ABSTRACT
Archaeologists of the future trying to understand computer network technologies of the early 21st century may stumble upon something called blockchain. Digital media scholar Finn Brunton maps out a speculative methodology for future scholars encountering, as he did, the “digital middens” of the era of networked computing – the “accidental archives, collections of digital rubbish”, “the accumulations of by-products and junk and trash and bits and pieces of the working life of computers and communities”. Blockchain has opened up a public conversation over the politics of infrastructure. By the end of the 20th century, the owners of digital intellectual property had adopted numerous legal and technological strategies to deal with the reproducibility problem, classed under the umbrella term digital rights management (DRM). DRM strategies included hardware- and software-based methods to prevent copying. Blockchain refers to a database with some distinctive features.
