Johanna

immaterial materialities

+++ some thoughts to the topic +++

web3 discourse can be seen as emblematic for "immaterial materialities" the idea to put everything on the blockchain just because we have that technology elevates technology from mean to end.

different strands of new materialism... some try to find a common theme in relationality based on intra'action. some of this thought is based on or lends itself to post-marxist anticapitalistic thought.. but then a lot of web3 can also be "justified" in new materialist manner, e.g. "decentralization", "non-hierarchical" resembles ANT... in this way new-materialist thought contributes to the left-washing of crypto venture capitalism - at least in my brain in my neurons this devilish combination has occured a couple of times and i found myself wondering: wait, isnt the capitalist destruction of the planet or the hyperstructure of amazon-the-company in the end merely intra'acting forces? some ideas of "new materialism", "more-than-human matter", are easily exploited / commodified, e.g. when considering economy as an "ecosystem", its participants/financial trends as "actants", ...