ACCIONES

One of the challenges is how to makes sense of “the political” in such, if not relativist, “relationist” ontology. The fading of archetypal figures of authority and performance of political exercise, such as the state, in digital phenomena like blockchains highlight the relevance of this inquiry. It is not contested that states have strengthened their role in controlling the “free” internet of the 90s, using different techniques such as censorship and division of platforms according to territorial constrains (i.e. China’s firewall and their main internet services ecosystem, such a Baidu and Alibaba, as developed in Chapter Four). However, on the one hand their central role as control points is diplomatically contested by transnational corporations; on the other hand, alternative illegal services that also challenge their manoeuvrability keep surfacing from the deep ends of the web. Bitcoin, for example, is in a middle point here: its markets do follow regulation as any other service depending on the territorial law of each country, but at the same time is the de facto currency of black markets in the dark web. What I want to stress is that phenomena such as blockchain technology provide an interesting standpoint to reflect on a post-state notion of “the political”.

Hardt and Negri point out the transformation of this notion in the figure of the Empire discussed in the first chapter. According to them, the political as ‘determination of consensus’ or ‘sphere of mediation among conflictive social forces’ has disappeared. Consensus is now determined by economic factors (e.g. speculation of currencies): “Government and politics come to be completely integrated into the system of transnational command. Controls are articulated through a series of international bodies and functions (...) Politics does not disappear, what disappears is any notion of the autonomy of the political” (Hardt and Negri 2001, 307). This reading considers that in a period of global capitalism,

systematic relationships of transnational corporations and other bodies disperse the place of politics. Representation in post-hegemonic times “leaks out”, and the ubiquity of computation and media “bequeaths to us ubiquitous politics” (Lash 2007, 71). The identification of the political as a central power is dismissed, and instead it spreads across an untraceable number of actors and relations. Since a delimited sphere of “the political” disappears, ANT as a relational method stance, and its notion of politics, become particularly relevant to rephrase politics.

Latour defends ANT notion of politics in a reply to a Gerard de Vries critique (de Vries 2007). De Vries argues that ANT does not engage with a political position, and suggest that it would benefit from considering existing political philosophies (in de Vries example, using Aristotle as political framework). Latour’s reply defends STS exclusion of pre-determined political theories, not because they cannot be applied to an understanding of the politics involved in a relational research, but because they prescribe issues that frame what is to be known of a network. Instead, ANT follows the issues that are generated by the relationships, and previous to the interactions of the network. Moreover, he defends that this research technique does not imply a lack of politics, but a different, perhaps more raw, notion of them. Latour’s reading of STS ignores canonical elements of political theories, like ‘traditional characters’ (citizens, ideologies), ‘traditional sites’ (demonstrations, control rooms), ‘traditional passions’ (indignation, anger), “but pays attention to new means through which politics are carried out” (Latour 2007b, 3). Latour ANT’s approach is concerned with understanding politics neither as a domain or procedure, nor as a set of beliefs that can simply applied to any situation. Instead, he argues that situations produce their own politics. Latour argues that STS has expanded the vision from the traditional political scientists, by introducing a notion of politics as the composition of the shared world or cosmos (Stengers 2010). Politics in this reading are then issue based (Marres 2007) and generate their own publics, and not a sort of definition to put into use in the absence of any issue. He identifies layered ways in which politics can turn around issues or “successive moments in the trajectory of an issue” (Latour 2007b, 2). First, how a connection of humans and non-humans (neither symbolic nor naturalistic causalities [Latour 2007a]) redefine the cosmogram; then, the moment an issue generates a concerned public; followed by the moment a governmental machinery that turns the issue into a common problem; fourth, the issue gets

absorbed by democratic processes; and finally, it is integrated into bureaucracy. Latuour argues for the relevance of STS in detecting the ‘political-1’ moment, where “every non-human entity brought into connection with humans modifies the collective and forces everyone to redefine all the various cosmograms” (Latour 2007b, 5).

While my research does not claim to follow or be based on the Science and Technology Studies (STS) tradition, the work on this thesis coincides with Latour’s STS positioning: First, I understand ‘the political’ in a broad sense, and acknowledge that different instances, or moments, can be considered part of the political but researched by different methodologies and theories. And second, I pay particular attention to the early stages of the previously presented trajectory, that is, to the way new relations between humans and non-humans (cryptography, developers, mining stations, borders) are put into play in a still undetermined way, and considered these as political relations. Thus, the focus of this study should be considered political in part because it does rely on a political theory framework (it makes use of political economy discussions, e.g. Hardt and Negri’s Empire, to discuss the notions of regulation and production and the significance of its outsourcing to computational processes, as introduced in the first chapter), but also because the emergence of blockchain objects reconfigures a network of asymmetric elements.26 _{The miner machines, for example, are non-human actors}

that come into play with other already existing human and non-human actors (like developers, or open source standards), and in doing so, disturb or event create new power assemblages. While this research is not ANT committed, it does share its characterization of power not as reservoir, but as a product of these relations (in the specific case, the relations at play in the production of tokens by distributed computation).27 _{The point of view of ANT also benefits the approach to}

the agency of non-human elements. The computation involved in superabundance and production of authority, as seen on Chapter One, by a bitcoin’s mining has no agency by itself. But it does have it in a relational scheme. While not being completely designed, nor self-governed, it becomes a “matter of concern” (Latour 2007a, 114), which is capable of agency when considering as gathering, rather than as object. While along this work I will constantly refer to blockchains,

26 For Actor Network Theory (ANT), the symmetry does not imply an identity of substances, but to ignore any a apriori distinction between “human intentional action and a material world of causal relations” (Latour 2007a, 76)

cryptocurrencies, and bitcoin as digital objects, I am understanding them with the aid of ANT, that is, neither isolated agencies nor anthropologically designed machines, but as gatherings.