Blockchain Papers

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.

Alexia Maddox

Abstract This chapter critically examines the impact of Web3 technologies on financial, digital, and future-focused inclusion through three case studies: El Salvador’s adoption of Bitcoin, Soulbound tokens for digital identity, and the Helium network for decentralised wireless infrastructure and environmental monitoring. By applying an insider–outsider lens, the chapter reveals the complex dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in Web3 initiatives, highlighting the gap between decentralisation promises and real-world implementation. The analysis demonstrates how top-down technological solutions can create new forms of exclusion, particularly when they fail to consider local needs and practices. The chapter also explores the potential of Web3 to transcend human-centric paradigms and include non-human actors in digital ecosystems. Policy recommendations provided address the identified challenges, emphasising the need for context-sensitive implementation and careful regulation. The chapter concludes by advocating for a nuanced understanding of Web3 technologies that recognises both their transformative potential and limitations. It sets the stage for discussing the future of Web3 in creating a more inclusive digital landscape that not only expands human access but also fosters sustainable coexistence with our planet’s ecosystems, challenging us to reimagine digital infrastructure beyond purely human interests.

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.

Raras Fitriyani Astuti, Andry Alamsyah

Over the past decade, the financial sector has developed in tandem with the globalization trends through Financial Technology (Fintech), Decentralized Finance (DeFi), and Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC), indicating the potential to enhance financial inclusion and system efficiency. This research analyzes public discourses on DeFi and CBDC adoption using BERT and RoBERTa methods emphasizing multilabel classification for text understanding and word relationships. The research findings indicate that RoBERTa’s multilabel classification has proven to be more effective than BERT’s multilabel classification in analyzing public discourse on CBDC and DeFi because RoBERTa, with epoch four, learning rate 2e-5, and batch size 32, exhibits higher levels of accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 compared to BERT. Specifically, RoBERTa demonstrates an accuracy of 0.9636, with MacroP 0.9798, MicroP 0.9811, MacroR 0.9770, MicroR 0.9775, MacroF1 0.9793, and MicroF1 0.9793. This study recognizes the challenges and variations in model performance that need to be focused on in future research. Additionally, this research has the potential to provide a better understanding of public discourse on financial innovation topics, considering various perspectives.

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.

Tanmay Sharma, Geet Kiran Kaur, Hritik Kumar Mahto, Gaurav Kumar · 6 authors

The DeFi (decentralized finance) platforms that are coming up present a ground breaking chance in the crypto world. Here the analysis is based on ApexWolf, an Ethereum-only crypto exchange, and its collaboration with DeFi protocols. The system's evaluation uses a methodology that combines user feedback and transaction simulation to assess the security measures, features, and usability. Results are the proof of fast transaction execution, competitive costs, and the positive feedback from the users. The ApexWolf project despite the intrinsic blockchain limitations demonstrates great potential in supporting users to interact in a decentralized finance system. The study provides knowledge about the transformation process of cryptocurrency exchanges and DeFi platforms presenting both opportunities and difficulties for future development and widespread use.

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.

Wenrui Zuo, Aravindh Raman, Raúl J. Mondragón, Gareth Tyson

Web3 social media strives to eliminate the need for centralized management by building upon on technologies such public ledgers and smart contracts. This has generated significant hype, but creates many notable challenges, many of which remain unaddressed. One such challenge is content moderation. Specifically, the immutable nature of blockchain means that it becomes impossible to retrospectively delete posts. This means that illegal content posts cannot be moderated or removed. In an attempt to overcome this, Web3 platforms, such as memo.cash, allow users to filter out posts from their personal timelines. Taking memo.cash as a use case, the goal of this work is to study the efficacy of the approach, and identify associated challenges. A particularly unique feature of memo.cash is that users must pay money (satoshi) for each social action (e.g., posting and blocking other users). We conjecture that this may impact the nature of moderation, particularly among poorer users. To explore this, we gather data from memo.cash covering 24K users, 317K posts, and 2.57M user actions. We investigate how the need to pay may impact the moderation system and propose potential solutions to address the challenges that arise.

