Platform Cooperativism Resource Library

Summary

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.

Added April 28, 2020