13 March 2025. Cryptostatecraft - Recoding Value/s in the Digital Economy. Andrea Leiter
Thursday 13 March 2025
2 - 3 pm
In person
Cryptostatecraft - Recoding Value/s in the Digital Economy
Crypto is back. With the re-election of Donald Trump to the White House in 2024, the role of the crypto industry in shaping US politics and its government apparatus has moved center stage. This talk explores blockchain technology as a technology of statecraft, pointing to the idea that the technology enables some of the most far-reaching governance experiments – a phenomenon best understood as cryptostatecraft. Cryptostatecraft refers to both the cooptation of state mechanisms to advance the interests of the crypto industry as well as the transformative potential of blockchain technology in shaping new societal structures. Two affordances of blockchain technology make it particularly interesting for governance experiments. First, it enables the creation of DAOs (Decentralised Autonomous Organisations) that can operate without the necessity of legal recognition into a corporate form, thus foregrounding bottom-up community governance. Second, they work through token engineering, allowing to intertwine economic value with social and political values. Two examples of cryptostatecraft, Prosperá’s Network State in Honduras and the Coordi-(Nations) in pop-up cities like Zuzalu, illustrate the broad political spectrum that underwrites these experiments in governance.
My thinking draws on the idea that societal transformation is closely connected to the concept of value. Inspired by David Graeber’s relational approach to value, the paper views social systems as structures of creative action, where value is determined by collective practices of valuation. Building further on Nehal Bhuta’s work on ‘recovering social rights’, I locate state-centric thinking as a historical phenomenon that emerged under particular conditions as a screen for projecting demands of equal participation in the distribution of wealth. Does the state still hold as the scaler of collective futures? It is precisely here that cryptostatecraft can reveal a lot about the Zeitgeist. So what to make of cryptostatecraft? How to dis/engage it? And how to keep up with its acceleration in accumulating power, capital and territory?