Blockchain and clockwork trust

Abstrakt

This article investigates the hypothesis that we can understand blockchain technology as a mechanization of trust. As inspiration, the author accesses the categories introduced by Bernard Stiegler, especially grammatizationand proletarianization. The reflection on the social relation of trust and its mechanization in processes based on blockchain technology develops in the direction of the analysis of the way social time is generated in the process of “digging”. The thesis is that blockchain is not only a mechanized ledger, but also has a more complicated function similar to the role played by subjectivities who generate social time in Jacques Lacan’s concept of logical time. Only the appearance of time modalities, present, past and future, can guarantee a common memory of the past, which is the condition of the possibility of trust.