Utopia of abstraction: Digital organizations and the promise of sovereignty

Abstract

Digital organizations form part of the new wave of blockchain technologies, following Bitcoin and related cryptocurrencies. “Utopia of Abstraction” offers an analysis of the utopian promise of digital organizations through a reading of one such project, Colony. We provide a critique of the ideology of Colony's white paper, supplemented by readings of pages from its website, as a member of a genre of texts that promote their products through seemingly neutral, technical descriptions. Colony's texts suggest an abstract, contextless and scaleless organizational solution—powered by smart contracts on a blockchain—that, according to its proponents, might be applied to any social situation, from small firm to state-level governance. For its users, this organization combines a promise of sovereignty removed from that of the state, as well as implied financial returns. Our reading of Colony echoes the critiques of scholars arguing that cyberlibertarianism is a dominant politic of blockchain technologies. Furthermore, drawing on critiques of code as law and the elision of the social in smart contracts, we argue that Colony's vision presents a model of technical organization that substitutes for the state in the context of waning popular sovereignty. We ultimately suggest an understanding of digital organizations reminiscent of the settler colonial situation: the assumption of an empty social space to be filled, and the promise of sovereignty and riches for those occupying it. Analysis of these logics is relevant as hype increases around non-fungible tokens, Web3, and the corporate metaverse as well as data practices more widely.

Since 2009, with the launch of the Bitcoin cryptocurrency, blockchain technologies have attracted both hype and notoriety. They are most well known as the technical foundation, not only of Bitcoin itself, but of a wide range of similar cryptocurrencies, infamous for their wildly fluctuating values as well as their role in illicit economies and, for their proponents, the promise of money free from the centralized control of banks and the state. Blockchains themselves are ledgers of transactions between users, maintained in identical copies on all computers within a decentralized, peer-to-peer network. They are expanded through the addition of “blocks” of transactions, verified by individual users able to provide “proof of work” (Nakamoto, 2008)—a rare cryptographic key that can only be discovered by the application of massive computing power, with substantial energy and environmental costs.

The uses of blockchains extend beyond currencies to any context where a ledger is useful. Indeed, at least according to their advocates, the applications of blockchain technologies have come a long way since their origin in the development of currencies. Their basic elements—anonymous, cryptographic proof of identity, a decentralized public ledger of transactions, a proof of work “mining” procedure—form, as Adam Greenfield has put it, “a powerfully general vocabulary, [which] can be used to build all kinds of useful things” (Greenfield, 2017: 96). A recent case is that of “non-fungible tokens” (NFTs)—a blockchain-based method for implementing market scarcity on otherwise easily reproducible digital goods, resulting in the rapid expansion (and environmental cost) of a speculative bubble, encompassing everything from stolen digital artwork to sports highlights, video games, and memes.

One development in the blockchain space is represented by the advent of Vitalik Buterin's Ethereum framework, launched in 2014. This allows for the distribution, not only of a static ledger, but of computation—the ability of the blockchain to execute code based on the fulfillment of a set of initial conditions. This means that an Ethereum blockchain can be used not just for recording transactions but for enacting rules. As such, it can be put into the service of so-called “smart contracts”: agreements between parties that are not only recorded on the ledger, but automatically enacted when triggered by their conditions, usually by distributing tokens or currency (Buterin, 2014; Greenfield, 2017: 99). The horizon of this promise is the establishment of “digital organizations” (or DAOs) ¹ —organizations whose rules are self-enforcing. With this promise comes the dream that hierarchies can be eliminated; that rules need no layer of administrators, managers, or interpretation for their implementation. Such utopian dreams draw heavily on beliefs in technological neutrality common in the milieux of technology and big data, and ultimately dovetail with the anti-statist orientation of “crypto-anarchists”, “cypherpunks”, and other “cyber-libertarians”, who hope for a technological alternative to state governance (Dahlberg, 2010; Golumbia, 2016; May, n.d.; Winner, 1997).

In this article, we will be looking at the texts associated with one proposed structure for digital organizations, and the claims to be found in them: Colony, whose white paper is authored by Alex Rea, Daniel Kronovet, Aron Fischer, and Jack du Rose and originally published in 2017. We chose Colony after auditing a 2019 university course on digital organizations, billed as among the first of its kind, which presented Colony as a typical example of digital organizations. We might in fact have chosen any others of a range of white papers from digital organization technologies, such as Aragon or DAOstack—white papers we will return to in places to support our argument (Cuende and Izquierdo, 2017; DAOstack: An Operating System for Collective Intelligence, 2018). Colony's white paper is an ideal case study, however, because it contains the most explicit and thorough engagement we are aware of with a theme common to many white papers: the classical economic theory of the firm, an entry point to thinking about organization more generally. Colony serves, then, to illustrate what we believe to be an ideology common to many digital organization advocates.

Our overall approach in thinking about digital organizations fits a critical theory tradition focusing on ideology and utopia. That means a sensitivity to a range of factors within a text: to “errors, mystifications, and techniques of manipulation and domination”; but also to “a utopian residue or surplus that can be used for social critique and to advance progressive politics” (Kellner, 2011: 85); to the actual political effects of ideologies; as well as to the effect of “bring[ing] the reader up short against the atrophy of the utopian imagination and of the political vision in our own society” (Jameson, 2005: 308).

