An Anthropological Perspective on Ethereum by Ann Brody (Devcon5)

[Applause] supervision of dr. Gabriela Pullman cheese and anthropologist and she's fantasy known for her work on the Atlantic's community and the hacker group Anonymous so what is my purpose here you know I ask that all the time it's like a bunch of these like techies here and I have to learn the lingo and nothing makes sense humor makes no sense it's a process right so we're trying to do is trying to bridge the gap between the social science I can be man and walk Cheney because I think there's a lot that we can learn from each other so tech people think that social science is useless that it's not a real okay but on the other hand social science academics critique watching as a hyper libertarian technology that's supported by a bunch of technocrats and I know that's not necessarily truth but so yeah I want to know how can we proceed forward so that there is greater mutual understanding between us and can we coddle the children's hands and build together historical base current I'm learning I'm learning so the story of how I got into watching is actually a pretty interesting one so my partner was in the watching industry and basically he got invited to an IC 3 bootcamp at Cornell University and not knowing really much about blockchain at the time I decided since I go on see what it's all about course I've encountered a lot of these like hyped up media articles on walk change so I wanted to find out for myself what it was about by you know talking to like really prominent people there so yeah so I went there and there was like this excursion which was like a hike with fatality and there I was just like hiking with him and asking him all these questions like what do you think about his earring was your vision embarrassingly enough ok I will admit I did not know who he was at the time only now like whoa I was yes so I'm very inspired and basically I wanted to know more about this very unique community and that's really good coffee to embark on this research so before I knew about the culture of dynamics that we Syrian I just assumed like many high tech like Silicon Valley even eat you know it was like super technique of being the rainbows and unicorns certainly didn't help that and just like so here on the same page few techniques hoping it's basically an ideology that's encountered and technologic communities that's premise on the belief that advances in technology could bring about a perfect society or help fulfill utopian ideals in the near future so before really going into the community I started observing how the general public perceives blockchain so some of my general observations were like people outside of crypto watching space thing it's a hyper libertarian technology you know she's so much like right libertarians got a running it and there was actually a conference in Montreal this year that I the ietf conference which is the internet engineering task versus the guys that establish standards for the Internet's and it was really interesting how nobody spoke about blocking there nobody mentioned anything and I talked to some prominent people and asked them like what do you think the watching and they just tended to avoid with that whole discussion and it's like what is going on here then going into more depth on these discussions they said oh you know what what changed was like a bunch of these people are just trying to solve every human problem with you know this technology and it's just a huge sham planet it's really not better in the social academia they think it's like a hyper libertarian technology with this technical O'Neill twist and of course that's the general public that assumes that is hype or just something that supports criminal activity based on their knowledge of Bitcoin so going into this research I had to pool tonight so the first one I wanted to know what are some of the ideology that exist in a theory and suddenly I wanted to know to what extent this tech neutral beam is a prevail in the community narratives and this led me to draw two findings so basically I found that aetherium accommodates developers and other actors with distinct political motives up perspectives right you come let anarchists and right libertarians and everything in between and secondly developers are not really Tecna you tow peon to my surprise so I was really interested in how there's like this plethora of diverse ideologies in in Syria and I really wanted to unpack that like I wanted to know what was behind this phenomenon and this led me to draw two more conclusions basically have to do with the design of the protocol and the philosophy of decentralization so the design of the protocol so part of the reason why those nine percent colleges in Syria is based on how a Syrian is actually designed great so artifacts actually have politics and there is a theorist named Langdon winner forward this theory that all technology is in fact so this means that all technological artifacts in their design they have political properties and the and impact on the ways that they enact social ordering so uses the example of bridges that were built over overcut ways on Long Island in the 1920s and they were built in such a way to discourage buses from entering them which resulted in limiting the access of racial minorities and low-income groups who use these buses to get to popular beaches we were at that time so this means that technological society enforces a specific political agenda and in the case of bridges it was a racist agenda and to this day even though our attitudes towards racism have somewhat improved the bridge is still continue to stand up there and enforce the dynamics so this inherently means that specific design choices can affect how power is distributed and that certain technologies are compatible with some form of organization than others so the best example is nuclear energy right that requires highly centralized and authoritarian forms of organization in order to be operated so what this really says is that we need to consider the relationship between technological design and its material outcomes and this really got me thinking about Bitcoin in this area and how we can apply this theory to these two protocols so like bitcoin is a fairly it's a fairly restrictive protocol it's you know House of limited language script and it's mostly just a cash protocol where is um you know it's based on entering a complete language salinity or Viper and it had unlimited potential so it allows people in in this industry to basically encode their values and it allows through this diversity to happen whereas Bitcoin it's more secures and there's less room to experiment with it so therefore you're only getting like not as diverse of values of like inferior so that's that and then secondly second reason why there's diverse perspectives and experience because of the philosophy of decentralization itself however to be honest with you like I don't know where decentralization is I don't think there was a clear-cut definition for it and actually center ization has long been central to economic and political philosophy but has only recently become a core technical imaginary so just so we're clear it wasn't the technology that emerged with a sanitized technology but actually political philosophy that later on seeped into the technical fields so something interesting about the philosophy of decentralization that it can accommodate people with different perspectives and