Carnival in the global village: Re-imagining information infrastructures

Donncha Kavanagh and Gianluca MiscioneCollege of Business, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

CONTACT INFORMATION:

Donncha Kavanagh, College of Business, University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland; EMAIL: donncha.kavanagh@ucd.ie

Kavanagh, Donncha and Gianluca Miscione. (2019) “Carnival in the global village: Re-imagining information infrastructures.” The Information Society doi: 10.1080/01972243.2019.1647321.

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Abstract

Infrastructures are typically seen as boring and serious, and are routinely depicted using metaphors from transportation. We argue that the carnival is a fruitful metaphor for understanding emerging information infrastructures, as the information age is also the age of the carnival. We distinguish between the ubiquitous or distal carnival and its particular manifestations – the proximate carnival – both of which are characterised by play, anarchy, dissimulation, vulgar language and excessive consumption. The article focuses on Bitcoin, which we see as a nascent information infrastructure and an exemplary instance of a proximate carnival. It also considers how the carnival metaphor might help us reimagine our study of the information age.

Keywords: information infrastructures, Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, carnival, Bakhtin, games, carnivalesque

Introduction

The word “infrastructures” is well understood in everyday discourse as the physical and organizational systems needed for society to operate. It typically includes roads, rail networks, ports, water supply, sewers, telecommunications, power supplies and the like. The notion of an “information infrastructure” (II) is less well-known, but the Internet is a rather obvious example, while it also includes such things as industry-wide electronic data interchange networks (Datta and Mbarika 2006), broadband networks (Frieden 2013), health information systems (Rodon and Silva 2015; Constantinides and Barrett 2015), national library systems (Caidi 2004), corporate information systems (Rolland and Monteiro 2002), land registries (Harvey 2009), etc. And beneath these are deeper infrastructures, such as the temporal infrastructure that supports a global system of time-measurement (Mulvin 2017). What they share with other infrastructures is that they are typically seen as serious, if not boring, things that are practically invisible until they break down. Indeed, this is axiomatic to the concept: as part of the taken-for-granted, infrastructures are necessarily unexciting, generally not talked about, and are largely out of sight and out of mind.

In this article, we consider how the carnival metaphor advances our understanding of information infrastructures and, in particular, the nascent information infrastructure that is Bitcoin (recognising that Bitcoin may fail). We have been studying Bitcoin for four years now and we begin with a brief introduction to the cryptocurrency and explain why cryptocurrencies warrant being considered as an information infrastructure. Cryptocurrencies are significant, not only as a new form of money, but also because they will probably exemplify emerging digital modes of organizing, and, as an infrastructure, will be taken-for-granted and hence unseen in years to come. Thus, our understanding of infrastructures can be deepened through studying Bitcoin, while, conversely, our understanding of Bitcoin (and monies more broadly) can be enriched by seeing it as an infrastructure.

The article is structured as follows. We first introduce Bitcoin, explaining why it can be considered an information infrastructure. We then discuss the role of metaphors in thinking about abstract organisational concepts, noting how the railroad metaphor and the transmission view of communication often underpins our understanding of information infrastructures. Carey (2009/1989) has previously argued for a ritual rather than a transmission view of communication, but we prefer the metaphor of carnival. In our analysis, we draw particularly on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin (1984/1968), the Russian philosopher and literary theorist, who wrote what is generally considered the seminal analysis of the carnival (which he termed the carnivalesque) of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. We distinguish between the proximate carnival, which is the particular instantiation of the carnival manifest in Bitcoin, and the uncontained, distal carnival that is a feature of the Global North since c. 1960, and which, significantly, is contemporaneous with the information age. We posit that the carnival is an invisible but crucial aspect of digital infrastructural innovation that is largely overlooked by conventional approaches, especially those informed by an engineering paradigm that privileges rational design and planning. The bulk of the article examines different features of the carnival, illustrating how the metaphor provides a new way of seeing both information infrastructures and cryptocurrencies.

Bitcoin: A nascent information infrastructure

We begin with a note on nomenclature. We use cryptocurrency, digital money, and digital currencies as synonyms that refer to native digital currencies, such as Bitcoin, and not to the digital version of fiat monies, such as the euro, dollar, pound, etc. We use the term “Bitcoin” for the overall Bitcoin network, and “bitcoin” for the digital money produced by this network.

