Blockchain is part of this push to sort of rationalize, marketize, and bring the world's assets, as DeSoto would put it, into a single computer platform. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Sabas.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Olivier Jutel.

Olivier is a lecturer at the University of Otago, and his research recently has been focusing on blockchain projects and the narratives around them that have been deployed in the Pacific, usually on Pacific Island states, that have been promoted as a means of providing aid or some form of humanitarian effort to these countries.

And if you've been paying any attention to blockchain and

crypto discourses, you know, in the recent months and years, you'll probably notice that

there's been more and more focus on kind of humanitarian and human rights implementations

of these technologies to try to give them a different kind of image as they have started

to receive more criticism and more open criticism of the kind of things

that they are actually doing and enabling, like money laundering, environmental harm,

things like that. And kind of unsurprisingly, what Olivier finds in his research is that

rather than promoting really positive things in these societies where these kind of

ostensibly human rights oriented implementations of blockchain are being made, rather they are

reinforcing existing power structures, whether that is of capitalist dynamics and, you know,

wealthy kind of capitalist power players or existing kind of state power in the sense of

the imperial pressures that have been long been placed on the Pacific and parts of the global south

by countries like the United States. So I think this is an important conversation and an important

kind of corrective to some of these narratives that we have been hearing recently,

and if you haven't encountered them, I'm sure that you will hear them soon. I'll note that Olivier

mentions a lot of names of different people who you might not be familiar with, and he usually

gives a bit of information on who those people are, but what I'll try to do in the show notes is

to list some of those people

and to provide links where you can find more information about them if you are interested in doing so.

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