Nathalie Casemajor, Will Straw

Over the last fifteen years, the development of blockchain technologies has attracted a large volume of professional expertise, capital investment and media attention. This burgeoning sector of technology practices has coalesced around a few major initiatives (Bitcoin, Ethereum), but it is still moving at a fast pace and its configuration is evolving. If this sector is marked by a variety of technological protocols, financial arrangements and organizational forms, it is also, we would argue, a site of social effervescence. Parties, meet-ups, and the sorts of informal socializing which gather around events and networks of all kinds function to endow the blockchain sector with the characteristics of what, in cultural analysis, are often called “scenes”. The aim of this special issue is to examine the interest of the notion of scene for the analysis of blockchain practices. We argue that the notion of scene may be mobilized as a useful analytical framework not only for the study of blockchain practices, but for that of technology practices more generally. In this introductory article, we ask the following questions: how can the notion of scene contribute to the understanding of blockchain practices? And what sort of research agenda does the notion point to? In the following sections we first identify some “scenic” components in blockchain phenomena. Then we review how media discourses and academic scholarship have framed these phenomena to show that the scene perspective is undertheorized in the context of technology-related social groupings. Finally, we propose a framework to analyse the main dimensions of blockchain scenes, before presenting the contributions to the special issue. With this special issue, we aim to establish a research agenda around technology scenes at the junction of STS and cultural analysis.

Justin R. Ellis

This chapter synthesizes practitioner and academic literature on LGBTQ organizing in the pracademic tradition. It analyzes the ways that advocates, activists and allies ‘queer it up’ and harness digiqueer resistance through participatory and policy advocacy against challenges to diverse LGBTQ expression. This includes new rituals of LGBTQ organizing through hashtag activism, crowdfunding advocacy, philanthropy through non-fungible tokens, and the continued commodification of LGBTQ identity through ecommerce for advocacy and allyship. The chapter considers where LGBTQ networked expression sits within the digital organizing landscape. On one level, political insecurity through the ‘hate feedback loop’ keeps LGBTQ organizers in the policy ‘trenches’ as they maintain the fight for basic relationship, expression and conduct rights that the general public might take for granted. On another level, increased recognition of LGBTQ expression through popular culture, relationship rights such as same-sex marriage, and social networks sees a related expansion of the social imagination of homosexuality as identity rather than conduct across health and welfare, religion, securitization, markets, nationalism, a sense of belonging, and other identifiers.

