Parody of money: Techno-social imaginaries of Bitcoin and their contradictions

Abstract

The dissertation thesis analyzes Bitcoin as a socio-technical phenomenon by focusing on its prevalent socio-technical imaginaries and exploring these imaginaries into their contradictory consequences. Based on ethnographic research conducted in Czech and Slovak Bitcoin communities and following Lana Swartz's and Nigel Dodd's respective theories of Bitcoin, four imaginaries are identified: commodity, relation, ideology and money. Each of these imaginaries is explored in its own chapter. Bitcoin approached as a commodity explores the process of Bitcoin mining through the lens of the Marxist labour theory of value combined with Negri's theory of the socialized worker. The chapter explores how Bitcoin mining reproduces class antagonisms between miners and investors while also creating a new mode of production based on control via labour. The second chapter focuses on Bitcoin as a relation via the theories of kinship and knowledge developed by Marilyn Strathern. The chapter explores particular analogies of Bitcoin and kinship and how these analogies serve to develop relationless persons and personless relations. The following chapter analyzes Bitcoin as an ideology while utilizing theories of immaterial labour developed by Italian autonomists. It focuses on symbolic labour carried out in order to...