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Paper short abstract

This paper detects and analyzes temporal logics of blockchain and their operationalization within blockchain communities and media. Categorizing these logics as preserving, anticipatory and apocalyptic, the paper inquires into the material, narrative, and social production of digital temporalities.

Paper long abstract

Time is a constitutive part of blockchain, as blocks are ordered according to intervals of time, creating a chain of data packets stretching into past and future. This technical configuration underlies blockchain thinking around past immutability, and simultaneous anticipatory futurity. In order to interrogate temporality on blockchain, this paper detects three operational temporal logics; preserving, anticipatory and apocalyptic, analyzing how these logics materialize within blockchain communities and media.

The paper draws on material from blockchain content gathered in forums, blogs, news outlets, blockchain platforms etc., as well as through participatory fieldwork and interviews in select blockchain communities. From this material, the detected temporal logics of blockchain are shown to have narrative, technical, material, and social outcomes and conditions. In the material, blocks are often understood as immutable and therefore to be permanent and persistent over time. These preserving notions of blockchain are, however, both complicated and extrapolated in imaginaries and material conditions of change and breakdown of blockchain systems.

Fundamentally, this paper draws on the work of Swartz (2017), and her conceptualization of radical blockchain projects as performatively leaning into and creating futures. This paper also draws on the work of scholars who have interrogated the material and social aspects of digital temporal regimes. It seeks to expand on critical data and storage studies on the friction-filled relationship between material data presents and imagined data futures (Bresnihan & Brodie, 2023; Velkova, 2021; Halpern, 2017), developing these thoughts within the framework of blockchain.