Bitcoin is the best-known and the first widely used form of cryptocurrency. While the first bitcoin software was released in 2009 and the first transaction only occurred in 2010, it is the culmination of decades of research into cryptography and distributed systems. As Antonopolous (2014) explains, it consists of four key innovations brought together in a unique way: (a) a decentralized peer-to-peer network (the bitcoin protocol); (b) a public transaction ledger (the blockchain); (c) a decentralized mathematical and deterministic currency issuance protocol (distributed mining); and (d) a decentralized transaction verification system (transaction script).

The seminal contribution to the development of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies was made by the mysterious individual or group known as Satoshi Nakamoto, who published a paper setting out the basis for the “blockchain” on which they are based (Nakamoto 2008). Nakamoto began his paper with an imaginary world populated by trustless individuals, and the problem he addressed was how to enable trustworthy transactions on the Internet – where the population is not fixed and known – without recourse to a trusted third party such as a state-regulated (or state-supported) bank. His solution is the blockchain, which is a public record or ledger of all transactions maintained by a dispersed and open-ended number of “miners”, who provide computing power to guarantee the ledger’s integrity. Bitcoin is then usable by whoever installs a “wallet” on a digital device – there is no form of identity check at access points. This architecture makes it impossible to either double-spend money – which would create immediate and infinite inflation – or for a central authority to rule.

Rather than describing the phenomenon further – more details are readily available on the Internet – we will now explain why Bitcoin should be considered an information infrastructure.[footnoteRef:1] To address this, we turn to Star and Ruhleder’s (1996) influential conceptualisation of an information infrastructure. [1: See Popper (2015) for a good history of Bitcoin to date; see Antonopoulos (2014) for a detailed description of how it works; see Dodd (2018), Swartz (2018), and Maurer, Nelms, and Swartz (2013) for sociological perspectives on the phenomenon.]

Their work builds on the common understanding of an infrastructure as something that is built and maintained, and which is at once ever-present and ready-to-hand, and yet becomes completely transparent as it sinks into the background. They advance this understanding by emphasizing that an information infrastructure is a fundamentally relational concept that is always grounded in particular practices; for instance, the water system is a piece of infrastructure for a chef cooking dinner, but it is something quite different for a city water engineer. Hence, the issue for Star and Ruhleder (1996) is as much about when – rather than what – is an infrastructure. For them, infrastructures are characterized by a number of dimensions.

1.They are “sunk” into other structures, social arrangements, and technologies (embeddedness).

2.They do not have to be reinvented with each task (transparency).

3.They reach beyond a single event or one-site practice (scope).

4.They are learned as part of membership of a community of practice.

5.They shape and are shaped by the conventions of a community of practice.

6.They plug into other infrastructures and tools in a standard way.

7.They are built on an installed base.

8.They become visible upon breakdown.

Bitcoin is generally considered to be a form of money (though some dispute this) and so we will first consider the idea that money is an information infrastructure.[footnoteRef:2] Money does seem to exhibit all eight characteristics identified by Star and Ruhleder. It is certainly deeply embedded in other social arrangements, structures, and technologies (1); it does not have to be reinvented with each task (2); it reaches beyond single events or one-site practices (3); as a technology, it is learned – from an early age – through membership of a community (4); it is performative in that a community’s collective belief that some pieces of paper are “money” is sustained and validated by the practices that inform that belief, while, at the same time, the belief self-referentially enables and sustains these practices (5); it inserts itself into other infrastructures (e.g. an ERP) in a standard way (6); the creation of the euro out of separate currency systems in 1999 is a good example of money being built on an installed base (7); while Greece’s potential exit from the euro system in 2015 is a good example of money, as an infrastructure, only becoming visible upon threat of breakdown (8). Indeed, money is perhaps the example par excellence of something that is in plain sight – we see it everywhere around us – while at the same time it is invisible, in that we routinely do not think about it as a constructed piece of infrastructure. If money is a form of information infrastructure, then so too is digital money, specifically Bitcoin. [2: It is important to point out that money – like bitcoin/Bitcoin – has two sides: it as a currency, instantiated in coinage and notes, but it also relies on a network of institutions and practices, including the state, the central bank, commercial banks, mints and the like. It is at once a commodity with a price and a token of the state’s authority (Hart 1986).]

