Abstract
Although blockchain is often posed as a revolutionary and disruptive technology, its politics and socio-technical configurations often align with aims to maintain the status quo, and/or aims to concentrate wealth and to make existing powers more efficient. I empirically describe how colonial-contingent, neoliberal economic policies in Puerto Rico have incentivized the techno-capitalist industries of cryptocurrency and blockchain. Portions of the archipelago are being re-made into a so-called “crypto-utopia” to satisfy the desires of new settlers in a new form of crypto-colonialism. Puerto Rican government organizations, institutions, and businesses are also engaging blockchain technology with differing intents, all using rhetoric as a covert design tool. In this paper I will focus on blockchain and cryptocurrency as neoliberal and libertarian technologies adopted by governmental agencies, businesses, organizations, and individuals, as well as efforts of resistance through alternative, decolonial design.
Notes
Acknowledgments
For the writing of this paper, I owe much to Andrew Mercado-Vázquez and Noemí Segarra for their connections, passion, and discussions. Thank you to Jilly Traganou, Miodrag Mitrasinovic, Miguel Robles-Durán, and Antina von Schnitzler for inspiration and advising during development of this thesis at Parsons School of Design. Thanks to Ed Keller for the invitation to present work-in-progress at the “Agent Intellects Symposium” at The New School (December 2018); and to Agnieszka Leszczynski and Gillian Rose for inviting me to present portions of this work on a feminist digital geography panel at AAG (April 2019) in Washington DC. Thanks also to the editors of this Special Issue and peer reviewers for critical insights and suggestions.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Analyzing the top two blockchains/cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin and Ethereum) – the original Bitcoin whitepaper uses the term “transaction” sixty nine times. The Ethereum whitepaper (as of March 2019) uses the term 131 times.
2 See Design and Culture, The Journal of the Design Studies Forum, Vol. 10, 2018 – Issue 1: Decolonizing Design.
3 A report by McKinsey claims: “Digital technologies could become the engine of economic progress, and blockchain, without a doubt, could be one of them” (Gupta Citation2018).
4 Joseph Schumpeter was an Austrian economist who coined the concept of “creative destruction” as the “fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion […] the opening up of new markets” (Schumpeter Citation1994 [1942]). This concept would become central to the Austrian school of free-market economic thought.
5 By some accounts these are not considered true blockchains, since they are permissioned (not open) and use proprietary consensus protocols rather than cryptographic proofs.
6 An example of an outside tech company is Renovatio PR that is seeking to transform the Island into the “next Silicon Valley of the fintech industry” (Renovatio Citation2019). However, Puerto Rican entrepreneurs are also designing blockchain projects in neoliberal spaces of innovation, such as the co-working spaces of Piloto 151, Engine4, and the startup accelerator Parallel 18. RedCat is a drone monitoring blockchain company that has a partnership with the University of Puerto Rico. Abartys Health is a healthcare company co-founded by a Puerto Rican woman. They are considering blockchain as a database for health records, and they aim to solve the “global healthcare crisis with smarter, faster care” (Abartys Health Citation2019). With drastic neoliberal austerity cuts to Medicaid under former Governor Ricardo Rosselló’s administration, combined with negative health consequences linked to the precarization of labor in the gig economy (Bajwa et al Citation2018), Abartys Health is posed to do good business.
7 An understanding of the concept of cryptoeconomics is not required to design or build blockchain projects, but the concept has gained popularity over the last two years. There have even been higher-education programs dedicated to cryptoeconomics, including the “Cryptoeconomics Lab” at MIT, the “Interdisciplinary Research Institute for Cryptoeconomics” at WU Vienna, and the RMIT University “Blockchain Innovation Hub.”
8 Puerto Rico has a local cryptocurrency project – Coqui Cash – also meant to be used for local goods and services. Its audience is different than Valor y Cambio, geared toward cryptos coming in from the outside, and those within Puerto Rico.
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Jillian Crandall
Jillian is an architect and educator based in New York. Her work focuses on the implications of digital/physical infrastructures on space and lives. She is an advocate for data justice, spatial justice, and design justice, which are the aims of her critical urban research and design practice, Contra+. jcrandall@newschool.edu