Blockchain Papers

Anass Sedrati, Nelly Stoyanova, Abdellatif Mezrioui, Abdelaziz Hilali · 5 authors

In the era of digital revolution many contemporary events that changed the world were shaped through the internet. Nowadays, the emergence of internet of things (IoT), combining physical objects with virtual networks is expected to have even more influence. This new 'decentralised' structure in the world raises questions such as power, governance and the notion of democracy online. The aim of this paper is to investigate these notions. We have taken the examples of Bitcoin and Wikipedia and examined their decision-making process. Our analysis has found some inconsistencies in their policies, that are in contradiction with democracy and consensus principles of governance. Starting from our findings, we present further improvements that can be used to achieve more democracy and equity in the digital context.

Sabrina Wollenschläger, Michael Lustenberger

This study examines how Decentralized Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) could be incorporated into municipal administration to improve citizen participation and transparency. As DAOs in governance are attracting growing academic and practical attention, this research uses scenarios to analyze the conditions for their application at municipal and regional levels. It takes a conceptual, scenario-based approach to develop a model for DAO-based e-participation, identifying key concepts and their relationships to explain how DAOs operate as self-regulated systems for digital participation. The research is structured into three phases: First, in the foundational phase, this study synthesizes existing research on DAOs and participatory governance models, contrasting blockchain-based and traditional processes to establish a framework for DAO integration. Second, the application phase uses illustrative scenarios to explore how DAO mechanisms might influence participation and decision-making in municipalities. Third, the evaluation and recommendation phase consolidates insights into a structured model for implementation, highlighting task characteristics, contextual conditions, and organizational capacities that shape DAO feasibility. The analysis suggest that DAOs may enable new forms of participation and more transparent procedures, but only when antecedent conditions such as digital literacy, administrative capacity, and infrastructure stability are sufficiently met. Future work should look at long-term effects, compare cases across municipalities, and examine the role of legal and regulatory frameworks.

Sandro Lüscher, Uwe Serdült

This paper explores how Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) could inform and shape participatory procedures in democratic governance. We apply DAO decision-making, such as rule-based input aggregation, transparent participation, and programmable decision-making, to a real-world case: the legislative development of the Swiss E-ID law, a proposal to establish a digital identity system for secure online authentication for Swiss residents. Using data from the official legislative consultation, we simulate how DAO-inspired mechanisms could have altered the aggregation of input and policy outcomes. Our analysis contributes conceptually and empirically to debates on digital democratic innovations, showing how programmable governance can be used not only to design new institutional forms, but also to critically assess the procedural dynamics of existing ones.

J.P. Vergne

Abstract This essay argues that social media document (rather than fuel) the decline of political democracy while helping revive organizational democracy, including through ‘decentralized autonomous organizations’ (DAOs). Yet, despite giving everyone a voice and the ability to organize across borders, social media could over‐concentrate power if, in the future, a few large but siloed platforms ended up shrinking viewpoint diversity – the oxygen of democracy. How can we curb corporate platform concentration without dulling democracy? Due to trade‐offs in platform design, no single service can deliver free speech, free usage, and safe usage simultaneously. Fortunately, this ‘trilemma’ can be transcended at the industry level with an interoperability mandate that fosters user multihoming and lets various platforms provide different bundles of democratic benefits. Email works across service providers, and so can social media. Interoperability thus represents a viable answer based on six advantages: practical feasibility; competition on merit; faster complementor innovation; jurisdictional flexibility; unlocking network effects between, rather than just within platforms; and alignment with democratic values. Platform interoperability can make social media social again and future‐proof democracy. This proposal is a clarion call for blaming the Internet a little less for democracy’s problems and instead leveraging its infrastructure strategically to address them.

