Contemporary governance theory confronts a tripartite crisis that existing frameworks address only in isolation. First, algorithmic systems are systematically eroding the cognitive, affective, and epistemic conditions for individual personhood - what this paper terms the Personhood Atrophy Model. Second, recommendation-engine-driven fragmentation has dissolved the shared cultural and epistemic spaces upon which collective purpose and democratic deliberation depend. Third, the structural asymmetry between the pace of technological change and the operational tempo of democratic institutions has produced a compounding legitimacy crisis for the sovereign nation-state, increasingly outflanked by corporate platforms exercising sovereign-equivalent power without democratic accountability. Political theory and science and technology studies have addressed each of these dimensions in isolation. No integrated analytical framework currently exists that connects the micro-level erosion of selfhood, the meso-level collapse of shared meaning, and the macro-level transformation of sovereignty into a unified theory of algorithmic governance. This paper introduces the Republic of Code framework, drawing on the monograph by Shaik (2026), and proposes three original theoretical constructs: (1) the Wet Code/Dry Code distinction as a governance epistemology tool, formalizing the fundamental incompatibility between human-interpretable and machine-enforced law; (2) the Personhood Atrophy Model mapping algorithmic erosion of agency across cognitive, affective, and epistemic vectors; and (3) the Five Futures Matrix, a two-axis typology of possible political arrangements under algorithmic conditions. The paper concludes by proposing a suite of constitutional innovations - including Proof of Humanity (whose mechanism design infrastructure is formally developed in Shaik, 2026b), Zero-Knowledge Justice, and High-Fidelity Democracy - necessary for the reconstruction of democratic legitimacy in what it terms the Republic of Code. The analysis carries implications for legal scholarship, platform governance policy (including industrial cyber-physical systems, examined in Shaik, 2026e), and the updating of social contract theory for an era in which digital exit costs approach zero.
The Information Systems research discipline claims to build a cumulative Knowledge Base to inform practice, yet it is organised around a closed loop of self-referential simulation. We diagnose this state as hypernormalisation-a late-Soviet condition in which official rituals are meticulously performed despite a widespread recognition that they no longer map reliably onto lived reality. We identify four escalating mechanisms that sustain this institutional order: the Simulation of Accumulation, in which the journal article functions as a proof-of-work token; the Simulation of Relevance, in which "Implications for Practice" operate as rituals of displacement; the Simulation of Problem Solving, in which Design Science Research produces perpetual prototypes; and the Simulation of the Scholar, in which researchers inhabit a split subjectivity (Living Vnye). We argue that Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) constitutes the discipline's Glasnost moment. By automating the generation of methodologically fluent, theoretically compliant text at near-zero marginal cost, GenAI precipitates the collapse of the proof-of-work signalling economy not by attacking its institutions, but by exposing their performative nature. It renders the underlying logic visible, stripping the journal article of its value as a proxy for cognitive labour. Instead of offering renewal, this transparency forces a structural reweighting of epistemic authority: away from the mechanical production of form (Episteme), now inexpensive and abundant, toward judgment grounded in direct contact with reality (Phronesis) and exposure to consequence-a signal that cannot be sustained without the friction of the world.
