Toward a Situationist Blockchain
Toward a Situationist Blockchain was created by Şerife Wong and I for Excavations: Governance Archaeology for the Future of the Internet, a virtual artist & research residency hosted by the University of Colorado, Boulder’s Media Enterprise Design Lab and King’s College, London.
The residency was designed to imagine “new, more inclusive Internet governance policies,” examining pre-digital governance structures. Then we explored how those precedents might be adapted to manage and govern today’s online communities. An exhibition of the work was presented to the United Nation’s Internet Governance Forum in December of 2021.
Our project looked at the Situationist International, a group of French anarchists from the 1950’s and 1960’s who contributed ideas about media culture, theory, activism and rebellion that pre-date the digital age and in many ways which were predictive and others that have struggled to meet it.
We looked at ideas of voluntary exchange — autonomy and agency, in a human senses of the word — as opposed to commodification. Then we asked how the Situationists might build this anti-commodification impulse into the logic of cryptocurrencies: a modern ledger designed to organize everything in the world into accounting information.
The blockchain, used toward that end, represents a dystopian cybernetics. As a digital ledger, it reduces every form of the world’s connections and relationships into something measurable and accounted for, all for the sake of productivity, management, and control. We were interested in the reverse of that concept: a ledger that matched the radicalism of cryptocurrency’s rhetoric.
You can read more about the project in our white paper, which explains the concept of a “proof of non-work consensus protocol” for a blockchain that can do the work of economic production for you, while you abandon it completely. We touch on indigenous roots of the Situationist’s approach — appropriated from the Native American tradition of Potlatch (which we explore in more detail in the paper).
In summary, the Situationist Blockchain is a wallet that, once installed, uses 100% of that device’s system resources. By dedicating all available processing power to crypto verification, the device becomes useless to any other activity. It becomes a “brick.” Inspired by the Situationists — whose use of “bricks” in the streets of Paris were notorious — we wanted to reveal the object behind the spectacle of network connectivity and user interfaces. It is a seductive form of spectacle, and we wanted to encourage people to drop those bricks and go do, or build, something else.
So we asked: how might we design a blockchain with this Situationist goal in mind? And LutteCoin (literally “struggle” in French) is our answer.
Below are some of my responses to an interview recorded for the Media Archeology Lab.
Is there a particular online governance failure that motivates your work?
The Situationist blockchain isn't motivated by a particular governance failure, but by the distance between the rhetoric of radical reinvention promised by the cryptocurrency space compared to what actually happens in that space. The crypto sphere seems very eager to reinvent banks. Decentralizing a bank might help us create a network where we disintermediate financial exchange, but I don't think that's particularly powerful if the nodes are run by massive concentrations of validators. It reminds me of how the web used to be decentralized in practice, not just in theory. You had people running blogs and web pages, doing all kinds of experimental things, and then you had the walled garden -- facebook, Twitter, reddit, for example, kind of building on the backs of what people were doing online and then becoming the exclusive place to do those things.
Blockchain and cryptocurrency suggests it would be that rhizomatic network of possibility and experimentation, but for the most part you have a hundred thousand get rich schemes, a culture of investing in inflating assets, and wealthy elites with spending power gaining control of the networks. It's just reshuffling who has power, which has its benefits, but it's not a benefit on par with the radicalism defined by folks invested in the cryptospace.
I was pleased to see that a number of activists disrupted the Internet Governance Forum which hosted an exhibition with this work. The protestors had a slogan: “Platform Worker’s Rights are Human Rights.” I hope this piece, viewed by policymakers at the United Nations, reinforces the idea that there is a value to the Web, even a “Web3”, that are distinct from its use as an engine of economic productivity.
What has informed and shaped your research and exploration process, from the start of the cohort to this point?
The idea was also to build a system of governance using Situationist concepts, which is important to remember! We didn't walk into here thinking we would make an “anarchist blockchain.” We started with the question of how would the Situationists govern, and how could that be translated into a technological solution?
