Notions of the Possible: Smart-Contracts and the Obscene Sign of (Racial) Freedom

Abstract

This paper asks: how does smart-contracting think through the knotted relation between freedom and captivity expressed in contract? Contrary to the transcendental register of universalist humanity and right contemporary imaginations of justice deliriously describe, this paper triangulates between contract, free will, and the slave to consider how the time of slavery persists in and as the exchange protocols encoded on blockchain platforms. The stakes here concern a need to track the deep continuity of anti-Blackness, white supremacy and their associated legal constructs as they replicate within the “extra-legal” field of digital exchange protocols, before ending with a challenge to the grammar of credit, labor and right the slave’s emancipation is always forced to rhetorically work through.