ABSTRACT
Blockchain needs a critical regulator. Power relations dominate networked technologies as they have a variety of institutions, systems, networks and organisational forms throughout the history of capitalism. Blockchain is a capitalist technology and speculation is therefore unnecessary as to whether capitalist class power is operating through it. The dividual obtains amid peer-to-peer networks, searching for and anticipating each new transaction and exchange as an erotic event: an encounter with the other within the system worthy of the performative demands of conduct of neoliberal self-hood. Peer-to-peer networks qua digital marketplaces, such as those underpinned and facilitated by blockchains, are auto-erotic sites which themselves harbour the repressed desire of the death wish, Thanatos. The blockchain ecosystem is pushing back against the 'stifling' effects of government intervention and regulation, whilst lining up to suggest ways in which government could make bureaucracy and public services more efficient, and 'put democracy online', and 'leverage' the gains.
