Blockchain is a form of platform imperialism that expands capitalist interests and enables violence in the global south.

This article argues that blockchain represents a form of ‘platform imperialism’ (Jin, 2015) that extends both the cultural and economic power of Silicon Valley and American geopolitical interests. Blockchain has emerged as one of the central technologies of the ICT4D paradigm drawing together foreign governments, NGOs, platform developers and corporations in shaping developing world economic policy and governance practices. The US State Department has played a crucial role in coalescing these networks through initiatives such as Civil Society 2.0 which cast Silicon Valley platforms and a culture of techno-solutionism (Morozov, 2014) as universal. What is distinct about blockchain platform imperialism are its claims to algorithmic governance and powers of cartography. As part of ‘Data’s Empire’ (Isin and Ruppert, 2019), blockchain undermines the developing world state’s ability to control its own resources, while mapping new ‘territory as an object of power’ (208). Blockchain complements techno-colonial processes of data extraction and computational capitalism (Beller, 2018) by using code to lock in proprietary relations.

Opening new terrains of data and expanding network technologies does not depend upon imperial coercion but an assemblage of development agencies, foreign governments and platforms all ‘celebrat[ing] the transformative nature of ICTs’ (Ndemo, 2019: 27). Within these contours, there are rival cyber-powers and platforms as well as indeterminacies of connectivity which diffuse the exercise of imperial power. However the ‘spiritual hegemony of American-based entrepreneurship’ (Jin, 2015: 16) pervades these networks. The US has relied on the soaring rhetoric of freedom, democracy and empowerment through connectivity in shaping global communication systems. American hegemony in ICT4D can be explained in political-economic terms as the support of domestic capital and platforms, the leadership of governing bodies such as ICANN and the US State Department’s long-standing interest in tech-centric soft power initiatives. This continuity of soft power and cultural imperialism spans the ‘free flow of information doctrine’ (Schiller, 1975) during the Cold War to the ‘freedom to connect agenda’ (Powers and Jablonski, 2015: 74) in the era of network computing. As articulated by former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, connectivity is the ‘great leveller’ creating ‘a common body of knowledge that benefits and unites us all’ (US Department of State, 2010).

This cultural imperialist portrayal of the internet as a human-centred development tool is epitomized by the State Department’s launch of the ‘Civil Society 2.0’ initiative (US Department of State, 2019). This policy has been enacted through an on-going series of State Department workshops, hackathons and fora that operate under the banner of ‘Tech Camp’ with the aim to ‘[empower] civil society to solve the world’s most pressing challenges through technology’ (Tech Camp, 2019). As a champion of ICT, the State Department has promoted ‘the wider trend toward digital innovation and data practices in the humanitarian field’ (Madianou, 2019a: 582). Similarly, the emergence of the hackathon as a solutionist practice in the development sector represents the performative entrepreneurial style of Silicon Valley. It legitimizes existing platforms and offers participants an opportunity to ‘rehears[e] for future employment, partnerships, or investments’ (Irani, 2019: 225). The role of State Department programmes such as Tech Camp is to facilitate the private/public collaborations between platform developers, the NGO sector and the developing world state.

‘Platform Imperialism’ (Jin, 2015) is the material, economic and cultural power that is advanced by disavowing network geopolitics through humanitarianism. Platform Imperialism has allowed FAANG platforms to function as ‘beachheads’ (McChesney, 2013: 131) for American capital. It ensures the flow of data by monopolizing online advertising revenue, intellectual property rights and fees to Tier 1 ISPs. Leveraging a desire for development platforms are able to plan ‘infrastructure in the global south engineered for their own needs…while imposing privatized forms of governance’ (Kwet, 2019: 7).

Blockchain complements and extends existing techno-colonial practices of shaping social life for the extraction of data (Couldry and Mejias, 2019; Thatcher et al., 2016). This cultural and economic power enables digital platforms to ‘produce a new type of “social” for capital’ (Couldry and Mejias, 2019: 341). What is distinct about blockchain however are its pretensions to universality: a singular platform which mediates all data and the social world. Thus blockchain does not simply try to enter the fields of advertising, retail and cloud services but seeks to shape developing world governance systems for data production and platform dependence. It is in this way that blockchain creates a technological frontier with developing world resources as its prized objects.

