Tag: Blockchain

• Facing blockchain’s double bind: Trustless technologies and “IRL friends” in Berlin’s NFT community (in New Media and Society)

  How does a community remain committed to an imagined digital future despite that future’s inherent contradictions? This peer-reviewed article analyzes such a challenge as it was faced by Berlin’s NFT (non-fungible token) enthusiasts. Dominant narratives about NFTs and other blockchain technologies envision a virtual and ostensibly trust-free future, but these enthusiasts’ pursuit of such “trustless…

• Tokens, Voids, and Archives: Locating Berlin’s NFT Projects (Published in Platypus)

  Berlin’s NFT projects and events remind us that the users of blockchain, like users of any digital technology, are embodied, emplaced, and encultured beings whose lives extend beyond the immediate site of technological interaction. By extension, the affordances of the technologies they use take on particular meanings and values in local context. In Berlin, one…

• Secrecy Systems and Forensic Methods (Some thoughts on NFTs)

  What kind of scarcity can coexist with reproducibility? And how does it continue to serve as a source of value? This paper draws from the information theory and cryptography of Claude Shannon as well as the theories and histories of art by Walter Benjamin and Carlo Ginzburg. It demonstrates how, using cryptography, NFTs employ blockchain…