Arjun Appadurai, Vyjayanthi V. Rao

Every journal strives for a signature, a combination of topic, tone, and texture. This is a difficult asset to nurture, in the growing cacophony of journals, blogs, social media influencers, and micro-audiences. For a journal like Public Culture, there is an additional challenge, which is to be open to the ever-changing present without losing an identifiable take on it, which necessarily implies a less volatile orientation. In the triangle of critical energy constituted by the diaspora of modernity, the mediated constitution of all public spheres, and the circulation of cultural forms, Public Culture was a pioneer in identifying the volatile edges of transnational cultural politics. Just as Public Culture has witnessed some of the key transitions within academia, which can be traced to globalization and to transnational cultural politics from an early moment, we are also able to trace the ways in which Public Culture's signature has circulated across numerous other scholarly journal and fora, expanding the reach of these forms of thinking.Circulation is both our most enduring theme and the signature of our social life as a journal. It is worth recalling why circulation has been a vital concern for us since we began in 1988, more than three decades ago. In the very early years of cultural globalization, when markets appeared to be dissolving borders, our authors and readers sensed that the idea of commodities as mobile and culture as stable was not useful. Instead, the tropes of flow, diaspora, mobility, and multiplicity began to appear in descriptions and theorizations. Cultural forms began to be read as agentive and not as primarily representational. The transnational morphed into the global. The movement of bodies was seen as part of the same energy that moved images. The formative ideas of liberal political theory (civility, publicity, representation, participation) began to be seen as parts of a global ecumene of words and ideas, as in the case of the idea of the “people,” which was transformed by its journey to places like China, Haiti, and India, and could be reimagined in its original homes in Europe and the United States as a consequence of its circulation.In the second and third decades of the journal, marked by the destruction of the Twin Towers in September 2001, the new millennium appeared to encourage many dark forms of circulation: the violence of asymmetrical warfare, the black holes of torture and rendition, the rise of arms and finance mafias, new forms of human trafficking and slavery, the rise of multiple ethnonationalisms. Public Culture went with the flows of these phenomena, staying as close as possible to the shifting dramas of the ordinary that registered the stubbornness of locality amidst the ceaseless circulation of forms. We tried hard to remind our critics that we understood that movement was not freedom, that aspiration was no substitute for justice, and that even as wealth increased, so did inequality.By the time our present editorial team took responsibility for the journal, a little over three years ago, our world looked permanently changed—again. The planetary had eclipsed the global, repatriation seemed more urgent than revolution, data had become the central raw material of global capital, the growing pronomination of gender roles had generated an unrestricted set of possibilities, and COVID-19 had made many prior axioms of sociality unstable.So, we offer you this issue of our journal in the spirit of critical uncertainty, of situations not yet crystallized into contexts, of forms of circulation not yet fully available to theory, of predicates of a subject still in the making. In this issue we present three forum essays that embody an exploratory spirit, suggesting but not yet drawing definitive conclusions. The essays, one of which is collectively authored, draw explicitly on transnational circulations—of cryptocurrencies, community land trusts and activism, and mediatized forms of irony.The difficult relationship between law, circulation, and value-production in global capitalism is the topic of Ritu Birla's alarming essay on cryptocurrency, both within and beyond the domain of visual art. Beginning with a discussion of what are called NFTs (non-fungible tokens), which are a new hybrid of artwork and value storage, Birla takes us into a troubling reading of the dangers of cryptocurrency. She shows that the biggest risk of this new form of money is to blur the distinction between the social contract—as a form of liberal political agreement—and the aleatory contract, which is oriented to risk, uncertainty, and profit. In other words, we are facing the possibility that financial and political contracts become two sides of the same coin.In “Trust Land,” our second forum essay, Keller Easterling draws together the threads of a remarkable set of stories from the past into a potential narrative connecting two moments of activism around land and civil rights across time and geography. Easterling presents us with a loose sheaf of stories, set around the town of Albany in Georgia, spanning several decades since the 1960s. Deftly drawing suggestive connections across these stories, she writes, “In the Albany stories, a forgotten chapter of the civil rights movement in the US South meets an underexamined watershed moment in the global South.” Focusing on multiple and diverse strands of activism, she suggests that such diversity may be the answer to overwhelming dominant capitalism with “multiple modes of exchange and incalculable productivity.” These exchanges, embedded in networks of care and mutualism, have once again come to the fore during the COVID-19 pandemic. Her work suggests that there is also a kinship across time between the abolitionist and decolonizing modes of activism and relational infrastructures prevalent in the early to mid-twentieth centuries and what is needed today to combat the multiple crises produced by “globalizing infrastructure projects that have reinforced Western dominance and exacerbated inequality” in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.The third Forum essay titled “Animating Irony” by Farhan Samanani and his coauthors, draws on a very diverse set of contexts (primarily Greece and Ghana) with sharp asides on Donald Trump's America, to explore the political contradictions of irony in political discourse, both on- and offline. The authors show a keen eye for what was observed long ago by Søren Kierkegaard, namely, that both irony and hypocrisy exploit the distance between the external utterance and the inner motivation. To this understanding, they add the original insight that irony opens a space for uncertainty, speculation, and ambiguity for a variety of political actors, thus offering a sensibility that is especially suited to the growing uncertainty of our times, revealed in economic crises, new experiments in voice and group formation, and blurred boundaries between hope and pessimism in politics.The Essays section opens with Valerie Werder's essay on the legal struggles around a set of daguerreotypes of American slaves in the possession of Harvard University. Werder's essay speaks to the embattled terrain of lawfare and visual exploitation, in this case involving issues of race, science, property, and visuality. In this scandalous case, Harvard shows its remarkable willingness to commoditize its own shameful collections of enslaved humans, first collected as evidence for the theories of white supremacy endorsed by one of its founding zoologists, Louis Agassiz. Today Harvard asserts its rights to use these images in various visual campaigns to promote its claims to being a bastion of inclusion and diversity.Continuing the focus on visuality and visibility, Danny Hoffman's essay, “Rally Day: The Urban Landscape of Postcolonial Political Violence in Sierra Leone,” explores “the configuration of violence, politics, and the city” in contemporary Sierra Leone, focusing on a moment of extra-judicial violence during a political rally. Reading this moment of violence as a moment of political violence, Hoffman overturns a dominant understanding of violence as signaling the absence of the state and the breakdown of governance. Coupling his own observation and witnessing in the field with readings from cinema and fiction, Hoffman offers an alternative interpretation of a moment of violence in which a young man is caught and punished as a thief during the rally. Contrasting the suggestions in works of Cameroonian filmmaker Jean-Marie Teno and the Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole that popular justice is meted out due to the frustration that results from the absence of the state, Hoffman offers a different and perhaps more surprising reading of popular violence, which draws both on the improvisatory setting provided by cities to enact self-government as well as on the suggestion that the state operates through “clandestine, rhizomatic, and extralegal circuits,” making it possible to participate in and to understand violence as a preemptive, political act to root out the criminal presence of the state in everyday life. The urban setting “affords a certain security of unknowability to those taking justice into their own hands” while “the anonymity of the thief, for example, makes him an especially effective, unmoored signifier for the machinations of the state.”Finally, Elana Resnick offers us an essay on the scabrous humor of Roma women street sweepers in Sofia (Bulgaria) where they simultaneously constitute, perform, and clean the marginal spaces of urban life. Their humor plays with the stereotypes of dirt, immorality, and sexuality that define Roma bodies, and they produce a powerful politics of recognition among themselves under the shadow of the very civil society that despises them. Indeed, this is a “refusal of refusal,” in this instance by women forced to deal with refuse, and it is a reminder that no social margin is an island, and that even the most marginalized identities can snatch dignity from the jaws of humiliation.Each of these essays can also be read in the light of our stubborn interest in the logics of the circulation of forms and the forms of circulation. Both logics are ever changing, but, as with the many tropes of the blade and handle of a knife that can change many times without changing the identity of the knife, we urge our readers to wonder what has truly changed in the nature of circulation.

