A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.”
– Brian Massumi’s preface to A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze and Guattari
Tech backlash is in vogue and for many good reasons. People are realizing the downsides of big tech and becoming disillusioned with the utopian fantasy we were sold all the while that the internet was being privatized, forcing us into walled gardens in which we connect broadly but seldom intimately-our every interaction recorded and sold to advertisers who mine that data for insights, effectively commoditizing our attention and emotions. From this growing realization is a similarly growing group of media critics that are ready to discredit any innovation seen as though emerging from or lauded by Silicon Valley and blockchain/cryptocurrency is no exception.
In a recent piece in Real Life magazine titled Reconnected, Paris Marx, host of the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast (one of a growing number of podcasts giving a much needed critical discussion of technology), criticizes what he believes to be the underlying assumptions and eventual conclusions of what is commonly called Web3, the supposed next evolution of the internet which is associated with the integration of blockchains into the stack.
There is much to agree with in the article, such as its lamenting the fact that the infrastructure which powers the Internet and the websites or platforms we rely on for most communication are concentrating in only a few companies’ hands. His thesis is that “Decentralizing the internet alone won’t lift it above politics or save it from corporate co-optation.” On its face, this is clearly true because citing the value of decentralization without context is simply an empty statement as “decentralized” is not a way something can be described in its essence.
Too often on the Left, we critique ad infinitum the latest areas in our lives capitalism has so unsurprisingly invaded in the pursuit of profit. This certainly has it’s place, but little do we expand on what potential solutions or clear calls to action might prove necessary to counter such incursion. It is expected at this point that authors on the Left leave whatever solutions they might venture to the very end, leaving readers disappointed in vague or obscure proposals – plenty of memorable critiques but little that is actionable. After all, is changing the world not the point? Similarly, the incomplete analysis in the article does not provide adequate alternatives to the current state of the internet.
While I share many criticisms of the current blockchain and cryptocurrency landscape, there are still basic misunderstandings too pernicious to ignore for any complete analysis of the matter. Treating blockchain, crypto, or web3 as one entity with singular agency errs in precluding some helpful tools for novel forms of left organization reminiscent of mutualism, the cooperative movement, and anarcho-syndicalism.
For this piece I want to respond to two themes mentioned by supplementing Paris’ analysis of web3 and pointing out what I, as a likely much more active follower and user of web3 protocols, believe to be some of the article’s chief misapprehensions.
On Decentralization
As noted earlier, speaking of decentralization without context is seldom fruitful and never a political goal in itself. Decentralization is a buzz word used throughout the web3 space as a way to entice both venture and retail capital to fund projects. Similarly, the Left uses this word quite loosely as well and seldom with context in arguments between anarchists and Marxists. A proper framework for (de)centralization is specifically needed for the Left, however, the Left does not have such a framework.
Ironically, one useful framework is one that was used by Vitalik Buterin in his Medium post titled The Meaning of Decentralization. In the article he acknowledges that the word can be thrown around in confusing ways and provides the following framework for greater clarity:
In the blockchain space, there is a lot of conflation of architectural with political decentralization which is what is being alluded to but is never fully articulated, owing to the absence of any requisite framework. It seems likely that when technologists in the web3 space use the word in a genuine sense, they are talking about architectural decentralization. This is often conflated with leading to political decentralization, which is likely what the Left is more concerned with (as in decentralizing power away from capital). This has been discussed in more detail in a previous Patreon episode of my podcast.
There are however good examples of those on the Left applying such a distinction. In the article Decentralize What?, Francis Tseng provides a compelling analysis of the matter, specifically with regards to the conflation of decentralization in different contexts, especially in computer networks and systems. He makes the case, for instance, that architectural decentralization can also be a desired property of the state surveillance apparatus which can be said to be architecturally decentralized but obviously politically centralized when the NSA controls all of the computers in a peer-to-peer network.
The conversation around decentralization and internet technologies too frequently takes for granted unstated goals around authority, ownership, and governance, conflating infrastructural decentralization with the realization of these less technical goals.”
– Francis Tseng in Decentralize What?
It was peculiar that in the article, Cybersyn was hailed as an example of socialist technology and yet the MIT Press summary of the book Cybernetic Revolutionaries by Eden Medina, who was interviewed for the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast, notes the system was meant for “decentralized management.” This marked a difference in how Chile could explore its own destiny, different from Soviet bureaucratic or American corporate power centralization. Of course, Cybersyn was not able to prevent the US-backed military coup that terminated the project in favor of neoliberal capitalist interests, but it was never meant to shoot down missiles.
