Abstract
Distributed ledger technology (DLT) is increasingly proposed as a powerful tool to address the social and ecological challenges in the Global South. DLTs are opening up possible futures, one of which is a wave of infrastructure decentralization with common-centric and cosmo-local production. Shared logistics and supply chains for a circular economy, with collaborative and networked ‘flow’ accounting allow the integration of contributive logics as well as the integration of social and ecological externalities, including practical knowledge on resource use limitations linked to planetary boundaries, as an integral part of ecosystems of productive collaboration. Indeed, DLTs remove the need for central intermediaries to validate transaction between parties, who instead place their trust in the encrypted, disintermediated system software. DLTs can be designed as a new unencloseable (non-commodifiable) medium of communication, which could lead to radically new forms of cooperation, organization, and governance. Yet these revolutionary possibilities will not be realized unless technologists consciously and strategically design systems redistributing sovereignty from elites to the people in financial, service and national infrastructures. This paper concludes with a critical examination of the application of DLT in Puerto Rico and how DLTs could alter the production and exchange of “value” in service of a global popular sovereignty.
Highlights
Technology is always a combination of the technical, political, social and economic
This paper concludes the possibilities of Distributed ledger technology (DLT) cannot be achieved unless developers, designers, investors and technologists consciously and strategically design systems according to the principles of the commons with further analysis and discussion of the class nature of technology and accounting, including an exploration of the implications for social movements’ praxis and accounting technology agency as part of the struggle to create emancipatory and regenerative future techno-social infrastructure
—See (2019, Community Matters webpage), A Holochain Community Builder Located in the Crypto Valley, Switzerland. For those involved with DLT projects, the technological affordances (Manski and Manski, 2018) allowing for a fundamental shift in value accounting, is inspiring a wave of activism designed to change the way our social, political, and economic societies work away from global capitalism to the commons
Summary
Technology is always a combination of the technical, political, social and economic. Distributed ledger technology (DLT) is a relatively recent technological innovation which enables secure, distributed exchange and registry of assets without the need for a trusted third party. Brastaviceanu is part of a global movement sharing a vision of a post-capitalist society created through cooperatively controlled socio-technological architecture Central to this transformation is a shift in the concept of “value” as it exists in contemporary global capitalism toward a new role for value in a decentralized system of economic relations. P2P and commons-oriented communities, values and practices are increasingly present in the world of physical production through open design, the sharing economy and co-working in community-operated, collaborative workspaces like hackerspaces, makerspaces, and Fab-labs These movements represent a cultural shift toward new kinds of technology enabled democratic and economic participation that we believe are sowing the seeds for a more sustainable, egalitarian future. This paper concludes the possibilities of DLTs cannot be achieved unless developers, designers, investors and technologists consciously and strategically design systems according to the principles of the commons with further analysis and discussion of the class nature of technology and accounting, including an exploration of the implications for social movements’ praxis and accounting technology agency as part of the struggle to create emancipatory and regenerative future techno-social infrastructure
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