C. Edwards

The key to the roaring success of the Web 2.0 platforms has been the way they have inserted themselves between traditional broadcasters and networks of friends through activities of the influencers with high follower counts. Though they are constantly at risk of being booted off the platforms, they were able to build up large audiences without bearing the cost of server and network bandwidth, choosing to take a small royalty instead once they have reached a threshold. If influencers can build networks of equivalent size on the decentralised systems, that may bring Web 2.0 to an early finish. However, those platforms can do a lot to prevent a kind of disruption they are unlikely to favour. If that is the case, Web3 may remain a niche interest for the average user if they see entertainment as a greater priority than social network control. As it was in the days of Web 1.0, it's not hard to wind up shuffled off to an unseen corner of the internet; you just have to be someone who does not get promoted by a search engine or social-network provider. Decentralisation may do little to change the power-law dynamics of social networks.

Wenrui Zuo, Aravindh Raman, Raúl J. Mondragón, Gareth Tyson

There has been growing interest in the so-called “Web3” movement. This loosely refers to a mix of decentralized technologies, often underpinned by blockchain technologies. Among these, Web3 social media platforms have begun to emerge. These store all social interaction data (e.g., posts) on a public ledger, removing the need for centralized data ownership and management. But this comes at a cost, which some argue is prohibitively expensive. As an exemplar within this growing ecosytem, we explore memo.cash, a microblogging service built on the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) blockchain. We gather data for 24K users, 317K posts, 2.57M user actions, which have facilitated $6.75M worth of transactions. A particularly unique feature is that users must pay BCH tokens for each interaction (e.g., posting, following). We study how this may impact the social makeup of the platform. We therefore study memo.cash as both a social network and a transaction platform.