The possibility of architectural decentralization, while not in itself political, still bears forth possibilities never before available to socialists. Too often in history we see leftist networks destroyed because too many “nodes” are taken out or subverted by capitalist forces which has led to a declining labor movement, coup d’états across the global south, and the Left’s inability to unite in recent years.
There are interesting implications of having entire businesses’ operations inherently open source on smart contracts held on a public blockchain which can only be open source. This has the potential to reduce information asymmetries against the working class. This gives a new source of information for labor unions to draw from in negotiations, allows radicals to copy and paste entire institutions for their own ends, and creates a culture of transparency by default (even if this understanding is still lacking by those who are victim to rug pulls). Like any other technology that creates radically new affordances, this is a double-edged sword, but at the same time creates an opening for the Left that must be taken advantage of else we leave its development solely in the hands of capital.
Available technologies make up our material conditions, just as the printing press allowed for cheaper dissemination of pamphlets during the time of Karl Marx whose works may have otherwise passed unseen or unnoticed. This does not ignore the need still for a clear political agenda and democratic organization which is politically decentralized and a common positive culture among its members which could be seen as a form of logical centralization.
On Public Good
In his piece, Paris alludes to a need for “technology for the public good” with which I wholeheartedly agree. Once on the internet, users have access to a plethora of public goods, especially thanks to the open source software movement. One issue with publicly available software projects under capitalism is that many times the developers are unable to economically sustain their work on their own, relying solely on donations to continue or cooptation from large corporations. This trait is actually one of the reasons some researchers prefer referring to them as “public things” instead, as not all such things are good for the public. However this is not a new discovery and it is unsurprising given this that developers involved in Web3 are interested in funding public goods using the advantages not afforded by Web2.
Organizations like Gitcoin and Panvala have sought to leverage Web3 technologies to find alternatives for funding open source projects and other public goods, blockchain related or otherwise. They do this largely through a mechanism called Quadratic Funding, a form of fund matching that limits the influence of those with significantly more capital than everyone else. Something very difficult to do without the use of blockchains. It is also a more immediate solution than waiting for the neoliberal austerity-hawks in public office to fund public goods. This is partially thanks to the rather forthright critiques of free market token governance levied by significant figures in the web3 and Ethereum space as well as their encouragement for the community to help fund open source projects.
In a piece for the Berkman Klein Center, Juan Ortiz Freuler, who was quoted in Paris’ piece for his work on “splinternets” and a “digitally non-aligned movement”, actually advocated for decentralizing the internet as a “means to achieve other goals” in three points. In his last point, he laments the tendency for decentralized systems to delay the design of proper governance structures. This point is critical. At the moment, current Web2 systems lack not just the economic incentive (due to centralized corporate organizational structures), but potentially also the technical capabilities to design governance systems over their platforms if by some miracle they desired such. Given the circumstances, it would seem then that the undertaking is as unlikely as it is indispensable, given how vital these platforms have proven to public discourse and political understanding.
With the ever-increasing importance of the Internet for facilitating how we share information, governance and social coordination over a digital space has become a defining issue of our time. One of the research groups that has undertaken this challenge in earnest is P2P Models, a group of researchers led by Dr. Samer Hassan, an activist and Associate Professor at Universidad Complutense Madrid and Harvard. P2P Models is a project to help build collaborative economic organizations that are “decentralized, democratic, and distribute their profits.” Their work draws heavily from the economist Elinor Ostrom who famously debunked the idea of the “Tragedy of the Commons” professed by classical economists through ethnographic research of how different communities governed common resources. One of their recent publications titled An Analysis of the Potentials of Blockchain for the Governance of the Global Digital Commons concluded the following:
Overall, blockchain technologies could facilitate coordination, help to scale up commons governance and even be useful to enable cooperation among various communities in interoperable ways. In addition, our analysis reveals that, when considering the challenges of managing global commons, the role of blockchain is particularly valuable to explore solutions that tackle the scaling up of governance and the definition of global collective agreements within more heterogeneous conditions”
While more the exception than the rule, there are projects working on using the technology based on the work of Elinor Ostrom and with a vision of democratically governing common resources as opposed to the whims of the free market like The Commons Stack and Token Engineering Commons to name a couple. Research collectives focused on the web3 space like Other Internet have also advocated for governance mechanisms that don’t solely rely on technical systems around funding public goods. The Crypto Commons Hub is a group explicitly exploring “post-capitalist visions of commoning” using the technology and recently hosted the first Crypto Commons Gathering where crypto-commoners were able to come together in person.