Calzada, Igor

This research examines how emerging forms of digital sovereignty, decentralized infrastructures, and anticipatory AI governance are reshaping nationhood in the algorithmic age. Drawing on the conceptual framework of Algorithmic Nations (Calzada 2018) and incorporating new empirical insights from embedded action research (2022–2025), the study analyses the Basque Country as a paradigmatic case of a “small stateless nation” navigating the global reconfiguration of power between states, corporations, and communities. The presentation synthesizes three competing post-Westphalian paradigms—Network States (Srinivasan 2022), Network Sovereignties (De Filippi 2024), and Algorithmic Nations (Calzada 2018)—as shown in the comparative table on page 19, highlighting their differing assumptions regarding governance, identity, participation, and technological control. Building on the diagnostic indicators of Europe’s digital dependence (page 10) and the transition from Gaia-X to EuroStack (page 11), the study evaluates the strategic implications of digital public infrastructures, data cooperatives, federated architectures, and Web3 ecosystems for stateless nations. Through comparative analysis of the Global North (e.g., Scotland, Quebec, Flanders), the Global South (e.g., Kurdistan, Sámi, Tamil, Amazigh), and the Basque Country (pages 16–17), the work demonstrates how communities with diverse geopolitical constraints can articulate forms of AI sovereignty grounded in rights-based, culturally rooted, and community-driven governance. The Basque case illustrates how fragmented digital systems (.eus, EJIE/Izenpe, Osakidetza, MUBIL, etc.) can evolve toward an interoperable, multi-scalar technopolitical architecture, aligning linguistic, territorial, and infrastructural dimensions. The analysis argues that AI-driven infrastructures, data governance, and decentralized architectures are not merely technical layers but emerging geopolitical terrains where stateless, indigenous, diasporic, and minority nations can renegotiate autonomy. The concept of Algorithmic Nations provides a framework for understanding how community sovereignty can be built through data commons, federated systems, and anticipatory governance, particularly in multilingual and culturally distinct territories such as the Basque Country. Overall, the study contributes to debates on global digital governance, digital sovereignty, and the future of nationhood by proposing that algorithmic infrastructures are becoming central to political organization. It calls for democratic, inclusive, and community-oriented models of AI governance capable of avoiding techno-authoritarianism, Big Tech dependency, and “sovereignty washing,” while enabling emancipatory, culturally anchored, and future-oriented forms of collective self-determination.

Katja Leifheit, Judith Pies, Hilde Van den Bulck, Alessandro D’Arma · 8 authors

This article presents a quality assessment of Web3 coverage in mainstream media across four European countries—Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom—as a starting point for discussing the standards of technology journalism that can meaningfully support an informed public. It begins with an overview of existing research on technology journalism and its role in fostering informed citizenry. This is followed by a mixed-methods content analysis, combining quantitative and qualitative approaches, to examine how the complex topic of Web3 is reported in the four European countries. Insights from journalists and editors contextualize the analysis. The findings highlight three key challenges across all countries: an event-driven rather than process-oriented focus, a narrow thematic scope on the financial applications of Web3 technology (cryptocurrencies), and a relatively limited diversity of sources. The article concludes by exploring how these challenges—and the broader trends in Web3 reporting—shed light on the potential and pitfalls of technology journalism in contemporary societies.

Roxana Maria Druță, Elena Simina Lakatos, Radu Munteanu, Lucian–Ionel Cioca · 7 authors

This study explores public perceptions, involvement, and barriers to energy communities in Romania, a country where decentralized renewable energy initiatives are still in their infancy. Data were collected through a nationwide online survey based on a quantitative research design, involving 118 respondents from all four macro-regions in Romania. The survey assessed awareness of the concept of energy communities, perceived benefits, technological and regulatory challenges, and willingness to participate or invest. The results show that the perception of energy communities is generally positive, with solar and environmental benefits being the most important. However, significant barriers remain, particularly in terms of financing, institutional support, and regulatory complexity. Urban, involved, and female respondents consistently rated benefits higher and identified more barriers than rural, non-participants and male respondents. Statistical differences between groups were confirmed using the Mann–Whitney U-test. These results highlight the importance of targeted communication, improved policy frameworks, and educational initiatives to ensure broader public involvement and inclusive development of renewable energy systems in Romania.

Hongzhou Chen, Chenyu Zhou, Abdulmotaleb El Saddik, Wei Cai

In the rapidly evolving Web3 world, non-fungible token (NFT) communities are reshaping the formation, distribution, and activation of social capital in ways distinct from traditional models. However, despite their growing impact on societal prosperity, a comprehensive understanding of social capital dynamics within Web3 NFT communities remains limited. This study explores the Mfers community, a key example within Web3 NFT ecosystems. By analyzing social media and blockchain data and using a Delphi method-based human-large language model (LLM) collaboration, we uncovered unique social capital patterns across six dimensions. Our findings highlight a compelling blend of decentralization, inclusion, trust, and empowerment but also raise critical questions about wealth inequality, content quality, and ethical challenges. Based on the findings, we discussed the uniqueness of social capital in Web3 NFT communities, the tension between technical and power decentralization, and the multidimensional nature of societal prosperity. We also suggested directions for future research on decentralized online communities in the CSCW field. This study provides a systematic perspective on social capital in Web3 NFT communities and introduces an innovative human-LLM collaborative analysis, offering insights into the design and governance of benign decentralized online communities.