In the case of digital organizations, this translates first to a set of critical observations that cleave close to established arguments in new media scholarship, concerning technological solutionism and the right-wing politics encoded in cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies (Golumbia, 2009; Golumbia, 2016; Morozov, 2013). It also, however, emphasizes the utopian aspects of these ideologies—the evocation of a new and better world, run according to computer logics. It is this utopian hope that makes the ideology of the digital organization something like the apotheosis of blockchain ideologies, and of tech ideologies more generally. Third, our approach suggests an understanding of the violence of digital organizations as a violence, in part, of the imagination, a violence that relates to that of settler colonialism—one that empties, clears, and dominates social space in the name of its vision. And finally, the attempt to organize sovereignty through a blockchain diagnoses a lack of political vision in our own society: a dearth of popular sovereignty in the organization of contemporary western polities, and an inability to address that lack in either imagination or practice.

It should be clear that we are talking about texts and ideas, rather than digital organizations in practice—which have a very brief and relatively ignoble history. ² Working in this way means, in general, remaining relatively agnostic about whether digital organizations can actually do what they say they do. We believe they cannot, but perhaps more importantly we hope they cannot. The larger vision they embody, as should be clear from our critique, is not one we share. ³ The utopian promise of the digital organization obscures the ways in which early adopters and crypto evangelists have both financial and ideological vested interests in expanding and enclosing the ambit of such technologies—they seek both a financial apparatus free of government regulation and legal protection, and the injection of capital and potential for liquidity that comes with mainstream adoption and investment.

Digital organizations, white papers, colony

In this article, we will be looking closely at the 2 October 2020 commit on GitHub of the Colony whitepaper, and turning later to related text on the project's website—largely a set of blog posts from the colony.io website by Colony founder Jack du Rose. As well as recording the technical details of blockchain and other technologies, white papers offer a place to advocate for their virtues, generally through circulation among the user communities of sites such as github.com. The Colony white paper describes “an Ethereum-based protocol for creating and operating Internet Organizations”, whose “rules are defined in code and enforced by a blockchain mining process” (Rea et al., 2020: 1). White papers give us access to the stated claims and assumptions of digital organization advocates, to details of their proposed technical operation, and to their hopes for how their protocols might be applied. White papers are also suggestive of a wider milieu of users and developers, imagined communities that might share some of the visions recorded in them. Technical white papers form a hinge between the people who write and read them and the users, members, and players they imagine will populate the communities they hope to establish. As such, reading them gives a sense of how their authors imagine the solutions to organizational, political, and social problems, and the kinds of subjects that would populate the resulting structures.

Reading white papers for their implied communities means reading them, in part, as members of a genre. As C.R. Miller suggests (see Miller, 1984; Miller and Shepherd, 2004) genres are defined not just in terms of their formal features, but for the stance they take toward their readership and the social action they perform. The term “white paper” itself, while it makes a suggestive association with the governmental white papers originating in early 20th-century Britain, is not enough of a basis to define a single genre. Indeed, Malone and White argue that technical/marketing white papers do not derive from the government documents that share the name, but have a lineage that links them to other historical forms—the technical documents of early scientists and mathematicians, intended to describe and promote new scientific instruments of measurement and calculation for the purpose of sale (Malone and Wright, 2018: 114–115).

For Malone and White, the technical/marketing white papers that draw on this scientific precedent do form a recognizable genre. They share formal features: primarily text-based PDFs shared online, containing some product diagrams and/or technical tables or bulleted lists. They generally aim to be concise, taking an authoritative and neutral tone that is informative instead of promotional. Characteristically, white papers identify a problem and then offer a product or service as a solution, convincing the reader of that solution's utility through information, education, data, and careful technical description. These features are, by and large, shared by the white papers circulating on repositories such as GitHub and foundational texts for cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies (see, e.g. Buterin, 2014; Cuende and Izquierdo, 2017; DAOstack: An Operating System for Collective Intelligence, 2018; Nakamoto, 2008). Colony, for its part, meets many of them despite the authors’ claim their whitepaper is “not a marketing document” (Rea, 2017).

The Colony white paper is descriptive and technically detailed, persuading with an authoritative tone, backed by technical terminology and formal symbolisms. It is “primarily a technical document describing the current design of the Colony protocol, focusing on on-chain actions and affordances” (Rea et al., 2020: 1). It asks its readers to imagine applying its protocols for any range of uses. It clearly identifies a problem: how to coordinate complex production within the “pseudonymous, adversarial environment” of the blockchain, without falling back on expensive, implicitly corrupt trust-based hierarchies of the “traditional” company (Rea et al., 2020: 4). This is echoed, though less explicitly, in white papers written by others in the digital organization space. For example, DAOStack identifies “increasing coordination costs” of traditional organizations that prevent them from growing indefinitely (DAOstack: An Operating System for Collective Intelligence, 2018: 5). The solution according to Colony is a “protocol seeking to facilitate the same kind of meritocratic division of labor and authority that the idealized model of the corporate hierarchy should, except from the bottom up, and less prone to error” (Rea et al., 2020: 4).

