 supervision of Dr. Gabriela Coleman, she's an anthropologist and she's famously known for her work on the Devi and Linus community and the hypergroup anonymous. So what is my purpose here? You know, I ask that all the time. It's like a bunch of these techies here and I have to learn to let go and nothing makes sense and the Huber makes no sense. So it's a process, right? So what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to bridge the gap between the social science academia and blockchain 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 science. Okay, I get it. But on the other hand, social science academics critique blockchain as a hyper-libertarian technology that's supported by a bunch of technocrats and I know that's not necessarily true. But so yeah, I want to know how can we proceed forward so that there is greater mutual understanding between us and can we puddle each other's hands and build together and sorry if that made you cringe. But yeah, I'm learning, I'm learning. So the story of how I got into blockchain is actually a pretty interesting one. So my partner is in the blockchain industry and basically he got invited to an IC3 bootcamp at Cornell University and not knowing really much about blockchain at the time I decided to tag along, see what it was all about. Of course I've encountered a lot of these hyped up media articles on blockchain so I wanted to find out for myself what it was about by talking to really prominent people there. So yeah, so I went there and there was like this excursion which was like a hype with Vitalik and there I was just like hiking with him and asking him all these questions like what do you think about Ethereum? What's your vision? And embarrassingly enough, okay, I will admit I did not know who he was at the time. And only now I'm like whoa. But yeah, so I was very inspired and basically I wanted to know more about this very unique community and that's really what caught me to embark on this research. So before I knew about the cultural dynamics of Ethereum I just assumed like many high tech like Silicon Valley communities you know it was like super technotopian, the rainbows and unicorns certainly didn't help that and just like it's over on the same page, technotopian is basically an ideology that's encountered in technological communities that's premised 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 of blockchain spaces think it's a hyper libertarian technology you know it's just a bunch of like it's right with libertarians that are running it and there was actually a conference in Montreal this year that I went to is the IETF conference which is the Internet Engineering Task Force it's a guy that established standards for the internet and it was really interesting how nobody spoke about blockchain there nobody mentioned anything and I talked to some prominent people and asked them like what do you think of blockchain and they just tended to avoid that whole discussion and I was like what is going on here then going into more depth on these discussions they said oh you know well blockchain is just like a bunch of these people are just trying to solve every human problem with this technology and it's just a huge sham and then it's really not better in the social academia they think it's like a hyper libertarian technology with this techno-colonial twist and of course there's the general public that assumes that it's a hype or just something that supports criminality based off their knowledge of Bitcoin so going into this research I had two goals in mind so the first one I wanted to know what are some of the ideologies that exist in Ethereum and secondly I wanted to know to what extent this techno-tolbianism prevailed in the community narratives and this led me to draw two findings so basically I found that Ethereum accommodates developers and other actors with distinct political motives of perspectives right we have left anarchists and right libertarians and everything in between and secondly developers are not really techno-utopian to my surprise so I was really interested in how there's like this plethora of diverse ideologies in Ethereum 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 that basically have to do with the design of the protocol and the philosophy of decentralization so the design of the protocol so the reason why there's diverse ideologies in Ethereum is based on how Ethereum is actually designed right so artifacts actually have politics and there is a theorist named Langdon Winter who put forward this theory that all technology is in fact political so this means that all technological artifacts in their design they have political properties and that they can have an impact on the ways that they enact social ordering so he uses the example of bridges that were built over parkways on Long Island in the 1920s and they were built in such a way to discourage buses from like entering them which resulted in limiting the access of racial minorities and low income groups who used these buses to get to a popular beach in New York at that time so this means that technological designs 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 bridges still continue to stand there and enforce these 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 and Ethereum and how we can apply this theory to these two protocols so like Bitcoin is a fairly restricted protocol it has a limited language script and it's mostly just a cache protocol whereas Ethereum is based on a totally complete language or salinity or viper and it has unlimited potential so it allows people in this industry to basically encode their values and it allows for this diversity to happen whereas Bitcoin it's more secure and there's less room to experiment with it so therefore you're only getting like not as diverse of values as like Ethereum so that's that and then secondly second reason why there's diverse perspectives in Ethereum is because of the philosophy of decentralization itself however to be honest with you like I don't know what decentralization is I don't think there's a clear cut definition for it and actually decentralization has long been central to economic and political philosophy but has only recently become a poor technical imaginary so just so we're clear it wasn't the technology that emerged wasn't decentralized technology