Mentre, Gilles

The dissertation aims to demonstrate that direct democracy is the new stage of democracy. Direct democracy has never been taken seriously. Most authors deem it unrealistic given space and time constraints and stress the risk that the ignorance of the masses could pose. Since democracy is the search for a legitimate and efficient system producing increased equality and respecting individual and minority rights, direct democracy seems, to many, a dead-end. In section 1, I analyze how direct democracy, theoretically, can answer these objections. Legitimacy is grounded in intersubjective and institutional trust. Distrust is not only targeted against the government but also toward others, fueled by and fueling polarization. Direct political participation in deliberating and voting is not only a solid human desire and condition of fulfillment but also a vector of renewed institutional trust, echoing a broader movement for more horizontal power. The efficiency of direct democracy is more debated. An increasing number of voters prefer decisions driven by experts over the crowd. Direct democracy must only prove that it is at least as efficient as experts or that experts are fallible. Given the epistemological value of non-experts, the private character of expertise, and the dynamic and inclusive aspect of pluralistic intelligence, this minimal test is passed. Direct democracy is, therefore, a powerful tool to solve the compromise/consensus conundrum. While consensus has turned into that of a particular elite, compromise is impracticable in a polarized context. Direct democracy creates new majorities based on projects rather than programs. The condition is that minority rights stay off-limits and that individual rights are treated through qualified majoritarianism. In section 2, I empirically test direct democracy's adaptability and margin of uncertainty. Direct democracy, in the 24 American States that allow it, leads to results closer to the majority opinion than legislatures. Initiatives present no constant political trend in their results and prove resistant to polarization. In recent popular votes on abortion, voters did not align with their parties on critical issues. In Taiwan, direct democracy helps re-unite on specific topics a divided nation, powered by online debate and decentralized fact-checking tools. In Estonia, citizens have had the possibility to vote via the Internet since 2005, a system that has increased turnout and overhauled the generational digital divide. The Swiss used internet voting for twenty years until it was halted in 2020. Security issues around e-voting still need to be solved regarding identification, devices, and verifiability. Nevertheless, both examples prove that, once these difficulties are solved or in contexts with higher trust or lower stakes, e-voting fosters participation, flexibility, and security. It enables direct democracy to self-institutionalize itself. In section 3, I make concrete propositions for a "digital direct democracy". The referendum is subject to criticism. Renewed fact-checking and tracking are needed, although fake news is no excuse for inaction. Citizens' assemblies can be helpful to deliberative and controlling tools if their recommendations are submitted for a referendum. Referendums always risk becoming plebiscites unless they are citizen-led. Multiple-choice voting, multi-stage referendums, or open questions need to be experimented with through e-voting. What does the future hold? Efficiency needs to be reconsidered with AI, potentially leading to "datatorship". Reversely, the development of e-voting has the potential to allow for a fully direct democracy. This model of "pancracy" could be powered by communities in a society with multiple individual affiliations. Decentralized autonomous organizations already provide an experimental framework. "Datatorship" and "Pancracy" are processual utopias. They allow us to understand the conditions of a true democracy.

David Krause

No abstract is available for this record.

Axel Marsford

No abstract is available for this record.

Kate Bennett

The Regenerative Finance (ReFi) movement is gaining traction in the Web3 space, with numerous blockchain-based initiatives claiming alignment with regenerative outcomes. However, many of these claims remain vague or structurally unsubstantiated. This study evaluates 40 self-identified ReFi initiatives to determine the extent to which their design, governance, capital structures, and impact logic align with foundational regenerative principles. Drawing from regenerative economics, living systems theory, and regenerative organizational design, a structured evaluation framework was developed covering six dimensions across three domains: regenerative finance, real-world impact, and regenerative organizational design. The framework informed two scoring-based questionnaires, enabling systematic assessment of regenerative and impact claims. Results revealed significant variation in alignment: 50% of initiatives were categorized as Regenerative Finance (ReFi), 45% as Sustainable DeFi, and 5% as Structurally Misaligned, reflecting limited coherence between regenerative claims and actual practice. The findings showed that team diversity and initiative maturity were positively correlated with regenerative performance, and that a lack of holistic impact evaluation—across thematic dimensions and throughout operational, direct, and indirect value chains—remains a key limitation across the sector. A typology of regenerative alignment and a replicable self-evaluation tool were developed to help funders, practitioners, and protocol developers assess which ReFi initiatives are structurally aligned with regenerative principles and which remain aspirational. This research advances conceptual and practical clarity around the term “regenerative” in Web3, supporting the evolution of more accountable, transparent, and transformation-oriented financial systems in service to the Global Commons.

