By Jasvinder Nakhwal and Rachel Cook
Russian assurances on prison conditions are highly topical and have been crucial to the UK courts’ decisions in recent cases on whether to extradite individuals to the Russian Federation. Extraditions from the UK to Russia are, for the time being, at a standstill, owing to deficiencies in the independent monitoring of Russian prison conditions, which undermine the assurances provided by the state, and pending evidence to the contrary.
The UK’s relationship with the Russian Federation is complex, to say the least. In 2006, the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko demonstrated how Russian operatives are well able to administer a deadly poison in broad daylight on British soil. Despite stabilising for a short while, UK-Russia diplomatic relations were once again plunged into conflict in 2018, with the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury. Both incidents caused a major diplomatic crisis and legal consequences, including for Litvinenko’s poisoning, a Public Inquiry and a serious extradition standoff.
Despite President Putin’s denial of any involvement in the Skripals’ poisoning, the UK publicly condemned Russia and, last year, expelled 23 diplomats from the Russian Embassy in London. Condemnation also came from the European Union, which sanctioned the heads of the Russian military intelligence for their suspected involvement, and the US, which imposed sanctions on the basis that the Russian government was responsible. Then, in August 2019, the US imposed further sanctions on Russia relating to the state’s refusal to guarantee that it will no longer use chemical weapons.
The UK’s view is that Russia was willing to violate the Chemical Weapons Convention, to which it is a signatory, and to breach international law by undermining the UK’s sovereignty. The UK government’s clear position is that Russian assurances are implausible and unreliable.
Climate of Crackdown and Enforcement
When responding to the Salisbury crisis and action against the Russian state, then Prime Minister Theresa May declared: “…we will continue to bring all the capabilities of UK law enforcement to bear against serious criminals and corrupt elites. There is no place for these people – or their money – in our country”. It can be difficult for the UK authorities to differentiate between “these people”, i.e. Russians who are serious criminals and corrupt elites, and those who are merely accused of, or are presumed to be such individuals. An obvious example of how this distinction has the potential to be applied arbitrarily is the US Treasury’s list of those considered for US sanctions. The list names every senior member of Russia’s political administration and, replicating the Forbes rich list, every Russian oligarch with a net worth in excess of $1 billion. It appears that the starting point is that all Kremlin politicians and wealthy Russians are suspicious.
In parallel with these pronouncements, the UK has seen the introduction of Unexplained Wealth Orders, Account Freezing Orders and various anti-money laundering rules, providing the enforcement authorities (both UK and foreign) with key investigative tools in combatting financial crime. New legislation will also see a public register on the ultimate beneficial owners of UK property introduced in 2021, with a view to preventing criminals from using the UK property market to launder criminal funds. Furthermore, with Deutsche Bank likely receiving a significant fine for its role in the $20 billion Russian laundromat case. Financial institutions are well aware of the risk of criminal investigation for money laundering and increasingly cautious when conducting due diligence and accepting funds from wealthy foreigners. This applies, in particular, to individuals who are deemed to be politically exposed persons with links to foreign governments.
Extradition treaty
On the other hand, our diplomatic agreements for cross-border cooperation with the Russian Federation remain and continue to be honoured, by the UK at least. Given the Russia’s membership of the Council of Europe, the UK has even relieved the Russian Federation of the need to demonstrate a prima facie case when the UK extradition court decides whether or not to allow extradition to Russia.
In 2007, the Russian government refused to extradite Mr Lugovoi, who was accused in the UK of poisoning Mr Litvinenko. There is no doubt that if asked to do so, Russia would likewise refuse to extradite the Russian citizens charged with poisoning the Skripals. It is the case that Russia, as a matter of policy, does not extradite its citizens to any state. However, this has been seen as a convenient basis on which to avoid bringing the alleged killers to justice.
It is not uncommon for Russia to make extradition requests to the UK for current or former Russian nationals living here. Under the UK extradition legislation those requests are reviewed at the initial stage by the Secretary of State for the Home Department, and under the terms of the diplomatic arrangements with the Russian Federation, are almost always accepted and passed to the UK extradition court. These extradition proceedings are usually resisted by the wanted individuals on several grounds, including that the request is made for the purpose of persecuting or punishing them on account of their political opinions; that any extradition would be contrary to their human rights including their right to a fair trial; and that Russian prison conditions would breach their right not to be subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment. There are well publicised cases with some of the most egregious examples of appalling treatment in Russian prisons, to intimidate, harass and ultimately to stifle. These have led to the development of disease, mental illness and death. Even in general, where the prisoner is not a political target, Russian prisons are reported to be overcrowded, with poor sanitation and numerous other problems.