To deepen the analysis, we briefly examine how Bitcoin maps on to another influential, if somewhat competing, conceptualisation of an infrastructure, namely Hanseth and Lyytinen’s (2010) highly cited articulation: “a shared, open (and unbounded), heterogeneous, and evolving socio-technical system…consisting of a set of IT capabilities and their user, operations, and design communities” (4, italics in original). Bitcoin is shared, as it is available to anyone with an Internet connection. It is open in that anyone can transact in bitcoin, the underlying code is open-source, while the blockchain itself, as a public ledger, can be considered a public good. It is heterogeneous in that it encompasses different actors, including miners, coders, transactors, regulators, exchanges, as well as different applications and platforms such as different altcoins (alternatives to bitcoin), sidechains, and is the basis for other infrastructures such as Ethereum and the Lightning network. It is rapidly evolving: initially, personal computers were used to “mine” bitcoin, but because success in mining is linked to computing power, dedicated mining hardware was quickly developed to the point where large mining “farms” have now been built in locations with cheap electricity. Likewise, the constellation of services and applications that sit on the blockchain network is ever-increasing and evolving. Many have predicted that Bitcoin will die, but even if it does it will almost certainly be replaced by one or more alternative cryptocurrencies embedded in new variants of the blockchain technology. At the same time, the Bitcoin protocol is essentially the same as originally set out in Nakamoto’s original white paper which continues to inform the infrastructure’s overarching ideology, structure, and standard.

On Metaphor

Metaphors are powerful because they provide a way of thinking about abstract organisational concepts and the appropriateness of particular forms of institutional practice. Powerful metaphors can also be self-fulfilling as the primary metaphors used to study an emerging technology often influence the technology’s subsequent form. For instance, Sawhney (1996) has observed how metaphors function as “midwives”, anticipating MacKenzie’s (2006) well-known idea that theories and models are not so much “cameras”, recording an external reality, but instead work as “engines”, performatively enacting the world. Here, existing legal instruments are important as they provide ready conceptual templates and a well-understood basket of tropes and metaphors for new technologies. For example, the US Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 was initially formulated to regulate the railroads, but subsequently provided the primary template for new “network” technologies, including oil pipelines, trucking, aviation systems and telecommunications. Indeed, the railroad metaphor persists in our understanding of cryptocurrencies, in particular through the expression, “The blockchain’s the rails, bitcoin’s just one of the train cars”, which helped identify the blockchain as a distinctive technology, potentially separate from Bitcoin.

The railroad metaphor is potent because it invokes a set of related ideas, such as a network of nodes, a system of moving entities, and a constant transmission and exchange of information and transactions. In turn, these ideas harbour and manifest ideological issues around synchronisation, ownership, control, governance, and norms of institutional practice. However, each way of seeing is also a way of not-seeing, and it is telling that the railroad metaphor is largely absent from contemporary conversations about Bitcoin, probably because the metaphor over-emphasizes transportation, technical efficiency, transmission, utility, and linearity, and does not sufficiently capture what is involved in the design process.

For us, the carnival metaphor has more potential as it sheds light well beyond the technical, efficiency, and utilitarian dimensions of infrastructures, which tend to be foregrounded in the literature. In many ways, the carnival metaphor builds on Carey’s (2009/1989) important distinction between the transmission and ritual view of communication, which, surprisingly, has found little purchase in studies of information infrastructures. For Carey, the transmission view of communication, which is commonest in our culture, is founded on metaphors derived from geography and transportation, and is centred on the idea of sending and receiving information between nodes in a network. In contrast, a ritual view of communication,

is linked to terms such as “sharing,” “participation,” “association,” “fellowship,” and “the possession of a common faith.” This definition exploits the ancient identity and common roots of the terms “commonness,” “communion,” “community,” and “communication.” A ritual view of communication is directed not toward the extension of messages in space but toward the maintenance of society in time; not the act of imparting information but the representation of shared beliefs.

If the archetypal case of communication under a transmission view is the extension of messages across geography for the purpose of control, the archetypal case under a ritual view is the sacred ceremony that draws persons together in fellowship and commonality. (Carey 2009/1989, 15)

In the pre-modern world, the ritual view of communication was predominant. With the coming of the telegraph and other communications networks, in a broader context of industrialization and the integration of society and economy across space, the transmission view became ascendant. Today, it has become so dominant that we are losing sight of the ritual view of communication. Carey shows how the ritual view brings into the field of vision a different range of problems that are glossed over when we see communication as essentially about transmission.