Blockchain’s role within platform imperialism is in charting a ‘historical and planetary totality’ (Beller, 2018: 5) for computational capitalism. The mediation of all data via blockchain embodies the neoliberal premise of Friedreich Von Hayek that price signals, or in this case encrypted data, advance the prime social good of markets. This surpasses the e-commerce and advertising-based platforms of web 2.0 in incorporating private and public forms of governance. For blockchain developers, the governance systems of the developing world are a frontier ‘empty of other entrepreneurial ideas, histories and claims, but full of potential for new and improved use’ (Howson, 2020: 2). Thus biometric identification, land titles, resource management and cash-aid can all be integrated into this universal governance solution.

The vantage of American platforms and the state over this emerging cartography of control owes to the long-standing imperial vision of computation as the ‘underlying matter of everything in the social world [which can] be brought under state-capitalist military control’ (Golumbia, 2009: 60). While there are more than simply American platforms and agencies active in this space, Palantir is an example of a state-capital platform nexus which bring development agencies like the World Food Program into this orbit (Kintsler, 2019) through data and blockchain governance. Thus as blockchain claims a ‘technical agency separate from the messiness of society and the economy’ (Zook and Blankenship, 2018: 253), it reproduces these North-South asymmetries of power in mapping developing world societies for future exploitation.

Blockchain governance and discourse

Blockchain claims to democratize big data, finance and provide all manner of governance solutions. Governance principles of ‘increased transparency, accountability and efficiency’ (Coppi and Fast, 2019: 1) fit the rubric of both blockchain and the NGO sector. It is a technology and discourse that possess a totalizing view of social transformation through data encryption, accumulation and decentralization. While space precludes a discussion of the entire field of blockchain possibilities, I have summarized the key technological, political and economic contours necessary for an examination of Pacific blockchain. The following section is organized around blockchain’s relationship to the state; the utopian ideal of disintermediation; technical architectures and governance; and the role of proprietary platform developers.

Blockchain and the state

The origins of blockchain as a project of radical cryptocurrency cyberlibertarianism (Golumbia, 2016) have indelibly shaped its notions of governance and the state. Blockchain’s technological parameters – an encrypted digital ledger, distributed across a decentralized network with a communal devotion to data encryption – is a product of Bitcoin’s antipathy towards the state. Crypto enthusiasts decry the state’s role in creating money by fiat, adopting goldbug theories in which encryption becomes a tangible social value equivalent to gold. Bitcoin mining is the energy intensive process of creating financial rewards for participants who compete to add encrypted ‘blocks’ of transactions to the existing ‘chain’. The pivot to the NGO sector and away from the insular subcultures of crypto has been crucial in extracting blockchain technology as a universal governance ideal for the state and beyond. Academic research centres such as MIT Media Lab’s Digital Currency Initiative (DCI) have played a central role in extolling the virtues of blockchain for the developing world’s ‘2 billion unbanked’ (Dragos, 2017). The uptake of blockchain by the World Food Program for aid distribution and biometric identification has functioned to both legitimate blockchains for social good and have marked the organization as a leading innovator within the NGO sector.

The state is a central preoccupation of blockchain enthusiasts as an entity that can be sold governance solutions, superseded by innovation or confer legitimacy upon blockchain. It is this contradictory relationship that allows blockchain to function within platform imperialism as a means to inculcate a market logic, Eurocentric techno-rationality and ‘rework colonial relationships of dependency’ (Madianou, 2019b: 2). Blockchain presents itself as the universal standard of data integrity with digital assets and identity protected through tamper-proof ledgers and self-executing smart contracts. In certain jurisdictions, blockchain advocacy has secured the state’s imprimatur as a technology of ‘uncensored truth’ (Walch, 2017: 744). What is envisioned here are social relations increasingly assuming the characteristics of encrypted data with blockchain ‘replacing law as a means for capitalist control’ (Käll, 2018: 136). As a regulatory regime, blockchain enforces code as ‘ex-ante’ law and as a set of technical rules determined by proprietary software (Hassan and De Filippi, 2017). Blockchain governance is exemplary of the solutionist view of human ‘virtues’, in this case, discursive and democratic processes of law, as ‘problems’ (Morozov, 2014: 20). As a paradigm for the NGO sector, blockchain platforms have the potential to control property and organizational resources outside of the purview of developing world states.

