Blockchain imperialism in the Pacific

The origins of blockchain as a project of radical cryptocurrency cyberlibertarianism (Golumbia, 2016) have indelibly shaped its notions of governance and the state. Blockchain’s technological parameters – an encrypted digital ledger, distributed across a decentralized network with a communal devotion to data encryption – is a product of Bitcoin’s antipathy towards the state. Crypto enthusiasts decry the state’s role in creating money by fiat, adopting goldbug theories in which encryption becomes a tangible social value equivalent to gold. Bitcoin mining is the energy intensive process of creating financial rewards for participants who compete to add encrypted ‘blocks’ of transactions to the existing ‘chain’. The pivot to the NGO sector and away from the insular subcultures of crypto has been crucial in extracting blockchain technology as a universal governance ideal for the state and beyond. Academic research centres such as MIT Media Lab’s Digital Currency Initiative (DCI) have played a central role in extolling the virtues of blockchain for the developing world’s ‘2 billion unbanked’ (Dragos, 2017). The uptake of blockchain by the World Food Program for aid distribution and biometric identification has functioned to both legitimate blockchains for social good and have marked the organization as a leading innovator within the NGO sector.

The state is a central preoccupation of blockchain enthusiasts as an entity that can be sold governance solutions, superseded by innovation or confer legitimacy upon blockchain. It is this contradictory relationship that allows blockchain to function within platform imperialism as a means to inculcate a market logic, Eurocentric techno-rationality and ‘rework colonial relationships of dependency’ (Madianou, 2019b: 2). Blockchain presents itself as the universal standard of data integrity with digital assets and identity protected through tamper-proof ledgers and self-executing smart contracts. In certain jurisdictions, blockchain advocacy has secured the state’s imprimatur as a technology of ‘uncensored truth’ (Walch, 2017: 744). What is envisioned here are social relations increasingly assuming the characteristics of encrypted data with blockchain ‘replacing law as a means for capitalist control’ (Käll, 2018: 136). As a regulatory regime, blockchain enforces code as ‘ex-ante’ law and as a set of technical rules determined by proprietary software (Hassan and De Filippi, 2017). Blockchain governance is exemplary of the solutionist view of human ‘virtues’, in this case, discursive and democratic processes of law, as ‘problems’ (Morozov, 2014: 20). As a paradigm for the NGO sector, blockchain platforms have the potential to control property and organizational resources outside of the purview of developing world states.

Blockchain is one of the few remaining grand narratives of connectivity, which allows it to stand-in for more than simply expanding digital property rights. Proponents claim that blockchain is a technology of immutable truth and pure mediation capable of ushering in a ‘Trust Revolution’ (Lubin, 2019). It is touted as the universal security protocol for all data (Kaili in Herian, 2018: 165) providing the encryption necessary to overcome issues of privacy and realize the potential of data solutionism.⁴ The blockchain subject assumes a ‘self-sovereign identity’ (Lundkvist and Key, 2015) achieving the cyberlibertarian ideal of disintermediation as the individual mediates their own relationship to the state and other gatekeepers (including FAANG platforms).

What is imagined is a utopian future in which the subject is free from coercive mediating institutions, the state chief among them, wielding data certainty as a means of freedom and social transformation. For Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin, the trust that comes from encryption allows blockchain to function as the locus for ‘creativity and novel problem solving’ and a ‘network platform economy…[which] for the first time in human history empower both the collective and the individual’ (2019). While meditations on the potential for alternative social values are a consistent feature of blockchain discourse, the role of financial institutions, Silicon Valley and governments has principally made blockchain a ‘means of maintaining and extending bureaucratic and commercial power’ (Cheesman, 2020: 4).

In order to critically assess blockchain claims to truth and innate human values, a cursory outline of technical architectures is necessary. The Bitcoin blockchain, while a highly volatile and ideological project, can be said to achieve universal or ‘permissionless’ access to an insular world of truth represented by all Bitcoin transactions. This is achieved through the energy intensive ‘proof of work’ consensus mechanism of Bitcoin mining. Blockchain governance projects attempt to supersede enormously wasteful proof of work algorithms with ‘proof of stake’ or ‘proof of authority’ consensus mechanisms. Proof of stake allows for permissioned or private blockchains where stakeholders advance the block based on ‘who holds coins inside of the system’ (Buterin and Griffith, 2017) while the proof of authority simply formalizes a division of labour or hierarchy within an organization. The utopian rhetoric of blockchain seeks to conflate proof of stake and proof of authority with the seeming universality and truth claims of proof of work. Proof of stake/authority governance projects conceal the explicitly political questions of blockchain architectures around apportioning stakes and permissioned roles. Architectures may be configured in indeterminate ways; however, the platform geopolitics, political economy and under-girding cyber-libertarian ethos of blockchain loom large.

