SPIKE-70-Amy-Ireland-Is-Crypto-Patriarchys-Newest-Tech

Question Question Is Crypto Patriarchy’s Newest Tech? Page 58 By Amy Ireland Photo: Tristan Ireland AMY IRELAND IS CRYPTO PATRIARCHY’S NEWEST TECH? There’s no shortage of commentators eager to level this accusation against Web3, but what does it mean to call a technology “patriarchal”? It seems to me that this charge is based on three fundamental assumptions: that the relationship between humans and technology is one of users and tools; that we already know what “women” are; and that the legibility of IRL identities equals political agency. But these ideas themselves are part of the representational system of patriarchy – and if we continue to rely on them, this is only evidence of the extent to which patriarchal assumptions concerning identity are preventing us from assessing new technologies on their own terms. Patriarchy’s authentication system has always sidelined women as social agents. They have been the objects to patriarchy’s subjects, and their status as “human” hasn’t always been a given. This is feminism’s basic insight. Some feminists aim to rectify this by fighting to secure for women the same status as that enjoyed by men – in doing so, tacitly endorsing the patriarchy’s rules of validation and the attendant dogma that legibility equals power. But what if this focus on the human as a legible, autonomous individual is the problem? What if new technological developments changed the authentication system, so that political agency was no longer determined by the standard model of the autonomous human subject – aka “Man”? Back in the early years of Web 1.0 – the days of large message boards like Usenet and multi-user domains like LambdaMOO – the interaction was entirely text-based, and pseudonymity was the norm. The tyranny of the visual interface that would come to characterise Web 2.0 had not yet ushered in the one-to-one relationship between individuals and their social media personae that we are so accustomed to today. It was the fluidity of identity inherent to Web 1.0 that accompanied the birth of cyberfeminism, and queer and trans theorists wrote passionately about the freedom of experimenting with identity online. You didn’t have to be “you”, you didn’t have to be “one”, you didn’t even have to be human. Of course, it wasn’t all gender euphoria and cooperation between benevolent strangers. Anonymity was also exploited by those with less noble agendas, and since there was no incentive to invest in building a consistent and enduring pseudonymous persona, behaving badly online cost users very little. It was this inconsistency that the real-name regime of Web 2.0 attempted to counteract. As the internet matured across the threshold of Page 59 the millennium, the utopianism and weirdness of Web 1.0 gave way to the boring individualism of Web 2.0’s Big Daddy Mainframe with its Facebook, iPads, and Myspace, and patriarchal humanism won out once again. But Web3 might change all of this. From the beginning, crypto culture has been about privacy. Since blockchains are public ledgers – which means that anyone can pick an address and view the entire history of that address’s transactional activities – privacy has to be secured in a very specific way, and this is one of the things that makes identity on Web3 interesting and unique. The line that divides the private from the public, or the unknown from the known, runs through the user themselves. Their anonymous address is visible to everyone, but the IRL agent behind that address can be invisible. And because the authentication criterion for anything taking place on-chain is literally hard-coded into the system – with no need to appeal to an external authority (a Trusted Third Party) – the real-world identity behind the address, whether that’s an individual with a specific biology, a company, a collective, or something much weirder, is completely irrelevant. All that matters is its on-chain history. This means that, unlike Web 1.0, crypto has a built-in ethical system whereby users, although technically anonymous, are incentivised to accumulate a history connected to an address with a reputation attached to it, which in turn, encourages them to act in a way that will not deter others from transacting with them. In short, if identity on Web 1.0 is pseudonymous and inconsistent and identity on Web 2.0 is real-named and consistent, identity on Web3 is pseudonymous and consistent. The agents that it indexes are no longer validated by any of the criteria so integral to the representational regime of patriarchal visibility. Simply by playing the game, being on the chain, they become synthetic, post-human, and full of transversal potential. Web3 has the capacity to usher in a profound social paradigm shift because, among other things, it provides a totally novel notion of what counts as an agent – one no longer tethered to the male, the individual, or even the human. No. Crypto isn’t patriarchy’s newest tech; it belongs to something far stranger and wilder than is dreamt of in Man’s philosophy. AMY IRELAND is a writer, theorist, and a member of the technomaterialist transfeminist collective Laboria Cuboniks.