[su_pullquotes]What is perhaps most startling about recent UK extradition case law is that the prevailing political backdrop has played a relatively limited role in the UK courts’ decisions on whether to accept such assurances and extradite individuals to Russia.[/su_pullquotes]
Other defence arguments that are typically made arise from real concerns about a lack of a fair trial (a human right enshrined in Article 6 of the Convention). This is in circumstances where ‘telephone justice’ (whereby informal influence or pressure is exerted on the Russian judiciary) is the norm, and conviction rates are as astonishingly high as 99.75 per cent.
One way in which Russia has responded to the UK courts’ concerns about these issues, in particular that prison conditions would amount to inhuman treatment, has been to provide assurances (i.e. promises) to the contrary, and in essence that the human rights of the individual in question would be respected. What is perhaps most startling about recent UK extradition caselaw is that the prevailing political backdrop has played a relatively limited role in the UK courts’ decisions on whether to accept such assurances and extradite individuals to Russia.
Brief history of extradition cases
All extradition requests heard in England and Wales are initially heard in Westminster Magistrates’ Court. In the mid-2000s, the Senior District Judge of that court stopped extraditions to Russia until the state was able to demonstrate that the prison conditions were not inhuman or degrading. This position remained the same in 2012, when the European Court of Human Rights held in Sergey Ananyev’s case that the prison conditions in Russian remand prisons (where prisoners were held before trial) breached human rights . The Ananyev judgment annexed a list of 80 other judgments demonstrating human right breaches in Russian remand prisons. The European court said that “the set of facts underlying these violations was substantially similar: detainees suffered inhuman and degrading treatment on account of an acute lack of personal space in their cells, a shortage of sleeping space, unjustified restrictions on access to natural light and air, and non-existent privacy when using the sanitary facilities”.
In 2012, an extradition request for Georgy Trefilov was refused, partly on the basis that the conditions of the remand prison might amount to inhuman or degrading treatment. There followed a series of Russian extradition cases where the court held that any person detained in a Russian prison was at real risk of inhuman or degrading treatment, effectively halting further extraditions.
At that stage, regardless of what crime they had been accused, or whether it was a politically motivated prosecution, anyone in the UK being sought by Russia was able to resist extradition by relying on the poor state of Russian prison conditions.
Assurances
The position changed again in 2015. The Senior District Judge of Westminster Magistrates’ Court declined a Russian extradition request for Igor Kononko on the grounds that he could not have a fair trial, but in doing so, he indicated that the court would be prepared to accept assurances from Russia about prison conditions to confirm that they would not amount to torture or inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
In response to the judge’s indication that the court was open to assurances, the Russian Federation began to provide them. In 2016, in Evgeny Korolev’s case, Russia provided assurances about prison conditions, but the UK court deemed them to be too vague and refused the extradition request. The following year, in 2017, the UK court in Stanislav Dzgoev’s case accepted Russian assurances on prison conditions. Mr Dzgoev appealed to the High Court. In refusing his appeal, the High Court went so far as to articulate the assurances that they required the Russians to give, which were subsequently provided in that form. Mr Dzgoev was extradited to Russia.
Further Russian extradition cases followed, including that of Egor Schuppe, the son-in-law of Boris Berezovsky, a late Russian oligarch and prominent Putin critic. During this period, those individuals who successfully resisted extradition to Russia usually did so based on arguments that they could not have a fair trial in Russia or that their prosecutions were politically motivated. Arguments on prison conditions failed because of what were deemed to be satisfactory Russian assurances, promising special conditions for those being extradited that were sufficient to allay the UK courts’ concerns about human right breaches.
In October 2017, Westminster Magistrates’ Court acceded to a request to extradite Alexey Shmatko, rejecting all his arguments, including those relating to prison conditions, again owing to an acceptance of Russia’s assurances. Mr Shmatko appealed to the High Court and his extradition was paused pending the outcome of his appeal.