While Bitcoin is the ur-blockchain from which the idea of immutable truth emerges, Ethereum is the platform of blockchain governance projects. Ethereum is a cryptocurrency designed to allow developers to launch applications on its blockchain, from smart contracts and digital applications to the ideal of digitally autonomous organizations. The overwhelming majority of blockchain offerings to date, however, have been scams (Alexandre, 2018). The key evangelist of blockchain governance is Ethereum co-founder and founder of the blockchain start-up incubator ConsenSys, Joe Lubin. Funded by Lubin’s billion-dollar crypto fortune, ConsenSys boasts a suite of proprietary platforms and an academy to ‘develop the global blockchain eco-system’ (ConsenSys Academy, 2020). ConsenSys programmers and community members serve as emissaries to the corporate, government and NGO sectors. In this growth before profit phase for ConsenSys⁵ user uptake is crucial for the start-ups vying to be the ‘killer’ blockchain platform that might yield monopoly profits. Blockchain governance projects belie the hierarchical digital property relations that are abstracted through claims of disintermediation, data encryption and a transcendence of politics.

Before examining Pacific blockchain projects in detail, it is important to consider the techno-colonial histories of the Pacific and Silicon Valley’s frontier culture. The emergence of the Pacific as a blockchain frontier owes to Silicon Valley’s re-tracing of the pathways of Anglo-American imperialism (Keown et al., 2018) and the Pacific articulation of the Californian Ideology (Barbrook and Cameron, 1996). My notion of a Pacific Ideology takes up Barbrook and Cameron’s, as well as Turner’s (2010), cultural analysis of Silicon Valley’s frontier imaginary. Fantasies of open space and a fetishization of indigenous people are reconstituted in the Pacific as the western most frontier and ‘American Oceanic Sublime’ (Geiger, 2018: 112). Anglo-American imperialism has designated the Pacific as a space for military and commercial mobility, with leisure industries created by American military R & R, a synthesis the late Pacific scholar Teresia Teaiwa terms ‘Millitourism’ (1999). American imperial cartographies, leisure and technology are inextricably linked in the Pacific through the launch of the nuclear age and ‘the development of much of the technology that enables continuing Western global hegemony’ Keown et al., 2018: 4) on the atoll bearing the name ‘Bikini’.

The Pacific Ideology relies on this imperial mobility and utopian desires for a new world via blockchain tech-experiments. Islands are cast as open spaces where entrepreneurs and self-imagined ‘digital artisans’ (Barbrook and Cameron, 1996: 50) have the freedom to pursue techno-utopian desires. The Pacific frontier is ‘between cyberspace and outer space’ (Thiel, 2009) with visions of free-floating islands offering the ability to model cyber-libertarian ideals of statelessness.⁷ This rhetoric of tech-transformation and experimentation sits alongside the imperial class politics of tax shelters, tax-free economic development zones and the desire of possessing one’s own private island.⁸ Brock Pierce, president of the Bitcoin foundation and founder of the stablecoin Tether, has exemplified the imperial politics of this island fantasy in attempting to transform Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria into a ‘crypto-utopia’. As Crandall observes this fantasy of a blank slate contains blithe ignorance of political and colonial histories, privileging blockchain evangelists ‘as futuristic visionaries as opposed to settler colonialists’ (2019: 288).

