Breaking the chain through blockchain : decentralization, autonomy, and labour process in the Architecture Decentralised Autonomous Organisation (archiDAO)

Other conference contribution, 2023

Labour process theory can potentially offer an understanding of how to counter aneotaylorist managerial control at the point of production by considering spaces of relative autonomy in the workplace regulation dynamics (Thompson 2010) – not least due to digitalization and new technologies (Briken et al. 2018) . On these grounds, our paper focuses on the Architecture, Engineering, Construction, and Operations (AECO) sector and presents a novel labour model for the Architecture Decentralised Autonomous Organisation (archiDAO), an architecture studio run on smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain.

A widespread narrative on the AECO industry in several (inter)national contexts considers it as fragmented and trailing behind other industries in terms of the processes involving digitisation and productivity, esp. regarding the way digital technologies are managerially used (if used at all) for increasing productivity but breaking the labor process by separating between mental and manual labour. This fragmentation and limitation can even affect white-collar workers involved in AECO work – who could thus benefit from exploring spaces of autonomy by utilizing technologies potentially affording them with decentralization capabilities. Introducing blockchain technologies within AECO has the potential to re-shape the industry and the labour that goes into it by allowing for such autonomy through the form of peer-to-peer economies and bottom-up governance of construction project processes.

Blockchains are distributed ledger technologies that employ crypto economics to secure the ledger. Moreover, one can run smart contracts on top of a blockchain, creating various token mechanisms that have project and economic utility. Smart contracts can be explained as the computing code equivalent of automated vending machines (Savelyev 2016). Smart contracts get deployed unto blockchain packaged into a transaction. The Byzantine-fault tolerance mechanisms of the blockchain ensure then that smart contracts cannot be tampered within the same manner that transactions are secured, allowing only validated accounts on the network to act on the smart contract. Deployed smart contracts act then as automatons, with the blockchain automatically executing their code when specific events trigger the computation. This creates then an infrastructure automation layer where public permission blockchains, such as Ethereum, can be used as global computing state machines.

Within our paper, we analyse the affinity of labour process theory with the set of stigmergic principles which archiDAO has used to organise production. These stigmergic principles have been developed via a review of the Viable System Model of Stafford Beer, as applied in the Cybersyn project in Chile. The paper analyses the construction of the token mechanics in the design of the archiDAO infrastructure and presents concrete examples of the overlay of labour processes with token processes. This can be of particular interest to the labour process community as the ArchiDAO is governed via its member-workers directly using tokens, providing an alternative to the extractive gig economy or the top-down hierarchy of classic architecture firms which are routinely managed in a neo-taylorist way.