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Cryptostatecraft: Recoding Value/s in the Digital Economy

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Location:

Moot Court Room,
Old College

Date/time

Thu 28 November 2024
14:00-16:00

About the event

This paper explores blockchain-based Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) as experiments in governance at scale beyond the state, or as what I call here ‘cryptostatecraft’. DAOs are blockchain-based digital organisations governed by smart contracts and token engineering, enabling decentralised creation, management, and distribution of resources. Two affordances of blockchain technology make DAOs particularly interesting for governance experiments. First, they can operate without the necessity of legal recognition into a corporate form, thus foregrounding bottom-up community governance. Second, the creative reliance on token design allows them to intertwine economic value with social and political values. Two examples of cryptostatecraft, Prosperá’s Network State in Honduras and the Coordi-(Nations) in pop-up cities like Zuzalu, illustrate some key features in these experiments in governance.

Drawing from a broader theoretical context, my thinking is grounded in the idea that societal transformation is closely connected to the concept of value. Inspired by David Graeber’s relational approach to value, the paper views social systems as structures of creative action, where value is determined by collective practices of valuation. Building further on James C. Scott’s proposition of an “anarchist squint”, I can side-step conventional state-centric thinking and open up possibilities for non-state-based governance at scale. By situating DAOs within this historical and theoretical framework, the paper critically examines how these digital governance experiments at once reinscribe existing modes of governance, while at the same time open the possibilities for securing collective futures by building on alternative valuation practices.

 

About the speaker

Andrea LeiterAndrea Leiter is an Assistant Professor and the Acting Director at the Amsterdam Center for International Law working on technology enabled governance. She focuses on global inequality and transnational law making through private actors in the digital economy as part of the Sustainable Global Economic Law Group. Her current research project ‘(Re)coding Values: Decentralised Autonomous Organisations as Pathways toward Sustainable Societies?’ is funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) in the form of a VENI grant (2024-2027). Her manuscript called ‘Making the World Safe for Investment: The Protection of Property 1922-1959 was published with Cambridge University Press in 2023. Andrea also co-founded the Dutch non-profit organization Sovereign Nature Initiative, working at the intersection of ecology, technology and economics.

 

Image credit: CodeXDiagrams

 

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