Do Digital Technologies Have Politics? Imaginaries, Practices and Socio-political Implications of Civic Blockchain

This chapter questions the purported technical neutrality and the aura of political impartiality surrounding digital technologies arguing that technical neutrality rarely, if ever, exists. Through a theoretical analysis of the blockchain, we argue that socially emancipatory and democratising applications of the blockchain require more than just identifying new users and contexts. For a people-driven, socially orientated civic blockchain to truly work, we need to be vigilant about how we design technological features as these embody contending socio-political visions of our collective futures. We conclude by proposing a research agenda for critically investigating how digital technologies (and blockchain in particular) affect socio-geographical space and ask who should be responsible for imbuing public values in digital technologies; and guaranteeing conditions of fairness, accessibility, democratic control, and accountability.