The Shared Frontiers of Economic and Civil Society: Toward Optimal Political Context for Distributed Ledger Technology in Finance

Abstract

Distributed ledger technology (DLT) facilitates a new chapter for the internet, one known as Web3. It is a back-end upgrade (Voshmgir, 2020, p. 28) that drives particularly rapid innovation in the finance industry. Its trajectory will be in part determined by the role of developer communities, innovators, and technology companies. It will be shaped by government supervisors and decisions by policymakers on how to foster innovation, control risk, or compete internationally. It is no secret that the ideals of DLT developers regarding decentralization and democratization are partly social in nature; indeed, their efforts have been recognized as the ultimate form of protest (Russo, 2020). Despite this, discussion of DLT developers as belonging to social movements or civil society is a research gap in the academic literature. In seeking a better political context for the social efforts of DLT developers, the first contribution of this thesis is a definitional distinction between DLT Automation and DLT Activism. The null hypothesis that DLT activism must exist as a theme in DLT narratives, presented by the mainstream written media, is then developed. This is done by tying together interdisciplinary literature on DLT, banking, environmental and social governance, as well as civil society, and social movements. The importance of decision framing in the media is discussed in the research methods section, along with natural language processing techniques used to test the hypothesis. The research methodology begins with a multi-label classification prediction model built using machine-learning packages available in Python. Predicted descriptive labels for a large sample of articles from The Economist magazine suggest the null hypothesis should be rejected. This outcome is subsequently validated more comprehensively using ProQuest command-line queries and a larger sample, which suggests that at a 5% confidence level there is evidence to accept the expanded hypothesis; that DLT activism exists as a minor theme in mainstream DLT narratives. The thesis concludes with discussion about the risk of divided partisan views about DLT. Technology is used to create decentralized organizations and facilitate widespread contractual cooperation. One could say that political polarization regarding DLT could result in extreme collective organization within, rather than across, group lines thereby exacerbating social cleavages. As democracy faces the growing challenge of political polarization, the inclusive and open ecosystems that DLT communities have nurtured so far should be studied more deeply with a view to strengthening cross-cutting ties. DLT communities should not be left to develop in an isolated and insular manner.