The blockchain frontier masks this imperial politics by appeals to indigenous peoples as pure embodiments of techno-utopian values. The nomad has long served as the ideal cyber countercultural subject innately connected to nature and technology via cybernetic metaphor (Turner, 2010). The founder of Indigicoin, a Māori cryptocurrency, has explicitly claimed that ‘we [indigenous people] were the original inventors of blockchain’ (Dunn, 2019) with songs and stories as the distributed, collective production of knowledge. Blockchain is held as a return to the authentic mediation of indigenous oral traditions and barter economies, analogous to blockchain’s promises of trust and disintermediation. Indigenous authenticity and blockchain entrepreneurialism would thus forge a frontier synthesis of the universal and particular akin the figure of the ‘cowboy nomad’ (Turner, 2010: 87). Pierce’s crypto-colonialism in Puerto Rico is exemplary of an imperialist appropriation of indigenous values. Central to his blockchain solutionism were appeals to the pseudo-indigenous principles of Burning Man and the ‘decolonization of money’ (White, 2019). McElroy (2019) has written that this fetishization of indigenous people and a nomadic mobility, enabled by new digital frontiers, represents the expansion of property relations with Silicon Valley serving as the ‘techno-imperial centre’ (218).

Narratives of techno-indigeneity and a blockchain imperial mobility in the Pacific have been central to the emergence of blockchain developer Ledger Atlas in Papua New Guinea (PNG). The Delaware registered company signed a MOU with the government of PNG in 2018 to establish a blockchain special economic zone (SEZ) in the Finschhafen region (Malone, 2018). The proposal is backed by Bitcoin billionaire, venture capitalist and Theranos investor Tim Draper, and is being led by ‘Draper University’, DCI alum and PNG national, Shane Ninai. The MOU, signed without local consultation, establishes Ledger Atlas as the governing state-corporate entity able to control migration, enact laws and issue passports (Rarick et al., 2019). The agreement also ‘obligate[s]’ the government of PNG to ‘promote and develop the blockchain and innovative technology…to support the development of Finschaffen district as a centre of excellence for global financial services’ (Papua New Guinea Government, 2018: 25). This speculative land grab and declaration of blockchain state power by fiat is described by Ninai as a chance for PNG to place indigenous practices at the centre of blockchain development. Making reference to existing systems of barter, Ninai claims ‘alternative economies and governance systems are deeply ingrained in our culture and are still alive and well, and blockchain allows us, for the first time, to capture this activity’ (Rollins, 2017). This potential enclosure of an indigenous commons and the freedom of Silicon Valley to use this territory as an experimental ‘sandbox’ (Ninai, 2017) exemplify the material forces of the Pacific Ideology and blockchain frontier.

In Vanuatu, the specious distinction between cryptocurrency libertarianism and blockchain solutionism is on display with equal parts tax avoidance and humanitarianism. Vanuatu’s status as a tax haven saw it emerge as a blockchain hotspot while OXFAM has declared its Ethereum disaster relief payment system a ‘game changer’ (Fenton, 2019); more on this below. Vanuatu’s lack of corporate, income, capital gains or estate taxes, as well citizenship by investment laws, has made it an ideal spot for crypto entrepreneurs. Geoffrey Bond, a passport broker for the Vanuatu Information Centre, garnered significant attention in international financial media in claiming Vanuatu as the first country to sell passports in exchange for Bitcoin (Bach, 2017). Not betraying an imperial class politics, Bond has sold Vanuatu as a Pacific escape from a volatile world, offering wealth protection and a government ‘desir[ing] to be at the forefront of adopting new technologies’ (Bach, 2017). Among Bond’s other Vanuatu projects is the purchase and development of resort land in partnership with Sebastian Greenwood (McGarry, 2018a), the now indicted co-founder of Onecoin, a cryptocurrency style Ponzi scheme, which targeted the developing world and defrauded users of billions (Bartlett, 2019). The untoward headlines of Bitcoin passports and pressures to comply with the anti-money laundering efforts of the Financial Action Task Force saw the Reserve Bank of Vanuatu issue a statement ‘strongly advising all corporate, financial institutions, public enterprises, and individual customers and public at large to refrain from involving themselves in Bitcoin’ (2018). Subsequent to this policy intervention, the Republic of Malta, an island tax haven that has declared itself ‘blockchain island’, has vowed to assist in developing Vanuatu’s legal framework for blockchain (McGarry, 2018b).

