Blockchain Papers

Kabiru Uba Ibrahim, Muhammad Samir Tahir, Dr. Auwal Salisu

No abstract is available for this record.

Mohammad Modabber Chaharborj

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.Web3 ecosystems represent an emergent field of digital religion where decentralized infrastructures—spanning smart contracts, token economies, and symbolic interfaces—actively generate novel forms of ritual life. These rituals, deeply embedded in algorithmic processes and economic incentives, cultivate collective identities, symbolic hierarchies, and affective economies marked by hope and betrayal. To interpret these dynamics, this article proposes Distributed Rituals Analysis (DRA), a comprehensive framework synthesizing Lived Religion, Ritualization Theory, and Actor-Network Theory. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic engagement across diverse Web3 communities —including NFTs, DAOs, and staking protocols—I illustrate how decentralized practices become ritualized through temporal orchestration, symbolic differentiation, and distributed agency. Reflexive participation further reveals the researcher’s complex positionality as both observer and participant. DRA offers conceptual and methodological clarity for exploring emergent rituals in decentralized environments, illuminating how digital infrastructures reconfigure sacredness and collective meaning-making. This framework also lays the groundwork for future comparative inquiries into ritual forms across decentralized and hybrid spaces.

Ilana Khanin

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are not only blockchain-based digital assets; they are theatrical practices taking shape between social bodies. Understanding the theatricality of NFTs provides a way to account for the criticism directed at them. NFT critiques often purport to focus on underlying politico-economic ideologies but, in actuality, reveal deep-seated antitheatrical anxieties recontextualized for the digital realm.

Michael Adelowotan, Collins Achepsah Leke

No abstract is available for this record.

Julia Ebner

The transition from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 is likely to leverage the latest technological advances including AI, machine learning and blockchain technology.This might not only bring about a new interplay of the physical, virtual and augmented reality but could also fundamentally change the ways in which corporate entities, social communities and political move ments organise themselves.Decentralisation is a key property of the Metaverse.Policies, legal con tracts and financial transactions that were traditionally the domain of governments, courts and banks might be replaced with smart contracts and financial transactions in blockchain.Cryptocurrencies can be used as a new medium of exchange outside of established banking systems, while non-fungible token (NFT) might serve as unique digital identifiers to certify ownership and authenticity.Taken together, these new forms of self-governance could lead to the explosion of so-called Decentralized Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) in the Metaverse.Decentralized Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) are digital entities that are collaboratively governed without central leadership and operate based on blockchain (Jentzsch, 2016).As such, DAOs allow internet users to establish their own organisational structures, which no longer require the involvement of a third party in financial transactions and rulemaking.DAOs allow online communities to simplify their transactions and use a community-based approach to establish rules (World Economic Forum, 2023).However, as this study will explore, they might also give rise to new threats emerging from decentralised extremist mobilisation, pose a risk to minority rights, challenge the rule of law, and disrupt institutions that are currently considered fundamental pillars of our democratic systems.

Melyn McKay

The emergence of blockchain technology spawned numerous experiments in alternative ownership and value creation. Uniting these was a singular thesis: That decentralized infrastructures could birth a new, user operated and owned Internet. This vision is what drives the otherwise inchoate collection of actors and activities called “Web3.” Web3’s infancy has been a wobbly one. Despite persistent claims to the contrary, many of its projects had echoes of practices that had emerged in different places and times – many of which were snuffed out by the relentless march of colonial capitalism. These same forces remain at play within Web3 and are most pronounced at its intersection with centralized and/or highly speculative financial services and products. There is a risk of building alternative’ digital spaces, modes of governance, and value systems, which are blind to history. In this chapter, I describe how my own blockchain alternative payment company offers an anthropology-based intervention, and how an anthropologist such as myself might guide these nascent projects away from building more technologically complex architectures of colonial capitalism, directing them instead toward alternatives which bulwark against the most pernicious harms of our time – from climate change to wealth inequality.

