Down and Dirty in the Field of Play: Startup Societies, Cryptostatecraft, and Critical Complicity

Climate change and fourth industrial revolution (4IR) technologies are massively shifting the material and social conditions of existence on Earth and contribute to a state of indeterminacy and increased political experimentation. While various models for what might become the ‘next iteration of governance’ are currently emerging, this essay turns to specific contemporary political experiments which claim to democratize power, distribute and/or share sovereignty, function as peer-to-peer or actor-to-actor, and move beyond criticism—be it to the moon or to soil. More precisely, I look at extropist experiments in competitive crypto-governance and at (post)critical laboratories closer to the conceptual frame of international law, which both, in different ways, rely on a specific practice of determination characterized by binary relations and existential negation. In favor of an alternative approach, I argue for an ethics of legal thought capable of attending to indeterminacy and the relationalities it enables differently.