Can’t we have blockchain technology without the ideology?

The stone age, the block age, and why blockchain is just a technology.

Plinio Nomellini

By Dr J Ellis Cameron-Perry, Executive Director of the Adrealm Editorial & Intelligence Operations Unit (AEIOU).

Dionysus in chains

What’s with the florid use of religious language in our industry and this noticeable drift from ideology to eschatology? If you haven’t been paying attention to any of this, perhaps you should be. The article to read is by Liam Kelly (Wired, 28 June 2018). “The cryptocurrency sector has all the hallmarks of religiosity” he observes — a gracious understatement. “[It’s] not surprising that blockchain and crypto communities tend to look cultish,” adds Amber Baldet, co-founder and CEO of Clovyr, who is quoted in Mr Kelly’s article and who offers a short explanation as to why this is the case (1).

My favourite nugget, though, is from Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of Ripple:

“These are holy wars,” Garlinghouse said. “There are groups of people who are grounded in the ideology and passionate zealotry that [say], ‘We’re going to overthrow governments. We’re sick of being held down by the man and we’re going to circumvent all these regulations and unlock crazy new things.’”

Holy wars, indeed. To my ears, all this has the menacing din of a dozen wasps in a Hill’s Brothers coffee tin: scary, but you know you won’t be stung and that the wasps will eventually suffocate — or sting each other to death. I was planning to write an essay discussing whether any of this pulpit pounding really matters when a short paper by Professor Bill Buchanan (Napier University, Edinburgh) provided me with a better point d’appui.

The title of Professor Buchanan’s article is “Governments of the World Need To Stop Seeing Blockchain As a Technology, And Rebuild Trust in a Digital World.” There’s a lot packed into that sentence, and I think it’s worth examining closely his insistence that blockchain is not just a technology. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll call this MTAT (“em-tat”) thesis, the thesis that blockchain is more than a technology.

When bees wax lyrical

Let’s start by assuming that this is just a slogan or an emotive battle-cry, and note that Professor Buchanan isn’t the only one in the “not just/more than” camp. Whether one is moved or not moved by this cris du coeur depends on how one feels about blockchain specifically, or technology generally, or how one feels about those items on (e.g.) Professor Buchanan’s wishlist. Assuming it’s a slogan, it’s on par with what’s going on in the song “More Than A Feeling” by the band Boston:

“When I hear that old song play it’s more-than-a-fee-ling.”

I don’t believe anyone has ever asked whether we should try to predicate truth or falsity of the claim that the singer’s feeling is, in fact, MTAF (more than a feeling), because it isn’t really a claim. It’s a line from a ballad. It’s immediately cogent, it doesn’t need to be true or false, and to assume that it was intended to be a statement of fact is to fail to slip into that dreamy aesthetic moment the artist has prepared for us. Five syllables. We tap our fingers on the steering wheel in time to the brilliant riff that prefaces the chorus, and we sing along. More than a feeling. Great tune — ne plus ultra.

The thing is, even if the feeling is (poetically speaking) “more than a feeling,” it is still a just feeling. And that’s the simplest rejoinder to the MTAT thesis: however one feels about the potentials and promise of blockchain, it’s still just a technology.

But suppose we’re interested in whether the claim is true or false — and given the stature of some of the people making this and similar claims, maybe we should be. If one believes, and one is actively promulgating the belief, that blockchain is in fact “more than a technology,” it’s fair to ask: Well, what exactly do you mean by “more than” or “not just”? And is that claim even intelligible?

The present king of France is bald

Let’s allow that the “more than” clause intends to communicate something like this:

Blockchain is more than a technology, because the use, adoption, and distribution of this technology may result in consequences that have formidable and perhaps lasting or even permanent impacts beyond the consequences intended by those who created the technology and contemplated use-cases for it (2).

That’s a ghastly sentence, I know. Sorry. But it does help us determine whether we can predicate truth or falsity of the statement “blockchain is more than a technology.” And the answer is: we can predicate truth or falsity of the claim, it is probably true, and it is true trivially.

True, because the use and distribution of tools and technologies do tend to change more than the one or few things that were in the innovator’s contemplation and immediate purview. Trivially true, because the previous sentence is and will be true of any tool or technology.

The raw and the cooked and the half-baked

For example, use of a sharp stone to cut, flense, and distribute meat had a formidable impact on (inter alia) hominid cognitive development, even if no single individual living at the time had the intellectual wherewithal to know this (3). Imagine a forebear holding aloft a piece of obsidian, saying,

Dude, listen to me. This rock I just sharpened. I’m telling you, this is not just technology. This is going to change everything — I mean, like, everything.