Kate Bennett

‘ReFi’ is a rapidly emerging movement in the web3 space that seeks to leverage blockchain technology and decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols to deliver positive real-world impact. While ReFi is short for regenerative finance, regenerative practitioners query the regenerative claims of the movement. This perspective article explains why the regenerative claims of the ReFi movement are under scrutiny and highlights the implications for the Global Commons if the movement does not adhere to regenerative principles. Given that ReFi is a blockchain-enabled movement, the impact of ReFi on the Global Commons is implicitly a blockchain-related concern. This article provides a regenerative practitioner’s perspective on the ReFi movement as a point of reference for blockchain practitioners in the ReFi movement seeking to be a force for good. Long-standing research in ecological economics highlights the negative impacts of over-financialization and commoditization on the natural world. Given that blockchain technology enables more of the world’s natural assets to become commoditized, securitized, and collateralized than ever before, the article asserts that DeFi’s drive to financialize everything could make the Global Commons the next, and final, commodity frontier. It also asserts that the ReFi movement has the potential to reverse this trend if it can genuinely adhere to the regenerative paradigm.

Valéria Maria de Oliveira, João Marcelo Teixeira

Este artigo examina o papel significativo das mulheres no ecossistema emergente da Web3, apresentando as realizações de oito mulheres notáveis na área. Ele analisa como suas contribuições, incluindo inovações tecnológicas e o desenvolvimento de comunidades inclusivas, estão influenciando o futuro das tecnologias descentralizadas da internet. Além disso, o artigo discute a relevância de iniciativas como o Web3EduBrasil, que se concentram em capacitar e educar mulheres, promovendo assim a diversidade e a inclusão no espaço Web3. Esses esforços contribuem para a equidade de gênero, ao mesmo tempo em que incentivam a criatividade e a inovação na indústria.

Mrinalini Tankha, CHRIS ROGERS

This paper addresses a misalignment between market motivations and community needs in Web3, arguing that comparative ethnographic work can identify strategic opportunities in the industry. Comparing findings across different design research projects, we show how Web3 builders and founders are driving a plurality of projects and products and enabling cross‐chain operability to build diverse blockchain‐based ecosystems. Although this plurality is generative for innovation in the industry, it de‐prioritizes fully fleshed out, end‐to‐end Web3 solutions to urgent social problems, and is increasingly displacing community‐centered perspectives. We found that users desire a different kind of plurality—interoperable financial instruments across traditional banking and blockchain ‐ based platforms.

Igor Calzada

This article explores how decentralized Web3 is reshaping Internet governance by enabling the emergence of new forms of nation-statehood and redefining traditional concepts of state sovereignty. Based on fieldwork conducted in Silicon Valley since August 2022, this article systematically addresses the following research question: How is decentralized Web3 reshaping Internet governance and influencing the rise in new nation-statehood paradigms? It compares three emerging paradigms around Web3: (i) Network States (Srinivasan), envisioning digital entities rooted in crypto-libertarian principles; (ii) Network Sovereignties (De Filippi), emphasizing communal governance aligned with digital commons; and (iii) Algorithmic Nations (Calzada), drawing on Arendtian thought and demonstrating how communities—such as indigenous and stateless groups, as well as e-diasporas—can attain self-determination through data sovereignty. This article contributes a unique conceptual analysis of these paradigms based on fieldwork action research in Silicon Valley, responding to evolving technologies and their potential to reshape Internet governance. This article argues that decentralized Web3 provides a transformative vision for Internet governance but requires careful evaluation to ensure that it promotes inclusivity and equity. It advocates for a hybrid approach that balances global and local dynamics, emphasizing the need for solidarity, digital justice, and an internationalist perspective in shaping future Internet governance protocols.

Ashton Kingdon, Aaron Winter

In response to the data revolution, academic research and media attention have increasingly focused on the technological adaptation and innovation displayed by the far right. The greatest attention is paid to social media and how groups and organizations are utilizing technological advancement and growth in virtual networks to increase recruitment and advance radicalization on a global scale. As with most social and political endeavors, certain technologies are in vogue and thus draw the attention of users and regulators and service providers. This creates a technological blind spot within which extremist groups frequently operate older and less well regarded technologies without the oversight that one might expect. This article examines the less well-studied traditional and official websites of the Ku Klux Klan, the most established and iconic of American far-right organizations. By incorporating non-participant observation of online spaces and thematic analysis, this research analyzes the evolution of 26 websites, from their emergence in the early 1990s to the present day. We examine the ways in which traditional printed communications and other ephemera have progressed with advances in technology, focusing on the following central elements of Klan political activism and community formation: Klan identity, organizational history, aims and objectives; technology and outreach, including online merchandise and event organization; and the constructions of whiteness and racism. The results add value and insight to comparable work by offering a unique historical insight into the ways in which the Klan have developed and made use of Web 1.0, Web 2.0, and Web3 technologies.

