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (University of Helsinki, Finland) and an associate senior researcher at PAST Research Center (Tomsk State University, Russia). In 2015-2017, she served as the head of the EUSP Center for Public Policy and Governance, since 2017 she is the head of the STS Center at EUSP. She is the author of a number of edited volumes and articles on a range of topics including Russian innovation and technological policies, university governance. She has been a principal investigator for a number of research projects on technological and innovation policies, industry-university R&D collaborations and university governance in Russia.

Artyom Kosmarski

Artyom Kosmarski received his BA degree in linguistics from the Moscow State University in 2006 and MA in sociology/social anthropology from Central European University in Budapest in 2007. He has done extensive research in the field of STS and anthropology of science. Blockchain caught his attention as a hotbed of various and sometimes unpredictable solutions to the grievances of academic community, as well as a pathway to a more flexible, grass-root and reputation-based governance of science. Right now he is a senior researcher at the Institute for Cultural Studies (HSE University, Moscow).