ABOUT

Blockchain likely will transform the Web, labor, finance, and governance.  Exactly how and the degree is still in the early stages of playing out.  Will ideals of decentralization, and greater agency and equality, at the heart of some digital (and green) crypto projects, achieve ground with combatting IT-amplified systemic inequality and algorithmic biases?  How do decisions on the creation, maintenance, regulation, and use of blockchain, smart contracts, Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT), and Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) advance or retard social and ethical possibilities? Offering a Blockchain and Society Blog of sociocultural essays, annotated best crypto books and top social equity books (in IT studies), a crypto timeline and other resources, the site lends perspective on the history of cryptocurrency, crypto studies, and the future of our digital world.

THE MISSION: Blockchain and Society: Political Economy of Crypto Blog and site provides visions of the future through prisms of the past. The website includes the Blog; annotated booklists; a Crypto Historical Timeline; Blockchain Historical Timeline a glossary; and much more. It draws on the history of cryptocurrency to promote critical inquiry and dialogue on decentralized governance, privacy, gender, race, and ethics.

Jeffrey Yost, MA, MBA, Ph.D., is Principal of Blockchain and Society Blog/Site. He is Director of the Charles Babbage Institute (CBI) for Computing, Information, and Culture & HSTM R. Prof., U. of Minnesota.  Author of six books, including Making IT Work (MIT Press), Yost co-edits Studies in Computing and Culture book series for Johns Hopkins U. Press. He has been a PI of six major NSF projects, & others for Sloan, DOE and ACM. He co-organized the event (soon a book) Just Code.