ICS Seminar Series - Jack Parkin

Date: Thursday 14 July 2016
Time: 11.30am–1pm
Venue: EB.G.17, Western Sydney University, Parramatta South campus

Jack Parkin

(Institute for Culture and Society)

The Algorithmic Geographies of Bitcoin: Material Architectures of a 'Decentralised' Code-Money

Abstract

Money and code are two 'things' that saturate our contemporary life-worlds. The emergence of Bitcoin, a form of decentralised code-money, has facilitated new geographies of value exchange that 'move' across space in a neoteric fashion. Bitcoin and blockchain technology (the algorithmic architecture that Bitcoin utilises) are moving into the mainstream yet few understand their applications outside of the industry of micro-finance and tech start-ups. What's more Bitcoin has fallen into an all-too-familiar unproductive digital rhetoric that aligns itself with the traditional immaterial and ethereal ideologies of cyberspace. I reorganise a 'follow the thing' methodology and apply it to the Bitcoin algorithm (the blockchain) in order to trace a bitcoin in a cross-border transaction from Australia to the United States. This uncovers what it means to transfer value across a peer-to-peer algorithmic network and what human and non-human actors are brought into the fray to support this new geography of value exchange.

This paper ultimately shows that algorithms are not digital spectres that apparently operate outside of any real space but are fundamentally of-the-world: 'materialising' as visceral components of reality. By following a digital thing (a bitcoin), this understanding helps define what a digital unit of cryptocurrency actually is as a cultural object and how it comes to intersect with the world (economy). Contrary to popular imaginings of Bitcoin as spaceless, I argue that Bitcoin is inherently spatially infused and it is this geographical organisation of its material-digital architecture that allows it to become a political, social and economic reality.

Biography

Jack Parkin (Twitter: @parkinspace (opens in a new window)) is a PhD candidate at the Institute for Culture and Society. He has an undergraduate degree in Human Geography from the University of Exeter where he specialised in digital embodiment and the blurring of actuality and virtuality in the online economy of Second Life. His Masters degree in Sustainable Development from the same university looked at the (in)ability of social networks to encourage sustainable behaviour from global connectivity. During this time he worked as a researcher for the College of Life and Environmental Sciences with Associate Professor Ian Cook collating followthethings.com (opens in a new window), which catalogues academic examples of commodity activism. His research pertains to the geography of Bitcoin and the spatial connotations of using a 'decentralised' digital currency.

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The Institute for Culture and Society is located in Parramatta, “the place where the eel sets down” in Dharug language,
along the north bank of the Parramatta River. It sits on the traditional lands and waters of the Burramattagal people of the Dharug Nation,
who have been stewards and caretakers of these territories since time immemorial, in what today is referred to as Greater Western Sydney,
one of the most diverse cultural communities in the world and home to the largest number of Indigenous Australians in the country.
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and Wiradjuri peoples as traditional custodians and Indigenous knowledge-holders, whose storytelling serve
as historical record, a form of teaching and learning, a way to care for Country,
and an expression of Indigenous culture and identity.