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Paper short abstract

This paper offers a geoanthropological critique of Donna Haraway’s (in)famous credo “Make Kin Not Babies.” It argues that techno-capitalism produces non-biological kinship infrastructures that fix hierarchy and scarcity via immutable distributed ledgers such as blockchain.

Paper long abstract

This paper develops a geoanthropological analysis of blockchain technologies to critically revisit Donna Haraway’s slogan “Make Kin Not Babies!” in the context of the Anthropocene. While kinship has been mobilized as an ethical response to planetary crisis, the paper argues that kin-making is not inherently emancipatory and can be reorganized as an infrastructure of domination when technologized. Focusing on blockchain, the paper shows how techno-capitalism produces non-biological forms of kinship that regulate social reproduction through immutable ledgers and fixed scarcity. Drawing on Marxist anthropology and the lineage mode of production, it demonstrates how blockchain reproduces senior/junior hierarchies analogous to lineage systems, while suspending the redistributive effects of death and inheritance. Situating these dynamics within debates on entropy and geopower, the paper argues that blockchain articulates two strategies for escaping Earth-bound limits: the production of post-mortal forms of value and ownership insulated from biological finitude, and the spatial displacement of economic reproduction beyond the planet through inter-planetary and post-terrestrial imaginaries. In other words, the former strategy seeks to secure ownership for immortal beings, while the latter seeks exchange and wealth creation through space colonization. Together, these strategies reveal how techno-capitalist kinship aims not to inhabit haritable earth, but to transcend it.