Even if he didn’t really have an inkling as to how far “everything” would or could extend, he would be right. Imagine now a second forbear piping up from the greasy shadows of the communal barbeque pit:

Yeah, yeah. Whatever. My grandmother said the same thing when she worked-out that fire-starting tech. She was always, like, “Did I ever tell you about the time I created a portable spark-kit? That was not just a technology, you know. It changed everything.” Bro, she never shut up about it.

Gutta-percha insulation; gutta-percha insulation for cables; latex condoms; childproof caps; Velcro. Grant that “MTAT” is both a slogan and a statement of fact. It applies to every technology. In this respect, there’s nothing special about blockchain.

So here’s where we’re at:

In a poetic sense, blockchain is “more than a technology;” but it is still just a technology. Taken as a claim, the statement “blockchain is more than a technology” is true, at least in the sense that the impacts and consequences of use, adoption, and distribution of this technology may and probably will result in a number of other changes and novelties, some of which are not foreseeable, and some of which might be as monumental as firemaking, paper, moveable-type printing, gunpowder, and the compass; but this applies to every technology.

Conclusion? The MTAT thesis alone cannot establish or even explain what makes blockchain technology special — just in case it is special. Slogan or fact, it’s all the same. At least you can sing along to Boston. Blockchain? You can’t even see it, let alone dance to it.

William Blake — The Raising of Lazarus

But, this amplifier goes to 11…

If in spite of this you still want to insist that blockchain is special, then we need to go back to where this essay started — with wasps making a dreadful noise in a coffee tin and my suspicion that the eschatological tail is wagging hell out of the technological dog. So let’s cut to the chase. With respect to blockchain, when people like Professor Buchanan say it is “not just” a technology, and mean it as a statement of fact, they are probably referring not only to the intended and/or foreseen consequences of the adoption and distribution of this technology, but to certain sociopolitical aspirations (ends) and their confidence in how these are to be achieved (means).

And they are correct: blockchain, in their conception of it at least, is not just technology. It’s not even Promethean technology. It is a messianic technology. Blockchain is the means of being able — at long last — to shoehorn the fungused foot of humanity into something sensible and comfortable — like, say, the glass slipper of “radical liberalism.”

Well, good luck with that. These glass slippers are exquisite artefacts of super difficult math + best-intentions, but they’re unlikely to wear well or to last long on the concrete of reality. Their transparency is to die for, aye, but they suck in inclement weather. They’re also tough on your sole.

Rawls + Turing = 404

Blockchain technology might enable some of us to construct wonderful, serviceable tools that help some us achieve noble and worthwhile ends; but mathematics alone cannot determine which ends are good, and which means are right.

Cryptography can establish parameters for some things, but it cannot help us define the words we use in normative discourse, or alert us when the sound and fury of our language has outpaced our logic.

Fancy math might improve the utilitarian calculus, but it can neither establish a warrant for utilitarianism nor disestablish the claims of deontologists. That’s the first point.

The second point is that one of the things standing in the way of this technology being better understood by more people is blockchain ideology. I would not insinuate (as some have) that there’s something weird and culty about the crypchain crowd; but I remain doubtful that the best way to promote decentralised computing, DLT, and applied cryptography (etc.) is with hymns to a New World Order crafted in code and paid for with e-wampum. I’m a freethinking pagan and blockchain evangelist, but I’m also wary of golden idols.

Sermon on the Mount Gox

What most alarms me, however, is the suggestion that we should exchange faith in each other for faith in an abstruse mathematical conception of aggregated trustlessness. Trust in code that supposedly eliminates the need for trust cannot be described as “trustless;” and the fact that the architects of our future hive fail to see this suggest that they are probably not to be trusted with too much of our faith — their intellectual gifts and best intentions notwithstanding. Faith in and respect for their math, I have. But I wish they would stick to math.

I remain confident that some uses of blockchain technology will enable some of us to attempt things that most of us believe are worth attempting. I anticipate some interesting new bottles for old whines. I hope, though, that we have not become so loathsome to ourselves, and so intolerant and fearful of human imperfection, that our greatest aspiration is to transform human beings into hymenopterae with Antminers, Etherum wallets, and a wardrobe full of kitsch t-shirts.

Not too long ago, Fan Wenzhong, head of China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission, urged people not to “mythologize” blockchain.

Outstanding suggestion. Not bad for a spokesman of a centralized authority.

By Dr J Ellis Cameron-Perry, Executive Director of the Adrealm Editorial & Intelligence Operations Unit (AEIOU)