Stephen Pihlaja

This chapter focuses on how digital communication has impacted on the development of religious language and communities over the previous 30 years, tracing the development from the early use of the world wide web, through social media, and into Web3. Focusing on how religious groups have used the internet to present their own beliefs and interact with those who hold different beliefs and no belief, the chapter will show how technology continues to impact how religious belief changes over time and how people come to hold beliefs and form communities around those beliefs. The chapter will then explore the development of Web 2.0 interaction over 15 years using YouTube as a case study. The chapter will show how the changes in rules, moderation, and other affordances on the site contributed directly to the relationship between religious and political identities in the Trump Era and how responses to political extremism related directly to further divisions in how people of faith and faith groups presented themselves. The chapter will then suggest ways forward for analysis of religious belief and positioning in networked and digitised interaction, particularly as they relate to blockchain technologies, NFTs, and the commodification of manufactured scarcity.

Ali Fisher, Nico Prucha

The fronts on which groups such as the Islamic State wages the media war have evolved. The modus operandi of Salafi-Jihadi groups, such as the Islamic State and al-Qaeda (AQ), means that they can appear to be degraded or in decline when closer inspection of their documents, written mainly in Arabic, shows that their operations and media strategy have evolved. The Islamic State uses dispersed forms of network organisation which constantly reconfigure, much like the way a swarm of bees or flock of birds constantly reorganizes mid-flight. This marks a shift from the broadcast models of communication during conflict to a new dispersed, fast moving, and resilient form, the user-curated ‘Swarmcast’. Through the Swarmcast, the Islamic State has continued to disseminate its set of coherent narratives expressed in tens of thousands of written documents and in thousands of professionally made audio visual productions. This chapter demonstrates the role Telegram and Web3 now play in the information ecosystem and media strategy employed by Salafi-Jihadi groups.

Angga Avila

With a number of churches racing towards the metaverse, this paper offers a preliminary response to the phenomenon of the meta-church from the context of Indonesian churches. Churches that adopt and participate in the metaverse ought to do so not simply to be another institution that holds worship or preaches there. Churches that enter the metaverse follow strategies that are driven by followers, likes, and viewers (Joas Adiprasetya) as digital equivalents for measuring attendance, building, and cash (Chloe Lynch) without a proper understanding of the nature of the metaverse and a lack of contextual awareness may unconsciously endorse and even underwrite a system that fosters injustice and inequality. To kindle such an awareness, in this article I wish to consider Belle, a 2021 Japanese animated movie that depicts a metaverse, which features Sponsors who capitalize on its resources and thereby abuse the metaverse by perpetuating deep inequities. The film illuminates the potential condition of a metaverse that promises unlimited possibility and purports to be impartial to everyone, insofar as it connects people and removes for many the barriers of time and distance. While I argue that Indonesian churches must learn from the prophetic character of Bitcoin, they must also stay vigilant against the inherent inequities brought to bear with the advent of the NFT (non-fungible token). Leveraging Joshua Nunzianto’s interpretation of an Augustinian economy of sacrifice, I re-evaluate the very concept of a metaversal economy based on notions of scarcity and proprietary ownership. Then, with reference to Walter Brueggemann’s Prophetic Imagination and Jürgen Moltmann’s The Spirit of Hope, I construct an ecclesiology of prophetic communities that sing the melody of hope.

Sandra Faustino, Inês Faria, Rafael Marques

In this paper, we present an ethnographic account of the quasi-religious romanticism of the crypto-community towards blockchain technologies. To do so, we explore the cultural significance of phenomena such as myth, faith, and ritual, without excluding both the realms of technological practices and techno-scientific narrative. Drawing on a comparison with the legend of King Arthur, we analyse how the legendary creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, translates contemporary anxieties resulting from the financial crisis and the centralisation of power. By analysing white papers, we further explore the persuasive narratives which convey how ethics and virtue can be encoded into software, and, finally, we describe the secular rituals that reinforce cohesion among the community – in moments which are often guided by charismatic preachers and specialists. We argue that blockchain technologies have had a symbolic impact in re-invigorating enchantment and material romanticism towards finance and technology, which has had a wider impact on the social perception and acceptance of the transition to a digital society.

Usman W. Chohan

No abstract is available for this record.