It is worthwhile noting a corollary of the white paper's formal features: in comparison with academic or scientific papers, it does not derive its authority in any significant way through a structure of citation, reference, or allusion. Its authority, that is, rests significantly on its own technical features rather than reference to the combined work of a wider community. The few references it does make to other sources are generally to technical papers or documentation of related protocols, though there are also appeals to two economics papers—both written in the 1930s. This limited citational context is shared by other digital organization white papers: DAOStack's white paper is similarly narrow, and appeals to one of the very same economics sources (Coase's “The Nature of The Firm”, discussed below), while others such as the Aragon Project limit their field of reference entirely to technical forebears such as Nakamoto, Buterin, and peers within the Blockchain community (Cuende and Izquierdo, 2017; DAOstack: An Operating System for Collective Intelligence, 2018: 5).

The suggestion is of an established and timeless world of technical truth, of which economic truth is a part. The broader lesson is that there is no general need for a community of thought and debate—problems can be solved from the ground up, perhaps using a few preexisting tools, but primarily through the application of individual technical acumen and novel thought. In this, the authors share in the utopian impulse identified by Jameson, the impulse to “bring to bear some necessary combination of the identification of a problem to be solved and the inventive ingenuity with which a series of solutions are proposed and tested” (Jameson, 2005: 11). It is in the hard-nosed practicality of the project, the impatience with precedent, and the belief in solving problems that it is most utopian—let us stop messing around and fix the world.

Digital organizations and the problem of the firm

At first glance, however, Colony's aspirations seem relatively mundane. Colony is designed for creating, hosting, and running organizations. Its architecture is intended to replace rules recorded in policy documents with rules written in code. Enforcement of those rules is no longer a matter of human interpretation, instead delegated to a proof of work process. Colony might, according to its authors, be used by organizations including “a photo-sharing app which meritocratically divides revenue between users, a driver-run P2P ridesharing service, crowdsourced claims handling in an insurance dApp, or a merchants’ guild in a virtual world” (Rea et al., 2020: 1). The list is suggestive of the imagined scale of its application—familiar, medium-size businesses or societies with a gig economy flavor and implications of the concomitant lack of labor protections—even as the white paper hints at “entirely new and previously impossible organizational forms” (Rea et al., 2020: 1).

Many of the features of Colony, in fact, simply echo the traditional functions of the firm: making decisions at different points within the organizational structure; dividing tasks into work units and sub-tasks; arranging remuneration for work; and managing stakes (to ensure members have “skin in the game” and can be “incentivized towards good behavior”, Rea et al., 2020: 17). Notably, the Colony project, in addition to establishing a protocol for digital organizations, aspires to establish a platform from which to host and manage the creation of other digital organizations using that protocol—recursively this Metacolony also runs on the protocol itself.

Colony uses “domains” to structure its colonies. “A domain is like a folder in a shared filesystem, except instead of containing files and folders, it can contain subdomains, funding, and expenditures” (Rea et al., 2020: 6). This metaphor of the file system presents as novel and transformative a hierarchical structure that effectively imitates traditional organization. Access within domains is governed by “permissions” which can be assigned to either human actors or Ethereum-based smart contracts to facilitate access to specific functionality. Colony presents itself as an open-ended framework, empowering users to define their own organizational structures while being “prescriptive only where necessary” (Rea et al., 2020: 6). Yet, permissions in a domain are inherited by the entire tree of sub-domains, a structure that trends toward the traditional, hierarchical structure of the firm.

Colony aims at a solution to problems for the firm—but it also offers a solution to the problem of the firm. This problem derives from the well-known “The Nature of the Firm”, by Hayek devotee and Mont Pèlerin Society member Ronald Coase (1937)—one of the two economics citations the white paper makes. ⁴ Coase's original question is why firms with planned organization and management hierarchies are necessary, given that market mechanisms should always offer more efficient ways of working. His answer was that at small scales, the costs associated with acquiring information, bargaining, and the monitoring and enforcement of agreements prohibit the effective functioning of markets (Coase, 1937; Rea et al., 2020: 3–4). There is a scale beneath which it is easier to coordinate production directly. The firm is, then, a solution to the problem of transaction costs at those scales.

The Colony authors note that, in the case of platforms built on new information technologies such as Uber or Airbnb, online auction sites or cryptocurrencies, “it is possible to dramatically reduce the transaction costs of the market mechanism by making search and information discovery easy, bargaining straightforward, and having policing and enforcement provided essentially for free by the platform” (Rea et al., 2020: 4). Firms, in Coase's sense of a direct, hierarchically organized unit of coordination, are outcompeted by these platforms and the markets they support. For Colony's advocates, technical, automated software solutions (particularly those utilizing the blockchain) have enabled market mechanisms to become such an efficient method of organization—near costless—they can operate at any scale, breaking through Coase's threshold and replacing hierarchical and social models of organization even within a firm-sized organization. This leaves the nature and scale of the digital organization radically open. Without a threshold where direct coordination of production is cheaper than the cost of coordinating via a market—a restriction that would lead organizations toward a certain size and nature based on the market costs of their sector at the time—an organization might be of any scale and do anything.