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are of particular interest and would be to the broader Left if fully understood in all its potentials with great properties to bolster the cooperative economy and what could be called the “autonomous social sector” according to Peter Drucker in his 1993 book titled Post-Capitalist Society. While definitions are still loose and changing, DAOs are organizational structures that use smart contracts on a blockchain to facilitate and automate many basic functions that normally we rely on banks or states for.
They have the potential to create new forms of organizing at a global scale for the Left that assures the resilience of uncensorable funding pools as WikiLeaks has showed since 2011 and Sci-Hub since at least 2016 as well as the ability to facilitate democratic decision-making over the funds at a scale that would make any socialist inspired. Imagine wildcat strike funds with unseizable assets thanks to cryptocurrencies. Wells Fargo likely won’t help open a joint bank account for a wildcat strike to collect funds from supporters across the world. As far back as 2015 decentralized autonomous worker councils were proposed as a way for the Left to use the technology for radical forms of organizing.
We cannot divide society solely into being either the part of the public or private sector as if they are diametrically opposed when corporate capture of the state has made it clear that the system encourages legislation in favor of capital. This is the impression when the only alternative articulated is stronger government regulation. This gives the feeling that the Left can only express its power through regulation imposed by the bourgeois state. With this framework, where would successful movements like the EZLN, the Black Panther Party, Rojava, etc. fit? We cannot fall under the trap of binary encoding as this does not fully capture the nuances of what is in the interest of the public good. This oversimplification kills creative attempts at left-wing organizing and must be tossed to the side if we want to be serious about taking power back for the working class in the modern age.
Conclusion
There are a few ironies that are too on the nose with having a leftist podcaster critical of tech writing a piece in an online publication funded by Snap, Inc., a prominent web2 company, that denigrates web3 in the way that it was. It feels that there is a disconnect with what is perceived to be web3 and what it actually is at this moment. For anyone who has been around this space, it is clear that web3 is dominated by Ethereum-based applications currently, yet there is not one mention of Ethereum, but there is one mention of Bitcoin in Paris’ article.
As a fellow left-wing podcaster using Patreon, a company which fired 36 employees while its valuation rose to $4 billion, we are very dependent on the company’s tolerance of our politics. The day Patreon decides content deriding capitalism to be unsuitable for its users (whether on its own or pushed by outside influences) will be the day many left-wing content creators lose a substantial amount of their income. This is part of the reason why I’ve been trying my own experiments with implementing web3 for accessing paid content to be less reliant on centralized corporations like Patreon. I’ve used Unlock Protocol which has given out a governance token to creators who use their solution which can be used to guide the project’s direction. This is potentially an influence from the work of Nathan Schneider, a prominent professor and advocate for cooperatives, on Exit to Community. The increase in interest in cooperatives by those involved with DAOs can be at least partially attributed to Nathan’s work and advocacy for cooperatives directly to the Ethereum community.
When it comes to software and politics, decentralization without context means nothing and too often leads those who are uncritical to conflate it to mean what their deeper desires are. It is imperative that we progress the Left’s understanding of what is and is not possible to do with the technology and only critique is not how we do it, we must experiment with it inspired by our own values. Web3, blockchain, crypto are not a panacea to fix all of our problems, but if we are serious about improving our material conditions then we cannot throw the baby out with the bath water.
The Left should seize the narrative around decentralization to mean what our political goals are. Decentralize the ownership of the means of production to the workers and decentralize power away from capitalists and archaic political structures bent on worker exploitation. Libertarian decentralization under capitalism is not true decentralization because centralization of wealth and power is an inherent property of capitalism and is at best only poly-centric.
A legitimate critique of the web3 space would include the influence of venture capital over popular web3 protocols. This is not as a sign of insurmountable corporate co-optation, but a clear signal that this a battlefield for political struggle, just like the internet should have been treated in the decades before, which the Left failed to do. It is undeniable that blockchains give us certain affordances that have otherwise not been possible and this should not be ignored for aesthetic reasons. Tech won’t save us but we can’t let that be an excuse to do nothing when the tools are right there in front of us to add to our toolbox for creating political and economic change.