The transmission view also limits our understanding of Bitcoin. We rarely encountered it in our four-year empirical study of cryptocurrencies, save for peripheral conversations about peer-to-peer networks. However, the ritual metaphor is also problematic, not least because it has so many religious overtones that do not resonate well with our study of Bitcoin. The reality is that “sharing,” “participation,” and “fellowship” that Carey talks about need not spring from some form of religiosity alone – they could also be borne of mischievous instincts of the grosser sort. Here we found the metaphor of the carnival to be much richer and more evocative of the phenomenon of interest to us – Bitcoin.[footnoteRef:3] [3: Huizinga (1949) – in his seminal book on play, Homo ludens – sees play as foundational to both festival (which is akin to carnival) and ritual. Indeed for Huizinga, “there is no formal difference between play and ritual, [and] so the ‘consecrated spot’ cannot be formally distinguished from the play-ground” (10). ]

The value of Carey’s work is that it encourages us to consider the internal or proximate aspects of information infrastructures and to also see infrastructures in their wider historical context. Building on this, we distinguish between the uncontained, distal carnival that is a feature of the Global North since c. 1960, and the proximate carnival, which is the particular instantiation of the carnival that we find in Bitcoin.

Carnival as metaphor and practice

The Russian philosopher and literary theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin, wrote the foundational analysis of the carnival of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, based on, in particular, his study of the sixteenth century novels of François Rabelais (though the carnival tradition goes further back to the ancient Roman festival of Saturnalia and the earlier Greek holiday of Kronia). Bakhtin’s Rabelais and his world was first published in English in 1968 and is best known for highlighting how the carnival (or carnivalesque) challenged authority through ridicule and promoted a grotesque style that exaggerated the body’s primary needs (eating, drinking, sex, urinating, defecating). Bakthin’s ideas have been influential in communication studies – he is often referred to as the “philosopher of human communication” (Danow 1991, 3-4) – but his influence in information studies has been minimal.

One exception is Herold and Marolt’s (2011) edited book, which employs the carnival metaphor to describe the unique character of the Chinese Internet. They argue that scholars have been fixated on political resistance on the Internet, focussing on: (1) how the Chinese circumvent the Great Firewall of China, which regulates the interface between China and the rest of the world, and (2) how the Chinese evade the censors in their communications over the Internet within China. Preoccupied with political resistance, scholars miss out on what is truly significant about the Chinese Internet – it is an exuberant carnival of e-commerce, entertainment, and social media exchanges. In the introductory chapter to this co-edited collection, Herold (2011) writes: “the Chinese Internet is a far more varied space in which individual netizens act not primarily to resist the Chinese state, but rather to avoid its influence on their own personal lives and activities. While resistance may be an implied consequence of their actions, it is not their primary focus, nor should it be the main topic of academic discourses” (14).

While Herold and Marolt (2011) employ the carnival metaphor to reorient scholarship on the Chinese Internet, we use it to develop an analytical framework. Distilling the literature, we see the carnival as having five primary characteristics that distinguish it from “normality”: it (1) is playful; (2) is ambivalent towards authority; (3) celebrates dissimulation; (4) has its own distinctive, vulgar language; (5) sanctions excessive consumption.

In the remainder of the article, we discuss how these five characteristics are dominant themes of the last half-century in the Global North (the distal carnival), and are also manifest in the particular case of Bitcoin (the proximate carnival).

Play

Perhaps most obviously, the carnival is a playground, and is a time and place where many different games are played. In terms of the distal carnival, we argue that the last half-century has witnessed a remarkable ludic shift in the zeitgeist. The video game industry, which did not even exist 40 years ago, enjoyed estimated revenues of $43.4 billion in 2018 and is now larger than the film industry, with three-quarters of all Americans having at least one gamer in their home (Entertainment Software Association 2019). The principal web forum for board games, boardgamegeek.com, founded in 2000, claimed, in July 2019, to have a database of over 108,000 table-top games and 1.5 million registered users. Not coincidentally, the ludology literature – notwithstanding early contributions by Huizinga (1949) and Caillois (1961) – emerged around the same time as Bitcoin, with almost all academic journals appearing since 2000: Game Studies (2001), Game Developer (2001), Gaming Research & Review Journal (2002), Games & Culture (2006), and Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture (2007). The number of books on games has also grown rapidly (e.g. Juul 2005; Salen and Zimmerman 2006; Järvinen 2009; Woods 2012; Elias, Garfield, and Gutschera 2012; Schell 2008), while, since 2009, a single publisher – MIT Press – has publishing 67 books about games (see https://mitpress.mit.edu/topics/game-studies ).

