A research group representative and a PhD student at the University of Vaasa Alesha Serada presented their research on blockchain, freedom and exploitation at the international transdisciplinary conference Indeterminate Futures / The Future of Indeterminacy hosted by University of Dundee, Scotland, on November 13-15, 2020. Their talk explored the concept of #datapolitik as applied to blockchain-based algorithmic governance.

How do deterministic technical milieus and the growing mass of unstructured data configure #datapolitik – a set of operations that regulate space-time through the cybernetic feedback loop, tracking, capture, and feelings of safety or threat?

The conference was hosted by the project The Future of Indeterminacy: Datification, Memory, Biopolitics funded by Arts and Humanities Research Council. Karen Barad, Franco Berardi and Xin Wei Sha were keynote speakers.

The future is no longer seen as open. It’s seen as precarious on the one hand, and technologically over-determined on the other. Economic uncertainty, the rise of the risk society, the culture of fear and neoliberal necropolitics are seen as a serious threat. The risk society attributes all hazards to human decisions; the culture of fear cultivates the tendency to catastrophise; neoliberal necropolitics welds technology to the exploitation of natural and social reserves in an irreversible way.

More information about the event and its full agenda can be found in this call for papers.

Presentations from the conference are now available on video, including Alesha’s presentation ”The Historical Determinism of Blockchain (and Its Limits).” Watch the presentation here!