Paper short abstract:

This paper explores liminalities crossed in ethnographic research about blockchain technology. It includes reflections on the methodological mixture of digital and live terrains, but also on the issues researched projects met while managing implementation in digital-material hybrid grounds.

Paper long abstract:

Doing anthropology about computation technologies and current, and increasingly pervasive, modes of socio-technical interaction brings about manifold analytic and methodological challenges.

In this paper, I intend to address some of such challenges stemming from research about (Fin)Tech imaginaries and the use of blockchain technology. Departing from ethnography carried out in online and live terrains in the Netherlands, I wish to draw attention to two, interconnected, liminal situations. On the one hand at a methodological level, and on the other hand at subject level. The first situation regards the hybrid ethnographic landscapes involved in anthropology about (blockchain) computation practices, where ethnography is not only carried out through live interactions and observations, but expanded into online dimensions - thus reconfiguring research terrains and demanding for further reflections about theory and practice. The second situation regards the liminalities of blockchain projects, whose imaginaries and plans reflect a forming, and increasingly intense, continuum between digital and 'real world' spheres of action, that seems to become accepted but not without its challenges.

Departing from reflections about my own fieldwork, and on case studies about blockchain-based FinTech solutions - namely banking experiments and a project for a non-volatile crypto token - I intend to debate the pragmatics of working in liminal grounds: regarding ethnographic research in hybrid terrains (digital and material), and regarding the realization of blockchain-based financial and entrepreneurial experiments in digital, but also real-world contexts with their regulations and materialities.

Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at development processes of three innovative technologies: ultrasound for tactile feedback, low-cost microcomputer, and inclusive indoor navigation technologies.

Paper long abstract:

Creating a new technology involves dealing with a number of risks. These include the risk that it won't work, that development will be too expensive, that there is too much competition in the market, or that there might be insufficient demand. To deal with these uncertainties, developers rely not only on their scientific knowledge and technical expertise. They also appeal to belief. Instinct, gut feeling, and believing strongly in one's idea are what makes engineers persist in their creative quests.

This paper discusses the ways of knowing, and of not knowing, that are employed in long-term processes of invention. We will also reflect on the challenges that working with engineers as epistemic partners (Marcus 2013) poses to the ethnographer, especially in developing empathy, and in questioning her own assumptions about forms of knowledge production in physical sciences.

This discussion draws upon the findings of a wider study on creativity in engineering design conducted with award-winning technologists in the UK. It will focus, specifically, on three case studies in computing: ultrasound for tactile feedback, low-cost microcomputer, and inclusive indoor navigation technologies.

Paper short abstract:

The goal of the paper is to elaborate on the way computing technologies, automation systems and processes reconstruct the working environment and influence social relations in a contemporary production plant.

Paper long abstract:

Workers of the factories that are part of global corporations operate within an environment dominated by various computing technologies and automation systems, which determine multiple aspects of work experience to a substantial extent. Systems, programs and algorithms create an infrastructure that determines communication, managerial practices (including technologies of the self), production processes, and the way workers approach their everyday tasks and challenges. Computers gather, store and partially analyze an enormous amount of data used to control, discipline and shape the behavior of people, materials, products, and machines. In this presentation I would like to show the specificities of the socio-technical assemblage and how it shapes the nature of such work. In particular, I will focus on working relations and communication, and the way work ethics is imagined and performed. Discussing the issue, I will refer to the ethnographic research I conducted between 2015 and 2016 in a production plant located in Lower Silesia Province, in south-western Poland.

Paper short abstract:

This paper is a short exposition on some methodological shortcomings and opportunities I faced while conducting 12 months of fieldwork within a computer science laboratory in the UK.

Paper long abstract:

For my doctoral research, I carried out one year of participant observation within a "Science Automation" laboratory, whose scientists used artificial intelligence and robotics to automate microbiological experiments.

As I had no previous experience studying scientists, and had at most a fleeting understanding of what carrying out work with computer scientists entailed, I was thrown inside and had to navigate a social universe I knew relatively little about -- in proper ethnographic fashion.

