Log out. A Glossary of Technological Resistance and Decentralization

Much academic research in social sciences and technology is focused on scrutinising the adverse effects of the current structure of the information economy on individual, social, cultural and political life, and on the global distribution of power. Critical efforts point at the enclosure of users within platform ecosystems and at the logics of data accumulation: how they compress individual autonomy and create hard to reverse power asymmetries. But thinking critically against such a heavily centralised, data-intensive digital economy also implies imagining possible alternatives. Against the logics of information capitalism, which want users to be dumb and innovation centrally controlled, decentralised, privacy-enhancing technologies emerge, often from the peripheries of the internet, as tools for individual and collective emancipation and resistance. Unlike ‘big tech’-generated terminology, however, terms that originate in peripheral, subversive, resistant parts of the internet remain obscure, unheard-of or misunderstood by most people. If discourses are performative, the obscurity of these terms suggests that the alternative visions they propose are always already in the past, or in a future that struggles to materialize. With a highly ideological charge, discourses on decentralised technologies have generated a wide vocabulary of context-specific terms that associate political, societal and technological issues in rather original ways. Just as any other subject, however, these technologies (as tools, as conceptual design, as symbols) are rooted in specific geographies, ideologies, gender relations, and reflect the biases encoded in these contexts. The related terminology is used and interpreted according to different purposes and pre- and/or mis- conceptions. This results in uninformed hypes, prejudices, lost opportunities for discussion. This book brings together voices from various fields of intellectual inquiry, based on the idea that technological, legal and societal aspects of the information sphere are interlinked and co-dependent from each other. In order to tackle the existing gap in shared semantics, this glossary converges the efforts of experts from various disciplines to build a shared vocabulary on the social, technical, economic, political aspects of decentralised, distributed or sovereign technologies: artefacts which seek to challenge the status quo by, for example, circumventing law enforcement, resisting surveillance, or being participative. The idea of this glossary arose from the need for a workable, flexible and multidisciplinary resource for terminological clarity, which reflects instead of denying complexity. Situating the terms emerging through technology development in the wider context of multidisciplinary scientific, policy and political discourses, this glossary provides a conceptual toolkit for the study of the various political, economic, legal and technical struggles that decentralised, encryption-based, peer-to-peer technologies bring about and go through. Choosing relevant technology-related terms and understanding them is to investigate their affordances within a given ecosystem of actors, discourses and systems of incentives. This requires an interdisciplinary, multi-layered approach that is attentive to the interlinkages between technological design nuances and socio-political, economic implications. The glossary was envisioned as a long-term collaborative project, and as a work-in-progress, as new entries are periodically added over time. The present book collects the entries published on the Internet Policy Review between 2021 and 2023. Therefore, it represents the first volume of what hopefully will be a long-term, ever-evolving editorial collaboration, whose sources of inspiration and goals evolve with the evolving of the broader discussions on decentralized technologies. Initiated by the Blockchain and Society Policy Research Lab (University of Amsterdam), in collaboration with P2P Models (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), Trust in Distributed Environments (Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society, Berlin) and Blockchain Gov teams (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris), the project is backed by a solid academic network. However, it strives to exit the academic rooms, and it welcomes contributions from experts, activists and researchers whose perspective is crucial to this discussion.