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Parody of money: Techno-social imaginaries of Bitcoin and their contradictions
Tremčinský, Martin ; Grygar, Jakub (advisor) ; de Faria, Inês Domingues Figueira (referee) ; Faustino, Sandra (referee)
The dissertation thesis analyzes Bitcoin as a socio-technical phenomenon by focusing on its prevalent socio-technical imaginaries and exploring these imaginaries into their contradictory consequences. Based on ethnographic research conducted in Czech and Slovak Bitcoin communities and following Lana Swartz's and Nigel Dodd's respective theories of Bitcoin, four imaginaries are identified: commodity, relation, ideology and money. Each of these imaginaries is explored in its own chapter. Bitcoin approached as a commodity explores the process of Bitcoin mining through the lens of the Marxist labour theory of value combined with Negri's theory of the socialized worker. The chapter explores how Bitcoin mining reproduces class antagonisms between miners and investors while also creating a new mode of production based on control via labour. The second chapter focuses on Bitcoin as a relation via the theories of kinship and knowledge developed by Marilyn Strathern. The chapter explores particular analogies of Bitcoin and kinship and how these analogies serve to develop relationless persons and personless relations. The following chapter analyzes Bitcoin as an ideology while utilizing theories of immaterial labour developed by Italian autonomists. It focuses on symbolic labour carried out in order to...
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Kidnapping Otherness. Tourism, Imaginaries and Rumor in Eastern Indonesia
Kábová, Adriana ; Halbich, Marek (advisor) ; Vrhel, František (referee) ; Knotková - Čapková, Blanka (referee)
This dissertation is based on my research into distinction processes (Calhoun, 1994; Cerulo 1997) between tourists and inhabitants of West Sumba in Eastern Indonesia. The imaginiaries (Castoriadis, 1987; Strauss, 2006; Lacan, 1977; Anderson, 1991; Salazar, 2012) of West Sumbanese people about foreigners also emerge from diving rumors (Bysow, 1928; Allport and Postman, 1947/1965). Their origins, dissemination, and sharpening processes, as well as their consequences will be analysed herein. This case study demonstrates how mental models of otherness are formed and reified, how they clash, and for what purposes they may be utilized. It will also analyze how imaginaries influence behavior and may lead to miscommunication in West Sumba.
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