Playtime: Monitoring and Surveillance in NFT Sociality

Abstract

Blockchain platforms used for the exchange of decentralized digital assets regularly attract swindlers, hackers, and scammers. For ‘honest’ traders, such individuals and organizations betray the Anarcho-Libertarian spirit of collaborative experimentation that accompanied the crypto ‘ecosystem’ in the previous decade. Members of the many crypto communities that interact online therefore invest efforts in identifying and then excluding dishonest actors, mainly by digitally tracking accounts and users. Based on fieldwork with non-fungible tokens (NFTs) collectors in London, I will focus on the temporality of such acts of monitoring, which I argue constitute a post-panoptic reality wherein masking becomes intrinsic to interactions online or offline. The analysis rethinks the connection between play, uncertainty, and surveillance in conditions of hypervisibility.