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Paper short abstract

The paper detects and analyzes imaginaries of blockchain’s temporal resilience, found in blockchain proponent documents. Such visions of blockchain pervasiveness “past-apocalypse” are linked to temporal logics of resource extractivism and transhuman accelerationism.

Paper long abstract

To enthusiasts, blockchain presents an “apocalypse-resistant” data-storage system, due to its robust decentralized structure and immutability (Big Questions, n.d.; CoinGecko, 2023; Howard, 2021). In Halpern et al. (2017), operative visions for the futures of digital infrastructures’ can be seen to contain both doom and hopefulness. Drawing on this frame, this paper identifies and discursively analyzes imaginaries of long-term resilience found on high traffic blockchain media and news platforms. Detected peri- and post-apocalyptic visions of blockchain within these documents are linked to temporal logics of resource extractivism and transhuman accelerationism. Analyzing the political and cultural implications of imaginaries of blockchain’s pervasiveness addresses a gap in critical scholarship, as well as expands on overall critical data and storage studies on the friction-filled relationship between material data presents and utopic data futures (Bresnihan & Brodie, 2023; Velkova, 2021).

Within the gathered documents, blockchain is seen as highly resilient, able to withstand internet and power outages, as well as political, ecological and economic crises. As blockchain nodes are stored in local computer hard disks and remote data centers, this resilience rests on the extraction connected to digital hardware production and maintenance (Brodie, 2025; Soto-Hernández, 2026). Such extractivist temporalities expect a time “after” extraction, where riches will make up for present damage (Jonkman & van Roekel, 2023). This aligns with transhumanist accelerationist logics of a time “after” the material boundness of consciousness (Krüger et al., 2021). Interrogating blockchain’s temporal logics expands the view of the socioeconomic and environmental aspects within visions of resilient technological systems.