This scalelessness is part of the utopian vision of Colony which, we argue, may be indicative of the utopian dimensions of blockchain discourses more generally. Indeed, other digital organization white papers explicitly mention the scalability of their products, whether as a general feature of digital organizations (as in DAOstack: An Operating System for Collective Intelligence, 2018: 6) or as a feature specific to them, as with Aragon (Cuende and Izquierdo, 2017: 33). Conversely, there is next to no discussion of real-world applications of the technologies, except in passing or, as in the case of Aragon, to name a vague milieu of financial euphoria—“an ecosystem where organizations, entrepreneurs, and investors can efficiently and securely transact” (Cuende and Izquierdo, 2017: 1).

In this utopia, not only can technical solutions enable a fully efficient and all-pervading market, but they do so by freeing organizations from the restrictions of explicitly social forms of coordination, accountability, and human interpretation. This is reminiscent of early utopian visions of the Internet that saw the technology as enabling a digital community free of state bureaucracy as well as social contexts of race, gender, and class. ⁵ Within this frame, the blockchain offers a form of technological solutionism (Morozov, 2013) that, by stripping out social elements of organization, envisions a totally individualized subject participating directly in the market, with only a light-touch technical layer enabling the interaction. It should be noted that this vision has not held up in practice: one of the most high profile attempts to establish a blockchain-based digital organization, The DAO, failed spectacularly and demonstrated how code-based models of governance quickly “break down, and devolve into traditional models of sociality—using existing strong ties to negotiate an influence, argue and disagree” (Dupont, 2017: 158).

The overcoming of transaction costs even at small scales might suggest that there is no longer any need for firms. However, the authors of Colony justify the existence of digital organization by a somewhat downplayed mention of “coordinat[ing] complex production” (Rea et al., 2020: 4), some questions concerning trust, and a starting point in the notion of work—all of which suggest an unstated number of people coming together for an undetermined shared task. Colony presents, as a solution to the problem of the firm, a recapitulation of ideal, abstract organization through the vague promise of a self-organizing meritocracy.

A utopia of abstraction

The Colony white paper, then, describes an organizational architecture fully abstracted from the nature and scale of what is organized. Like other white papers, its overall focus is on abstract technical detail. Colony's organization is explicitly based on the architecture of computer operating systems, which provide a justification and a metaphor for it: divisions within an organization might be anything, but they are analogous to folders within a file system (see Rea et al., 2020: 6); and the language of permissions is taken directly from the technical language of file system administration. On the other hand, there are hints also at the very largest questions of administration: of political systems (“holacracy”, “aristocracy”) and the “separation of powers” (Rea et al., 2020: 8), all of which are suggestive of state governance. ⁶ Indeed, the name “Colony” itself hints at the organized community of an insect species (Colony.io, 2015), but also (in spite of Colony's rejection of the metaphor ⁷ ) at the organizational unit of empires, with all the associated suggestions of peoples organized, land taken, resources mined and the removal or subjugation of indigenous peoples. For the scale-invariant architecture of the Colony white paper, organization is organization: a company, a computer file system, and a state are subject to the same organizational logic. ⁸

The agnosticism of Colony with regards to its application is more radical, then, than a mere openness to what kind of medium-scale business it might support. It seems to reach toward any organizational task at all. Issues of human governance, arising out of a supposed Hobbsean background of mutual lack of trust between people—“Across the internet however, it's hard to have confidence in other people” (Rea et al., 2020: 4)—come under the remit of information technology. This is an extremely abstract vision—technology to perform any function, at any scale.

The vision embodied in digital organizations is a utopia of abstraction. It is the abstraction of organizational principles, constructed from the logic of code and the thinnest appeal to economic rationality without reference to society or prior social thought. It is a utopia of technological solutionism, in which not only can all problems be solved by technical means but problems—including, perhaps, the state and the social—are only regarded as such in the light of their own solutions (Morozov, 2013). It exemplifies the common move Donna Haraway (1990) identified in technological sciences and called the “informatics of domination”—an impetus to translate the world into a “problem of coding” where “all heterogeneity can be submitted to disassembly, reassembly, investment, and exchange” (164).

This utopia has a number of features. To begin with, it is enabled by the identification of code as a form of law, an identification that has become familiar since Lawrence Lessig's Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (2000). De Filippi and Wright (2018), for example, hope that “[w]ith blockchain technology and associated smart contracts, legal and contractual provisions can be translated into simple and deterministic code-based rules that will be automatically executed by the underlying blockchain network. Technical rules could increasingly assume the same role and functionality as legal rules” (p. 194). As Wendy Chun suggests, the idea of code as law is “every lawyer's dream of what law should be: automatically enabling and disabling certain actions and functioning at the level of everyday practice”, without the need for interpretation by human agents in courtrooms or other social contexts (Chun, 2011: 101). Law in the form of code abstracts from human concern to become a source of disembodied power: “code as source, code as true representation of action, indeed, code as conflated with, and substituting for, action” (Chun, 2013: 19). Chun argues this conflation of instruction and result forgets that code, like law, is a social phenomenon, both reflecting the social values that go into its composition and requiring interpretation of its own.

