Despite the cacophony of political conjecture, the story of blockchain so far is a tale of financial speculation, in which the cash rewards reaped by bankers and venture capitalists are largely a result of the techno-utopian hype. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The prospect of decentralizing control does not absolve us of the hard work of politics, and blockchain has so far failed to transfer power to ‘We, the people’, whatever the white papers might suggest. Political economy cannot be replaced by technology alone. Today, technological wealth produced by and for society largely oils the machinery of capitalist accumulation. While we have yet to witness the decentralization of control, the collective wealth produced by of the decentralization of production — that is, the ‘sharing economy’, the big data industry, and other platforms that monetize our daily social interactions — remains firmly in the service of exploitative (centralized) corporations. Whether in logistics or social media, it is not so difficult — nor even particularly radical — to imagine decentralized, peer-to-peer services which produce value by and for the commonwealth. Nonetheless, it would require governance, by nationalization or other means: the network is not identical to the commons, and nor should we hope for it to be.

A super-chewy long-read [via Jay Springett]: “Systems Seduction: The Aesthetics of Decentralisation” by Gary Zhexi Zhang, one of ten winners in the Journal of Design & Science “Resisting Reduction” essay competition.