Read more
Following the catastrophic events of the 2008 global financial crisis, an anonymous hacker released Bitcoin to claw back power from commercial and central banks. Its underlying architecture, blockchain, is now championed for delivering a decentralised global economy-a world free from hierarchy and control. Money Code Space shatters these emancipatory claims by revealing acute geographies of power that lie behind blockchain networks. Drawing on first-hand
experience in cryptocurrency communities and start-up companies from Silicon Valley to London, Jack Parkin untangles the complex web of culture, politics, and economics that truly drive decentralisation.
About the author
Jack Parkin is an Adjunct Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University, where he researches the political economy of cryptocurrency and blockchain ecosystems. His ethnographic work focuses on points of control in digital networks, analysing software development models, technical infrastructure, and start-up industries. He also provides consultancy services for automation and distributed ledger solutions internationally.
Summary
Following the catastrophic events of the 2008 global financial crisis, an anonymous hacker released Bitcoin to claw back power from commercial and central banks. It quickly garnered an enthusiastic following who sought to forge a stable and democratic global economy--a world free from hierarchy and control. In their eyes, Bitcoin's underlying architecture, blockchain, hailed the dawn of decentralisation.
Money Code Space shatters these emancipatory claims. In their place, Jack Parkin constructs a new framework for revealing the geographies of power that lie behind blockchain networks. Drawing on first-hand experience in cryptocurrency communities and start-up companies from Silicon Valley to London, Parkin untangles the complex web of culture, politics, and economics that truly drive decentralisation.
Additional text
Jack Parkin's book expertly integrates the fields of financial and digital geographies through the compelling case studies of the cryptocurrency of Bitcoin and the blockchain technology supporting it. From these strong empirics, Parkin makes a strong contribution to advancing and integrating theories of finance, code/space, software/data studies, and money. It is an excellent piece of scholarship and highly recommended for those studying the construction of financial and digital spaces and how the visions and dreams encoded in software are negotiated and materialized in economic practices. This book highlights the constructed, contested and political nature of so-called "neutral" technologies and moreover demonstrates how a technology designed to be the ultimate in decentralization, nevertheless relies on centralization in order to function.