Truth, trust and disintermediation

Blockchain is one of the few remaining grand narratives of connectivity, which allows it to stand-in for more than simply expanding digital property rights. Proponents claim that blockchain is a technology of immutable truth and pure mediation capable of ushering in a ‘Trust Revolution’ (Lubin, 2019). It is touted as the universal security protocol for all data (Kaili in Herian, 2018: 165) providing the encryption necessary to overcome issues of privacy and realize the potential of data solutionism.4 The blockchain subject assumes a ‘self-sovereign identity’ (Lundkvist and Key, 2015) achieving the cyberlibertarian ideal of disintermediation as the individual mediates their own relationship to the state and other gatekeepers (including FAANG platforms).

What is imagined is a utopian future in which the subject is free from coercive mediating institutions, the state chief among them, wielding data certainty as a means of freedom and social transformation. For Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin, the trust that comes from encryption allows blockchain to function as the locus for ‘creativity and novel problem solving’ and a ‘network platform economy…[which] for the first time in human history empower both the collective and the individual’ (2019). While meditations on the potential for alternative social values are a consistent feature of blockchain discourse, the role of financial institutions, Silicon Valley and governments has principally made blockchain a ‘means of maintaining and extending bureaucratic and commercial power’ (Cheesman, 2020: 4).

Permissions and algorithmic governance

In order to critically assess blockchain claims to truth and innate human values, a cursory outline of technical architectures is necessary. The Bitcoin blockchain, while a highly volatile and ideological project, can be said to achieve universal or ‘permissionless’ access to an insular world of truth represented by all Bitcoin transactions. This is achieved through the energy intensive ‘proof of work’ consensus mechanism of Bitcoin mining. Blockchain governance projects attempt to supersede enormously wasteful proof of work algorithms with ‘proof of stake’ or ‘proof of authority’ consensus mechanisms. Proof of stake allows for permissioned or private blockchains where stakeholders advance the block based on ‘who holds coins inside of the system’ (Buterin and Griffith, 2017) while the proof of authority simply formalizes a division of labour or hierarchy within an organization. The utopian rhetoric of blockchain seeks to conflate proof of stake and proof of authority with the seeming universality and truth claims of proof of work. Proof of stake/authority governance projects conceal the explicitly political questions of blockchain architectures around apportioning stakes and permissioned roles. Architectures may be configured in indeterminate ways; however, the platform geopolitics, political economy and under-girding cyber-libertarian ethos of blockchain loom large.

Platform prospecting

While Bitcoin is the ur-blockchain from which the idea of immutable truth emerges, Ethereum is the platform of blockchain governance projects. Ethereum is a cryptocurrency designed to allow developers to launch applications on its blockchain, from smart contracts and digital applications to the ideal of digitally autonomous organizations. The overwhelming majority of blockchain offerings to date, however, have been scams (Alexandre, 2018). The key evangelist of blockchain governance is Ethereum co-founder and founder of the blockchain start-up incubator ConsenSys, Joe Lubin. Funded by Lubin’s billion-dollar crypto fortune, ConsenSys boasts a suite of proprietary platforms and an academy to ‘develop the global blockchain eco-system’ (ConsenSys Academy, 2020). ConsenSys programmers and community members serve as emissaries to the corporate, government and NGO sectors. In this growth before profit phase for ConsenSys5 user uptake is crucial for the start-ups vying to be the ‘killer’ blockchain platform that might yield monopoly profits. Blockchain governance projects belie the hierarchical digital property relations that are abstracted through claims of disintermediation, data encryption and a transcendence of politics.

Blockchain and the pacific

What follows is an overview of emerging blockchain projects in the Pacific region. In undertaking this analysis, I have assembled technical reports from blockchain projects, policy statements, legislative documents, conference proceedings and media reports. These documents are treated to both discursive and technical analysis, and informed by concepts described above of platform imperialism, solutionism and computational capitalism. This overview is intended as a pilot for a larger qualitative study that will involve interviews and fieldwork with blockchain developers and participants. As part of this pilot, I have included an interview Kenneth Katafono, the region’s key blockchain advocate and developer. His company, TraSeables Solutions has partnered with ConsenSys start-up Viant and the WWF on a tuna supply blockchain that has been the region’s most high-profile project to date based in Fiji. This overview is intended to identify the diffuse actors – from governments, NGOs, financial institutions and entrepreneurs – which constitute Pacific blockchain.

