Technologists are designing blockchains and other distributed ledger technologies to challenge the extractive value accounting and identity management of global capitalism. This paper discusses how the new possibilities offered by distributed ledger technology enable an alternative future of generative value accounting and self-sovereign identity practices.
If power is increasingly harnessed through online and mobile infrastructures—whether at the level of movements or states—then some of the most important (and radical) movements will emerge around the use of these powerful technologies in society.
written in front
written in front
The problem with the logic of capitalism is that everything, including healthy social relationships, a stable climate, having meaning in life, etc., is only considered part of the value equation when it affects profit. Rejecting the logic of capitalism and insisting on creating a world where humans and living systems thrive, tech activists are developing new ways to affirm value.
Valuation is a social process whereas accounting is a social practice. Technological systems shape accounting in a variety of contexts, including the structuring of markets, capital raising, algorithmic pricing, digital platform services, and corporate organization.
This article discusses new digital valuation techniques that can change value and valuations within the institutions conducting the valuations. The same technology will allow for the recycling of our digital identities and real reputations, which are necessary for the trust that online organizations need. Tech activists gain momentum in their mission to design and use digital technologies for a world beyond capitalism.
In this future, the value of people, nature, and things is determined not by markets, but by their ability to promote human prosperity and account for the limits of the planet. These efforts are part of three contemporary historical determinants recognized by tech activists: first, the need to escape state repression; second, the need to maximize limited resources; and third, the need to create effective institutional solutions despite This has not been done in the past.
The construction of every accounting technique is limited by ideology. The dominant ideology of our time is capitalism. The everyday material techniques of accounting (written reports, techniques, ledgers, pictures, charts) make possible the practice of capitalist governance and the corresponding modes of social control.
Accounting technologies have material agency in large socio-technical networks, because they can be manipulated from a distance, and they make invisible objects visible. The inscription of the accounts enables modern states and institutions to"remote governance", and make things, ideas, and people"computing center"presented.
“Accounting cannot be independent of its social conditions. Under capitalism, accounting is driven by political economy—class contradictions. Accounting works partly by adjusting to the economic needs of the ruling class.”
—Kechepole, Cooper
Under capitalism, accounting techniques are a logic of appropriation of material production, a way of rationalizing or explaining the appropriation of production by members of another social class as an intellectual and practical tool of social domination. This understanding of accounting calls upon scholars in favor of a world free from economic exploitation to understand how social movements and related technologists create new technologies of valuation and personal identity, reflecting a liberating imagination of a future beyond capitalism.
Dillard argues that a fundamental change in the underlying economic structure must occur before accounting technology can change, but what if tech activists in social movements can reverse this historical course and strategically redesign accounting technology entirely? What about injecting favorable affordances into new accounting techniques, giving them transformative material dynamics that fundamentally change the structure of the economy?
The strategic design of technology has long been part of the activism repertoire. The use of value accounting to justify exploitation and inequality of capitalist rivals is commonplace. It can be found in trade unionists and socialists, anti-sweatshops and fair traders, anti-corporate globalization campaigners, etc. What is new at this historical moment is made possible by the liberating nature of modern digital value accounting and digital identity systems powered by Distributed Ledger Technology or DLT (i.e. blockchain and full chain).
The following hairball technology will be discussed from three parts:image description
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Part 1: The sociotechnical imagination of global social movements for the masses
Across the globe, hundreds of millions of people are on the rise demanding more than just profit. Determining what is valuable shows how society can hold together, and what is valuable shows our collective social capacity and interdependence.
People create technology to realize their visions of the future, and once created, technology literally expands the possibilities of the future. Blockchain technology and the post-blockchain DLT that followed the first Bitcoin blockchain are excellent examples of how socio-technical imagination can be brought to life through the design of new technologies.
The question here is, How does distributed ledger technology, a set of new technologies including blockchain and post-blockchain systems, shape the vision of the future, and how do these visions affect the construction of new technologies? Maoqiu Technology believes , several approaches in futures discourse can be employed to study the social and institutional practice of value accounting.
For example, causal layered analysis (CLA) could be used to map and analyze many competing discourses related to worldview and metaphor layers, or future empirical research could seek to quantify multiple dimensions of trust within each technological accounting system and how it affects user outcomes .