But the distal carnival extends well beyond the explosive interest in table-top and video games that has occurred since 2000. As early as 1986, Strange (1986) had coined the term “casino capitalism” to describe the high-risk/high-reward nature of advanced capitalist economies that, in her view, was at the root of the economic turbulence of the 1970s and 1980s. Many attribute that turbulence to the revolution in finance that occurred in the 1960s as finance became infused with mathematics and advanced probabilistic techniques (Hacking 1990; MacKenzie and Millo 2003). The intellectual roots of present-day finance are in game theory (von Neumann and Morgenstern 1944) and in Markowitz’s (1952) mathematical theory of portfolio selection under uncertainty. The stock market, in turn, came to be performatively reconstructed in the image of a game, where the winners were those who best understood, and had the tools to manage, chance, risk and uncertainty.

Turning to the proximate carnival – the carnival nature of Bitcoin – we see that it is not just one game, but a multiplicity of games; games in – and on – games. Many, if not most, of these games are games of chance (which are much more prevalent in the carnival than, for instance, in a children’s playground). For instance, Bitcoin is a form of betting game, in that it is clear that many purchases of bitcoin are essentially speculative gambles that bitcoin’s value will increase into the future. Participants can join in the fun by purchasing bitcoins – not unlike the way tokens are often used to pay for carnival activities – which they can then use to buy items on the Internet, or else they can play a game, akin to the “wheel of fortune”, watching the value of their bitcoin (token) appreciate astronomically, or disappear completely.

The game aspect of Bitcoin is also evident in bitcoin mining, which is designed as a competitive game based on a series of “rounds” in which miners compete with one another to find a “proof-of-work,” with the winner obtaining a prize (a bitcoin). The blockchain, then, is just the record of past rounds and continually lengthens as the game progresses, akin to an ever-growing chain of domino tiles. The miners are essentially playing a game of chance, in that “proof-of-work” is akin to throwing a pair of dice repeatedly until a highly unlikely series of numbers appears. Miners must also bet on which mining technology to use, where to locate their mining farms, and the scale of their operation. The miners compete with one another, but Bitcoin is also a cooperative game in that coalitions or pools of miners are allowed. Miners are also incentivized, through the game’s design, to work together to ensure that greedy attackers, who may subvert the rules to their advantage and double-spend their money, do not hijack the “game.”

As the interest in cryptocurrencies developed, a new phenomenon emerged – ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings) – that also has a strong gaming logic. Not unlike the virtual currencies found in computer games like World of Warcraft and Second Life, an ICO is a fundraising mechanism that involves creating a sellable token (or coin) that can be purchased with existing cryptocurrencies (such as bitcoin or Ether). These coins (or tokens) have a utility value, in that they are the digital venture’s medium of exchange (money), but often what attracts investors is the speculative value of the tokens on cryptocurrency exchanges, rather than the originally intended use. ICOs have now created a significant, if now deflating, economy – sometimes referred to as the “token economy” – peaking in the first six months of 2018 when $7bn was raised.

Ambivalence towards authority

In the carnival, all participants are considered equal, and free and familiar contact occurs between those who, elsewhere, might be divided by barriers of profession, caste, age, or property. Through this interaction, hierarchy and status are suspended, and a temporary social unity is produced, somewhat akin to the unity characteristic of an enclave. The carnival’s ideology of equivalence is central to Bitcoin, which was deliberately designed as an open-source system where individuals could be brought together into a digital context where all would be equal. In theory, and in practice, almost anyone with an Internet connection and a rudimentary knowledge of browsing and software can join in the Bitcoin carnival.