Thus, rather than positing what should and should not be done - as I recognise anthropological fieldwork is first and foremost about learning how to conduct oneself in the field -, it is my intention here to merely highlight some things I wish I knew before starting my fieldwork, and recount how I managed to gradually negotiate a place to myself among my informants.

Paper short abstract:

The paper discusses the fundamental misalignment between the new notions of trust proposed by the emerging digital technologies and the traditional forms of social trust people know and recognize.

Paper long abstract:

The emergence of new digital economies involves unprecedented redistribution of trust, transfer of ownership, and circulation of capital and goods in unfamiliar contexts. However, despite their global intentions, most recent digital technologies are the result of ideas and practices generated in particular cultural and economic spaces. The paper discusses the ethos brought about by mainstream digital technologies, such as blockchain, Internet of Things, and social media developed in Western countries and some of the social consequences. The paper suggests that one important source of ambiguity in terms of trust is represented by overlooking the distinction between trust in computing systems and social trust.

The paper is informed by my current research in the design and consumption of personal digital technologies in the UK. It shows that most of the emerging digital economies are based on the assumption that people need technology to ease and bring efficiency to their everyday lives and advance ideas of public good and social well-being. However, these new economies also promote contested notions of value, ownership, and trust mainly because they add new levels of abstraction to the economic and social relations in late capitalism.

The argument of the paper is that unlike the traditional forms of social trust people know and enjoy, most emerging digital economies tend to impose rather partial and / or exclusive notions of trust that are designed to work in very particular social and cultural settings. The challenge is represented by the misalignment between different concurrent forms of trust.

Paper short abstract:

This paper addresses the technological design of blockchain technologies and the co-relations between people and technology in the creation of meaning. It draws on a collaborative ethnography with the Economic Space Agency and reflects on the particularities of ethnographic fieldwork.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on the Economic Space Agency, a start-up dedicated to 're-engineering' economics and finance. It aims to contribute to thicken the body of ethnographic accounts of blockchain-based practices in particular and of socio-financial experiments more generally. It focuses on the creation of meaning in socio-technical arrangements - in looking at a particular network it identifies order-making elements, consider both objects - such as blockchain - and language - such as metaphors, as strategic points of connection; what is lost is the absolute distinction between representation and things, and what remains is the attention on meaning production (Latour 1987, 1996, Callon 1998, MacKenzie 2009). Methods included virtual ethnography (Kozinets 2010), semi-structured interviews, participant observation and document analysis. As a community, the Economic Space Agency is a socio-technical arrangement in itself, mobilizing a series of on-line digital environments for members to establish communication and coordinate action, bringing to life a new, non pre-existing group that must be approached considering its rhizomatic agencement (Callon 2004, 2005). Furthermore, in encountering an epistemic community / community of practice, collaboration is placed as a central tool for the ethnographic research (see Holmes and Marcus 2008). The reflections around the ethnographic fieldwork point to the importance of signaling the creation of situated orders through the orientation of objects and words (Garfinkel 1967) and to the attention on imagination and discursive practices (Sneath et al. 2009, Star 1999, Rorty 1989).

Paper short abstract:

This paper, based on the study of the two-sided rating system used by Uber, will show how anthropology and computational methods can be combined to better understand the perceptions of the riders and the drivers who rate each other after every trip.

Paper long abstract:

As Uber's stake in India, particularly in the metros, is on the rise, it becomes important for this ridesharing company to maintain the quality of service, trust, and reliability when moving people around the city space. To ensure this while also maintaining employee satisfaction, Uber tends to follow the two-sided rating system where both the rider and the driver judge and rate each other after every trip.

Though popularly advertised by Uber as a trust-building exercise to increase cooperation and respect between the rider and the driver, such rating through algorithmic design also has an impact on the driver-rider matching when ordering a cab service, thus in a way affecting the riding experience and the value for money. The system has several unintended consequences in a socio-cultural context such as India and very specifically for the middle class who use this service often. The pressure to maintain a certain high score very often gets juxtaposed with the burden to present themselves and constantly judge each other in ways that sometimes increase rater bias.

This paper using both ethnography from an anthropological perspective and computational methods intends to show how the riders and the drivers perceive and rate each other and how such perceptions may lead to rating collusions and sometimes in collisions.