Call for entries - Glossary of decentralised technosocial systems

Tuesday, 25. April 2023 - 23:00

Introduction

In the past years, growing popular debate and technological developments have focused on the potentials and promises of decentralised or distributed technologies for purposes of financial transactions, governance, data storage, and content sharing. However, the project of leveraging decentralisation as a means of resistance against the centralised and monopolistic models of governance, is being called into question by scholars and the public alike as the blockchain based systems are gradually being governed in an ever more centralised way. Meanwhile, the pitfalls of cryptocurrencies and distributed technologies are becoming increasingly apparent. On the other hand, within the traditionally centralised systems there is growing exploration, experimentation, and migration towards more decentralised and pluralistic means of governance as the pressures from governments and civil society question the legitimacy of monopolistic and transnational structures of governance. These tensions call for advancements in the conceptualisation of the main features and debates relating to techno-social systems, by adequately capturing and critically evaluating dynamics emerging from the project of decentralisation as a means of resistance.

Objective of the new Call for contributions and intended readership

The objective of this new Call for contributions is to enable researchers and practitioners to engage with techno-social developments, relevant academic debates, and a normative appraisal of their ability and efficiency to resist the prevalent dynamics of centralisation and erosion of autonomy. In turn, the concept of decentralisation in the Glossary is understood to include the developments within the infrastructure and systems of information sharing and distribution of various types of content that seek to challenge and/or provide alternatives to the current organizational structures through distributed technologies.

Additionally, the glossary aims to consolidate the current list of terms in a way that allows for broad engagement across academic communities to inform parallel research in different fields by broadening current theoretical frameworks through analysis of the processes, structures and societal outcomes of decentralisation. For instance, this could be valuable to researchers in the fields of data rights and management, informational governance, platform power, computer science, media pluralism, and media and design studies. To achieve this goal, the contributions will need to avoid excessively specialised terms and concepts left unexplained in order to foster cross-disciplinary engagement.

Current state of the glossary

The glossary of decentralised technosocial systems launched in 2021 aimed to build a shared working vocabulary regarding specific aspects of decentralised techno-social systems among researchers in an interdisciplinary fashion. Indeed, a comprehensive understanding of the technical, economic, and political aspects of these types of technologies transcends traditional boundaries of scientific fields and demands an interdisciplinary approach that seeks to better conceptualise and critically evaluate specific mechanisms or processes inherent to distributed technologies. The ever-growing discourse on the ideologies and values enshrined in such technological innovation requires this type of analytical framework whereby the conceptualisation of each term is attentive to the interlinkages between technological design and socio-political, and economic implications.

The contributions received and published since the launch of the glossary represent an important first step in the process of mapping the deeply socially and politically interlinked nature of the technological processes arising out of decentralisation. The current catalogue of (28) terms included in the glossary reflects the necessity of the multi-layered conceptualisation of each term in combination with a critical appraisal of the contemporary academic debates and socio-political aspects surrounding each specific term. The conceptualisation of decentralised or distributed technologies as a means of resistance to the heavily centralised and platformised data-driven digital economy will remain at the core of the glossary and of the future contributions adding to the existing terms.

Going forward

This special section of Internet Policy Review fulfills the objective of descriptively mapping the techno-social developments and dynamics taking place in the field of decentralised technologies. The glossary maintains its commitment to engage in critical analyses of these developments and debates in order to function as an interdisciplinary “toolbox” for researchers. As this strand of research stands in the pursuit of a critical approach to the technosocial status quo and/or prevalent dynamics, the glossary will be directed in a way that aims to appraise the trade-offs between the current platform-based landscape and decentralised alternatives at various levels within contemporary society. This should include a continuing effort to conceptualise, within the scope of decentralised technologies, where mechanisms of governance, power imbalances, and inequalities reproduce prevailing structures and, on the other hand, to evaluate to what extent they may contribute to the creation of novel power structures and imbalances. The terms should ideally be centered around the developments in distributed data ownership, decentralised means of governance including participatory models and systems of networked governance as well as decentralised infrastructure and software.

Against this backdrop, an appraisal of decentralised technological processes should be done with reference to the relative gains and losses to efficiency, individual and collective autonomy, and the restructuring of power dynamics. This implies, for each term, an adequate conceptualisation of the spaces, structures, and processes in which safeguards and freedoms exist, and are permitted to take effect within the various technological developments and social movements related to the evolving convergences/divergences of techno-social systems.