The carnival goes further than temporarily suspending hierarchy, in that it also enables and encourages conventional authority to be contested. This is routinely effected through inversions – such as a commoner acting as a king – which Bakhtin (1984/1968, 109) suggests are best seen as attempts by the lower orders to subvert and challenge the dominant social hierarchy. Indeed some have claimed that it is precisely because carnivals and fairs were sites of (potential) revolt that they were suppressed, especially in the nineteenth century (see Ó Maitiú (1995) for a description of the State and Church suppression of Donnybrook Fair). However, some see the carnival as a location where social protest is licensed and thus controlled (Sales 1983). Burkert (1985), for instance, in his study of classical Greece, sees such licence as motivated by conservative goals: “Even the festivals of dissolution and upheaval lead to the confirmation of the existing order. Important antitheses which reflect the history of mankind are acted out … and thereby the everyday order of authority and labour proves the only one that is permanently possible” (p. 259). Regardless of which position one takes, it is clear that the medieval carnival was a site where authority was contested and where various forms of behaviour – including prostitution, drunkenness, stealing, and violence – deemed illegal by the authorities, were prevalent, expected and temporarily allowed.

From this perspective, Bitcoin is very much a form of carnival in that it is an explicit attempt to escape the existing social order where states and banks are the dominant players. Importantly, Bitcoin emerged out of the cypherpunk movement of the late 1980s and early 1990s, that sought to use technology, especially cryptography, to advance an anti-state, anti-authority political ideology centred on protecting privacy, countering mass surveillance, promoting individual liberty and freedom of expression, and fostering alternative financial and economic systems. One of its leaders, Tim May, anticipated and articulated this contest with the state in the crypto-anarchist manifesto:

The State will of course try to slow or halt the spread of this technology, citing national security concerns, use of the technology by drug dealers and tax evaders, and fears of societal disintegration. Many of these concerns will be valid; crypto anarchy will allow national secrets to be traded freely and will allow illicit and stolen materials to be traded. An anonymous computerized market will even make possible abhorrent markets for assassinations and extortion. Various criminal and foreign elements will be active users of CryptoNet. But this will not halt the spread of crypto anarchy. (May 1988)

Authority has always found it difficult to deal with the carnival, and that pattern has continued with Bitcoin. Speaking at the BitFin conference in 2014, the Irish Central Bank’s Director of Markets Supervision, Gareth Murphy, urged the Bitcoin industry to “work actively to address the concerns of financial authorities rather than ‘playing cat and mouse’ and eventually, and inevitably, being drawn into the regulatory net” (Murphy 2014). Yet, as of July 2019, the Irish Central Bank had made no official comment or taken any action on Bitcoin. More broadly, The Law Library of Congress (2014) in a survey of the regulation of Bitcoin in different jurisdictions, found that “the debate over how to deal with this new virtual currency is still in its infancy” (1). Two years later, the authorities continued to be tentative about Bitcoin, as illustrated by the title of De Filippi’s (2016) article, “We must regulate Bitcoin. Problem is, we don’t understand it.” Nevertheless, the elements of a regulatory structure are being put in place, if slowly. In 2013, the New York State Department of Financial Services announced an interest in regulating Bitcoin, as it subpoenaed the major Bitcoin players seeking information on their operations. Two years later, the same regulator introduced BitLicense, a business license for virtual currency activities, and twelve such licences had been issued by November 2018. Other regulatory authorities have also been working to understand how best to engage with the phenomenon, with the European Central Bank publishing reports on “virtual currency schemes” in 2012 and 2015 (European Central Bank 2012, 2015), while the Bank of England is considering issuing its own digital currency (Danezis and Meiklejohn 2015; Haldane 2015; Small 2016).

In large part, the authorities have maintained a watching brief on Bitcoin, only intervening when the transgressions are of significant size, as was the case with Mt. Gox, Silk Road, Liberty Reserve, and GoldAge. But as Bitcoin has grown in scale, some authorities have become more proactive, e.g. in September 2017 the Chinese authorities ordered all Beijing-based cryptocurrency exchanges to cease trading and banned all Initial Coin Offerings.

Turning to the distal carnival, we see that Bitcoin’s ambivalent relationship with state authorities is but a particular instantiation of a wider trend, characteristic of the late 20th century. While authority has been routinely challenged throughout history, we argue that it has taken on a pervasive, carnivalesque form since the mid-20th century across multiple domains. In the world of politics, the attack has been ideological, where key texts like Hayek’s (1946) The road to serfdom and Friedman’s (1962) Capitalism and freedom provided the intellectual foundations for the retraction of the state under Thatcherism and Reaganomics, as well as the liberal agenda that dominated advanced economies in the latter part of the 20th century. Ironically, the attack on the state was led by political leaders, with Ronald Reagan famously proclaiming in his 1981 inaugural address: “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem” (Reagan 1981).