In 2021, the Bank for International Settlements identified that blockchain-based finance was laboring under a âdecentralisation illusion,â because of âthe inescapable need for centralised governance and the tendency of blockchain consensus mechanisms to concentrate power.â In other words, notwithstanding that blockchain is a decentralized technology, it cannot live up to its promotersâ promises that it will disperse economic control. This Chapter surveys accumulated evidence that supports and underlines the importance of that conclusion. This Chapter also argues that individualsâ continuing susceptibility to narratives about the decentralizing potential of blockchain technology reflects, at least to some degree, their normative priors about the degree to which concentration of economic power is acceptable. In other words, blockchain-based finance can serve as a Rorschach test for attitudes towards the normative goal of âcompetition.â
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are typically explained as governance experiments that failed due to poor design-wrong mechanisms, insufficient incentives, inadequate participation tools. This article argues that something more fundamental is at work: DAO governance failures follow predictably from a systematic mismatch between the participant model encoded in governance arrangements and the actual cognitive and social architecture of human actors. Drawing on secondary empirical evidence from five major protocols (The DAO, MakerDAO, Compound, Uniswap, Beanstalk) and existing governance datasets, the article documents five recurrent dimensions of failure: voter apathy, governance as performance, the code is law paradox, cognitive plutocracy, and voter fatigue. Each dimension follows from a specific mismatch between the assumptions built into governance design and how people actually behave under conditions of complexity and limited attention. Across all five dimensions, formal decentralization produces functional recentralization-power concentrating among those with the cognitive and financial resources for sustained participation. The article further argues that DAO governance does not simply suffer from participant limitations: through autopoietic reproduction, it actively produces the type of subject it requires. Attempts to eliminate politics through protocol design reproduce politics in new infrastructural forms. The findings matter beyond blockchain. DAOs function here as an unusual kind of natural experiment: a governance system that stated its assumptions explicitly, left a detailed public record, and failed in ways that are theoretically traceable. The patterns documented here speak to broader questions about institutional design, the limits of technocratic coordination, and what happens when governance systems are built for a participant who does not quite exist.
The dissertation studies how privacy and trust are shaped by digital technologies: how individuals value privacy over personal data, how AI alters trust and disclosure, and how decentralised blockchains can sustainably replace trusted intermediaries. Chapter 1 argues that the 'privacy paradox' --- that individuals claim to value privacy, yet readily disclose personal data --- arises because privacy is treated as monolithic, when it is multidimensional. I develop a framework that distinguishes voluntary disclosure from involuntary data diffusion, reconciling the paradox by showing that disclosures reflect contextual trade-offs. Using a discrete choice experiment, I provide estimates of privacy valuations across both institutional and social contexts. I find that privacy has substantial value when exposure results in harmful consequences, such as socially revealing data reaching close contacts. I also document an AI privacy puzzle: individuals are less concerned about privacy from AI assistants than from the firms that develop them. Chapter 2 examines this AI privacy puzzle. Using a survey experiment, I replicate the finding from Chapter 1 specifically for firms in the AI industry, highlighting the privacy gap that arises despite the clear product--firm relationship. An information treatment that explicitly links AI assistants to their firms increases concern about both, but does not significantly reduce this gap. Instead, the gap also reflects the anthropomorphic features of AI assistants, aversion to the commercial nature of firms, and the trust and perceived control consumers attach to each. However, when respondents evaluate real-world AI assistant--firm pairs, brand familiarity is the strongest predictor of where privacy concern is attributed. Chapter 3 considers decentralised trust in blockchain systems, in which consensus mechanisms replace trusted intermediaries. I propose a 'proof of quiet quitting' consensus mechanism that reduces the excessive energy consumption of proof of work while retaining the decentralisation that proof of stake can compromise. By introducing a participation lottery with unrestricted entry and an endogenous cutoff, the mechanism separates maximum effort capacity from the probability of winning, inducing participants to exert no more than the minimum effort required in equilibrium.
When Ethereum (ETH) shifted from a Proof of Work (PoW) protocol to a Proof of Stake (PoS) protocol, not all users were enthused. We use Ethereumâs shift from PoW to PoS as a case study for the broader question of whether developers of a blockchain owe its members certain fiduciary or fiduciary-like duties. We argue that if done properly, in accordance to the rules governing the blockchain, then developers do not necessarily owe fiduciary responsibility to other members of the chain, but they nonetheless may owe fiduciary-like responsibilities to users inadvertently and negatively impacted. We argue these users may be entitled to an oppression claim akin to what minority shareholders may be entitled to in the corporate law context.
Existing scholarship often employs metaphors that depict platforms as fixed, bounded spaces. This paper introduces the concept of âliquid platformsâ, inspired by the metaphor of liquidity, to critically examine the fluid, layered and contested nature of contemporary digital economies. Drawing on ethnographic research and interviews with non-fungible token collectors and industry leaders based in Hong Kong, I demonstrate how these actors enact a form of âmakeshift decentralisationâ through the manipulation of fluid platform boundaries, labour-intensive âgrindingâ practices and visualisation tools, all aimed at imbuing non-fungible tokens with liquidity. Despite these efforts to manufacture price stability, platforms remain susceptible to structural liquidity corrections. The analysis highlights the increasingly important role that platforms â both as infrastructural and sociotechnical systems â play in generating liquidity. The âliquid platformâ metaphor offers a valuable framework for understanding the ever more complex, unstable dynamics that shape modern digital economies.