When we started imagining a situationist blockchain, we had no idea what it would look like. We knew about the Situationist’s work, but hadn’t explore it through the lens of governance: how does a Situationist world make decisions?
Through our research, we found that the Situationists did have an idea of how the world would manage itself. They explicitly described an economy of voluntary exchange, giving away things, or experiences, without expectation of a return. That's what the name refers to — “Situations" are the gifts you get, the ones that can't be returned, because they are simply experiences. It was hard to imagine what a Situationist blockchain would be, because the blockchain is the opposite of this. The blockchain stores every transaction permanently, it's a dedicated system of tracking what is given and returned.
So, it was helpful to think of the blockchain through the Situationist concept of the Spectacle. The Spectacle was the Situationist's idea that culture had been commodified in such a way that everything we did was part of sustaining that engine of commodification. Blockchain makes it very clear that this is the goal of its protocols, too. It wants ID tags on individual pieces of fruit to be scanned and tracked. It wants paintings to have chips so that their NFT can be sold, too. It's all about financialization and commodification of everything, and the crypto "culture" that emerges is really focused on this.
What inspired you to choose the medium you chose?
A Situationist Blockchain makes sense only in one way, which is using the tool of a blockchain to subvert the layers of meaning attached to that tool. How could we ask people to see their digital devices, and cryptocurrencies, from a perspective outside of economic productivity and financialization? That ultimately became the goal of this project.
The Situationists relied heavily on detournement, a strategy of taking that culture of spectacle, erasing some parts of it, and filling in a countering ideology. So they used newspaper comic strips, for example, erasing the comics and filling it with dense theory. We leveraged that strategy in two ways. First, in using the blockchain and its protocols to create a critique of the blockchain and its protocols. Second, to use the signifiers of the crypto world -- promotional videos and websites, stock footage, revolutionary rhetoric and white papers that read as manifestos. So we took all of those vessels and tried to sneak some situationist passengers on board.
A Situationist Comic Panel, translated into English.
If your project could reinvent the internet, what would it invite to be designed differently?
I think the idea of the piece — which is taken into absurdity — is actually quite beautiful and idealistic at its core. It's expressing something I think a lot of people feel right now about the pressure of financialization. There's a labor shortage, people don't want to work, to be disrespected. We treat that as a crisis of the pandemic, but why? It's beautiful. People are staying home with their dogs, gardening, playing music, sleeping. That's great. Why is productivity so important if it comes at the expense of all that?
And the internet should help us create networks that support that. It should be the ultimate mutual aid and organizing tool. We should be supporting each other online. Instead, because of the pressure of capital — because everyone needs to make money — we have websites that spy on us, sell our depression to the highest bidder, put toxic and inflammatory ideas front and center in order to get us to engage and click. Those objectives are just way off!
So the piece is saying, “burn it all down.” Literally, set your device to “burning” crypto (ie, make a wallet useless, taking the coins out of circulation) and “burning” your CPU (turn it into a brick). Then walk away from networks that make you miserable and alienated. It's a poor design solution, sure, but the dream is what’s important. I hope it opens up the imagination to think about the web and digital connectivity as a complement to what we do offline.
What if we focused critical attention on building platforms of equitable exchange, a system of transfer and relationship and voluntary action as a way of organizing activities, interactions, and “situations.” What would “Web3” look like if that was the primary objective?
LutteCoin is a project of the Excavations: Governance Archaeology for the Future of the Internet residency held virtually at University of Colorado Boulder and King’s College London. Its aim is to explore pre-digital mechanisms across diverse societies and cultural practice through creation-oriented research. Curated by Federica Carugati (King’s College London), and Darija Medic and Nathan Schneider (Media Enterprise Design Lab, University of Colorado Boulder), with support from the Eutopia Foundation and in collaboration with DiploFoundation.