Sarah Whitcomb Laiola

Online Culture Wars Sarah Whitcomb Laiola (bio) Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right Angela Nagle Zero Books www.zero-books.net/books/kill-all-normies 136 Pages; Print, $16.95 Since Barack Obama’s 2008 election, the influence that both the mainstream social web and digital networked media hold over political elections has become undeniable. In 2008, we saw the rise of a “millennial president,” as Obama demonstrated his social media savvy, using Facebook, Twitter, and similar sites to connect with his voters. Obama’s own use of these, young, “hip” technologies was bolstered by the vitality of his iconic “HOPE” poster that, originally designed by street artist Shepard Fairey, was soon distributed all over the web as an internet meme. As with any meme, the poster was parodied with a wide range of subjects: from figures like the Pope and Hillary Clinton promoting HOPE, to Star Wars’s R2D2 promoting NEW HOPE, Batman’s The Joker (as portrayed by Heath Ledger) promoting JOKE, and the web’s own Trollface promoting TROLL. In 2016, we saw much of this play out again, as a presidential candidate rose to prominence through the shared power of his own social media savvy, and a viral media army of internet memes. This time, however, the drama played out in distortion. Where Obama impressed with his engaging, humanizing use of Facebook, Donald Trump shocked with his crass, inflammatory use of Twitter. Where the 2008–9’s social web was earnestly peppered with the HOPE poster, the 2016 web was awash with Pepe the Frog memes that featured the character transformed from his original role as an “everyman” into a white nationalist decked out with Nazi insignia and unapologetically promoting inflammatory, racist, homophobic, xenophobic, and misogynist ideas. So what happened? “How did we get from those earnest hopeful days broadcast across the media mainstream to where we are now?” Having spent eight years closely watching rightist forums on the web, and in 2015 earning a PhD from Dublin City College following the successful completion of her thesis, “An Investigation into Contemporary Online Anti-Feminist Movements,” Angela Nagle is acutely well-positioned to answer this question. In Kill All Normies, she aims to do just this by “map[ping] the online cultural wars that formed the political sensibilities of a generation,” while providing “understand[ing] and [keeping] an account of the online battles that may otherwise be forgotten but have nevertheless shaped culture and ideas in a profound way.” Finally, in what may be its most ambitious goal, the text “place[s] contemporary culture wars in some historical context and attempts to untangle the real from the performance, the material from the abstract and the ironic from the faux-ironic.” This account ultimately offers a short, critical history of the ways the overt misogyny, unchecked harassment, and anti-feminism of the rightist social web—illustrated in the text through the anonymous forum, 4chan—became normalized and entered mainstream culture as the alt-right. As Nagle chronicles, the alt-right will rise in direct opposition to the sensitivity and identity politics of the leftist, mainstream social web—illustrated in the text through the microblogging network, Tumblr. As it provides a critical history of the online culture wars from 2008 to 2016, Kill All Normies makes an important contribution to two growing bodies of work: that which attempts to understand the 2016 election, and that which focuses on the rising toxicity, harassment, and anti-feminism of online and other media spheres. To the first area, Nagle’s text provides a necessary divergence from a preoccupation with the role that back-end algorithms and data-manipulation played in the election, as it focuses instead on the role played by user-generated content and user communities at the web’s front-end. Through this focus, her text offers an important alternative to the idea that the entire 2016 election was the result of web-based media running rampant, uncontrolled, and beyond its people. To the second area, Nagle’s history of the anti-feminism and misogyny of the alt-right...

Bruce Hoffman

Al Qaeda, accordingly, evolved into a global terrorism movement that functioned equally well with top-down and bottom-up components: commanding and directing terrorist operations while remaining at the vortex of an increasingly decentralized structure populated by newly created, autonomous territorial extensions. Accordingly, in the years following September 11 th it was no longer possible to equate the global terrorism threat solely with the threat posed by Core Al Qaeda. As it evolved due to the pressure and success of international countermeasures, the global terrorism threat diversified both geographically and organizationally in order to survive. Despite having suffered the greatest onslaught directed against a terrorist organization in history, the Al Qaeda movement&s;s ideology and brand nonetheless both thrived and prospered. The advantages of the new social media to terrorists are manifold. Ease, interactivity and networking, reach, frequency, usability, stability, immediacy, publicity, and permanence are benefits reaped by those terrorist groups exploiting and harnessing these technologies.