Chun's arguments are supported by scholarship on smart contracts, the technical basis of digital organizations. As Karen E. C. Levy has argued, “[a]utomated contracts tend to focus on contracts’ capacity for legal communication, perhaps to the expense of their social capacity” (Levy, 2017: 11). Smart contracts forget the important social role that contracts play—the setting of norms and the building of relationships through the initial negotiation as well as the interpretation of (sometimes imprecise) contract terms, and the provision of a strategic fallback option for negotiation outside of formal proceedings (5). Jeremy M. Sklaroff notes that automated contracts “must be written in precise, fully defined computer code; they are unmodifiable once executed; and they favor anonymous and one-off transactions”—rather than flexible, evolving, and lasting relations (Sklaroff, 2017: 291). Indeed, bugged smart contracts are vulnerable to exploitation and difficult to fix across a decentralized network. Automated law and contract, then, eschew any of the human contexts within which they exist and their role in producing trusting social relations between people.

Specifically, then, the utopia of digital organizations abstracts from the social—from any preexisting or emerging human organization. It imagines the vanishing of the social and interpretive dimensions of law, and indeed of society as such. It imagines and constructs a neutral background, in fact founded on obscuring of the power relations of state governance. The framing of Colony as providing simple laws that enable workers to self-organize around common goals serves to naturalize the assumptions such rules make about those they govern—that they are isolated, asocial individuals. Within a Colony “every member is rationally self-interested and focused entirely on maximizing personal utility and profit” (Rea et al., 2020: 4). As we will see, Colony would construct its users as perfect neoliberal subjects, naturalizing the social relations encoded by its programmers.

Importantly, the utopia of abstraction also evokes a form of sovereignty for its members: a sovereignty of the user, a “seemingly sovereign individual, the subject driven to know, driven to map, to zoom in and out, to manipulate, and to act” (Chun, 2013: 8, italics in original). In the case of Colony, this promise is held out in the form of a gradual maturing from “admin-controlled” to a “more decentralized, trustless style of operation” (Rea et al., 2020: 21). Initially clearly under the management of an admin group (the founders of Colony, operating through the central organizational unit or Metacolony), control will be progressively distributed to other members. This individual sovereignty is neatly compatible with the ways blockchain technologies have been constructed as a frontier by which blockchain pioneers can bring previously excluded resources within the purview of neoliberal property rights (Jutel, 2021).

At the core of Colony's system administration is the distribution of account permissions. In another example of the application of digital organization structures to social relations, permissions operate on a model derived from “the distinction between kernel space and user space in the design of operating systems, [wherein] permissions can be thought of as providing the system calls needed to give end-user applications (extensions) the ability of securely manipulate the underlying resources of the system”. The authors go on to note that “this model has proven very successful in enabling a wide variety of software applications to safely share computing resources” (Rea et al., 2020: 21). This logic of permission and access resembles, and arguably descends from, that of “timesharing”, the development of individual, terminal-based user access to time on a large and expensive mainframe. This was a technology that “scholars agree […] would invent the modern user”, parceling out processing power seamlessly to interface spaces of apparent freedom, even leisure, while obscuring their (costly) economic and technical realities (Hu, 2015: 39).

The hopes of the Colony authors represent the hopes of a system that evolves to frictionlessly distribute user authority over the population of its users, ultimately through procedures such as reputation-weighted voting. The utopia of abstraction expressed by Colony also serves to obfuscate a very important feature: the capacity of smart contracts on a blockchain to materialize the types of behavior and organizations described. While smart contracts might distribute tokens, financially reward participants, and apportion reputation when certain conditions are met, there is no evidence as yet they have any unique power to organize or control human behavior over traditional forms of organization. In addition, the focus on self-executing smart contracts elides that the content of those contracts—the conditions that must be fulfilled, the rules to be executed—must somehow be negotiated, agreed upon, and implemented by those designing the system, just as with traditional statutes, contracts, or agreements.

From cyberlibertarianism to state as computer

The abstraction from society found in Colony and other digital organizations locates their vision within a broad ethos of cyberlibertarianism, a faith in technical solutions that recurs and proliferates within tech communities linking “ecstatic enthusiasm for electronically mediated forms of living with radical, right-wing libertarian ideas about the proper definition of freedom, social life, economics, and politics” (Winner, 1997: 14). These ideas remain present in the discursive space surrounding cryptocurrencies and other blockchain technologies, including digital organizations (Golumbia, 2016). Dahlberg (2010) argues cyberlibertarianism invokes signifiers that characterize the Internet as a nonhierarchical, disembodied space of free-flowing information—a frictionless, meritocratic “marketplace of ideas” allowing free expression unconstrained by bureaucracy, regulation, or authoritarian (particularly state) control. The subjects of this space are sovereign individuals who transcend borders of geography and culture, for whom ideal democracy is “a conflict-free arena, harmonized efficiently and strategically through networked private interactions, exchanges, and transactions” (Dahlberg, 2010: 336).

