Digital Governance as Recombination : The Institutional Generativity of Blockchain Protocols

The rapidly increasing power of digital infrastructures to shape social action has fueled a growing body of research on the multifaceted relationship between digital technology and governance. The emergence of blockchain as a form of digital infrastructure centrally concerned with governance and institutions has also given rise to a broadly interdisciplinary literature, albeit one that has largely operated outside of the literature on digital technology and governance. This paper seeks to bridge these perspectives by bringing the paradoxes and affordances of related digital technologies into the same frame with a detailed study of governance in blockchain. I do this by framing the study around a question motivated by the broader literature: how do the governance affordances of digital technology enable its users, developers and other stakeholders to navigate the tensions created by the technology’s generativity and fluidity? I study this phenomenon in the context of blockchain technology, an emergent form of digital infrastructure for which governance institutions have long been a focus. Rather than ledgers or cryptocurrencies, I focus my analysis on the role of blockchain protocols, a central mechanism for establishing the roles, rules, incentives and other aspects that define blockchain governance. Using a framework I developed for this analysis, I find that blockchain protocols combine the technology’s innate affordances with the controlled generativity of open source and the stabilizing control of algorithms into a unique blend that I term institutional generativity. This institutional generativity is at the heart of the technology’s ability to target longstanding institutions as well as its rapid iteration on the forms it creates