 Hi, folks. Thank you all for joining me. I'm a grad student here in CMS. I'm a researcher at SAITS Initiative. My thesis is called Trust Machines, Cryptocurrencies, Logtains and Humans and Cultures of Mis-Trust. Since it appears twice, let me start by introducing three key points about trust. Trust, according to Simo, is a capacity to forecast future actions. It is essentially the main condition to exist in a society with strangers. We need to have some capacity to know that things will go a certain way. Second, Giddens, another sociologist adds that trust is not just reliability. It is very much faith. And not only faith, but it's a blind faith. So for Giddens, we can trust in two ways, when we trust our friends or family or when we trust abstract principles to be true. So for example, when we're traveling by plane, we don't really need to know how a plane works. We just trust it's going to work. And Giddens adds a third thing, that modern institutions rely on people stressed in abstract systems. And a good example of this is, for example, the finance system. So for example, when we are exchanging money, we don't really need to understand the whole dynamics of what goes through our credit culture and section. We just trust that money is going to be honored. So it brings me to public institutions, which play a role in our society as trust mediators. They broker trust between strangers. So according to Fukuyama, modern state institutions emerge in societies with historically low interpersonal trust. So in other ways, they facilitate interactions between people who would normally not trust each other. And they do this through contracts or laws and policies. But modern states are not just the functional aspects of these institutions. Benedict Anderson says that the national states are rooted in something called imagined communities. So media technologies like books, maps, sensors, they help just diffuse this idea that we all share some common identity, that we're a part of something bigger. And so imagine communities go from this idea of they expand trust from our close friendships to something bigger to a wider polity. And Robert Putnam talks about two accounts of trust. One is based on our personal, strong, frequent relationships, thick trust, and thin trust, which refers to the trust we have with people with some shared social networks are expecting an oppressive property. So imagine communities enable this thin trust. But what happens when people mistrust these institutions? So Ethan Suckerman argues that when some people confront oppressive systems, they can become insurrectionists who try to overthrow and upheave existing systems. And one of these levers for change is code. Network technologies are interesting because they can indeed transfer attributions that were before monopolies of the state to market systems. So for example, before social media platforms like Facebook, censorship was something that more or less generally the state only did. Now with these platforms is attribution that is shared to the market. And in call, Laurence Glassic argues that the internet is governed by something called merchant sovereignties who profit, who prioritized profit making over public good and provide no accountability to the public. Is that a relationship to them? To them is the same that we have to McDonald's. So my interest is in this technological systems as market sovereignties. These are trust machines, technological systems that mediate trust and that operate through market principles. So specifically, these are my research questions. First, how is this technological trust mediator addressing a perceived mistrust in public institutions? What are the individual and collective practices involved in this new mediation? What is the role of perfect and emotion? And how are public institutions transforming and responsive to emerging imaginaries? And I explore this question by focusing on a specific case study, which is the use of cryptocurrencies in Argentina. And let me show you why. And before that I'm going to tell you what it is. So this thesis focuses on a specific long dated competence of the state which is governing money. So as most folks know here, James Kerry points out two visions of communications as transmission and communication as ritual. So scholars of media studies have studied money as most of these things. So first in the poor man's credit card, Marshall McLuhan says that money talks because money is a metaphor as transfer a bridge as the vast social metaphor a bridge or translator money like writing speeds up exchange and tightens the bonds of interdependence in any community. And the new money line of sorts says that money technologies produce transactional communities, networks of relations united by a common sense of identity, geography and values. And I'm happy to talk more about the survey you did review in the Q&A folks have any questions about how media studies addresses money. Now let's move on to to a technology that we're looking at for just cryptocurrencies. And these are digital currencies that exist in blockchains which are decentralized records that are composed of blocks that tie together through cryptography. And this might not be super clear. And I'm happy to answer more technical questions. But what we need to know is that it works like decentralized digital money. And the blockchain was invented in 2008 by a mysterious figure called Siddhu Siddhu Nakamoto, who we don't know who that is. And to support Bitcoin, which is a cryptocurrency, and Nakamoto published