The cyberlibertarian discourse is “persuasive in (and advance[ing]) a neoliberal-oriented world” (Dahlberg, 2010: 333) positioning itself in opposition to the authority of the nation state, presenting an alternative model of governance wholly defined by market logics. This free-market governance is enabled by the technological networking of private individuals, whose autonomous, rational, self-interested, and utility-maximizing decision-making about how to interact, transact, and consume constitutes democracy when distributed over the network. Politics is thereby “privatized, individualized and instrumentalized” (Dahlberg, 2010: 336); democracy becomes a market, and everyone votes with their dollar. The cyberlibertarian faith in technological solutions—assumed to be neutral, objective, and rational—obscures the fact that such technology is constrained by, and subject to, the ordinary dynamics of geography, culture, and materiality (Dahlberg, 2010). Not everyone has equal access to the network—nation state governments still regulate online transactions and protect online privacy, and online communities and discourse are shaped by the profit motive of corporate platform holders. The sociality of the extra-digital world is imprinted on the digital world. By proposing technical solutions to broad social problems Colony exemplifies cyberlibertarianism: flattening dynamics of power and disconnecting people from socio-political context, it naturalizes its own neoliberal assumptions.

The cyberlibertarianism present in digital organizations is also found in the related case of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. As David Golumbia argues, “Bitcoin, and the blockchain technology on which it rests satisfy needs that make sense only in the context of right wing politics” (Golumbia, 2016: 20). They rely on a conception of freedom that prioritizes individual sovereignty enacted through the accumulation and maintenance of private value free from the (assumed tyrannical) regulation of central banks and state economic policy. It is a logic according to which governments always restrict freedoms, while markets and capital are accountable and democratizing. From this perspective, cryptocurrency is an opportunity for investment as well as for destabilizing states, exiting from their currencies, and deregulating finance. Much of this right-wing politics is preserved in digital organizations: a model for how society might organize, absent the state, to preserve right-wing notions of individual sovereignty, autonomy, and liberty.

Colony's utopia of abstraction, however, is not only anti-statist. Despite the market logics built into it, it does not hope to reduce all organizations, including states, to markets. If neoliberal assumptions can be found throughout its justification and technical construction—including stable, autonomous user accounts and system sharing technologies and the assumption of universal competition and trustlessness—it also necessarily retains a belief in the organization as such, at least to the extent it can position itself as a technical solution to individualism through the community. This is part of the question arising from the overcoming of Coase's problem by the appeal to a form of frictionless capitalism in the digital lowering of transaction costs: why is an organization necessary? ⁹ The Colony authors claim to believe in bringing together isolated, neoliberal subjects through a structure that internalizes market dynamics but consciously adds to them. Colony appeals to its users to come together to coordinate a business, a common task, or set of tasks.

At its most ambitious—as indicated by gestures toward the language of state governance and separations of powers—it hopes, through the identification of computer and state organization, to offer a replacement for the state. Sinclair Davidson, De Filippi and Potts (2018) have argued that blockchain technologies are Coasian rather than Schumpeterian technologies. They do not drive productivity growth through creative destruction within the economic order, instead establishing a new kind of order: “a self-governing organization with the coordination properties of a market, the governance properties of a commons and the constitutional, legal and monetary properties of a nation state” (Sinclair Davidson, De Filippi and Potts, 2018: 654). Indeed, the founders of Colony seem to forget or ignore the existence of the state; Colony seems to be founded outside or after the state, with only a Hobbsean world of trustless individuals to coordinate. As Adam Greenfield notes, digital organizations do it hard, foregoing the support that (contra cyberlibertarian discourse) states in fact give to firms, for example, in the form of limitation of liability. All that exists is a trustless background, a problem to be solved in effect by a digital leviathan. The organization takes on the role of solving the apparent problem of trust, one that is, apparently, the sole remit of state sovereignty.

Organizations like Colony, then, are not businesses as such, operating within the structures set up by the state (Greenfield, 2017), but coordinations of activity that take place only against a supposed background of the state of nature. They emerge out of this contextless background, in which, as suggested also by the white paper's lack of reference to other sources, no prior organizational thought is in place.

Ants or empires

As we have suggested, white papers describing a particular technology in generic terms serve, in part, a rhetorical purpose of social action: “to generate interest in—and promote sales of—that technology” (Malone and Wright, 2018: 114; Miller, 1984). The Colony white paper, with the support of its surrounding texts (especially the project's website and blog) can be seen as performing the rhetorical task of building enthusiasm through the evocation of a utopian future—a form of boosterism. As Beller has it, a somewhat vague vision “in which government by the many (computers) will take over state functions, and agency will be enacted from the margins of distributed platform sovereignty, constitutes a large part of the discursive excitement and therefore of the general development surrounding [blockchain] technology” (Beller, 2017: 171). ¹⁰ This work has two possible broad aims: on the one hand, the appeal to a genuine, felt need for sovereignty (or opposition to state sovereignty), and the desire for financial gain on the other. It can, that is, target participants emphasizing the technology's utility, or it can target investors interested in returns.

