Democratech: reflections on the human nature of blockchain

1 In this talk I will be using ideas from my most recent book: here it is. You can download it for free or buy it in paper or electronic form if you wish. See http://teachingcrowds.ca. It is at least as  much about the nature of technology as it is about the nature of education, and that’s what I want to talk about today: what kind of a technology is blockchain, and why does it matter?

2 “Technology” is a fuzzy term that can mean many things to different people. I spend a whole chapter in the book exploring many definitions of what “technology” means. To, save time, I am going to use what I conclude to be the best definition, from Brian Arthur, “orchestrating phenomena to our use”.

3 I prefer to think of this as “organizing stuff to do stuff”, because it makes it clearer that the stuff that it organizes nearly always includes stuff already organized to do stuff: as Arthur observes, almost all if not all technologies are assemblies of other technologies, at least when they are put to use.

Technologies are made of technologies, at every scale, and they are parts of webs of technologies that stretch far into time and space.  Kevin Kelly calls this massively interconnected network the technium. And, as he puts it, technology can be thought of as both a thing and a verb or, as Ursula Franklin puts it fish and water – a slippery thing to pin down. It is something we do and something we have done. In fact it is typically both.

4 By this definition, democracies are technologies too – in fact, hugely complex assemblies of technologies. They orchestrate phenomena using systems, physical objects, and assemblies of them, to approximate a fair voice for all in the governance of where we dwell. So are words, and language, and, as Franklin notes, there are technologies of prayer.

5 If you take nothing else from this speech, take this: only the whole assembly matters. The parts are very important to the designer and make a big difference to how a technology works and is experienced, but it is how the parts are assembled and act together that makes the technology as it is experienced, as it is instantiated. That includes what we do with them – more on that in a moment.

If you are not convinced, think about some of the parts of the computer you are looking at now: some are sharp, some contain harmful chemicals, and there’s a good chance that there is a deadly amount of  electricity flowing through them, and yet we gain benefit from them, not loss of life, because we assemble them in ways that (at least normally) eliminate the harm by adding technologies to prevent it: counter technologies. Often, a large part of what we recognize as a technology is in fact a counter technology to other parts of it – think of cars, for example, where many of the components are simply there to stop other components blowing up, seizing, or killing people.

6 Technologies create what Stuart Kauffman calls “adjacent possibles” – empty niches that further technologies can fill, individually or in conjunction with others, including others that already exist. Every new technology makes further technologies possible, adding new parts to new assemblies. This accounts for the exponential growth in technologies over the past 10000 years or so: technologies evolve from and with other technologies, almost never out of nothing.

Those adjacent possible empty niches are fundamentally unprestatable, as Kauffman puts it: no one can imagine all the possible assemblies into which we might put something as simple as a screwdriver. A stirrer of paint, a back scratcher, a scribe, a pointer, a stabbing weapon, a weight, a missile, a crow bar… And this is true of every technology. All can be assembled differently, in indefinitely many assemblies, to make indefinitely many wholes. This is true at the finest of scales. Though there may be some very close resemblances between instances, you have never written your own signature, nor washed your clothes, nor eaten your food the same way twice. Only machines can do that, but they are part of our technologies as much as we are part of them: the machine may behave consistently but the technology through which we use it – the instantiation in which we participate – most likely does not.

Technologies also come with path dependencies that can harden and distort assemblies, because the soft must shape itself around the hard. What exists shapes what can exist.

7, 8 When instantiated, we are participants in, not just users of, the technology. Using a technology is also a technology: whether organizing it or being part of the organization

9 , 10 We are coparticipants in a largely self-organizing web of technology that is part organic, part process, part physical object, part conceptual, part structural. Technologies democratize cognition though they also embed and harden values of the powerful, and the uses to which they are put are too often to subdue, constrain, or abuse our fellow humans. It is always important to remember that the technology that matters is seldom its most obvious components: it is the assembly they are in. As they are used, they are different technologies to everyone that uses them, because they are parts of different assemblies: the production line is a very different technology for its boss, its workers, its shareholders, the consumers of what it produces, orchestrating different phenomena to different users. This means that technologies – as instantiated – are never neutral. They have histories, contexts, and propensities.