However, the advantage of furball technologys use of the concept of sociotechnical imagination in this theoretical article is that it provides a framework for understanding how technologists visions of an ideal future influence their design choices now.
In 2009, Yasanov and Kim called technocratic utopian visions of the future the"socio-technical imagination". This phrase combines the notion of sociotechnical with the notion of imagination.
In the field of science and technology studies (STS), the term sociotechnical is used to denote that technologies are neither entirely socially determined nor derived from underlying internal logic, technology and technological practices are understood as enduring (but not immutable) ) Social Compositional Relations and Technological Artifacts.
It is understood that technical experts are discussing how to use distributed ledger technology to realize the collective vision of a better future. The findings rely on explanations based on underlying theory, namely extensive formal and informal interviews with technical experts. Technologists agree on several standard components of a global technological federation, the movements emancipatory socio-technical imagination.
This shared imagination includes a post-capitalist society in which communities of common interest collaborate to build institutions of regenerative economic relations. This movement of technologists has a strong belief in contingency, because they believe that if the right intentions are outward, and if participants pay attention to opportunities that can be pulled inward, the necessary parts will come together. These technical design principles include:
Technology design should embrace planetary boundaries
Technical design should be modeled on natural biological ecosystems
Technology design should be able to redefine value
Technical design should enable thorough democratic coordination and governance
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Part 2: How to identify value under capitalism
Political economists and others have renewed interest in the role of imagination in shaping our visions of the future. Research into imagining the future is conducted in the fields of climate engineering, body enhancement, nanotechnology and synthetic biology. By using our imagination and anticipatory thinking, we can build a bridge from our present present to our desired future.
When we make statements about our desired future, we are intervening in the present, because future scenarios, once articulated, influence political debate and policy decisions. It must be recognized that people who engage in imagining the future bring their ideologies, interests, and positions of power in society to the process.
Every network architecture hides a power structure, and by clarifying the value we imprint in the economic system, we can be more nuanced in the design and use of technology. The dominant future imaginary is capitalist, but the Commons Movement is working to use blockchain technology to change the nature of capitalist value accounting.
This part of Fuqiu Technology briefly reviews the literature on how to calculate value under current capitalism, including a discussion of the increasing complexity of capitalism. As many researchers have observed, accounting is neither neutral nor separate from prevailing economic ideologies.
Crucial to capitalism, new accounting and production techniques and organizational forms were invented to increase productivity, reduce production costs and manage the resulting processes and complexities. As Dillard noted in his essay Accounting as a Critical Social Science,"The only characteristics of concern are those related to changes in economic objects"。
The logic of capitalism stems from the drive to maximize profits. What is produced depends on what can be sold on the market, and production decisions are controlled by the very few who own and control the means of production—the capitalists. Productive labor is performed by wage laborers who must sell their labor to capitalists to survive because they receive bank credit funds in return.
In Capital, Marx stated that a commodity has value only if it can be used to produce something that can be sold at a profit in the market, and this form of value is called exchange value. Such a market can only exist with money as the physical manifestation of value. It is the circulation of money as capital, the transformation of nature, and the transformation of wage labor into commodities with exchange value that drive the capitalist economy.
Marx envisioned a process of mechanization that we now call modernization, by which scientific knowledge and technology become more important factors of production. Competition stimulates technological and organizational innovation, destabilizes value,"There is a perpetually evolving inner link (an internal or dialectic relationship) between value defined in the sphere of market circulation and value constantly redefined through revolutions in the sphere of production"。
Productive forces and social relations—two distinct aspects of the development of social individuals—appear to capital as mere means by which it produces on its limited basis. But in fact they blow this Hype material conditions.
——Marx
Technological innovation also involves greater system complexity, which presents its own challenges, in part because the concept of defining complexity is a contentious issue. In 2003, Hodgson defined complexity as the variety of system interconnections and interactions within a structured system, according to this definition, increasing economic complexity means that the interaction between human beings and between people and their technology Its becoming more and more diverse.
Early in the study of technology, Mumford recognized that technology represented complex layers of objectifying intentions that embodied cultural artifacts in technical systems. As technical systems change over time, initial design choices solidify and are seen as timeless. These systems are interconnected, exerting influence on social systems and intuitions.