Tina Zintl, Annabelle Houdret

Digitalization has far-reaching yet under-researched impacts on state–society relations. This article addresses this gap and explores digitalization as a driver of change to social contracts. The conceptual framework explains how it changes (a) the state’s duty to grant protection, provision, and participation in exchange for legitimacy; (b) the modes of state–society interaction; and (c) the contracting parties with respect to their location and their relative power position. Based on a literature review and recent developments in digitalization, the article then discusses how this plays out in the MENA region. It shows that digital surveillance by authoritarian regimes often dominates over the states’ duty to protect their citizens. Spaces for political participation increase through social media and online platforms but often fail to translate into ‘offline’ mobilization. Digitalization can improve public service provision, but only for digitally-connected citizens. Thus, digitalization tends to enhance the relative power positions of MENA states even if states themselves partly depend on external actors for access to and control over digital technologies. Overall, digitalization is an important, structural driver of change to social contracts but pre-existing state–society relations and governance framework conditions lead to either more inclusive or rather more authoritarian social contracts.

Khiem Le, Nhan Luong-Ha, Manh Nguyen-Duc, Danh Le-Phuoc · 6 authors

Federated Learning (FL) is a promising paradigm that offers significant advancements in privacy-preserving, decentralized machine learning by enabling collaborative training of models across distributed devices without centralizing data. However, the practical deployment of FL systems faces a significant bottleneck: the communication overhead caused by frequently exchanging large model updates between numerous devices and a central server. This communication inefficiency can hinder training speed, model performance, and the overall feasibility of real-world FL applications. In this survey, we investigate various strategies and advancements made in communication-efficient FL, highlighting their impact and potential to overcome the communication challenges inherent in FL systems. Specifically, we define measures for communication efficiency, analyze sources of communication inefficiency in FL systems, and provide a taxonomy and comprehensive review of state-of-the-art communication-efficient FL methods. Additionally, we discuss promising future research directions for enhancing the communication efficiency of FL systems. By addressing the communication bottleneck, FL can be effectively applied and enable scalable and practical deployment across diverse applications that require privacy-preserving, decentralized machine learning, such as IoT, healthcare, or finance.

Andrea Peña-Calvin, Javier Arroyo, Andrew B. Schwartz, Samer Hassan

Blockchain technology enables a new form of online community: Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), where members typically vote on proposals using tokens. Enthusiasts claim DAOs provide new opportunities for openness, horizontality, and democratization. However, this phenomenon is still under research, especially given the lack of quantitative studies. This paper presents the first census-like quantitative analysis of the whole ecosystem of DAOs, including 30K DAO communities on the main DAO platforms. This enables us to provide insights into the allegedly "democratic'' nature of DAOs, building metrics concerning their lifespan, participation, and power concentration. Most DAOs have a short lifespan and low participation. There is also a positive correlation between community size and voting power concentration. Like other online communities, DAOs seem to follow the iron law: becoming increasingly oligarchic as they grow. Still, a significant amount of DAOs of varying sizes defy this idea by being egalitarian by design.

