Book: Imaginaries of Immutable Truth. The Cultural Politics of Blockchain
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Abstract
Blockchain has often been presented as a solution to a crisis of truth. Promising immutability, objectivity, and trust without human judgment, it is framed as a technology capable of stabilising reality itself in an age of widespread uncertainty. Yet beneath this rationalist promise lies a dense cultural terrain of belief, ideology, and power. Imaginaries of Immutable Truth examines how blockchain operates not only as a technical system, but as a cultural apparatus for knowing and shaping the world. Through analyses of environmental blockchain projects, cryptocurrency trading, religious and mystical narratives, online subcultures, and artistic-activist experiments, the book traces how truth is performed, stabilised, and reconfigured through code, discourse, and collective imagination. Rather than overcoming the post-truth condition, blockchain often responds to uncertainty by producing technocratic fantasies of control and verification. At the same time, alternative engagements with blockchain reveal cracks in this logic, opening space for more situated, relational, and plural ways of knowing. Positioned at the intersection of critical digital media studies, cultural theory, and science and technology studies, the book offers a critical account of how blockchain participates in contemporary struggles over truth, power, and world-making. In tracing these dynamics, it explores why engaging with uncertainty may be more politically generative than trying to eliminate it.
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