This panel explores how blockchains can support the development of a new of self-governed, economically sustainable commons-oriented communities.
Although cryptocurrencies and NFTs overpopulate the discussions about blockchain, this panel intends to divert the conversation towards the uses in commons-oriented ecosystems. Blockchain is a highly adaptable technology, meaning that its affordances can be adjusted to fulfil any tasks and desires of the community that puts it to work. The emancipatory potential is not necessary associated either to any capitalist nor anti-capitalist framework, its plasticity can reproduce any subjectivity.
The commons, in turn, are neither private nor public, but systems, ecologies of resources, people and relations linked to the sociopolitical conditions of their time. Commoning implies practices and strategies of care, solidarity and reparation, and collaterally become acts of world(s)-building. Blockchain can function as a structure supporting commoning and, with it, help to envision the word otherwise.
The public record-keeping features are especially useful in this context, in terms of the fostering assets as commons, to regulate the community and structure its social relations. The technology can, hence, track the uses and contributions to the common pool, channel the management of routine tasks, and also makes perceptible the involvement on the social aspects that help maintaining the community, like care or social reproduction.
Through different examples, the panel introduces how blockchain can unleash social creativity, moving way from hyper-financialization to reveal the potentialities of this new generation of self-governed and economically sustainable commons-oriented communities. Precisely, it explores blockchain configurations that are at the margins of traditional economic discourses and aim to unveil vibrant new understandings of economy, politics and social relations.
