The rise of blockchain as a techno-solution in the development sector underscores the critical imbalances of data power under ‘computational capitalism’. This article will consider the political economy of techno-solutionist and blockchain discourses in the developing world, using as its object of study blockchain projects in Pacific Island nations. Backed by US State Department soft power initiatives such as Tech Camp, these projects inculcate tech-driven notions of economic and political development, or ICT4D, while opening up new terrains for data accumulation (...) and platform control. Blockchain developers in search of proof of concept have found the development sector a fecund space for tech experimentation as they leverage a desire for tech-development and exploit regulatory weakness. The material implications of blockchain projects and discourse have been to create governance solutions which bypass the developing world state as a largely corrupting intermediary. In the Pacific, this has meant blockchain supply-chain management systems, proprietary financial innovation in humanitarian relief and an Asian Development Bank project to manage indigenous Fijian lands exclusively on the blockchain. In all these instances, discourses of solutionism, innovation and data empowerment have been deployed in aid of blockchain cartographies of control. (shrink)

Deleuze put forth a description of fluid control in computerized society in his text ‘Postscript on Control Societies’. With the help of the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon, we can broaden and complexify this view and understand digital systems through the concept of modulation. These modulatory systems intervene in human individuation by controlling individuals as ‘dividuals’. In contemporary digital technologies, like blockchain platforms, the modulatory dividual control can be fierce and even total. Simondon’s concepts of pre-individual, individuation, and transindividuation present us (...) with an ontology for this contemporary mode of control and enable us to better understand the complex relations between the being of humans and technical networks. (shrink)