Web3 and the Question Concerning Technology (ACLA 2025)

Digital technologies have transformed our personal lives as well as our political, economic, and social contexts. The Internet-ization (if not the internationalization) of the world by technology has enabled unprecedented forms of cooperation and competition, kindled modes of connection and alienation, and expanded the stage for the visibility of social and political issues. Although these technologies have gathered more people than ever before in a single (non-)place, theorists such as Wendy Chun and Jodi Dean have shown that the act and rhetoric of these digital gatherings have nevertheless extended the politics of enclosure and privatization at an equally unprecedented scale, withdrawing the commons even as people find themselves (through technology) in common touch.

This seminar seeks contributions that address the following question: In what way does blockchain technology (Web3) participate in or resist these politics? If "the question concerning technology" was urgent for Heidegger because he rejected technology's reduction of the world to a picture—that is, to what can be captured and disclosed—then blockchain technology, which advances claims not only to reconfigure capture but to engineer means of escape, merits deeper consideration than it has so far received.

We are open to submissions that expand arguments that Web3 is mired in "right-wing extremism" (Golumbria) through the legacies of accelerationism, "Dark Enlightenment," etc., as exemplified in the work of Curtis Yarvin, Nick Land, and others. Grappling with these traditions of anti-democratic illiberalism and anarcho-capitalism are essential to our understanding of Web3's broader context.

But we are especially interested in subtler arguments that read Web3 through the lenses, e.g., of the Occupy Wall Street movement and the ongoing crises of financialization, through dialogue with cypherpunk thought and writings, and through theories and experiments in (digital) government and collective power. While Bitcoin has received the most attention for its astringent Austrian emphasis on scarcity, the plethora of "altcoins" from Ethereum onward—with technical innovations running from novel consensus mechanisms to Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), and more—have furnished much richer and more complex sites for engagement. 

Accordingly, we invite proposals that examine Web3 in light of:

• cypherpunk themes in sci-fi and speculative media
• philosophies of programming, virtuality, distributed networks and being, control and evasion
• political theories of power: sovereign, constituent, destituent, instituent
• aesthetics of anonymity, pseudonymy, impersonality, especially to counter majoritarian formations
• concepts and histories of money, critiques of financialization, racial capitalism, and
• NFT museology and the visual culture of Web3.