Bitcoin in the white paper of Bitcoin, a way made on this about crypto cryptography, as a new technology that enables a peer-to-peer version of electronic cash that would allow direct payments without going through a financial institution. And on the Bitcoin, the multi-utilized blockchain is Ethereum blockchain. Ethereum is an open source blockchain created in 2013, realizing a cryptocurrency called Ether, and it has too many innovation that it supports smart contracts, which are code that is executed automatically in this blockchain, and it supports tokens which are other cryptocurrencies in Ethereum blockchain. And now why my focus in Argentina, for many reasons, for one, Argentina has gone through a serious political economic crisis. I'm just going to say that because I could just spend the entire presentation on that. And secondly, after an inflationary crisis in 2001, Argentina has had increasing inflation. Then in June 2021, Argentina ranked 10th in each analysis called Cryptocurrency Adoption Index, which means that Argentina is adopting crypto at an unusual rate. And in Edelman's 2022 trust parameter, our survey of 27 countries, Argentina ranked last in two categories, trust in government and trust in the central bank. And also in Argentina, we can see the existence of informal economic networks like partner networks, clandestine currency exchanges when people can bypass the government's restrictions on purchasing foreign currency. So my focus in understanding cryptocurrency in Argentina allows me to understand how a technological trust mediator, cryptocurrency, is understood alongside problems in public institutions. So above my methods, I conducted in depth interviews with 15 cryptocurrency users enthusiast and blockchain technology developers in Argentina. I recruited them through something that I call extended snowball sampling, which is getting in touch with people that my informants mentioned, but also seeing who they share Twitter spaces or other virtual communities with. I use digital ethnography methods to understand how users engage in virtual communities. And lastly, I used a walkthrough method to explore the artifacts that users engage with. And this method that's described by live burgers and do away aims to establish a software applications environment of expected use, which is how an app provider expected will be received, generate profit or other forms of benefit and regular user activity. So I will now present the chapters in my pieces and some of the findings. So my first chapter is called the legacy systems. And I'm going to spend a bit more time on this one because it's especially important. So the scholars of media know that adoption of media technologies is tied to the visions of its users. So social political context is important, but they only tell part of the picture. It also matters how a technology is framed as a solution to a problem. For scholars of media studies, this might ring a bell, which is Winston's idea of preventing social necessities by looking at the role of ideology too. So in this chapter, a look at how blockchain and cryptocurrency are framed as updates for outdated legacy systems to traditional institutions are seen as outdated artifacts that these technologies come to revolutionize. As Luisa Informant told me, crypto liberates individuals from a lot of obstacles set by institutions that don't really work for them. So three public institutions are addressed here, the national state, traditional finance and public identity. So first, national states are seen as mistrusted. So my informants often frame crypto as bypassing national borders and offering a level field for people worldwide. Its revolutionary potential was understood through the recentering of the capacity of individuals. But it's not just about individualism. The playing field vision applies also to social barriers. And Nicolas, a 27-year-old cryptocurrency trader, explained to me the adoption of the technologies relies on the solidarity of the Argentine and crypto community. Crypto, for me, is literal liberty and the capacity to engage with people who traditionally would not be at your level. In the crypto world, you can easily talk to someone who has 50 or 500 bitcoins without this person talking down on you. You can have a conversation in the same wavelength. Another institution that was opposed to a traditional finance and other informants said that crypto comes to decentralize and change the way that institutions use money. So I'm not in favor of the idea that you give money to the bank and the bank moves around the money and then they charge you. And this offer relates to how the government uses money, which is related to inflation, they say. And lastly, public identity is a contested idea. They negotiate the idea of the anonymity granted by the central as networks, but also the idea of publicness needed in the social development of the technology, engaging in something I call fluid anonymity. And what's interesting here is that Argentine entrepreneurs and developers are imagining new institutions using blockchain technologies. An example of this is the central on a project developed that situates a virtual 3D world in the blockchain and works through by a smart contracts, making its government incorruptible and fully transparent. Another project we're mentioning is proof of humanity, which is a registry of individuals on the blockchain where users can validate their identity as humans and automatically receive money. These are profit making enterprises, of course, as each project