ideologies to imagine the cells as part of a common project and we can conceptualize decentralization as something in social science we call a boundary object which is a theoretical term that signifies a concept or an actual object allows for actors from distinct political aspirations to cooperate on a project despite having different and sometimes even conflicting interests and this has been a defining feature of open-source communities and likewise etherium which accommodates developers with various political motives from left-leaning anti-capitalist agitators to capitalists friendly libertarians but the thing is is that everyone has their own idea about what decentralization is and that of course can be a good thing but you know because it allows for collaboration and to work efficiently but at the same time this lack of the choose specificity also can obscure an internalization I will speak more about that in the next slice to come so I'm going to continue on with the research goals so so I covered the first one and the second research role I had in mind is to what extent does tech nutopia nism prevail in the community an aerialist of area and the result was not technical yeah it's shocking right and these are some of the quotes I received that I pulled from my introducer crypto hype it's just a blind leading the blind we see the Challenger faced us which means that being optimistic isn't always easy most of us are not here to make a profit but are here for the intellectual challenge and curiosity making back Davis does a lot of the service to the technology and others along the similar lines so then this got me thinking where is the hype all right before that this led me to draw the conclusion that in fact aetherium developers are very pragmatic level-headed and reflexive of their privilege and technocratic status and these the ones that I've spoken to about I can't speak bro so where is this hype really coming from so watching public reputation is now hyper libertarian and perhaps this is for a good reason its uptake has been largely in capitalist supporters so this hype is essentially being used as a marketing we don't like in icos and whatnots and it's being used by profit driven entrepreneurs extreme right-wing libertarians and technology fetishes and since watching this in its nation see these stories are needed I get it like you sort of need the height in order to fill in some of the uncertainties that currently exist in relation to watching and the only problem however is that the capitalist venture people are the ones who are basically influencing the narratives about blockchain and they're basically shaping public perception of watching so what does this all mean so I'll just provide you with like a bunch of information and yeah so this is this is where I want to talk about how I do research questions start to infuse into so diverse perspectives and we fear in its nerium does not necessarily represent all of the perspectives in how the public perceives blockchain so the theorem allows for divers ideologies to exist in the space and make collaboration possible go through design and the philosophy of decentralization however this does not mean that people who enter into this network are equal and some have greater resources and skills which can result in resentful ization and this can be seen in the Bitcoin network for example so there are certain factors such as early adoption wealth an external economy and access to let's say will cross electricity for mining which can create concentration yet what we call this technology decentralized it just diverts attention from factors that can potentially leads to some degree of centralization so really it's the people with resources like the venture capitals who are determining a lot of the public discourse on blockchain and this is one of the reasons why to use force even as a height and this right-wing libertarian technology so I think what we really have to think about is finding a way of defining centralization because I say the truth is really risky and and this is because oftentimes when something gets centralized across new forms of centralization to emerge somewhere else in the system and this is something that has not only been found in tech but actually a pattern noticed by political science and studying government institutions yet we continue to use the term anonymous and translation and it obscures it from areas of centralization and we've seen this even in mining pools right they're the perfect example so I say don't expect any system to be fully decentralized is that it might be more helpful to be more clear about what the particular features of a system a given design seeks to decentralize and decentralizing mediations cannot expect to get rid of some every centralizing influence in the outside world this is just not realistic and this means that while technology that is meant to be centralized can introduce new possibilities which of course can be liberating it can also invite more unfavorable conditions such as unaccountable concentration of power because it always goes both ways therefore at the end of the day it's not really about caring whether something to decentralize or centralize what we should be asking is whether the thing we're building is accountable meaning that if we should be meaning that if perhaps like let's say we're the needs of user service room to change that or if we're not meeting the needs of libraries we can still change that it doesn't make sense to pursue decentralization at the expense of everything else if that means that you know even though they were just creating outcomes that run the risk of enabling on a common unaccountable concentration of power so going forward I have two propositions or aetherium so I propose we stop using the watch-chain as a solution narrative and instead focus on using the blockchain as an alternative method and the reason why it's because watching is precisely empowering right now because it's the underdog it introduces diversity into the existing systems allowing people to have more options pursuits of people in the space though they see it act like the means to it and I think when it's an ambition as replaceable and superior to every traditional institution that's kind of like if it's amplified to the extreme that's when it begins to take on a slightly dystopian term and take it takes on like this libertarian narrative which is fairly extreme tonight I don't think us where we want to be going depends another recommendation I have is to start building networks it's you know with other with other industries and in other fields so for example like ITF maybe academic ones and it's many no matter where ahead in the world I always see the same people and I mean it's great an office it's a community but at the same time it also becomes a plow circus and I think what we really have to strive for it's interdisciplinary because that is basically what is going to challenge us and make us step outside of ourselves and make us questions like why are we doing X and not Y right it's gonna give us some broader perspectives to some salt to solve some of the challenges that perhaps we're not seeing because we're like in our own headspace so yeah that's basically what I have for today thank you so much for listening if you'd like to debate or chat with me on any of the points that I'm happy to uh I love to argue stop thank you so much [Applause] one privacy in the box [Applause] what sister [Applause]