The diplomatic and humanitarian efforts to extol the virtues of blockchain are manifest in Oxfam’s Unblocked Cash pilot project. The project sought to utilize blockchain systems for rapid cash-based disaster aid in parts of Vanuatu highly vulnerable to extreme weather and geophysical events. Unblocked Cash is a product of rising solutionism within the development sector with Oxfam setting up OxLabs as its own ‘innovation hub’ (Rust, 2019). Through the OxLabs initiative ConsenSys and an Australian blockchain start-up Sempo emerged as Oxfam’s development partners through a competitive submission process. This partnership makes evident the power dynamics between the sector and blockchain platform developers. A report from Oxfam Australia’s lead humanitarian described project difficulties that stemmed from ‘a lack of awareness and understanding of what blockchain technology is’ and the differing outcome expectations between developers and aid funders (Carnaby and Hallwright, 2019). While Oxfam’s official report is much more bullish, it acknowledges an imbalance in this relationship as the implementation and technical support for the blockchain was entirely dependent upon one Sempo developer (Rust, 2019).

The Vanuatu project’s complexity was a product of connectivity issues, constraints in the existing financial system and the need to work around the Reserve Bank’s crypto prohibition. The project substituted crypto wallets and currencies with a near field communication (NFC) system, with pre-loaded cards for aid recipients, smart devices for vendors (small shops) and a super-vendor (larger shops functioning as cash intermediaries) working with Sempo to release funds and reduce transaction costs. Vendor smart devices are the medium to the Ethereum blockchain from which the Sempo dashboard allows Oxfam to collect data on purchases and regional variations in coordinating supplies. This system has been credited with ‘modest cost-savings and significant time-savings’ (Rust, 2019: 4) in identifying aid recipients. However, it has failed by its own admission to embody blockchain governance objectives of transparency and disintermediation. Oxfam’s blockchain is a permissioned data management system controlled by a for-profit developer which they acknowledge most participants do not have ‘access or the literacy to comprehend the information stored on the network’ (Rust, 2019: 13). Restrictions upon the use of cryptocurrencies meant the project relies upon the physical transfer of cash to vendors outside of the blockchain with complaints that ‘it took too long to get repaid’ (Rust, 2019: 27). In this context, it is not self-evident what virtues blockchain might have over mobile telephony payment systems such as M-VATU which can operate under existing financial regulations and communications infrastructure.

Where this project fits into the overall platform imperialism of blockchain is in how it perceives the problems of implementation in terms of solutionism as opposed to the cultural and economic suitability of blockchain. The limitations of the project and the need to work around Vanuatu state policy are treated purely as technical issues in need of regulatory openness as opposed to confronting the politics of blockchain in Vanuatu and elsewhere. Oxfam does not attempt to distance itself from Bitcoin, a common gesture in blockchain governance projects, describing the origins of blockchain in transparently cyber-libertarian terms as ‘retaliation’ against the banking sector with a digital currency ‘impervious to unpredictable monetary policies of political influence’ (Rust, 2019: 12). Oxfam attributes their project’s disintermediation failure as a reliance upon cash payments to vendors. Here, fiat currency and the state are posed as problems to be solved through online crypto exchanges which would end ‘the reliance on incumbent financial institutions’ (Rust, 2019: 45). Oxfam’s research report is replete with a tech triumphalism about ‘join[ing] the largest and most active [blockchain] based community in the world’ (15); and in ‘successfully deliver[ing] a first of its kind Distributed Ledger Technology based solution’ (4).

This desire to present unblocked cash as a ‘game changer’ marks Oxfam as part of the community of innovators open to tech partnerships in the race to plant the blockchain flag. At its most ambitious, Oxfam envisions a partnership with Sempo in a ‘proprietary system’ that leverages Oxfam’s ‘global reach and considerable brand recognition’ (Rust, 2019: 46) to issue Oxfam tokens. An Oxfam blockchain of this description would have less to do with the virtues of data governance then becoming the cash-aid platform of the Ethereum constellation that can be parachuted into any context regardless of cultural and political suitability. As the winner of the EU’s ‘Blockchains for Social Good’ €1 million prize (Cole, 2020), Oxfam presented Unblocked Cash as a universal solution with the sales pitch ‘we have the market, we have the network, we have the partners, we have the expertise’ (Next Generation Internet, 2020). For Sempo, the upshot of Unblocked Cash is the ability to wield humanitarian and solutionist bona fides in search of larger, for-profit projects. These credentials were strengthened by Wired who called on the US government ‘to take cues from global humanitarian agencies’ (Adinolfi, 2020) and implement Sempo as a solution in distributing economic stimulus payments following Covid-19. Here the hollowing out of the state’s welfare capacity necessitates blockchain solutions as ‘efficient, secure, and resilient systems [that] are overdue in America’s federal and financial infrastructure’ (Adinolfi, 2020). What blockchain experimentation in Vanuatu has yielded is a potent humanitarian narrative of platform innovation, the primary political and economic benefits of which exclude developing world subjects.