The entry for each term may include an account of the techno-social issue and an appraisal of the current state of academic debates and the potential trade-offs entailed. The resulting entry would therefore go beyond the conceptualisation of a specific term to expand on novel or possible research areas and seek to propose research agendas going forward.

Important dates

200-word abstracts should be emailed by 25 April 2023 to julian.morgan@hu-berlin.de

Decisions will be communicated to the authors by 10 May 2023

Full entries (between 1,000 and 2,000 words) should be submitted by 10 July 2023

Peer review lasts approximately 2 months

The deadline for submitting the revised paper to the journal is 1 October 2023

Publication in December

Special issue editors

Julian Morgan (Humboldt Universität zu Berlin)

Morshed Mannan (European University Institute)

Andrea Leiter (University of Amsterdam)

Florian Idelberger (European University Institute)

The initiative is led by The Blockchain and Society Policy Research Lab (University of Amsterdam), in collaboration with the P2P Models (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), Trust in Distributed Environments (Weizenbaum Institut, Berlin) and Blockchain Gov teams (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris).

List of potential terms

Potential terms may include, but are not limited to:

  • Open source development/publishing

  • Decentralised identity (DID)

  • Data commons

  • Federated systems/networks (fediverse)

  • P2P social networks

  • Social scalability

  • Multicentric content moderation

  • Semi-Decentralized networks

  • Infrastructure resistance

  • Distributed algorithms

  • Interoperability

  • Decentralised privacy overlays

  • Digital insurectionism/activism

References

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Bodó, B., Brekke, J. K., & Hoepman, J.-H. (2021). Decentralisation: A multidisciplinary perspective. Internet Policy Review, 10(2). https://doi.org/10.14763/2021.2.1563

De Filippi, P., & Wright, A. (2018). Blockchain and the law: The rule of code. Harvard University Press.

De Filippi, P. (2019). Blockchain Technology and Decentralized Governance: The Pitfalls of a Trustless Dream. Decentralized Thriving : Governance and Community on the Web 3.0. http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3524352

Finck, M. (2019). Blockchain regulation and governance in europe. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108609708

Davidson, S., De Filippi, P., & Potts, J. (2018). Blockchains and the economic institutions of capitalism. Journal of Institutional Economics, 14(4), 639–658. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1744137417000200

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Roscam Abbing, R. & Diehm, C. & Warreth, S. (2023). Decentralised social media. Internet Policy Review, 12(1). https://doi.org/10.14763/2023.1.1681

Szabo, N, ‘Unenumerated: Money, Blockchains, and Social Scalability’ (Unenumerated, 9 February 2017) <http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2017/02/money-blockchains-and-social-scalability.html> accessed 9 March 2023

Zwitter, A. & Hazenberg, J., ‘Decentralized Network Governance: Blockchain Technology and the Future of Regulation’ (2020) 3 Frontiers in Blockchain. https://doi.org/10.3389/fbloc.2020.00012

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Walch, A. 2019. Deconstructing “decentralization”: Exploring the core claim of crypto systems. In C. Brummer (Ed.), Cryptoassets: Legal, regulatory, and monetary perspectives: 39-68. New York: Oxford University Press.

Santana, C., & Albareda, L. (2022). Blockchain and the emergence of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs): An integrative model and research agenda. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 182, 121806. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2022.121806

Logas, J., Schlesinger, A., Li, Z., & Das, S. (2022). Image DePO: Towards Gradual Decentralization of Online Social Networks using Decentralized Privacy Overlays. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 6(CSCW1), 60:1-60:28. https://doi.org/10.1145/3512907

de Asís López-Fuentes, F. (2019). Decentralized Online Social Network Architectures. In T. Özyer, S. Bakshi, & R. Alhajj (Eds.), Social Networks and Surveillance for Society (pp. 85–100). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78256-0_5

Axelsen, H., Jensen, J. R., & Ross, O. (2022). When is a DAO Decentralized? Complex Systems Informatics and Modeling Quarterly, 31, Article 31. https://doi.org/10.7250/csimq.2022-31.04