In the meantime, in 2018, the UK court found that another Russian, Alexander Ioskevich, could be extradited, despite him also raising arguments on prison conditions and breaches of human rights. Like Mr Dzgoev, Mr Ioskevich was extradited to Russia. Mr Ioskevich’s lawyers had raised concerns that Russian assurances could be reneged upon once he was in Russia, by which time it would be too late because he would already be there. The High Court held that Russia had a powerful incentive to honour its assurances because to do otherwise would impact negatively upon the willingness of the UK courts to accept future assurances. This is a point of concern given that a failure to adhere to assurances given meet no sanction, other than acting as evidence of a breach to support arguments in subsequent extradition cases, and only if vulnerable prisoners are willing to give that evidence.
Recognition of political backdrop
Alexander Shapovalov, unlike the other Russians mentioned above, lived in Scotland, not England, and, in 2018, his extradition hearing took place in Edinburgh rather than London. Unlike the English court, Sheriff Ross rejected the Russian assurances on prison conditions provided in that case, distinguishing Dr Shapovalov’s case from those of Mr Dzgoev and Mr Ioskevich. The Scottish court expressed that there was a good reason to reconsider the benefit of doubt afforded to Russia and the presumption that their assurances on prison conditions could be relied upon. The Scottish judgment referred directly to the Skripal poisonings and the diplomatic breakdown in the relationship between the UK and Russia since the Ioskevich case. The Scottish court declared that “any trust of the Russian Federation as a member of the Council of Europe must be placed in some question by the sanctions visited on them by that body, the non-payment of their financial contribution, and the possibility… that the Russian Federation may withdraw from the Council of Europe”.
The Shapovalov judgment was not binding on the Westminster Magistrates’ Court. However, appeal judgments from the UK High Court are binding on the Magistrates’ Court. In 2019, the UK High Court dismissed the lower court’s decision to extradite Mr Shmatko finding that the Russian prison assurances could not be relied upon. This was largely on the basis that there was insufficient independent monitoring of the Russian prison in which Mr Shmatko would be held if he were to be extradited. The Russian assurances were found to be inadequate. Mr Shmatko would not be extradited on the basis of the facts of his case.
The Shmatko judgment went further and expressed that while it was not necessary to consider it in this case, the court could see “good reason to reconsider the benefit of the doubt accorded to the Russian Federation as a member of the Council of Europe in cases of this kind”. The court was raising concerns about the acceptance of Russia’s assurances generally, regardless of the evidence on a lack of proper prison monitoring.
In 2018, in Alexander Zmikhnovskiy’s extradition proceedings, similar arguments were made on prison conditions to those made by Mr Shmatko in his appeal, and Mr Zmikhnovskiy’s extradition was refused. Similarly, it was partly on the basis of limited prison monitoring. A post-script to the Zmikhnovskiy judgment noted that Russia had provided insufficient information about prison conditions and that it was fast becoming the UK court’s view that the Russian Federation should support any request for extradition with evidence, such as a video or photographs of any prison cell subject to an assurance, and that Russia should re-consider its view that experts are not allowed to visit the prisons in question. This led to a summarily discharge from extradition in a subsequent case of Dmitry Sokolov.
The onus is now on Russia. If it wants the UK courts to extradite individuals, it will need to engage more fully to satisfy the courts that prison conditions will not breach human rights.
Prison conditions
The UK court (and the Secretary of State) has an obligation to consider each case separately, even if the court has been presented with similar country-specific evidence on another case.
The issue of prison conditions is fundamental to recent judgments refusing extraditions to Russia. Russian assurances that it will house those extradited in special prison cells that will not breach their human rights must be understood against the backdrop of the conditions of the general prison population. The reality is that there are numerous reports of physical violence and humiliating, psychological torture in Russia’s prisons, perpetrated by both the prison guards and other inmates unimpeded or even encouraged by officers. There has been extensive media coverage of the fates of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Sergei Magnitsky, which is somewhat historical. However, the threat of torture and inhuman treatment in Russian prisons is current.