Noortje Marres

Sociologists have long argued that explanation, as a form of knowledge, has serious limitations when it comes to understanding society. The case against explanation is one of the field's founding ideas, it is literally a foundational idea. It was by rejecting causalist forms of explanation that had been developed in the natural sciences that 19th century scholars and activists that we today call sociologists succeeded in articulating a distinctive realm of reality with relative autonomy from the state, the economy and the family: society (Wagner, 2000). Key to their achievement was the argument that the phenomenon of society is fundamentally different from nature. Scientists at the time expected nature to obey eternally valid laws, but society has a number of features that challenge this assumption. Social actors formulate norms and rules to justify their actions and to make sense of social reality. This means that norms and rules themselves may play an active role in the transformation of social reality. Society, in other words, is marked by reflexivity. Of course, a lot has happened since the 19th century and this very notably includes unrelenting efforts by social scientists to create forms of explanation that are capable of taking reflexivity into account. Yet problems with explanation have continued to make themselves felt in the social sciences and humanities. The problem, in a nutshell, is that explanation sets up the relation between social science and its object, society, in terms of representation, but the relation between knowledge about society and social reality is fundamentally an interactive one: the creation of knowledge about society far more often than not involves intervention in society. The creation of social scientific knowledge can rarely, if ever, by considered a purely representational affair. This obtains for practically all forms of knowledge about society - and as we shall see, about nature as well - but it causes specific problems for the explanation of social phenomena. Let me give an example from contemporary social science, broadly defined. Some years ago computational social scientists published research that showed that the high levels of political polarization that can be observed among communities on Facebook cannot be explained by the role of social media algorithms in the promotion of content. As they put it: “individual choices, more than algorithms, limit exposure to attitude-challenging content” (Bakshy et al., 2015, p. 1131). Such a claim asks us to accept a number of assumptions, most notably, that it is possible to disentangle the influence of individual user choices on news consumption on Facebook from the influence of platform settings such as the structure of news feeds.1 This assumption may or may not ultimately be methodologically convincing. But in grounding its main finding in this distinction, this study distracts attention from a more fundamental phenomenon: that “choice” in online platform settings is socio-technically constituted in a highly distinctive way, involving clicks on links that are dynamically served up by the platform based on social network analysis, among others. This type of “choice” presents a very different form of action as compared to say, choosing what article to read in a paper newspaper. However, and this is the key point, affirming such ontological complexity would no doubt be seen as reducing the “strength” of the explanation offered. As the recently deceased constructivist sociologist Aaron Cicourel (1964) pointed out many decades ago, to draw attention to the participation of the underlying apparatus of social research - in this case, Facebook data categories such as “clicks” and “friends” - in the construction of social reality is to challenge the representational understanding of social science in general and of explanatory social science in particular. Explanation requires the relation between social categories and social reality to be stable and one-way (unidirectional): it requires that social scientific categories first and foremost refer back to social reality. When the apparatus of social research is shown to interfere in the realities it purports to measure, it is clear that this does not quite obtain. A persistent problem with explanation, then, is that its validity seems to depend on the bracketing, externalising or trivialising of dynamics of reflexivity. If the proponents of the idea that “social science is explanation, or it is nothing” would get their way, and social science indeed would offer only explanations, and nothing else, this would surely end up restricting our capacity to interrogate the manifold ways in which social categories interact with social realities. However, most people who are interested and/or trained in sociology are well aware of the phenomenon of reflexivity, of the power of social categories to shape social reality. So why do so many sociologists today favour explanation over other, more open-ended forms of knowledge, like ethnographic description and theory-driven interpretation, methodologies which have been specifically designed to enable interrogation of the interactive relations between social categories and social realities (Krause, 2016)? I would like to argue here that there is another layer to this phenomenon of interactivity, one that has less to do with how norms, categories and methods shape reality, and more with how social science achieves what Norbert Elias (2011) called adequacy to social reality. For me, there is a danger that lurks in the commitment to “explanation” that is related but different from the problem that it legitimates or encourages indifference to reflexivity, the danger namely that it distracts from a key task and purpose of social science: articulation. The slogan “explanation or nothing” makes me think of a remark by the German media scholar Erhard Schüttpelz who once reminded me that “all of our concepts are going downhill all of the time.” At the time, we were speaking about the concept of “media bias,” and the ways in which understandings of such bias developed in the 1970s are no longer adequate, though still highly relevant, to today's digital society with its algorithmic organisation of content, where frames are consolidated through post-discursive, automated, processes of selective circulation. I continue to find Schüttpelz comment helpful more generally speaking, as it draws attention to a brute fact that deeply affects the relation between the social sciences and society, which is that the world, society, is continously changing, and this changing world continuously renders our existing vocabularies, and forms of explanation, deficient. In other words, we should expect our existing social theories to be losing their adequacy to our present social reality. Schüttpelz slogan reminds us that many of the phenomena that it is our job to understand are invisible or badly named, and are difficult to even observe let alone measure. Take the example of the security state, which in its current technological form - which is marked by the deployment of a data-intensive apparatus of monitoring and control - developed in the post-war period, from the 1960s onwards. As the French sociologist Dominique Linhardt (2008) has shown, the very observability of the security state during this period was dependent on targetted interventions in society: it partly depended on the interventions of militants such as the Rote Armee Fraktion in Germany and Provo in the Netherlands whose demonstrations brought the police out onto the streets for all to see. It was these interventions that rendered the phenomeon of the security state publicly visible, putting the repressive apparatus of the state monitoring activists onto the front pages of newspapers. But the observability of this type of information-based security state also depended on the invention of a new kind of sociology, which had to rework its concepts of power, in order to be able to demonstrate the significance of the technological security apparatus to the structuring of wider societal relations between population and state during this period. The point is, in a case like this, it is clear that both a phenomenon in society - the security state - and the categories we use to understand this and associated phenomena - state power - underwent transformation during that relevant period. This is not a context in which “explanation” works very well. To “explain” the security state requires the very phenomenon to be observable and identifiable in the first place, and a lot of work has to be done before we get to that point: the work of articulation. If we go along with Erhard Schüttpelz and recognise that events in the world render our ways of knowing deficient all the time, then it is clear that our work as sociologists must be re-constructive, we will need to be able to revise and rethink our categories, so we remain capable of naming phenomena in the world adequately, so that we can make them count. To give another example from my own field: when in the 1980s feminist technology studies developed the notion of “invisible labour” through fieldwork studies in workplaces like airports and offices (Star, 1991; Suchman, 1996), they transformed the wider concept and understanding of innovation. At the time, innovation was a restrictive notion - and it still is - which allocates a disproportionate amount of agency to the engineers who create technology, while defining the rest of us, workers and consumers, as more or less passive “users.” Feminist studies of invisible labour in technology-mediated work used ethnographic description to demonstrate how often female workers accomplished tasks - performing flight checks, copying documents - that were later acribed to