The emergence of blockchain solutionism in the Pacific development sector is a result of the US State Department’s evangelism. In 2018, under the banners of Tech Camp and Blockchain@State, the American embassy held a blockchain conference at the University of the South Pacific (USP) in Fiji. USP is a university of 12 Pacific member countries and one of the most important multilateral organizations in the region. USP has previously hosted Civil Society 2.0 initiatives such as social media and digital journalism workshops, and ‘Fishackathon’ (US Embassy Suva, 2016), the progenitor of Tuna supply blockchain. This conference featured leaders in the region’s ICT sector, blockchain entrepreneurs, the leader of Unblocked Cash Sandra Hart, Fiji’s Permanent Secretary of Education and local developers (Traseable Solutions, 2018). The panels at Tech Camp covered a range of blockchain solutions from elections, electricity grids, sustainable fisheries to the WWF’s presentation ‘Can Blockchain Save the Planet?’ (Traseable Solutions, 2018). Local media coverage portrayed the event as a means for Fiji to become competitive in the global labour market (Movono, 2018b) and were exuberant about the ‘first-ever blockchain Tech Camp’ (Movono, 2018a) leading one news headline to claim; ‘Fiji chosen as first to have blockchain technology’ (Vucago, 2018).

The staging of the State Department’s Blockchain Tech Camp in Fiji owes to the tuna supply blockchain pilot project which partners the WWF, Viant and TraSeable Solutions. Viant is one of the 40-plus blockchain start-ups under the ConsenSys umbrella and has assumed a media prominence by virtue of its ‘bait to plate’ (Cook, 2018) tuna storytelling. The tracking of tuna from Fiji fisheries, onshore processing, regulatory compliance, distribution and appearance as sushi has become a regular proof of concept and augmented reality spectacle at Ethereum conferences (ConseSys Media, 2018). Key to this story of blockchain development is Kenneth Katafono (2019, Personal Communication, 12 July), a ConsenSys academy developer, prominent Pacific blockchain advocate, founder and managing director of TraSeable Solutions. Tyler Mulvihill, director of Viant, has described Katafono as ‘the product of an education and interest in technology…paving the way for this new technology…from a small island in Fiji’ (Katafono, 2019, Personal Communication, 12 July). Katafono functions as a stand-in for the promise of blockchain, ICT4D and the region’s creative potential, an idea Mulvihill lays on thick as he mistakes Suva, Fiji’s capital and a regional hub with population of over 300,000, with a ‘small island’.

The partnership of WWF, Viant and TraSeable blockchain is premised upon eliminating ‘unethically or illegally sourced products’, adding value to ethically sourced tuna ‘through informed purchasing’ and providing ‘a single source of truth for traceability’ (Cook, 2018: 12). This would be achieved through the participation of tuna vessels, processors, importers, retailers and consumers on the Viant blockchain platform. The blockchain authenticates supply chain information via a proof of authority consensus mechanism. Facing cost and connectivity issues similar to Vanuatu, data from Fijian fleets (fish weight, variety and location) are recorded off the blockchain via NFC tags on fish. Implementing this blockchain workaround [is] not straight forward as the project report notes that ‘no industry exists in Fiji to support the supply, implementation and maintenance of the RFID [and NFC] equipment’ (Cook, 2018: 24). The human and material realities that prevent a fully integrated blockchain and the problem of ‘garbage-in, garbage-out’ are elided by the pretence to real-time auditing allowing ‘fraudulent information [to] eventually be flagged’ (Cook, 2018: 25). Here, the suitability and promises of blockchain rest upon assumptions of big data’s inevitability. Where the value proposition lies is the consumer experience of a blockchain ethical certitude with QR codes capturing a product’s origin via an augmented reality interface. While ‘blockchain tuna’ may potentially add value to Fijian exports the notion of data transparency at the heart of blockchain does not demystify or transcend commodity relations; rather they are obscured through platform claims of absolute truth for the blockchain-empowered consumer.