This paper applies public choice theory to the governance of proof-of-work (PoW) blockchain systems, treating consensus mechanism design as constitutional political economy. The argument proceeds in two stages. The first establishes a feasibility constraint: under four conditions characterising permissionless systems-anonymity, permissionlessness, Sybil resistance, and oracle independence-identity-based governance is structurally infeasible, and any viable mechanism must weight participation by a costly, rivalrous signal (Propositions 1 and 2). The second establishes the normative content of that constraint. Through five constitutional axioms derived from Buchanan and Tullock (1962) and Brennan and Buchanan (1985), we prove that dynamic legitimacy-governance authority proportional to current productive commitment-is the uniquely required standard (Proposition 3). In a scaled PoW system, governance authority is structurally inseparable from productive participation: a miner cannot govern the network without running it. Proof of stake violates the temporal non-persistence axiom at the protocol level, creating the rent-seeking structure Krueger (1974) identifies, which regulatory capture dynamics documented by Stigler (1971), Peltzman (2022), and Fitzgerald (2024) then entrench endogenously. The paper derives five testable predictions and situates PoW governance within the constitutional economics and rent-seeking traditions of public choice theory.
This Article examines how platforms such as OnlyFans have transformed pornographic content creation and complicated the legal landscape for online sex workers. The COVID-19 pandemic, remote work, unemployment, celebrity influence, and shifting cultural attitudes toward sex work contributed to a dramatic increase in the use of subscription-based adult content platforms. At the same time, emerging technologies, including cryptocurrency, Web3, NFTs, blockchain, and artificial intelligence, have reshaped how pornographic content is created, monetized, distributed, and exploited. This Article argues that the growth of online sex work raises urgent intellectual property, privacy, and safety concerns that should not be dismissed because of the stigma surrounding sex work. Content creators face copyright infringement, unauthorized distribution, fake profiles, deepfakes, harassment, cyberstalking, privacy breaches, and exploitation, while existing platform protections and legal remedies remain incomplete. The Article further considers how AI and blockchain-based technologies may both empower creators and create new vulnerabilities. This Article calls for a more serious legal response to online sex work, one that recognizes pornographic content as protectable creative labor. Ensuring safe online sex work requires culturally competent legal representation, stronger education about intellectual property rights, thoughtful information policy for AI, and legal reforms that protect creators without undermining free expression or the safety of trafficking victims.
This article examines whether blockchain-based decentralization poses challenges to the legal order amenable to incremental regulatory adaptation, or with structural inadequacies in its very foundations. Legal orders presuppose the identification of subjects â natural persons, legal entities, public authorities â to whom rights and obligations are attributed. Attribution unfolds across three constitutive dimensions: territory, language, and embodied legal subjectivity. Blockchain technology and autonomous decentralized systems â Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, Decentralized Finance protocols â destabilize each, operating without identifiable centres of accountable authority. The challenge is therefore structural, not regulatory: as centres of attribution recede, legal categories lose the referent that grounds their meaning. Regulatory responses â the MiCAR Regulation, US enforcement actions â vest accountability in identifiable subjects. Integrating decentralized technologies thus brings to light the need to reconstitute identifiable centres of attribution: not a mere adaptation of the existing normative framework, but an exercise in institutional innovation.
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) represent a novel organizational form enabled by blockchain technology, characterized by decentralized governance, token-based incentives, and automated execution via smart contracts. This paper conceptualizes DAOs as entrepreneurial firms, examining their governance structures, incentive mechanisms, and failure dynamics. Drawing on emerging empirical studies and organizational theory, the paper argues that while DAOs reduce traditional agency costs and enhance transparency, they introduce new coordination challenges, participation inefficiencies, and systemic vulnerabilities. The analysis reveals that governance concentration, misaligned incentives, and low participation rates contribute significantly to DAO failure rates. The paper proposes a hybrid governance framework integrating decentralized mechanisms with adaptive institutional controls to improve DAO sustainability. This study contributes to entrepreneurship literature by positioning DAOs as a new frontier in digital firm formation and entrepreneurial finance.