11 And our input matters: it is not just the method but the way things are done that matters. Every assembly can be a creative assembly, and it is possible to do it well or badly. And so we all create new adjacent possibles for one another.  Through technologies we participate in the collective cognition of the human race: in effect, technologies form the distributed ledger of our shared cognition. But all of us assemble and interpret in the ways we use technology, whether we form part of it (hard technique) or are the organizers (soft technique).

12 Blockchain is a technology capable of achieving great good: potentially accountable but equally interesting in ways it can support anonymity, free from central control but also interesting in the context of an existing system of trust, good for both privacy and transparency, etc. It has indefinitely many adjacent possibles, from the exchange of property to the assertion of identity, from enabling reliable voting to making supply chains accountable.

13 But all technologies are what Neil Postman called Faustian bargains. When you invent the ship you invent the shipwreck as Paul Virilio put it. The story of the Monkeys Paw, by W.W. Jacobs is a tale of horror in which a monkey’s paw grants three wishes to a modest couple, who ask only to pay off their mortgage with their first wish. Moments later, they learn their son has died in a horrible accident at a factory in which he works and the company will pay compensation: the exact cost of the outstanding mortgage. And so the story goes on. Technologies are like that.

Blockchain can be subverted by organized crowds (botnets and human), malware, cracking, etc, and quantum computing means all bets are off about reliability an security. It is possible to lose votes as easily as it is to lose millions in bitcoin. Blockchain can conceal criminal activity, and, conversely, enable a level of surveillance never seen before. Remember, this is all about the assembly, and blockchain is a very versatile component. It’s a super-soft technology that connects many others. Blockchain makes new forms of democracy possible, but it also enables new forms of tyranny.

To understand blockchain we must understand the technologies of which it forms only part of the assembly. Never forget that it is only ever the assembly that matters, not the parts. This is and has always been true of all the technologies of democracy. Paper voting, say, in its raw form is incredibly and fundamentally unreliable, prone to loss, error, abuse, corruption, coercion, loss of privacy, etc and it is terribly, terribly inefficient and insecure. However, we throw in a lot of counter technologies – systems to assure reliability, safes, multiple counts, policing procedures, surveillance, electronic counts, , observers, etc – and so the process is now so well evolved that it often enough works. Paper is not the technology of interest: it is the whole system that surrounds it. Same for blockchain.

14 Understanding technologies mean we we must know the adjacent possibles but, remember, we we can only ever see the most brightly lit of these from where we currently stand. The creative potential, for both good and evil, is barely visible at all. Someone, somehow, somewhere, will find new assemblies that achieve their ends, whether it benefits all of us or not. Sadly, those most able are typically those least trustworthy thanks to the fundamental inequalities of our societies that reward greed and that give most to those who already have most. Anything is weaponizable, including democracy, as (here in Canada) our neighbours south of the border are discovering to their cost. And it means understand what happens at scale: the environmental impacts and counter technologies to that: but, as Reneé Dubos put it, fixing problems with counter technologies is a philosophy of despair, because every counter technology we create is another Faustian bargain that creates new problems to solve, and new adjacent possibles we never foresaw.

15 We must understand where blockchain fits in the massive web of the collective technium – the Ricardian contracts, the oracles, the legal frameworks that surround them, the ZKP techniques, the privacy laws, the voting practices, the laws of ownership, and so on. It is unwise to simply drop it in as a replacement for what we already do because it will harden what should not be hardened – when we automate we tend to simplify – and create new relationships that may be incompatible or positively dangerous to existing technologies of democracy. But, as we reinvent it, we must always remember the unprestatable adjacent possibles we create, the things we reinforce, the things we lose. And we must remember that someone, somewhere is seeing adjacent possibles we did not imagine, assemblies we have yet to conceive, and they may not be friendly to democratic ideals.

16 To understand this means we must look far beyond the bits and bytes and flashing lights; we must make empathetic leaps into the hearts and minds of our coparticipants in the technium. We are technologies, as much a part of blockchain as it is part of the broader web of the technium.

What kind of technologies do we want to be?