In an interview with the author TraSeables founder Katafono is clear about the North–South politics that blockchain discourse effaces. He describes his company’s work in far less grandiose terms; ‘we try not to associate ourselves too much with blockchain, at the heart we are traceability technology company’ (2019, Personal Communication, 12 July). TraSeables participation in this project relied upon the NFC tagging system functioning both within and outside the Viant platform as Viant was too expensive for Fijian operators; as Katafono states ‘we certainly couldn’t afford the tech that they were offering’ (Katafono, 2019, Personal Communication, 12 July). Incidentally, the WWF’s report on the pilot project lists every cost except Viant’s software charges which are described as variable and case specific. Given ConsenSys’ losses and the common Silicon Valley tactics of growth before profit in search of monopoly rents, the ‘true’ economic cost of the platform may be hard to determine. For Katafono, it is essential that Fijian exporters be engaged with this technology as ‘the US FDA are already looking at blockchain for goods coming in and they could mandate it’ (Katafono, 2019, Personal Communication, 12 July). As described by Katafono, blockchain would function as a prerequisite for market entry and a cost born by developing countries. Techcamp’s flagship blockchain project thus represents a mechanism to intensify neoliberal export-driven models of growth. A blockchain asset management regime for Fiji fisheries would represent a significant economic imposition and a platform monopolization of the supply chain for a product that accounted for 13% of Fiji’s foreign currency earnings in 2018 (OEC, 2019). Also given the prohibitive barriers to entry for the full Viant platform and a disparity in permissioned access, it is reasonable to assume that whatever the value of immutable supply chain information it will not be evenly distributed. Additionally, there is nothing in this blockchain solution to redress the power imbalances of the global tuna trade which sees domestic consumers priced out from their natural resource and Fijian companies unable to compete with behemoth Chinese longline fleets.

This amalgam of developers and NGOs brought together by the US State Department do not merely acculturate the development sector to a hegemonic techno-solutionism, but help construct the imperial geography of blockchain. In his launching address of Tech Camp, US Chargé d’Affaires Michael Goldman underscored the State Department’s role in fostering blockchain as a means by which they could advance US development goals (2018). Goldman referenced the department’s ‘Blockchain@State Forum’ co-sponsored by ConsenSys which sought to develop blockchain solutions for aid programs and the internal workings of the department (Stanley, 2017). At the heart of the Washington DC forum was self-sovereign identity as a technology of the state. The seeming paradox of this cyber-libertarian language of statelessness as a means of US statecraft is explicated by Joe Lubin as a platform for developing world subjects:

Once people own their own identity [via blockchain], then they’re less enthralled to their governments and less subject to adverse situations like natural disasters and wars. So, if someone is ejected from their country, if they’ve already established self-sovereign identity they can reconstitute their life. (Stanley, 2017)

Blockchain would thus serve to liberate subjects from the developing world state and replaces universal rights and citizenship with a fragmented blockchain subjectivity.

Lubin is pitching ConsenSys applications and the blockchain as part of an emerging platform architecture of digital identity for imperial resource management (Kintsler, 2019). The American state may ration resources or determine migration rights though the combination of biometrics, proof of reputation and social media data secured on the blockchain. This blockchain infrastructure of what Madianou terms ‘biometric assemblage’ (2019a), justified on governance principles of accountability and transparent auditing, can be interchangeably utilized under imperialist logics of border security, capitalism and solutionism. The utility of blockchain governance projects and the role of national security contractors like Palantir in managing developing world data is in filling out this emerging infrastructure of control and mapping the developing world for threats and resources.