In July 2019, the Russian opposition leader, Alexi Navalny, was serving a 30-day sentence for encouraging followers to attend an anti-government protest. While in prison, he became ill and was taken to hospital. The doctor suspected that Mr Navalny had been poisoned and, contrary to the doctor’s medical advice, he was discharged from hospital by the prison officers and returned to the prison. While facts continue to emerge about this recent event, there is already a list of potential human rights breaches in this single example. In the absence of reliable assurances from Russia, the risk of human rights breaches in extradition cases is very real. If assurances cannot be relied upon because the Russian Federation cannot be trusted, what protection is there for those extradited?
Next steps
The UK court has informed Russia what it needs to do in order to satisfy the Magistrates’ Court. It must engage meaningfully with the UK proceedings. The UK courts have not yet refused to accept the Russian assurances on the basis that the promises are simply unreliable because they come from the Russian authorities. The main contention at the moment is the lack of independent monitoring of prison conditions. With some minor changes to Russian domestic legislation, this problem could, in theory, be rectified, but this would mean a fundamental shift in the way in which criminal justice operates in Russia.
[su_pullquotes]The UK court system’s independence from the UK government may have caused it to be slow to factor the political background into its consideration of the credibility of Russian assurances on human rights.[/su_pullquotes]
Given the political backdrop, observers may find it difficult to believe that the UK courts would continue to accept the Russian assurances at face value. The constitutional separation of the UK’s government and judiciary means that the government cannot force its views on the courts. It is the UK courts’ responsibility to determine whether the Russian prosecutions, which are the subject of the extradition request, are politically motivated or whether they should rely upon assurances provided by the Russian authorities. While the political dimension of the UK-Russian relationship has not yet had the direct impact on extraditions that one might expect, the fact that the High Court and the Scottish court have begun to challenge the benefit of the doubt given to the Russian state in their judgments suggests that this may change.
The UK court system’s independence from the UK government may have caused it to be slow to factor the political background into its consideration of the credibility of Russian assurances on human rights. However, the UK courts’ attitude and approach to Russian assurances and prison conditions is in the process of further development, which currently, happens to have benefitted those whose extradition is being sought. Whether and if so, how, Russia will respond to these changes and how the courts will approach future Russian assurances remains to be seen. The extent to which the courts’ decision making should take account of the actions and credibility of the requesting state is a worthy debate, keeping in mind that the integrity of the UK courts must remain sacrosanct. Proper debate is also needed on the question of whether it is suitable to rely on mutual recognition by virtue of membership of an organisation of which the UK is a part, such as the Council of Europe, even when the operation of the criminal justice system in that state is severely flawed. In contrast to the criticisms made of the Russian system, in which the judiciary is described as subservient to the political will of the government and/or powerful political figures, the independence of the British judiciary remains fundamental in the pursuit of justice.
About the Authors
Jasvinder Nakhwal has over 10 years’ experience acting for many high-profile Russian nationals in numerous complex extradition cases involving requests from the government of the Russian Federation. She has succeeded in preventing extradition in all those cases on a number of grounds, including political motivation, abuse of process and human rights.
Rachel Cook is Senior Associate at Peters & Peters. She works on a range of fraud, white-collar crime, tax enforcement and regulatory matters. Whilst she has significant experience acting for clients in extradition proceedings, Rachel also regularly makes successful representations to the Secretary of State, Home Office and Metropolitan Police Extradition Squad in order to defeat extradition requests without the need for a substantive hearing.
Tokens of Technical Progress: Blockchains, Data Dysphoria & Fantasies of Control
By Dr Robert Herian
The discourse of data sovereignty (‘taking control’) at first blush implies empowerment of the data subject – Facebook’s Libra project explicitly uses this language and ideal in relation to their subscribers. However, as the author argues, ‘Taking control’ is only an illusion or, more precisely, a fantasy articulated through the notion of data sovereignty and constructed by neoliberal capitalism.
Cyberspace, as a shared dimension but unequal community, is in a moment of unease and alienation over the ways and means of data creation, dissemination and preservation, including methods of storage on- and offline. Communication and circulation of commercial and personal data increasingly occurs amid threats of intermeddling and exposure to varieties of fraud and exploitation. This unease is symptomatic of scandals involving the ‘psychological profiling’ of personal data in the course of supposed civic and democratic processes, and the growing uncanniness of digital social spaces. The company Cambridge Analytica, whose ‘data harvesting’ practices and psychographic analyses of user content from sources such as Facebook led to accusations of dubious interventions in and effects on the US Presidential elections and UK European Union Referendum1. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg’s subsequent tour of apology, confession and defiance in front of US government and European Commission representatives in early 2018 amid accusations that the company ‘weaponised’ personal data only served to add intrigue and consternation to the prevailing climate of unease2. Recently, the shortcomings of Facebook with regard to data privacy have undergone fresh scrutiny with the announcement that the social networking Titan plans to issue their own cryptocurrency, Libra3.