becomes more popular, their tokens become more pricey and the assets of assets of the original creators increase in value. But they can also be seen as experimenting world, experimenting world building of understanding what artifacts are necessary to replace the obsolete ones that sustain the national state as such. So in the second chapter, I critically engage with the idea of trustlessness in the blockchain that is commonly presented as a tourism in literature. The idea of trustlessness presents an essential binary between the everyday world and the blockchain, the centralized trustless blockchain. And this chapter end to deconstruct this opposition. So by focusing on the different gateways to acquire cryptocurrencies by Argentine users, I end to highlight the rule of off-chain transactions in the terminus once engagement with cryptocurrencies. So I analyze a series of technologies and arrangements, or human and non-human actors, like custodial and non- custodial wallets, or local exchanges and clandestine brokers peer-to-peer marketplaces. And I find that how a user engages with cryptocurrency is dependent on choices that are dependent on the political social ties existing existent in the off-chain world. For example, non-custodial wallets were artifacts for managing cryptocurrencies where users have access to the private and public keys, which makes it very private, but also very risky. The users of this shared, the user of this technology shared with me a vision of complete mistrust in the government, but custodial wallets, wallets that rely on businesses and therefore need users to authenticate their identity and this identity shared with the government, were understood as a bridge between the off-chain government relations and the affordances of the blockchain. They were also associated with the reliance on legal safeguards since they are legal entities. Another interesting finding was that when social media platforms like Facebook were used like a marketplace for cryptocurrencies, the affordances of Facebook to build trust that the requirements to use real names were repurposed by the users. The third chapter focuses on how communitarism is performed in the community and centers the role of affect and emotion in community building. Wagme is a common phrase among Ethereum enthusiasts that means we're all going to make it. It does not represent all the crypto community, but it's a good representation of the idea of solidarity and communitarism in Argentina's crypto community. And community building is seen as an important task for crypto enthusiasts. Natalia, an informant, described the community as a place for consultation. She believes there are three big pillars in the community, bringing new people into the community, making the community grow and making sure that making it so the community contributes to that community. Cryptocurrency users employ different social media platforms and chat applications to fulfill different communicative needs. For example, Twitter is useful to connect with like-minded enthusiasts, but the information there has an expectation of authoritativeness. Discord and Telegram are useful as spaces for specific interests or affinities and to share information more casually. And being semi-public, they can allow newcomers to get their currencies to ask questions. And lots of groups are seen as more intimate and allow for information to be shared less authoritatively, allowing users to share riskier products. And here's an interesting thing. So this community's spaces also play a role in managing emotions collectively, like FOD, which is fear, uncertainty, and doubt, and FOMO, the fear of missing out when a new product appears. And the volatility of the cryptocurrency is emotionally taxing so a virtual community acts as an enthusiast reports systems. As an informant told me, I mean who in your family can understand what you go through in this chaos that goes so fast? And lastly, different communities engage in different gatekeeping strategies to authorize and validate information. So for example, a community for women in crypto, the community, the moderates of community for women in crypto demand links to be validated beforehand with them so before they have posted in their group. And they didn't see this as holding authority, but as protecting community members from misinformation and granting them tools to make decisions by themselves. And lastly, the last chapter in my thesis is about future making. And this is a big thing about my thesis. This emerging imaginary is affecting how institutions understand themselves. So in this final chapter, I ask how are public institutions transforming in response to these emerging imaginaries? And in this chapter, I perform a close reading of a white paper recently published by the city of Buenos Aires secretary of innovation and digital transformation created in collaboration with developers on the blockchain community. And the paper is about identity protocols facing the blockchain and it echoes many of the values and visions I identified in this first chapter. A vision of decentralization, the recentering of individuals and granting users power over their value. This is in line with a vision of what Eric Orta and I call transparent institutions guided by the erasure of discretion and automatic enforcement through smart contracts. The erasure of discretion is something that's been at the core of diverse vision of the bureaucratic state, but other social theories like Lipsky or Saka argue that this question is actually essential