The developing world blockchain governance initiative most consistent with ICT4D rhetoric and imperial cartographies of control are land registries. The Global Blockchain Business Council (GBBC), whose CEO was scheduled to attend Tech Camp but prevented last minute due to a tropical cyclone, demonstrates how blockchain land registries are the apogee of the neoliberal development model. The GBBC describes its work as blockchain ‘education, advocacy and partnership’ in ‘developing the next trillion-dollar industry’ (2020). In a seeming caricature of neoliberal cosmopolitanism and imperial philanthropy, the council boasts of having been conceived on Richard Branson’s private island and launched at Davos (GBBC, 2020). Oxfam’s Sandra Hart is a regional ambassador for the GBBC and its board of directors includes Hernando de Soto as its chief economist. The pre-eminent theorist of neoliberalism in the developing world known as the ‘Friedrich Von Hayek of Latin America’ (Ames and Levine, 2013) de Soto’s central preoccupation has been formalizing private property rights. In a Wall Street Journal editorial entitled ‘How Blockchain Can End Poverty’, de Soto and his co-author envision developing world resources of $170 trillion governed under ‘a single computer platform [that], can share the blessings of private-property registration with the whole world’ (Gramm and de Soto, 2018). Encoding property rights beyond the purview of the developing world state, coupled with ‘satellite technology’ and the ‘organized knowledge about the location of every visible asset on earth’ (Gramm and de Soto, 2018) approaches something like a planetary totality for computational capitalism.

In Fiji, this process has begun under the auspices of the Japanese- and American-led ADB and the consultancy firm KPMG in developing a prototype to manage the leasing and registration of indigenous Fijian lands. Ninety percent of land in Fiji is owned by indigenous (iTaukei) communal groups and administered by the government’s iTaukei Land Trust Board (TLTB) which overseas lease tenders and the payment of dividends to iTaukei all the way down to the tokatoka or family unit. The TLTB CEO describes the project as a ‘digitized land strategy’ which includes ‘data cleansing…digitizing processes…[and] a blockchain prototype for TLTB to have an online service platform’ (Reece, 2019). The ADB’s proposed prototype boasts the usual governance efficiencies of immutable digitization as a protection against corruption and a lack of transparency (Roño et al., 2018).⁹ Katafono, having been approached to develop this prototype, has expressed scepticism of the utility of blockchain for land registration in Fiji as opposed to ‘a centralized database…lot[s] of countries do that it’s not difficult’ (Katafono, 2019, Personal Communication, July 12). He cites examples such as Dubai where the intention is ‘to transact land titles on the blockchain, allowing for buying selling with cryptocurrencies in the future…In the Pacific or in Fiji I am not sure why they would use blockchain’ (Katafono, 2019, Personal Communication, July 12).

The undergirding principle is of efficiency gains made through Hayekian notions of real-time price-signals via the recording of transactions on a blockchain ‘decentralized marketplace’ (Roño et al., 2018). The ADB envision that blockchain linked SMS messaging will be the ultimate decision-making mechanism to manage and bring communal lands to market. The ‘permissioned members’ of the TLTB blockchain app are the ‘core public agencies’ (TLTB), ‘auxiliary public agencies’ (other government departments) and ‘private organizations’ such as banks, insurance and investment companies (Roño et al., 2018). Building private investors into the core governance structure of the TLTB through smart contracts represents a prizing open of opaque customary lands into global capital flows. The production of immutable data presages the ability of capital to map resources and leverage informational imbalances. Further to de Soto’s vision of intensively cataloguing developing world assets, the ability to appraise the previously unknown land and encode this information as tradeable property rights logically brings with it the drive to collect indigenous knowledge for bioprospecting and genetic patent development (Rose, 2016).

Fiji is not the first developing nation to experiment with blockchain land registration, but what is at stake is a history of resistance to the imperialist calculus of quantification for exploitation and profit. The British Native Lands Commission of 1880 sought to ‘define and register all native lands so that a clear system might be established to delineate properties that could be bought and sold’ (Nicole, 2016: 1). The threat of data production was well understood:

Surveyors and the instruments by which they named, marked and mapped the land, were regular targets of retribution. They represented the means by which colonization advanced physically on the ground. (Nicole, 2016: 2)

In addition to attacking surveying equipment resistance tactics included the constant modification of oral accounts of land possession and non-compliance with the commission under threat of perjury (Nicole, 2016). It is this history of struggle which protected native lands and has guided the TLTB’s notion of land usage and ownership as being ‘held by iTaukei in according to iTaukei custom as evidenced by usage and traditions’ (Native Lands Act, 1978). To put it in the terms of blockchain, a mutable truth was key to preserving these lands for future generations. The ‘problem’ of land registration in need of a rational ‘techno-solution’ is the legacy of human resistance to colonial expropriation which has preserved indigenous lands.