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Paper short abstract:

Utilizing the findings of a multi-sited ethnography on Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), their collectors, and their creators, this presentation aims to highlight the potential of understanding ownership as part of processes of economization.

Paper long abstract:

How is ownership done? I explore this question through the peculiar case of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), a blockchain asset that collectors, artists and creators use to economize digital objects such as digital works of art. Before their inception, these digital objects presented difficulties to be both traded and owned due to their almost limitless reproducibility. NFTs, posed by many as a solution to this conundrum, act as a prosthesis to these files by playing the role of a unique digital certificate of ownership to the holder. Through a multi-sited ethnography carried out in both offline and online settings, I trace NFTs and the actors entangled with them.

Debates on ownership across the social sciences have historically taken the notion of property as a ‘bundle of rights’ as a parting point. (Boydell & Searle, 2014; Carruthers & Ariovich, 2004; Davies, 2012; C. Hann, 2005, 2006) Here instead, my focus is to treat ownership as an empirical question (Strang & Busse, 2011b; Strathern, 1999, 2001; Verran, 1998), something that is accomplished in practice and which takes shape within a socio-technical agéncement (Birch & Muniesa, 2020; Caliskan, 2007; Callon & Muniesa, 2005; Knorr Cetina & Bruegger, 2002a; Poon, 2007; Preda, 2006). I trace how actors coalesced to enact ownership and – with it – economized digital objects. Through this approach, I aim to highlight the potential of understanding ownership as part of processes of economization.