Many crypto folks have often hoped I would write a bit more on related topics, and now that’s good: for the next couple of years I really am going to come back to writing about blockchain.
The social science fund project I applied for was fortunate enough to be approved: “Research on the History of Technology and Philosophy of Technology of Blockchain.” This is a combination of my academic interests and the blockchain field.
At first I had wanted to paste the main body of the application directly, but a colleague reminded me that when the social science fund project is finalized, they need to check for plagiarism, so one should try not to publish too much related content outside journals and other publications. So I first wrote a brief summary; later related articles will also be posted after publication.
Neither of my two students is interested in this topic, so I will recruit other interested students or colleagues to join the research.
The summary or introduction is as follows:
In 2008, an anonymous author using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin white paper and proposed the technical idea of “blockchain” (when articulating the concept, Satoshi Nakamoto used words such as block and chain, but the compound word blockchain was not coined by Satoshi Nakamoto; it is a later summary). In 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto launched Bitcoin, a digital currency based on blockchain technology. Over the past ten years, aside from Bitcoin, all sorts of projects built on blockchain have emerged one after another; blockchain technology has been welcomed by hackers, black markets, and anarchists, but has also gradually entered the视野 of mainstream communities. Various blockchain applications have continued to appear, gradually changing the logic of economic and social operation. Especially by 2019, Facebook’s plan to launch the digital currency Libra attracted widespread attention.
Electronic computers developed during the Second World War, and computer networks were nurtured during the Cold War; they too were initially promoted as a national innovation strategy, but eventually became a “platform technology” with enormous potential, providing a foundation for more emerging technologies and forms of communication. So, in the new era of a world political order in constant flux, might blockchain technology become yet another innovation hub or technology platform?
Just as in the development of internet technology, participants from different positions—military, scholars, businessmen, and hackers—contended with one another, jointly shaping today’s diversified internet world. Likewise, the trajectory of blockchain technology is not determined solely by its inventors or a small group of programmers. Scholarly researchers, especially humanists, should also join in and voice independent judgments.
As humanists, our focus is not the principles and structures of technology itself, but the impact of technology on society and culture. As Marx said, “The handmill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam mill, society with the industrial capitalist.” If the new generation of information technology represented by blockchain can indeed have a profound impact on social and economic development, then basic research on blockchain technology, especially research in the foundational theories of philosophy and the social sciences, becomes particularly urgent.
Drawing together the perspectives of history of technology and philosophy of technology, this project does not treat blockchain as a ready-made tool, but examines it as a new paradigm that has not yet taken final shape. By tracing its origins, we aim to provide a more appropriate theoretical positioning of the significance and orientation of blockchain technology. On the one hand, blockchain technology is not something that arose out of thin air; it has backgrounds in the history of science, history of technology, economic history, and intellectual history. Its technical content can be traced back to the development of cryptography since the Second World War, and it also continues the decentralizing trend in internet technology since the 1970s, while being deeply influenced in particular by the “free software movement” since 1990, ultimately resonating with the digitization trends of Internet 2.0 and finance since the twenty-first century. But on the other hand, blockchain technology is also something entirely new. This revolutionary quality is not reflected in its technical details, but especially in the force of the ideas it carries. It seeks to redefine bookkeeping methods and transaction methods, and to reestablish “trust” on the internet in a new decentralized way. Where, exactly, is blockchain technology new? This is precisely what needs to be elucidated from the perspectives of history of technology and philosophy of technology.
This project will place blockchain within the history of internet development and the history of money, revealing that it is both the result of a certain large-scale trend and at the same time incubating revolutionary change. The project will also introduce phenomenological philosophy of technology and media ecology, breaking with the mindset of technological neutrality and revealing the intentional structure and cultural bias of blockchain technology. Finally, by means of examining blockchain technology, the project will also respond to a number of traditional philosophical questions, such as the distinction between “the real” and “the virtual,” the relation between “intrinsic value” and “exchange value,” and so on.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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