It is in the first of these aspects—digital organizations’ promise of sovereignty for their users—that we can locate both their positive utopian aspect, and the wider failure to imagine and organize popular sovereignty. That promise, that is, can be seen against the background of a broader waning of actual sovereignty in political institutions. In an analysis that draws on evidence from European polities but arguably applies far more broadly, Peter Mair claims that “the people, or the ordinary citizenry, are becoming effectively non-sovereign” (Mair, 2013: 2). ¹¹ Mair identifies a growing, mutual disengagement between the citizenry and the political class with the citizenry “retreat[ing] into private life or more into more specialized and often ad hoc forms of representation” (16) while the political class turns to increasingly legitimated “non-political, or depoliticized, modes of decision-making” (19).

While this waning of popular sovereignty has a number of factors, Mair focuses on one: the failure of political parties, as represented by dwindling party membership and participation from citizens, and party leaders’ retreat into roles determined by institutional and public office. Parties, for Mair, “would normally offer a point of connection and site of engagement for citizens and their political leaders” (18). Popular sovereignty can be seen as closely connected to popular involvement in party organization, with frequent practical contact and intermingling of membership and leadership.

The broader point to make here is that sovereignty requires a context of organizational structure, and without that context it wanes or disappears altogether. The stridency of the populist challenge in recent years—more spectacular and widespread since Mair's book was published—can be understood as a response to the loss of popular democracy, the expression of people without any meaningful point of contact with an otherwise apolitical, technocratic leadership.

If Mair is right, there is a sense in which the advocates of digital organizations are not wrong to locate their efforts in the context of a void. If their organizations were thought of merely as businesses, they would be hopelessly naïve to ignore the context of support that states offer, from the limitation of liability and tax write-offs right up to corporate bailouts. ¹² Seen, however, for their organizational promise of sovereignty—the involvement of their users in a shared social task—digital organizations offer an automated, market-based alternative to the party, an aggregation and organization of users’ sovereign decisions. They might originate, not only out of the promise of new technologies, but from a genuine social need for popular sovereignty otherwise unresolved. The Colony white paper can be seen as an attempt to argue for that vision: state as computer, and personal sovereignty enacted at the keyboard.

This promise of sovereignty should be seen in the light of the other promise: the hope for a return on investment. Part of the rationale for a white paper is to enact and prompt such excitement with the goal of raising funds for the project. In this regard, Colony and other blockchain projects might seem much like the “lean platforms” (such as Uber) described by Nick Srnicek in Platform Capitalism (2017). The “growth before profit” model of these platforms aims, not to make money, but simply to attract users, with the long-term aim of undercutting competition and achieving monopoly status through network effects that make use of the platform ubiquitous and unavoidable.

If lean platforms typically have relied on the largesse of venture capital, however, the point of blockchain projects is that they typically aim instead to raise funds through Initial Coin Offerings (of dubious legality, at least within the United States—see du Rose, 2017b) whereby participants buy the internal tokens of the project. The blockchain boosterism of the Colony white paper need not have the dual audience of a more typical startup white paper: for the user, the promise of utility (in the form of sovereign control); for the investor, the promise of returns. Indeed, its users are its investors. Colony developer Jack du Rose explicitly distances their position from startup boosterism that seeks venture capital: “In several recent cases […] a fancy website, and (using the term exceedingly loosely) a ‘white paper’, has been all that's necessary for a pre-product, pre-revenue startup to raise millions of dollars, thereby avoiding altogether the wheat-chaff sorting process of—crazy I know—actually building something people want before asking investors for money” (du Rose, 2017a). Du Rose appeals to utility—“something people want”—as well as frugality, “a vital quality in a startup”. Frugality “stands you in good stead when you do have money”; it “makes you concentrate”; it means your hires are not there for the money, but “because they vibe with your mission and culture” (du Rose, 2017a).

The resulting discourse recommends prudence for the larger good and the avoidance of excess, all of which contribute to a capitalist spirit of hard work, savings, and reinvestment—suggesting a return of Weber's Protestant ethic and a promised place in the Kingdom to come (Weber, 2012). This discourse is curiously mixed in its messages, with belief in the project, its vibe, mission and culture, its democratic and transformative potential combined with calls to “[d]o it for your own rational self-interest” (du Rose, 2017b). The blockchain version of “growth before profit” means belief and (literal, if small scale) buy-in, with the hope of later payoff—return on investment, perhaps, or participation in organized political sovereignty. In this, it retains something of the feel of bitcoin investments: “as investors and enthusiasts say, buying bitcoin (limited to 21 million coins each divisible into 100 million units) is like getting in on the ground floor of the internet” (Beller, 2017: 171)—with the vision of massive profits and the thrill of being part of it all. It is not, then, that self-interest is the hidden truth of a thereby corrupt decentralized utopia. Self-interest is openly part of the vision, a progressively decentralizing utopia in which empty selfishness and disciplined belief, investor and would-be sovereign people all converge within a single user-subject position. It should be clear, however, that the promised financial returns will never in practice be evenly distributed. More profits will accrue to early adopters of the technology, who also have a vested interest in attracting cash investments lest their own token remains confined to the blockchain and unable to be realized.

