Blockchain is the newest toy for capitalist exploitation

In a very short space of time, arguably the last three to five years, blockchain has risen to capture the feverish imagination of capitalists and entrepreneurs alike across the globe. There is now a morass of such players scrambling over one another in ferce competition to be the winners in this latest round of onanistic technological innovation. Fuelled almost exclusively by hyperbole and, contrary to the nature of the technology itself, a gradual centralization and aggregation of peripheral technological practices that is a direct result of the infuence of capitalist logic, blockchain is rapidly emerging as a proftable mainstream means for generating the surplus interventions, accumulations, exploitations and reproductions demanded by the capitalist imagination. Under the duel banners of ‘innovation’ and ‘progress’ blockchain has become the means du jour for the reproduction of capitalist class power through ‘world changing’ technology in the so-called fourth-industrial age in which advanced Western capitalist societies now imagine themselves.3 And the forward thrust of blockchain innovation is furious, with record levels of investment as of 2016/17 measured in billions of dollars of venture capital.

Capital and ‘Disruptive’ Innovation: An Entrepreneurial Love Afair The issue of blockchain as a means of reproducing capitalist class power does not begin (or end for that matter) with the technology itself but with people. Those who engineer and build the technology might care about blockchain solely as an intellectual challenge. The extent to which it is possible to separate those who, for instance, engineer a piece of software or build a platform from those who seek to exploit the technology (for the purposes of not simply generating personal fortunes in the short to medium term but also for the sheer thrill of the process of being an active economic subject) becomes less clear when they are one and the same person, namely a so-called tech entrepreneur. For this cabal of tech-minded libertarians and anarchocapitalists blockchain technology ofers an opportunity to leverage new markets and enable, as David Golumbia argues, ‘a wide range of extractive and exploitative business practices’ that ultimately ‘increase the power of corporations and capital outside the scope of any attempts by democratic polities to constrain them’.5 When discussing technology it is easy to forget the people behind it. Likewise, it is easy for those selfsame people to hide behind the technology and ultimately use it to both facilitate and conceal their desires and motivations. Desires that can be markedly diferent from those to which the technology appears to be aimed — or, at least, towards which they tell the world the technology is aimed. A single basic technological form with many diferent uses is the Holy Grail of technological innovation in engineering terms. Just as Stiglitz suggests in the quote earlier. But the economics of these innovations make happy reading for many as well. The reason is simple. If you don’t need to spend time or money changing technology to make it ft multiple applications then you are likely to have the gift of a technological ‘organizational form’ that is highly cost-efective and organizationally efcient.6 It is trite these days to highlight capital’s insistence on superseding the old with the new, whether via material obsolescence or some other form of cynical immaterial manipulation of one’s personal and subjective desires (advertising, marketing etc.). We must recognise what the process of making way for (or forcing) the new represents in this context however: a deeply ideological and often highly cynical process that determines the accrual of benefts into only a few sets of hands, and the onward march of capitalist class power through the creation of a constant tension between (supposed) problems and (necessary) solutions. Much like the comic plotlines of the hit HBO comedy Silicon Valley, entrepreneurial narratives of progress and innovation are fraught with fanciful thinking and dreamlike logic that see problems as always already indexed to solutions and vice versa, ad infnitum. Central to the reproduction of capitalist class power on this score is the necessity of a call to duty of individuals willing to play the game of problem versus solution. Akin to Louis Althusser’s interpellated economic subjects, entrepreneurs don’t just answer this call (the hail) made by capitalism, however; they locate their object of desire in the internal reason and (il)logic of capital. Entrepreneurs fall in love with innovation, they enjoy the promise of it, and it becomes their ‘passion’.7 As such they tell themselves that ideas not income are important, whilst searching, via a cycle of success and failure, for the one big idea that will secure their fortune.8 For entrepreneurs and capitalists alike the aim is always to unearth innovations and technologies that ‘disrupt’, which are capable of creating more competition and markets. Blockchain is a prime example of just such a ‘disruptive’ technology, hence why it forms the latest chapter in the enduring love story between capital and innovation. But it is important not to confuse technology with innovation. The latter ‘is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in’.9 Innovation, like progress, is rooted in historical contingency and narratives of power. ‘The idea of innovation is the idea of progress stripped of the aspirations of the Enlightenment, scrubbed clean of the horrors of the twentieth century, and relieved of its critics’, says Jill Lepore, ‘[d]isruptive innovation goes further, holding out the hope of salvation against the very damnation it describes: disrupt, and you will be saved’.10