Blockchain Scenes

Vol. 5 : No. 2 : 2023

About the issue

Over the last fifteen years, the development of blockchain technologies has attracted a large volume of professional expertise, capital investment and media attention. This burgeoning sector of technology practices has coalesced around a few major initiatives (Bitcoin, Ethereum), but it is still moving at a fast pace and its configuration is evolving. If this sector is marked by a variety of technological protocols, financial arrangements and organizational forms, it is also a site of social effervescence. Parties, meet-ups, and the sorts of informal socializing which gather around events and networks of all kinds function to endow the blockchain sector with the characteristics of what, in cultural analysis, are often called “scenes”. The aim of this special issue is to examine the interest of the notion of scene for the analysis of blockchain practices.

This issue is guest edited by Nathalie Casemajor and William Straw.