The attractiveness of the Pacific as a tech-frontier for blockchain is a result of development challenges and a regulatory openness based upon imperial power imbalances. Tech experimentation in the developing world has the benefit of connecting companies to aid-funding streams and outsourcing risk ‘to some of the most fragile environments in the world with value extracted for the benefit of stakeholders including private entrepreneurs and large companies’ (Madianou, 2019b: 8). In this space, governments, NGOs, local developers and blockchain evangelists all channel solutionist discourse vying to be the stand-ins for the promise of ICT4D. The varying political economic contours of Pacific nations shape the inflection of blockchain solutionism. What is consistent across these projects is the conflation of Western developers and ConsenSys platforms with Pacific self-determination and tech-development.6

The pacific ideology and blockchain frontier

Before examining Pacific blockchain projects in detail, it is important to consider the techno-colonial histories of the Pacific and Silicon Valley’s frontier culture. The emergence of the Pacific as a blockchain frontier owes to Silicon Valley’s re-tracing of the pathways of Anglo-American imperialism (Keown et al., 2018) and the Pacific articulation of the Californian Ideology (Barbrook and Cameron, 1996). My notion of a Pacific Ideology takes up Barbrook and Cameron’s, as well as Turner’s (2010), cultural analysis of Silicon Valley’s frontier imaginary. Fantasies of open space and a fetishization of indigenous people are reconstituted in the Pacific as the western most frontier and ‘American Oceanic Sublime’ (Geiger, 2018: 112). Anglo-American imperialism has designated the Pacific as a space for military and commercial mobility, with leisure industries created by American military R & R, a synthesis the late Pacific scholar Teresia Teaiwa terms ‘Millitourism’ (1999). American imperial cartographies, leisure and technology are inextricably linked in the Pacific through the launch of the nuclear age and ‘the development of much of the technology that enables continuing Western global hegemony’ Keown et al., 2018: 4) on the atoll bearing the name ‘Bikini’.

The Pacific Ideology relies on this imperial mobility and utopian desires for a new world via blockchain tech-experiments. Islands are cast as open spaces where entrepreneurs and self-imagined ‘digital artisans’ (Barbrook and Cameron, 1996: 50) have the freedom to pursue techno-utopian desires. The Pacific frontier is ‘between cyberspace and outer space’ (Thiel, 2009) with visions of free-floating islands offering the ability to model cyber-libertarian ideals of statelessness.7 This rhetoric of tech-transformation and experimentation sits alongside the imperial class politics of tax shelters, tax-free economic development zones and the desire of possessing one’s own private island.8 Brock Pierce, president of the Bitcoin foundation and founder of the stablecoin Tether, has exemplified the imperial politics of this island fantasy in attempting to transform Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria into a ‘crypto-utopia’. As Crandall observes this fantasy of a blank slate contains blithe ignorance of political and colonial histories, privileging blockchain evangelists ‘as futuristic visionaries as opposed to settler colonialists’ (2019: 288).

The blockchain frontier masks this imperial politics by appeals to indigenous peoples as pure embodiments of techno-utopian values. The nomad has long served as the ideal cyber countercultural subject innately connected to nature and technology via cybernetic metaphor (Turner, 2010). The founder of Indigicoin, a Māori cryptocurrency, has explicitly claimed that ‘we [indigenous people] were the original inventors of blockchain’ (Dunn, 2019) with songs and stories as the distributed, collective production of knowledge. Blockchain is held as a return to the authentic mediation of indigenous oral traditions and barter economies, analogous to blockchain’s promises of trust and disintermediation. Indigenous authenticity and blockchain entrepreneurialism would thus forge a frontier synthesis of the universal and particular akin the figure of the ‘cowboy nomad’ (Turner, 2010: 87). Pierce’s crypto-colonialism in Puerto Rico is exemplary of an imperialist appropriation of indigenous values. Central to his blockchain solutionism were appeals to the pseuo-indigenous principles of Burning Man and the ‘decolonization of money’ (White, 2019). McElroy (2019) has written that this fetishization of indigenous people and a nomadic mobility, enabled by new digital frontiers, represents the expansion of property relations with Silicon Valley serving as the ‘techno-imperial centre’ (218).