to public service provision. So in a way, the blockchain promises a reversal of Giddens understanding of trust in modern institutions. So as a reminder, Giddens said that when we trust modern institutions, we trust in abstract systems, things that we don't really know or kind of really think about. But the blockchain users do not primarily place trust in abstract systems, they do so in the material system of the blockchain itself. So blockchain presents an opportunity for public institutions to provide effective functions without the need for the institution to be trusted itself outside those functions. So this is a new vision of trust that is supported of these new technologies. So all right, thank you for listening and I hope this presentation has provided you with a window into the matrix behind this technology, behind what this technology means for a collective life. And thank you. And I would like to especially thank my advisors Eric Orta and T.L. Taylor who will be fantastic mentors, my cohort who have been an ideal community to think with folks at the Civic Design Initiative, the Latin American Media Studies Reading Group. I'm a friend and family in Boston and Buenos Aires so it's been incredible support for this. Thank you. Yeah, I yeah, sorry. So I'm about to ask me about web assets which are clandestine establishment where you can trade different currencies and buy crypto. And if I got there, I have not gone there, but luckily there is this topic that's been explored in the literature, not about crypto, but still, okay, Context of Argentina, you cannot buy US dollars legally because the government forbids that to keep inflation low and prices lower, but so what you actually when you want to buy dollars to save against inflation, you have to go to Quebas which are clandestine clandestine establishments which are actually pretty front-facing because the government tolerates them a lot. So the situation around Quebas is that Quebas also trading crypto, all right. So they can either sell you currencies like Ether or Bitcoin but they can also sell you something called Sablecoins which are cryptos that are tied to one dollar. So, you know, it wasn't all that your token is also always gonna be one dollar. And there are two things here. When you engage with a Queba, you're usually using your non-cosodial wallet, which is a very, it's a risky thing because if imagine you have some sort of problem with a Queba, then you have no one to, you know, you have no records. You cannot tell the government, hey, this person sold for me. So for example, an informant told me that a Queba, someone had gone through an interaction with Queba where they actually sent them their wallet to exchange to send them their crypto too but the Queba administrator actually swiped and got their private wallet which means they took power over the entire wallet. And this informant told me, well, then, you know, since the blockchain is pretty transparent that you can actually trace transactions very easily, people trace back to where the transactions were taking and then really tarnished the reputation of the Queba, right? But the thing is that the reputation of the Queba, that only gets known in a very small circle. So that actually shed light on how social capital, off-chain social capital from the real world affects our engagement with the blockchain, right? So that's interesting. And also something very interesting is that for so my informant told me that Quebas are good for small amounts but when you want to have bigger amounts, you need a arbolito an arbolito is one that is like a smaller scale Queba which pretty much goes to your house and you go to their house or to somewhere more private and that person like it's a reliable transaction for big amounts. So you need to be introduced to those people but they're not people you can find on the street like well, so that also should slide on how social capital works there. So, you know, when you're trusting the arbolito you're actually trusting the person who put you in touch with the arbolito and the arbolito knows that you cannot play tricks because you'll be sacrificing your relationship with that. So TL asks about the rhetoric of transparency and how that is contrasted to reality where things might be much more opaque and power relations might be especially salient. And there are there is a great paper by that about Gili Bidan which actually shed light on how, for example Bitcoin has the idea of being centralized, for example. But they're actually a bunch of actors have a lot of more power like miners or whales which are people who own a lot of crypto and they can also have a lot of market power on things. But regarding the idea of transparency, I think, you know, I think you care a lot about the discourse of transparency and how is that that's a discursive thing and to see how institutions respond to that and whether they do it in a meaningful way or not. And I think a lot of words Kastani actually, you know, like uncovering their real and power relations in the blockchain and say, well, this idea of democrativeness of communitarism of horizontalism is problematic. And I think that it's interesting but it's not exactly what I was trying to do in my thesis. I was, to some extent, taking a discourse of my informants for granted and respecting them what they had to say and kind of exploring these ideas and then see how this discourse is read by institutions and replicated that's what I do in my last chapter. So I think that what's valuable it's not necessarily whether