Thiago Dias Monteiro

Aim: Current scenario shows an increase in the adoption of off-chain voting applications in DAOs to avoid complexity and costs for user engagement in their governance. This exploratory research analysis shows the role of digital presence in DAOs with off-chain voting systems, respective voting properties, and general trends. Methods: Empirical hybrid approach with statistical analysis and QCA configuration analysis of datasets retrieved from most used off-chain voting system. Input data from DAOs, proposals, and votes. DAOs with the highest followers and proposals simultaneously as selection criteria for the analysis. Results: 179 DAOs (1,39%) account for 26,538 (32%) proposals and 1,268,474 followers (54%) of the entire Snapshot database in January/2023. The most preferred social media as communication channels are Twitter and GitHub. Decrease of Ethereum as main-chain, with Polygon and Binance Smart Chain already representing 22%. Basic type voting may lead to higher user engagement in the voting process. Conclusion: This research findings suggest a better understanding of the voting process, technology features, and governance knowledge towards social community engagement and decision-making in DAOs.

Quinn DuPont

Abstract This paper critically evaluates the political economy of Web3 and offers a neo-institutional model to explain qualitative observations of contemporary digital social movements. By starting to develop a sociological model of Web3 rooted in micro-organizational practices, including trust mediation and social coproduction, this paper re-evaluates assumptions of scarcity, economic value, and social belonging. It concludes by introducing a novel research program to study digital polycentric governance that focuses on community self-governance of digital common pool resources (DCPRs) and looks forward to empirical research using on-chain datasets from decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs).

Yong Gyu Lee, Jong-Tak Lee

Elections are an essential process for securing public opinion and legal justification in a democratic society. In the case of the Republic of Korea, a rigid electoral culture was established during the military dictatorship, which caused many electoral systems to become unilateral. However, as times have changed, various means of communication between candidates and voters have been newly introduced, and various ways to lower election costs and actively promote election activities have been attempted. Among them, the introduction of the use of social media reflects the transition from group focus to individual focus and from one-sided publicity to active election campaigns through interaction between candidates and voters. In this study, we present examples of election campaigns using the recently developed NFT(non-fungible token) as part of promoting the election atmosphere and encouraging the supporters of each party's presidential candidates to participate in the vote. The HOK (House of Kard) was a tournament project that used NFTs for the advance voting of candidates in the 20th Korean presidential election. In each round, the candidate-'s’ NFTs were presented with a new concept. The HOK project presented NFTs in graphic form as entertainment elements called league matches based on the presidential election. Consumers with NFTs tried a virtuous cycle structure where they could choose candidates they support or cards with a high probability of winning for various reasons, and small sales were attempted to increase the NFT value for owners who support and sponsor them. The HOK project had the goal to promote a new way of lighthearted participation in the presidential election away from the rigid election culture of the past, and became one example of the various NFT applications that may be attempted in the future.

Sheikh Muhamad Hizam, Waqas Ahmed, Habiba Akter, Ilham Sentosa · 5 authors

Web 3.0 is considered as future of Internet where decentralization, user personalization and privacy protection would be the main aspects of Internet. Aim of this research work is to elucidate the adoption behavior of Web 3.0through a multi-analytical approach based on Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) and Twitter sentiment analysis. A theoretical framework centered on Performance Expectancy (PE), Electronic Word-of-Mouth (eWOM) and Digital Dexterity (DD), was hypothesized towards Behavioral Intention (INT) of the Web 3.0 adoption. Surveyed data were collected through online questionnaires and 167 responses were analyzed through PLS-SEM. While 3,989 tweets of Web3 were analyzed by VADER sentiment analysis tool in RapidMiner. PLS-SEM results showed that DD and eWOM had significant impact while PE had no effect on INT. Moreover, these results were also validated by PLS-Predict method. While sentiment analysis explored that 56% tweets on Web 3.0 were positive in sense and 7% depicted negative sentiment while remaining were neutral. Such inferences are novel in nature and an innovative addition to web informatics and could support the stakeholders towards web technology integration