This combination of belief and self-interest allows us to regard the digital organization white paper as a very distant ideological descendent of those early modern texts that display, according to Antonis Balasopoulos, a “convergence between other-worldly idealism and mundane will-to-power” (Balasopoulos, 2004: 4). Balasopoulos notes “the interplay between Utopian desire and a peculiarly self-effacing kind of colonialist ambition” across utopian texts—the ways in which they model the establishment of a new society on land that is both idle and occupied, and in which indigenous people might be remolded into proper utopian subjects (Balasopoulos, 2004: 4). This association of utopia and colonialism suggests a supplement to the more usual accounts of digital colonialism, which define colonialism explicitly in terms of extractivism (Madianou, 2019: 3). It shifts the focus, that is, onto utopian ideology, the imagination, establishment, and imposition of a new order, rather than extractive practice, and onto the specific logic of the settler colony as opposed to the franchise colony (in the terminology of Patrick Wolfe, 1999)—however much the two can in practice coexist. Writing about settler colonial ideology, Lorenzo Veracini draws on an observation that “Plato […] refers to the relationship between body and soul as ‘colonisation’”, to argue that “the soul's proprietary command over bodily matters […] is mirrored by a settler determination to possess and dominate place” (Veracini, 2010: 93). This is suggestive of an impulse in digital organizations to regard the social body as a passive recipient of the digital organizational mind—both an empty space to be occupied and an idle collection of individuals waiting for the digital organization to raise them up to their potential as sovereign individuals.

The utopia of abstraction we have described is a frontierist utopia, then, not only because it aims to extend the bounds of neoliberal governance into new geographical territory (Jutel, 2021) or make deterritorialized claims over the potentially stateless (Cheeseman, 2022). It is also ideologically frontierist even before it is enacted, in the sense of its participants’ flight from the state, or indeed imagined extra- or prestate location, and their desire for position and opportunity in a newly self-organized world. In this, the utopia of Colony repeats a form of logic peculiar to the settler colony—the logic of entering a space (in this case with a technological foundation) to lay claim to it, to educate and organize, and to speculate on imagined future returns, all the while failing to confront the human and environmental costs of such speculation.

That this vision can appear to be driven by its users as much as by its leaders is suggested by the dynamics of early settler colonies. Indeed, according to James Belich’s (2009) historical account, Anglo-world settlements such as Australia, New Zealand, and California were founded on a “growth from growth” model: land, emptied of indigenous occupants, sold unseen on the promise of a better life in the colony—a promise made by those pioneers who had come before, who benefit from the sale. Advocates of blockchain based digital organizations such as Colony do the ideological work to imagine an abstract, contextless background—one that evokes settler ideology's image of a land without people which simultaneously relies on a utopian boosterism that evokes the settler project. In this way, much like the settler colony, Colony hopes to become the only game in town, an economy defined only by faith in its own promise and the import of new members into an organizational space that would hope to replace all others—including the state. In this sense, Colony is driven by expansionism, investment and a logic of “get there first”—the logic of a land grab as much as a gold rush.

Conclusion

In many ways, the utopian promise of digital organizations articulated by Colony simply repeats the neoliberal assumptions of the status quo, despite its seemingly revolutionary rhetoric. They present a technical solution to Coase's problem of the firm that, their advocates imagine, would enable frictionless, efficient, meritocratic markets at the level of interpersonal organization. This is achieved through the implementation of code as law: autonomous rules enacted without the need for human interpretation. Simultaneously, they leave the potential scale of code-as-law radically open, with implications that supplanting social organization with a light software layer could yield efficiency across any scale and could do so “from the bottom up”. This process of abstraction—from scale and from social context—effectively elides existing forms of social organization, imagining the world as an empty space to be filled with a blockchain-enabled market. Through this abstraction, advocates reinscribe their own assumptions about trustless society, technical solutionism, and their own centrality, but they also articulate a utopian vision of how the space they have imagined should be filled—sovereign, rational, self-interested neoliberal subjects governed by the light touch of self-executing code.

This vision is in some ways an alluring one that promises users their own individual sovereignty where they are otherwise disenfranchised by a loss of popular democracy. Such a vision of political power—state as computer and personal sovereignty enacted at the keyboard—resembles less the self-organizing, complex system of an ant colony, and more the logic of the settler colony. It does the ideological work of imagining “empty” space to be occupied, obscuring its own values behind a facade of presumed technological neutrality and expertise, all in pursuit of a return on investment. In that sense, blockchain-based digital organizations, as currently imagined, are largely a project of neoliberal worldbuilding and a speculative attempt to extract value where previously there was none.

We should be clear exactly whose interests such an ideological project serves, and why we should be intensely skeptical of the utopian claims of digital organization advocates. Their abstract appeals to popular sovereignty obscure the reality that any new uptake in digital organizations, as with other blockchain technologies, serves mostly to financially benefit their early adopters (including their designers). Their token investments benefit from user growth, and remain illiquid without the cash injections that mainstream adoption brings. The sidelining of the state or open hostility toward it serves to evade regulatory impediments—perceived or real—to the accumulation of profit. It is hard to ignore the resonances between this ideological project and the 2020s boom of NFTs, the growing corporate push for Web3 technologies of user ownership, and utopian claims about the “metaverse”. Through cryptocurrency, digital organizations and NFTs the commitment to a neoliberal world and the expansion of capital's remit for speculation at the expense of the environment has held firm. As a technology, blockchain has a long way to go to prove it can be anything else.