New data horizons
The fall-out from high-profile and rather salacious examples of unfair or unreasonable data use is a type of subscriber/subject unease that I refer to as data dysphoria, which involves but is not limited to specific examples of the dubious commercial data practices that pervade cyberspace. In conjunction with this unease ideas and mechanisms to ‘take (back) control’ of one’s personal data have emerged that provoke the desire for meaningful practices of data self-care in the subject, but which, I argue, instead entangle the subject in a burgeoning mesh of fantasy in which control and data sovereignty are always possible but never attainable. The extent to which data subjects are actually capable of or willing to assume control of personal data in a fully informed way is entirely unclear if not entirely unrealistic. Yet it fits ideologies of technological solutionism perfectly, enforcing the belief that new data horizons must be seized first and questioned later – a coda of the classic Silicon Valley mantra: “move fast and break things”. Use of a banking app on a smart phone to manage one’s finances is convenient, for example, but it does not require the user to negotiate the intricacies of global finance. On the contrary, the convenience of banking apps masks the extent to which personal finance (the credit held in a current or savings account) is embedded in a vast complex of different financial products and networks over which the user has little insight and no meaningful control. Banking apps, therefore, represent a de minimis form of user control, not a radical mode of individual financial liberation. This model is articulated by a wide range of contemporary data management platforms, mechanisms and applications, all of which are directly or indirectly hungry for data4.
Data dysphoria and its corresponding structure in fantasy describe part of the conscious and unconscious negotiations subjects make with networks, systems and the increasing levels of computational autonomy and authority that are in every sense alien and radically unknowable to the vast majority of users caught by and within them5. Importantly, as symptomologies, data dysphoria and fantasies of control describe affects not online but in the ‘real world’. Cyberspace (including databases, networks, systems, or interfaces) in this case does not “solve” the “problems” qua messiness inherent in human endeavour (as long, that is, as the primary role of cyberspace is to serve humanity) but represents ever expanding frontiers into which human psychology inevitably moves, may flourish but, equally, falters.
The discourse of data sovereignty (‘taking control’) at first blush implies empowerment of the data subject – Facebook’s Libra project explicitly uses this language and ideal in relation to their subscribers. But, I argue, data sovereignty satisfies ideals of consumer protectionism above all else, that is, sovereignty of data subjects is supported and promoted insofar as subscribers remain efficient, engaged economic subjects within the ambit of neoliberal capitalism. Data subjects who without demur bear a financial cost for taking part in history must invest energy into creating new “free” markets and ensuring all social life is calibrated to the logic of those markets6. It is, in this sense that blockchains, as a distributed and decentralising mechanism for improving economic efficiencies, impregnate those who use them with such logics. The irony being that the self-care insisted upon by data subjects who are “sovereign” assumes nothing more than a form of control contingent upon the constraints placed on the subject by neoliberal capitalism, and therefore is not a form of control the data subject is free to exercise or enjoy at all7. To paraphrase Jodi Dean, taking control in this instance does not delineate data subjects from a rest of us ‘whose work, lives, and futures are expropriated, monetized, and speculated on for the financial enjoyment of the few’, instead it serves to highlight the actual complicity of those data subjects in sustaining neoliberal capitalism and ‘the extent of the class power of an elite that has gotten us to think in terms of competition, efficiency, stock markets, bonuses, and financial success’8. ‘Taking control’ is thus an illusion or, more precisely as this essay argues, a fantasy articulated through the notion of data sovereignty and constructed by neoliberal capitalism, one, however, ultimately reaffirmed and maintained by the data subjects caught within it.
