web3xHumanities

This document was created to provoke open & collaborative ideation of research intersections between web3 and the humanities. Add to it as you please. If you'd like to delete or consolidate comments other than your own, discuss first in this telegram chat. If you decide to fork the document (please do), add a link to the fork at the bottom.

philosophy

deleuze studies

• What are the implicatons of blockchain protocols and DAOs for the themes of territoriality, deterritorialization & "the war machine" explored in the later chapters of A Thousand Plateaus?
• How might the notion of "control" described in Deleuze's essay Postscript on the Societies of Control be reified in a decentralized and blockchain enabled future? What is the relevance of Deleuze's framing of analogue and digital (elaborated in many places by Alexander Galloway, e.g. here) to web3?

extitutional theory

history

linguistics

cultural studies

black studies

• Considering the work of Saidiya Hartman (here, here & here ), what is the relation between blockchain and the archive? What reparative or creative frontiers does blockchain offer to what Fred Moten has called "the undercommons," or those elements of society that have received

art history

gender studies

• Silvia Federici's book Caliban and the Witch: Women, The Body And Primitive Accumulation posits a relationship between technological modes of production and the disciplining of bodies, with special attention to the reproductive labor of women. What kind of relationship to bodies is constituted by the rise distributed ledgers?
• What influence has Sadie Plants work Zeros + ones: digital women and the new technoculture had on the development of web3 culture?

anthropology

• What unexpected symmetries between web3 communities and other cosmoopolitan (or other) communities might web3 cultural ethnogrophies reveal? Are there classes of communities from pre-web days that share characterstics with web3 as a whole, DAO culture, etc?
• In his cultural anthropology of FOSS, Two Bits, Christopher Kelty names "recursive publics," called so because of the "radical technological modifiability of their own terms of existence." How have protocols and DAOs expanded on the concept of recursive publics?