Wessel Reijers's Books

Blockchain Governance

By: Primavera De Filippi,Wessel Reijers,Morshed Mannan

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Blockchain Governance

By: Primavera De Filippi,Wessel Reijers,Morshed Mannan

An engaging and comprehensive exploration of how fundamental ideas in political and legal thought shape the governance of blockchain communities, and are, in turn, shaped by blockchain technology. How can digital cash truly be “trustless”? What does it mean that blockchain offers a new paradigm of the “rule of code”? How are decisions made when a blockchain system faces an emergency, and who gets to make those decisions? In Blockchain Governance, Primavera De Filippi, Wessel Reijers, and Morshed Mannan offer answers to these questions and more, in an accessible, critical overview of legal and political issues related to blockchain technology, now the foundation of a multi-billion-dollar industry. Moving beyond the hype, they show how blockchain offers fertile ground for experimentation with radically new ways to govern people and institutions. Blockchain-based systems, like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tezos, and countless others, offer new ways of organizing digital cash, “smart” contracts to execute transactions, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to collect art, and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) to coordinate humans and machines. What these applications have in common is that they govern the behavior of people and artificial agents through distributed systems. Drawing from their extensive experience in researching blockchain technologies and communities, the authors discuss the origins of Bitcoin in cypher-anarchism and extropianism, spectacular events like the million-dollar theft of the DAO Attack, and the hostile takeover of the Steem platform. While engaging with political and legal thinkers such as Hobbes, Kelsen, and the Ostroms, these narratives explore how blockchain governance problematizes fundamental concepts such as rule of law, sovereignty, legality, legitimacy, and polycentric governance.

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Page Count

246

Publisher

MIT Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0262379864

ISBN 13

9780262379861

Narrative and Technology Ethics

By: Wessel Reijers,Mark Coeckelbergh

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Narrative and Technology Ethics

By: Wessel Reijers,Mark Coeckelbergh

This book proposes that technologies, similar to texts, novels and movies, ‘tell stories’ and thereby configure our lifeworld in the Digital Age. The impact of technologies on our lived experience is ever increasing: innovations in robotics challenge the nature of work, emerging biotechnologies impact our sense of self, and blockchain-based smart contracts profoundly transform interpersonal relations. In their exploration of the significance of these technologies, Reijers and Coeckelbergh build on the philosophical hermeneutics of Paul Ricouer to construct a new, narrative approach to the philosophy and ethics of technology. The authors take the reader on a journey: from a discussion of the philosophy of praxis, via a hermeneutic notion of technical practice that draws on MacIntyre, Heidegger and Ricoeur, through the virtue ethics of Vallor, and Ricoeur’s ethical aim, to the eventual construction of a practice method which can guide ethics in research and innovation. In its creation of a compelling hermeneutic ethics of technology, the book offers a concrete framework for practitioners to incorporate ethics in everyday technical practice.

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