Fantasies of control
The mainstreaming of blockchain technology in the present moment of data dysphoria is no accident: it is part reaction to it, and part exploitation of it. The technology satisfies, at least in theory, ‘problem’/’solution’ matrices with deep roots in a wide variety of global economic, political, social, legal and cultural contexts – too many to cover or mention during the course of this essay. ‘Solutions’ dreamt up by a variety of stakeholders including entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and technologists who consider blockchain-led socioeconomic and political characteristics of transparency, disintermediation, post-trust, and so on to be the keys to healthier cyber-socialites and ontologies. Capitalism is not seen as a problem to be solved, but rather the architecture supporting blockchain concepts and implementation. Notions of data or identity self-sovereignty derive from capitalist and, capitalism’s ‘mutant form9, neoliberal structures in fantasy that insist on the perfection and wholeness-of-being attainable through economic practice and self-care. Data practice and data self-care emerge as species of broader capitalist practice: a practice of the practice that maintains capitalism’s prominence whilst resisting countervailing and critical notions of data sovereignty from non-market and non-competitive communities on- and offline.
There are no shortage of businesses promoting the benefits of blockchain-led digital economies through idealisations of secure, peer-to-peer, data-as-property (e.g. tokenisation) paradigms that promise to empower users by allowing them to unlock ‘value’ from their personal data in the form of ‘micropayments’ – a model of granular payments that individuals, as well as corporations, can derive from all forms of data exploitation large and small. Far from novel enterprises, a number of these business models necessitate conventions in offline and off-chain markets and consumerism models that require high levels of interoperability between different interfaces, whilst also sustaining forms of centralisation and mediation that correspond closely to the logic of existing patterns of commercial development that blockchain, it was claimed (lest we forget), was going to destroy.
Peer-to-peer digital economies do not eschew but rely upon transactions of personal data within traditional (capitalist) business models. Data subjects auto-exploit by relying on data sovereignty mechanisms, models, skills and techniques given to them as indisputable tools of engagement and self-management, a clear contradiction if we take as our definition of sovereignty ‘the receiving of a general recognition of exclusive domain and consequent possession of the capacity to establish rules of conduct within a particular field of action’10. On this point we see the root of the fantasy of control begin to show itself, because the façade of subject/object choice as a condition of contemporary economic engagement is revealed to be the mere belief in the organisational networks enveloping the ‘free’ economic subject as data subject. In other words, it is an illusion that a data subject has ‘capacity to establish rules of conduct within a particular field’ because ‘a general recognition of exclusive domain’ has never existed but is instead always already capitalism’s domain and the data subject a material site for its ideological (re)production11.
‘Self-sovereign identity technology can put the control [of personal data] in the hands of individuals’ Andrea Tinianow has claimed12. For control to manifest in the manner Tinianow envisages would involve wholesale transformations of the present model of socioeconomic organisation and hegemony, however, that is, the transformation of capitalism into a new state of economic organisation predicated on more not less self-interest. Given the fundamental tenets of capitalist ‘free’ enterprise include supply and demand and ‘winner takes all’ market engagements grounded in the necessity of self-interested, competitive economic subjects, it is hard to see how more self-interest is going to fundamentally ‘disrupt’ the prevailing economic model, or, indeed, encourage it towards some specious notion of post-capitalism. But then it is not meant or designed to. Instead it is a fantasy of economic perfectibility by a data subject at work in the model of data or identity self-sovereignty; or, put more simply, capitalism reinventing itself for the sake of preservation.
What is perhaps most astonishing about the blockchain moment, one which is definitively neoliberal capitalist, has been the ability of stakeholders to convince the world of the desirability of digital ledgers as immaterial objects of ritual and devotion. Based on its potential for expansion the digital ledger is arguably an example of greater transformation of the mundane into the spectacular than even mobile phones achieved with the inauguration of smart phones13. We are witnessing the rise of a ledger society in which rituals of verification will become more central to the everyday normative functions of society than Michael Power first certainly envisaged two decades ago14. Within this paradigm the ledger assumes a vast and growing status as ritual object and multivocal symbol, its referents ‘not all of the same logical order’ but ‘drawn from many domains of social experience and ethical evaluation’ for the purposes of allowing data subjects to perform economically15. The result is a jumble of misunderstandings as to the precise nature and value of blockchain as a technology, and reductionist narratives of blockchain as a global economic panacea rushing to fill gaps evacuated of critical reason and reinstitute what Herbert Marcuse long ago called the ‘comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom’ that ‘prevails in advanced industrial civilisation, a token of technical progress’16.