the smooth running of “technology.” It was these descriptions of invisible labour that allowed this phenomenon to be named and defined. Only then could the work begin of incoporating sensibility to unrecognised work into the social study of innovation and its “apparatus of explanation,” and gain the efficacy it has today, for example, in the form of a critical exposé of the invisible labelling that workers in Kenya, India and other countries perform, so that “generative AI” can do well at image recognition (Catanzariti et al., 2021). To emphasise articulation as a key task and purpose of social inquiry is certainly not to imply that explanation is without value. Finding ways to measure the prevalence of invisible labour in society so as to be able to demonstrate its existence, explain its workings, and connect its persistence with wider underlying dynamics in the technological economy, is crucial. The problem, that is, is not with explanation as such, it is with the “or nothing” bit in the slogan above. The adequacy of our explanations to the world is dependent on the prior work of articulation, and it is this dependency that is at risk of being disregarded when it is suggested that explanation is all we need. An important part of the task of social science is to develop vocabularies, formulate categories, cultivate sensibilities, so as to render ever-changing phenomena in society observable, explorable, and communicatable. To name, to formulate, to label, takes us halfway to understanding. It is to draw what Alfred Schutz (1970) calls the “isohypses of relevance,” enabling some entites, some dimensions to stand out, to gain traction, in our engagement with the world, while submerging others. This is the work of articulation, as opposed to explanation. Without it, our explanatory apparatus will not just keep going down hill. Its adequacy will eventually be lost. There is an odd irony in the suggestion that sociologists should today consider putting all their eggs in the basket of “explanation.” We are living at a time in which the natural sciences are finally beginning to come to terms with the interactivity of science, as they grapple with the Anthropocene. Today, more and more colleagues in the natural and technical sciences are gripped by the realization that science has intervened in and indeed harmed and damaged the world in ways to which scientific epistemology previously rendered scientists blind. Representationalism places on science the methodological requirement to regard as external to the scientific mission - which is to represent reality - how its apparatus of representation impacts the world. Representationalism is part of what enabled scientists to cultivate indifference to how their work transformed the world physically, socially, materially, environmentally: think of the stress experienced by lab animals and lab technicians (Friese & Latimer, 2019); the PFAS molecules which are today found in ground and sea water, and known to cause cancer, and which for decades were represented in terms their qualities of “water-proofing” and “stick-resistance” (for carpets). There is a more complex story to be told here about the relation between science and innovation, but the problem is similar to the problem of methodologically ordained dis-interest in socio-technical complexity that I mentioned in the introduction. Damaging effects produced by the apparatus of scientific research on the world used to be referred to as “unintended consequences,” but they are today understood by an increasing number of natural scientists as a siginificant factor in the degradation of nature, animal and human life. Isn't it odd that at the very time that scientists are beginning to recognise interactivities between science and the natural and social world, we are debating whether the primary role of the social sciences is to represent the world? Why? Why would a sociologist today accept that “explanation” is the only serious game in science, at a time when the sciences themselves are finally waking up to the manifold problems with “explanation” as a scientific framework? Granted, one of the benefits of “explanation” is that it has a strong “theory of change” associated with it. Explanation offers us a tight, sequential relation between knowledge and action, whereby the representation of an underlying reality creates the basis for transformative intervention in society, for social change. By comparison, a theory of knowledge that puts articulation centre stage offers a far more contingent, multi-factored and messy view of how change happens in the world, and it requires an openness of inquiry to engage and continually attune understanding to a changing social world. My sense is that it is the strength and simplicity of the associated theory of change that the methodological paradigm of “explanation” promises, that explains much of its attractiveness to sociologists today. Perhaps it can be seen, too, as a response to the utterly restrictive expectations that are placed today on the social sciences. Explanation is able to offer knowledge of long-term processes and enduring underlying causes, which is badly needed in the face of muliplying social, environmental and political crises. It offers a robust alternative to the instrumental conception of social research, which is increasingly imposed on us by state and industry, and which requires that social science delivers on short-term policy needs and value for money, and which can seem to value knowledge of society only to the extent that it is able to produce demonstrable changes in behaviour and bottom-lines (Kelly & McGoey, 2018). However, precisely at this moment, when the social sciences face challenges from multiple fronts - from short-termist expectations of impact, to policy-makers endearement with behavioural science as provider of readily applicable solutions, and the eagerness of some computational scientists to serve as the go-to provider of “social explanations” - it is important that we don't feel pressured to retreat into the narrow methodological frame of “explaination” and to risk inadvertingly reasserting a false hierarchy between explaination and articulation. There is a vital difference between an instrumental social science whose value and legitimacy primarily derive from its ability to service short-term policy needs, and a sociology capable of affirming interactivity between social science and the social world. This difference needs to be urgently clarified, if we are to avoid sleepwalking into a future of shrinking sociological repertoires, and importantly, if we are to get better at engaging, informing and indeed leading the debate that is finally getting underway across the sciences, about what it means to affirm interactivity between knowledge and its objects, not only ethically and politically, but methodologically speaking. To sum up, my real disagreement today is with the “or nothing” element in the idea that social science is explanation or it is nothing. I don't have a problem at all with explanation as a form of social knowledge taking its rightful place among other forms of knowledge in the social sciences. I have a problem with the suggestion that explanation is superior to these other forms, and that other ways of knowing society need to make way for it. My problem is with the hubris of a social science that assumes that the work of articulation, of making phenomena perceptible, can be economised on. It cannot. Explanation depends on articulation: we can only posit and define phenomena and their underlying causes once the struggle to name, to make count - the struggle for the existence of a category - has been fought. The apparatus of explanation that we all rely on - the categories, standards, measures and data formats that together constitute the apparatus of social science - is always at risk of perpetuating outdated, inadequate categories. To the extent that "explanation" assumes that the work of articulation - what matters? how to name this? - can be taken for granted, it risks to become complicit in eroding conditions for articulation. The “or nothing” in the above motion wrongly implies that the renewal of our vocabularies, concepts and methods is of secondary importance. I would therefore like to turn the proposition around. “Social science is reflexive or it is nothing.” Sociology has impressive analytic and methodological resources at its disposal for creating knowledge under conditions of interactivity, and it is this capacity that should be celebrated and requires our endorsement, not just for the sake of advancing the social sciences but all sciences. Social studies of science and technology have shown how interactivity does not just operate on the plane of categorization, but also through indicators, infrastructures and indeed the world, as measures from GPD to the social media “clicks” and the have to the of realities in their affirming such interactivity effects does not making explanation the there are forms of explanation that the changing relations between social reality and the of social reality as their object, as in the work of Norbert Elias In sociological studies of how Elias a of explanation in which change in the explained partly by the dynamics of the I is that our categories, the apparatus that we rely on to render social phenomena and can be understood as a part of these As sociologists have pointed out since at the what and are relevant to the - and - of a social phenomenon is partly at in the of its articulation. is that this to our our categories and the measures that social science on. too, partly depend on and cannot be taken for to and for helpful and to the other in the “Social science is explanation, or it is nothing” for their This debate place online on