but actually political philosophy that later on seeped into the technical fields so something interesting about the philosophy of decentralization is that it can accommodate people with different perspectives and ideologies to imagine themselves 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 how 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 Ethereum which accommodates developers with various political motives from left leaning anti-capitalist agitators to capitalist friendly libertarians but the thing is is that everyone has their own idea about what decentralization is and that of course could 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 terms of specificity also can obscure decentralization and I will speak more about that in the next slides to come so I'm going to continue on with the research goals so I covered the first one and the second research goal I had in mind is to what extent does technical utopianism prevail in the community and areas of Ethereum the result was not technical utopia it's shocking right and these are some of the quotes I received that I pulled from my interviews the crypto hype is just the blind leading the blind we see the challenges that face us which means that being optimistic is always easy most of us are not here to make a profit but are here for the intellectual challenge and curiosity making bad statements does a lot of service to the technology and others along the similar lines so then this got me thinking where is the hype, oh sorry, before that this led me to draw the conclusion that in fact Ethereum developers are very pragmatic level headed and reflexive of their privilege and technocratic status at least the ones that I spoke to I can't speak for all of you so where is this hype really coming from so blockchain's public reputation is now hyperlibertarian and perhaps this is for a good reason its uptake has been largely in capitalist quarters so this hype is essentially being used as a marketing tool, you know, like in ICOs and what not and it's being used by profit driven entrepreneurs extreme right wing libertarians and technology fetishes and since blockchain is in its nasancy these stories are needed I get it, like you sort of need the hype in order to fill in some of the uncertainties that currently exist in relation to blockchain and the only problem however is that these capitalist venture people are the ones who are basically influencing the narratives of blockchain and they're basically shaping the public perception of blockchain so what does this all mean so I just wanted to do like a bunch of information and yeah so this is where I want to talk about how my two research questions start to fuse into each other so diverse perspectives in Ethereum does not necessarily represent all of the perspectives in how the public perceives blockchain so Ethereum allows for diverse ideologies to exist in the space and make collaboration possible both 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 re-centralization and this can be seen in the Bitcoin network for example so there are certain factors such as early adoption wealth and external economy and access to let's say low cost electricity for mining which can create concentration yet when we call this technology decentralized it just diverts attention from factors that could potentially lead to some degree of centralization so really it's the people with resources like the venture capital store determining a lot of the public discourse on blockchain and this is one of the reasons why the public continues to perceive it as a high end 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 term is really risky and this is because often times when something gets decentralized it can cause 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 in studying government institutions yet we continue to use the term of decentralization and it obscures certain 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 instead 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 every centralizing influence in the outside world it's just not realistic and this means that while technology that is meant to decentralize can introduce new possibilities which of course can be liberating it can also invite more unfavorable conditions such as unaccountable concentration of power so it always goes both ways therefore at the end of the day it's not really about caring whether something is decentralized or centralized what we should be asking is whether the thing we are building is accountable meaning that if we should be meaning that if perhaps let's say we're not meeting the needs of users there is room to change that or if we're not meeting the needs of minorities we can still change that it doesn't make sense to pursue decentralization at the expense of everything else if that means that at the end of the day we're just creating outcomes that run the risk of enabling unaccountable concentration of power so going forward I have two propositions for Ethereum so I propose we stop using the blockchain as a solution narrative and instead focus on using the blockchain as an alternative method and the reason why is because blockchain is precisely empowering right now because it's the underdog it introduces diversity into the existing systems allowing people to have more options for certain people in the space though they see it as like the means to it and I think when it's envisioned 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 it takes on like this libertarian narrative which is fairly extreme and I don't think that's where we want to be going and the other recommendation I have is to start building networks you know with other industries and in other fields so for example like IETF maybe academic ones and it's funny because like no matter where I am in the world I always see the same people and I mean it's great and all because it's a community but at the same time it also becomes a closed circuit and I think what we really have to strive for is interdisciplinarity because that is basically what is going to challenge us and make us step outside of ourselves and make us question like why are we doing X and not Y right it's going to give us the broader perspective 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 I love to argue so thank you so much this is my trigger Thank you