About the project
Painting by Hilma af Klint, used on the original project site.
Distributing Chains was a PhD research project by Jaya Klara Brekke, based in the Geography department at Durham University in the UK. Its starting point was a plain question: what matters politically in blockchain technology? The word "matters" is meant literally, as in making a material difference. "Politically" refers to how incompatible positions get mediated and resolved, and how the possible and the impossible end up spread across different spaces.
The research produced a thesis, Disassembling the Trust Machine: three cuts on the political matter of blockchain. The full thesis is available as a PDF (about 3.5 MB), posted on the project site in June 2019.
Background
Blockchain first appeared as a core part of how Bitcoin works. Transactions are registered, validated and stored by a distributed network, with no bank or other central authority in the middle, and the same process decides how fast new money enters the system. That arrangement drew in people from across the political spectrum who distrust centralised authority, and it spread into projects well beyond payments, with claims of coming transformations in state and finance.
Three strategies, three cases
The thesis works with three methods for thinking about the politics of the technology: diffraction, dissensus, and the (re)distribution of the possible. It applies them to three cases: Bitcoin, Ethereum and Faircoin.
First comes a description of each architecture and how it differs from the others, treated as a moment of choice that exposes principles, beliefs and assumptions. Then come moments of conflict in each case, where dissensus forces the principles (political, design, technical) to be spelled out and the rules for settling disagreements to be reworked. Last, the thesis looks at how each case shifts what is possible compared with other existing spaces and modes of politics.
People
The thesis was supervised by Joe Painter and Harriet Bulkeley and examined by Louise Amoore and Andrew Leyshon.
Where to go next
The objectives and research questions lay out what the project set out to map. Short texts from the project include Delegation, Block Busters #1 and the dissensus protocol. Lists of publications and talks and exhibitions cover the wider body of work.
About this archive
This site is an independent archive of the public material of the Distributing Chains project, rebuilt from the project's pages as they stood in 2019. It is not the author's site and has no connection with Durham University or with any organiser or venue named here. It takes no submissions, runs no mailing list and shows no contact form.