Our institutions face increasingly complex challenges, a process accelerated by the digitization of the economy. The interconnectedness of complex systems makes outcomes less predictable and leads to negative consequences. With vast amounts of information available regardless of geographic boundaries, more and more people can participate in a formal economy governed by an interdependent system of automated algorithms.
Humans attempt to address coordination challenges in complex networks with hierarchies, including monarchies, corporations, armies, and representative democracies with bureaucratic hierarchies. However, current economic and governance models have proven insufficient. Markets have been proposed as a solution, but current market approaches have proven insufficient as markets often have limited or irregular communication patterns and do not contain all socially valued information such as care work, landscaping, leisure time wait.
Price communicates remarkably well in complex supply chains, but the price of something is an oversimplified communicator of value. For example, when the price of copper rises, so do the prices of the goods that use copper and the services that use those goods. At the end of the line, consumers can feel the difference between a supply chain that uses copper and one that uses cheaper alternatives because of the difference in the price tag at the time of purchase, which is where the invisible hand comes into play.
However, other forms of information, such as the working conditions under which copper is mined, or the environmental records of mining companies, are communicated throughout the supply chain with little to the same fidelity. This imbalance in the composability of price information with other forms of information leads to larger-scale effects that amount to a race to the bottom. The fact that price is the primary form of information dissemination with this level of potency presents a challenge for technology activists and points to potential technological solutions.
To overcome this problem, technology activists ask, is it possible to increase the adaptability of value accounting not only to individual organizations but to the wider market? Many have concluded that there is a need for richer and more diverse forms of information that can not only be disseminated but also combined.
Currently, dollar usage is the only indicator of value that is highly combinable across contexts. Hairball Technology believes that what is needed are other ways in which individuals and communities can communicate value in a cross-environmental composition, because whether something has value depends on the context.
There is a tension here in acknowledging that value judgments are always communicated in a particular relational context. However, making this information composable outside of those specific contexts is useful, and can ultimately change the dynamics of the original relationship in the future as well. For example, restaurants are now under pressure to create photogenic food that makes for a great Instagram photo.
Organizational theory states that an organized system must adapt to its environment in order to survive. Ashbys Law of Variation assumes that for any system to be stable, the number of states of its control mechanism must be greater than or equal to the number of states in the controlled system. Hairball Technology believes that in an increasingly complex global system, we need new ways to coordinate.
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Part 3: Accounting for Value and Self-Sovereign Identity Using Distributed Ledger Technology
This part of Fuzzball Tech explores the social movement of a global tech federation, strategically using new technologies to transform value accounting to move beyond capitalism towards a commons-based economic system that regenerates both people and the planet. Commons can be managed sustainably by local communities when communities communicate to establish standard protocols and rules to ensure their sustainability.
Distributed ledger technology can be designed to create a self-sufficient commons economy where all participants profit based on the value they generate, rather than trying to align with a capitalist economy. These are cyber-physical commons powered by blockchain networks designed to align user incentives for maintaining the system. Miners earn tokens, developers hold tokens in the hope of increasing value through their efforts, and users buy tokens to create demand and pay transaction fees.
An open shared ledger is a key mutual coordination mechanism that can move open source coordination from software to manufacturing. Blockchain and distributed ledgers generally support open and contributed ecosystem accounting, REA (Resource-Event-Agent), which allows us to see flows in a shared circular economy involving multiple actors, and biocapacity accounting, which Based on straightforward assumptions about the flow of matter and energy. These types of contribution accounting systems promote fairness, openness, transparency, safety and environmental constraints. The current state of the blockchain world is a fragmented one, but tools are being developed to create interoperable P2P ledgers.
For example, members of the Giveth team are putting blockchain technology to good use by building a toolkit for creating these new community economies. The project, called Commons Stack, is a collaboration with BlockScience, a complex systems engineering RD firm. The Commons Stack is a project started in 2019 to create community tools to improve decentralized coordination around common goals.
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Figure 2. Future stack of common resources
The Commons Stack project has identified components of what they call the Minimum Viable Commons to provide the functionality necessary to coordinate a group around raising and allocating funds, making decisions, and measuring impact. The Commons Stack is using the emerging discipline of token engineering to design technical improvements to simplify community fundraising and decision-making, lowering barriers for groups with a common goal to operate as a distributed protocol cooperative.