For most of the last decade, Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) principles and the world of Bitcoin and Web3 have existed on opposite sides of the corporate conversation. ESG represented the rise of responsible capitalism â a commitment to sustainability, stakeholder accountability, and ethical governance that traditional institutions were being pressured to adopt. Bitcoin and Web3, meanwhile, were seen by many critics as antithetical to those ideals: energy-hungry, unregulated, ungoverned, and speculative. That characterisation is now rapidly becoming outdated.
Consensus protocols underpin the security and correctness of decentralized blockchain systems by enabling mutually untrusted participants to agree on a shared state. Early blockchain networks relied on Proof-of-Work (PoW), which achieves strong security by making participation computationally expensive, but its high energy consumption has driven the transition toward Proof-of-Stake (PoS) and its variants. Nominated Proof-of-Stake (NPoS) addresses PoS centralization tendencies by separating stake from block production, allowing participants (known as nominators) to delegate their staked tokens to validators, aiming to enable broader, fairer, and more decentralized participation in consensus. This thesis addresses the gap between NPoSâs design intentions and its realworld effectiveness by using Polkadot as a case study: we employ multi-year on-chain data and a graph-based methodology that models the evolving relationships between nominators and validators, and introduce metrics to evaluate centralization, fairness, and inclusiveness in NPoS systems. The analysis reveals persistent structural concentration. Validator turnover is limited, with around 90% of validators remaining active across consecutive eras, and nomination patterns are highly persistent, with fewer than 20 nominators controlling up to one-third of the active validator set. Regarding fairness, while validator rewards converge to near-equality, nominator rewards remain highly unequal as an inherent consequence of stake-proportional allocation. Regarding inclusiveness, participation remains constrained: a non-trivial fraction of active validators charge 100% commission, retaining all staking rewards and distributing nothing to their nominators, which constitutes a structural barrier to meaningful economic participation for the nominators backing them. Overall, these findings indicate that NPoS still exhibits concentration dynamics that limit its effectiveness in achieving decentralization and inclusiveness.
Drawing on feminist scholarship on money and finance and Âgeographical scholarship on everyday life and masculinities, this article examines the promises and futures that investment in and use of cryptocurrency represents for men in the UK. We explore the financial practices, logics and decision-making of ordinary crypto-users and examine how engagement with cryptocurrency shapes how these men understand themselves, their futures, and their place in the broader world. Through focus group and interview data we explore how research participants explain their rationale and motivations for their financial practices, including examining menâs perceptions of and relations to cryptocurrency, and how these shape and are shaped by the intimacies and moralities of everyday life. Based on our findings, we conceptualise crypto-masculinities as a historically and socially specific financial practice and gendered expression of the relations of (digital) money and finance. This article remedies the limited geographical attention that has been paid thus far to cryptocurrency âusersâ, and offers novel insights into the embodied dimensions of cryptocurrency use, including how cryptocurrency is experienced and lived.
This paper presents an ontology-driven administrative monitoring system that integrates blockchain smart contracts to ensure transparency, accountability, and integrity in organizational processes.This tracks resources and manages administrative workflows in an open and decentralised manner, addressing long-standing governance challenges such as opacity and unaccountability.Many important administrative processes involve the movement of resources from one point to another; these resources and processes can be modelled similarly to the movement of goods in a supply chain.Motivated by the need to improve institutional governance, particularly in contexts where individual actions often undermine fairness, this study combines ontology and blockchain to formalize administrative processes and enhance traceability.A pre-created ontology from the author's previous work, developed for postgraduate administration at the University of Ibadan, was adopted.The ontology defines classes and activities which were translated into blockchain entities and smart contracts, implemented in Solidity, and deployed on the Ethereum test network.Test cases derived from ontology competency questions validate the functional correctness of the smart contracts.The results confirm that administrative activities can be monitored transparently and immutably, providing a foundation for broader applications in public administration, education, and corporate governance.