things are materially true or not because in reality people think or believe that one thing is true that is valuable and that is a zeitgeist that defines the media moment right the ideology essentially which is why I think my thesis pays a lot of attention to two categories which are ideology and imaginaries. So imaginaries is this category that Sheila Jackson have invented over here at Harvard where they're at Harvard and it's the idea that people have this vision of technology in their heads right and that these visions are shared collectively and then they become stabilized and crystallized in institutions right when the government or a public institution says all right we're going to go forward this direction right and I'm interested in seeing that jump so I think there's a lot of work on the martial actuality on the contrast between decentralization and decentralization the power relations but I think other people do much better than me thank you yeah so actually so Shusti asked me about how media studies addresses money so actually something interesting about media is that the like the origins of the word medium are tied to money right medium of exchange so it's a very long competency also of media about all the social sciences right not only economics which are you know the science of money but also the idea that for example Giddens when he talks about trust and abstract systems he talks about exchange system money as an abstract system right but now there have been two big books recently that address this which are Lana Swartz CMS CMS person who talks about new money and the transactional communities and media technologies and the the communitarian part in the cultural aspect of this and Finn Burden who talks about digital cash and these two books I think are giving a twist on money that I think is really interesting and that is I think um trace it's it actually just slide in a on a ship we're seeing where all of our of our apps especially the ones on by Mira are now becoming apps to send us money all right so for example what's up in brazil is piloting how sending payments through the WhatsApp I know we chat offers a chat money transaction and you know Venmo as Lana Swartz talks about it in a book it's essentially social media so it's sending you attention the socks of media the media studies are paying attention to money um and I think that's a very exciting direction yes so the question was about um well the idea of trustlessness should be maybe more complicated because when you're engaging with cryptocurrencies you trust for example wallets or companies are these are different ways of mediating with the government and I think that's a very interesting point is something I do challenge in my pieces so there's this idea of trustlessness which is an idea that was crystallized in academic literature by if you might add Philippi um also Harvard and what this idea of trustlessness I I I into deconstructed a little bit because one thing is when it's echoed by our informants and I think that in that in that case it's it's good to pull it out as this course of thing but when we replicate it on the literature it becomes a bit more shaky right because I think we should address it more critically so what I do in chapter in chapter two of my thesis is I deconstruct the deal of trustlessness right but I I do see that there are some some ways of bypassing the government so for example you have two two wallets all right two like ways of what one are non custodial what's where you actually own your public and private key which are the things that in the blockchain give you authority overhandling transactions which is the power over your money and then there's there's custodial exchanges because your exchanges are companies right you don't have power over your public over your private keys you can only see your their public key and your private keys owned by the government so when you're trying to buy crypto you're buying crypto against the company right so this company is registered with the government they you know if if your money goes missing you can you know go to the government hey you you these guys took my money but then again it requires these companies to tell the government who you are it requires you go to something called KYC which is like I know your customer process so whereas non custodial wallets you can actually go to a cuea or any condescending exchange and actually have a transaction without the government knowing what goes in the middle so I think trust in the government there I think there is something interesting about the government being bypassed as an institution in something that the government had power of over which is money right either the Argentine government or the US government with the US dollars but essentially a competence of the government regardless the idea of mediations of trust I agree that the idea of trustlessness is not very useful as it is a discursive construct right but I do think that it's interesting to look at the mediations of trust and see what networks of trust emerge in that way right so for example when I'm trusting a coup so deal wallet I am to some extent trusting the government I am some exchange trusting the company that made the coup so deal wallet and when I'm not trusting when I'm using a non coup so deal wallet I'm trusting the clandestine person who is doing a peer to peer transaction or I'm trusting the social media network through which I found the other person like Facebook or or Binance's peer to peer network thank you all right thank you