Their team does this by generating design patterns for community toolkits, code specifications, and reference implementation libraries. These designs are chain-agnostic and can be applied to data-centric and/or agent-centric architectures. However, most developer interest to date has been in the Ethereum ecosystem, so they will likely see their designs implemented there first.
In materializing, objectifying, and displaying the value of the act, the publicity and formality of ritual approach the way the market objectifies the value of work, but renders its consequences uncommoditizable. One could even say that ritual decommodifies value change.
— Lambeck
In Lambecks quote above, Lambeck discusses how humans use ritual to define community values. Ritual sanctifies human activity, while commodification alienates humans from labor. Technological activists argue for migration to a collaborative, post-capitalist Odaily; then on a social level, we must decommodify human energy by seeing our productive activities as sacred and ethical.
MacPherson mentioned in a 1973 paper that human activity is moral when our internal and external motivations to perform behavior coincide, Man is not a mass of appetites seeking gratification, but a mass of conscious energy of. To the greatest extent possible, value must be incommensurable; meaning-value must remain unique and inalienable.
How could we possibly start this process? Technologies have material agents, defined as collections of structured relationships that enable or constrain different sets of possibilities. Across the globe, tech activists are working with Commons Stac teams to devise new technologies to open new paths and exclude others through the operation of technological material institutions.
Distributed ledger technologies (DLT) such as blockchain are driving a wave of infrastructure distribution in industrial production. This distribution is possible because people trust software to accurately verify transactions, rather than trusting banks or other intermediaries. Some DLTs are designed to be non-closable, meaning that no party can capture and control the communications that occur on the ledger.
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Table 2. Socioeconomic Objects in Capitalist Value Accounting Compared to Commons Value Accounting
The material proxy of distributed ledger technology can enable the construction of self-sovereign identity. The term sovereignty refers to the acquisition of general recognition of an exclusive domain, and thus the ability to formulate rules of conduct within a particular sphere of action. We all have offline and online identities. For anyone using digital systems, associated with our physical identities are various digital identities.
In most cases, these digital identities are not under our control, and often we cannot see what information is contained in each system. The problem is that if the information is incorrect, we have no way of correcting those errors, and we have no control over what and with whom the information is shared and sold.
Self-sovereign infrastructure allows users to set boundaries about who can access their data and maintain their privacy. It can also reward users for being contributors. Thus, this infrastructure will enable people to work together and act collectively while protecting their autonomy.
Our technologies will not produce broad human gains unless we invest equal time, energy, and resources in the development of social and emotional technologies that advance the way our entire society organizes and the way we work together. Mance Key backs this up by outlining five possible future scenarios for blockchain technology, concluding that technology without direct social movement intervention will always strengthen existing power relations.
“Amid blockchain trends toward verifiability, globality, permanence, and future focus, state actors are looking for greater capabilities to intervene in the daily lives of individuals on a global scale. These expanded capabilities enable new dimensions of state sovereignty. Emergence of forms of technological totalitarianism made possible. First, states cannot easily control what they cannot measure, and AI-amplified blockchain-enabled Internet of Things (IoT) further increases the extent to which states can monitor the physical and social world. By 2020 , the Internet of Things is expected to more than triple in size to nearly 21 billion devices. When every physical object we interact with has a microchip linked to the blockchain embedded in it, state agencies will surely seek oversight and regulate the personal, political and economic activities of many.
at last
at last
Valuation is a social process, and distributed organizations of tech activists are harnessing new technologies to disrupt accounting and identity management in contemporary capitalism, thereby changing the global economy, the nature of work, and the distribution of wealth. There is no direct link between technological innovation and an increasingly complex political economy. As a society, we can decide to create technologies that enrich humanity rather than commodify it.
What is certain, however, is that if we continue to live in an Odaily where capitalism is the primary determinant of value accounting and social identity, then expanding complexity and distorted value accounting will push humanity to the brink of the collapse of democratic civilization .
Self-sovereign identity is a necessary but insufficient tool for dealing with some aspects of increasing complexity. Only a widespread global movement has the power to stifle the underlying drivers of capitalism. As part of this process, we can use new forms of value accounting to reinforce and crystallize the social systems we imagine we want to live in. A growing number of social entrepreneurs, cooperatives, and tech activists are using these technologies to pursue collaborative ownership and wealth management. It is in everyones interest to keep an eye on this development.
