Hubris and Concern: Could Distributed Ledger Technology Replace Modern States?

Bitcoin, Venezuela's Petro and Facebook's Libra. Accused of enabling drug dealing, circumventing sanctions and undermining monetary policy, cryptocurrencies make headlines. Tech enthusiasts even predict a future entirely governed by cryptocurrencies, Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT). Meanwhile, lawmakers call Mark Zuckerberg to testify before Congress, the EU prohibits Facebook's Libra until its implications are researched and China bans cryptocurrencies altogether.

An unsettling question arises: Are Distributed Ledger Technologies capable of replacing modern states?

Yet let us take a step back: What are Distributed Ledger Technologies? And what are states? In fact, the answer to the question titling this book crucially hinges on how we define these two. In fact, neither DLT nor states are predetermined entities, but social and material realities that emerge from a continuous struggle of definitions. Hence, this book starts by studying the becoming of DLT and states as realities.

Underlying this quest is a reading of Martin Heidegger's Being and Time and a reinterpretation of postmodern thought through a series of drawings of carts. Taken together, they constitute the Theory of Carts. A cart hereby illustrates how entities are discursively materialized through a range of disciplinary techniques as realities, such as identities, norms or truths. These techniques are, to be precise, concealing, abstracting, including/excluding and obscuring mediation and are widely employed in mass-consumed media.

In the case of DLT, the named techniques effectively discipline anarchist significations to such an extent that the (re)production of Distributed Ledger Technologies ensures the continuity of modern states. However, the actual richness and depth of Hubris and Concern lies in its look behind the curtain of ostensible answers, in its probing of conventional beliefs about what is real and declared to be true. And by doing so, this book invites us to a unique philosophical journey to the place where today's truths are made.