The Shared Frontiers of Economic and Civil Society: Toward Optimal Political Context for Distributed Ledger Technology in Finance
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Duckworth, Peter
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Duckworth, Peter. 2022. The Shared Frontiers of Economic and Civil Society: Toward Optimal Political Context for Distributed Ledger Technology in Finance. Master's thesis, Harvard University Division of Continuing Education.Abstract
Distributed ledger technology (DLT) facilitates a new chapter for the internet, oneknown 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.
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