The implications of blockchain fermenting deeper economic reason in cyberspace, and transforming it into an ever more perfect market, is not something to be automatically welcomed. Through such propositions we risk an impoverished humanity existing through technology beset by and implicated in the ideals and practices of financial economy first and last. ‘Networked communication and information technologies are exquisite media for capturing and reformatting political energies’, argues Jodi Dean, they ‘turn efforts at political engagement into contributions to the circulation of content, reinforcing the hold of neoliberalism’s technological infrastructure’17. Where blockchain figures in Dean’s analysis is still evolving as the technology moves from the brute economics of cryptocurrencies to more obvious political domains such as the provision of public services and democratic accountability vis-à-vis voting and government transparency initiatives. Contemporary ledger technologies and the peer-to-peer networks they support not only enable contributions to the circulation of content, as Dean expresses it, but more accurately economize contributions in accordance with ever more concise neoliberal values. The data subject within peer-to-peer networks must thus search for and anticipate each new transaction and exchange as fulfilment of the fantasy of data sovereignty
About the Author
References
1. Olivia Solon and Oliver Laughland, “Cambridge Analytica closing after Facebook data harvesting scandal”, The Guardian, 2 May 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/may/02/cambridge-analytica-closing-down-after-facebook-row-reports-say (accessed 4 June 2018)
2. Carole Cadwalladr and Emma Graham-Harrison, “Zuckerberg set up fraudulent scheme to ‘weaponise’ data, court case alleges”, The Guardian, 24 May 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/may/24/mark-zuckerberg-set-up-fraudulent-scheme-weaponise-data-facebook-court-case-alleges (accessed 4 June 2018)
3. See: https://libra.org/en-US/white-paper/ (accessed 5 August 2019); and Robert Herian, “Libra, Iran and the potential end of cryptocurrencies as we know them”. The Conversation, 1 July 2019. https://theconversation.com/libra-iran-and-the-potential-end-of-cryptocurrencies-as-we-know-them-119606 (accessed 5 August 2019)
4. See, for example: Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism. 2017. Cambridge: Polity
5. As James Bridle maintains: ‘If we do not understand how complex technologies function how systems of technologies interconnect, and how systems of systems interact, then we are powerless within them, and their potential is more easily captured by selfish elites and inhuman corporations’ (James Bridle, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future. 2018. London: Verso, pp.2-3)
6. Adam Greenfield makes a similar point but specifically targeted at the role Ethereum, the organisation behind the other major public blockchain alongside the Bitcoin blockchain, is having on shaping individual adaption to and adoption of blockchain applications such as smart contracts and tokens (i.e. Ether) allowing for participation in decentralized autonomous organisations (DAOs). See: Adam Greenfield, Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life. 2018. London: Verso
7. See: Robert Herian. Regulating Blockchain: Critical Perspectives in Law and Technology. 2018. London: Routledge
8. Jodi Dean, The Communist Horizon. 2012. London: Verso, pp.69-73
9. Byung-Chul Han, Psycho-Politics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power. Translated by Erik Butler. 2017. London: Verso, p.5
10. Sarah Manski and Ben Manski, “No Gods, No Masters, No Coders? The Future of Sovereignty in a Blockchain World”. Law & Critique. 2018. (forthcoming)
11. Louis Althusser, On Ideology. 2008. London: Verso, pp.46-47
12. Andrea Tinianow, “GDPR Isn’t the Answer, But Blockchain Is”, Forbes. 4 June 2018. https://www.forbes.com/sites/andreatinianow/2018/06/04/gdpr-isnt-the-answer-but-blockchain-is/#75e88f8848bd (accessed 5 June 2018)
13. Of course, there are now “blockchain-enabled” smart phones as a marriage of the two phenomena. See: https://hackernoon.com/a-closer-look-at-three-blockchain-smartphones-28b746976d22 (accessed 8 April 2019)
14. Michael Power, The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification. 1997. Oxford: Oxford University Press
15. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. 1969. New Brunswick: Aldine Transaction, p.52
16. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimension Man: Studies in the ideology of advanced industrial society. 2002. London: Routledge, p.3
17. Jodi Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics. 2009. Durham: Duke University Press, p.32