Johannes Bennke, Lukas Weidener

No abstract is available for this record.

Igor Calzada

E-diasporas are communities of diaspora members utilizing digital technologies and data platforms to establish connections among themselves and with their homelands.In response to the pandemic, governments worldwide have intensified efforts to reinforce e-diasporas.However, these endeavours often rely on social media extractivist Big Tech platforms, which are referred to as 'hyperconnected diasporas' in this article.This trend potentially poses a threat to institutional trust and data privacy.This article introduces HanHemen (ThereHere in Basque language, Euskera), an ongoing action research-driven e-diaspora platform facilitated by the Basque Government.HanHemen aims to ensure data privacy through experimentation with blockchain technologies and co-production with endusers via DAOs.This article reveals findings from an online survey completed by 419 Basque diasporic citizens (N = 1,385), who demonstrated support for digital nomadism (62%) and expressed concerns about data privacy (84%).These findings highlight the need to overcome the mainstream 'hyperconnected diaspora' trend through HanHemen.

Stephanie Bowles, Priya Sharma

Our study builds on theories emphasizing connectivity for learning on social media to study learning networks on Twitter (e.g., Haythornthwaite, 2019;Siemens, 2005).Considering the nature of power law distribution on social media (Yoshida, 2021), we focus on a group of influencers from the Non-Fungible Token (NFT) community to uncover online learning networks and their emergent practices.By employing an exploratory Social Network Analysis (Nooraie et al., 2020) and qualitative analysis, we examine the way in which influencers form learning relations through conversational interactions and content, and the modalities and discursive strategies used in their tweets.We find that influencers built a strong learning network through sustained interactions and content relations among themselves and with a wide community outreach.This analysis contributes to the way that learning networks are analyzed and found on Twitter.