Blockchain, Affect, and Digital Teleologies
Olivier Jutel · 2020
In this moment of contingency and crises over truth and data, blockchain technology has emerged as a key discourse recapitulating the emancipatory power of computation. The encryption and distribution of data through blockchain is held as a universal governance principle that can produce immutable truth, trust and a flourishing of human creativity. Blockchain is here defined as an affective technology in that it claims to mediate the indeterminacy of affective encounters as the very production of data truth. This is a claim that relies upon the affective investment in digital teleologies of decentralization and a techno-democracy fetishism ( Dean, 2009 ). Blockchain underscores the stakes of the affective turn in digital media studies between a Deleuzian celebration of creative enjoyment and the Lacanian problematic of antagonism, jouissance and the political. The fantasy of pure mediation through blockchain is an attempt to transcend the political through a claim to universal truth which in this case embeds a brutal, hierarchical cyber-libertarian politics.