Outside of politics, “postmodernism” swept across art, literature, film, music, drama, history, and philosophy, especially during the 1980s and 1990s. Even though postmodernism encompasses a wide variety of approaches, in essence it rejects essentials and playfully problematizes and transgresses traditional and apparently authoritative categories and constructions. In philosophy, it took the form of deconstruction, which was an incessant attempt at destabilising the hierarchy of meaning in all texts, but in particular it sought to challenge the Western philosophical tradition that privileged some types of interpretations and repressed others.

In art, this attack on privileged interpretations has a longer history going back at least to the emergence of the avant-garde in 1863, which problematized the distinction between high and low art, and was a deliberate positioning by artists against the system and discourse within which they were embedded. Ultimately, avant-garde turns art in on itself, corroding the essential understanding of what art is or was, which is why the philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto (1997) has set 1963, precisely 100 years after the advent of the avant-garde, as the end of art, or, more precisely, the end of the new in art. The pop art movement that emerged around this time exemplified this idea of there being no difference between high and low art, or between art and advertising.

The effect of the postmodern moment, as manifest across many different domains, is that we now live in a “permanent liminality,” wherein “a temporary suspension of the normal, everyday, taken for granted state of affairs becomes permanent, generating a loss of reality, even a sense of unreality in daily existence” (Szakolczai 2017, 233). In other words, the carnival – which traditionally involved the temporary and contained suspension of the normal – has become omnipresent and uncontained.

Dissimulation

In the carnival, things are often not what they appear to be; in place of truth and transparency, we find make-believe, pretense, deceit, duplicity, and misrepresentation, epitomized in the carnival’s iconic image, the mask. And so it is in Bitcoin. Most obviously, the cryptocurrency emerged out of the cypherpunk movement which was dedicated to building anonymous systems on the Internet, including anonymous digital money (Lopp 2016). The cypherpunks had an almost paranoid obsession with privacy and put huge effort into developing complex cryptographic systems that worked to create what are essentially “digital masks”. Consistent with this, the original and seminal Bitcoin white paper was written by a mysterious character or characters, Satoshi Nakamoto, whose identity is still unknown to this day. More broadly, the effect of the blockchain technology means that the identity of actors is unusually difficult to pin down. Cryptographic code, embedded in algorithms, works to coordinate and act across a distributed network of computers of unknown size and location, and where identifiable actors and identities are not readily constituted or identifiable.

Dissimulation encompasses deceit and duplicity, which are prevalent in both the carnival and Bitcoin, where dissimulation easily morphs into illegal activity. A well-known example was the main bitcoin exchange, Mt Gox, which was launched in 2010 and which was, by 2013, handling 70% of all bitcoin transactions (Vigna 2014). In 2011 it was silently hacked, causing the company to collapse three years later with the loss of some 850,000 bitcoins, worth more than $450 million at the time. More recently, the cryptocurrency investment landscape is littered with scams and Ponzi schemes masquerading as legitimate ICOs.

Moving from the proximate to the distal, we see that, while dissimulation has always been with us, it appears to be especially characteristic of the period during which Bitcoin emerged. Today, much of our communication is mediated by digital technologies, leading to the emergence of a new phenomenon of “digital deception”, which Hancock (2007, 290) defines as ”the intentional control of information in a technologically mediated message to create a false belief in the receiver of the message”. We now live in “post-truth” age, brought about, in large part, by the ubiquity of social media, wherein political debate is transformed into a spectacle with advertising techniques being used to manipulate citizens’ beliefs and behaviours. In turn, advertising, which is now all-pervasive, trades in dissimulation. The mass media has become increasingly tabloidized (Sparks and Tulloch 1999) and partisan, with an attendant increase in the number of fact-checking and rumour-busting sites seeking to counter the phenomenon of “fake news”. In a digital world, deception can be centred on falsely manipulating or displaying a person or organization’s identity, or on dissimulating the content or meaning of a digital message. Information and communication technologies have vastly increased the surveillance power of states and corporations, which has resulted in the rise of various resistance movements. Tellingly, members of the hactivist group Anonymous refuse to make their identity known, with individual members typically wearing Guy Fawkes masks – masks commonly feature in carnivals – when they appear in public. Like the carnival, Anonymous has a serious intent – resistance against the powerful – which it articulates through entertainment, pranks and lulz (a 21st century word meaning fun, laughter, or amusement, especially when derived at another’s expense)(Coleman 2014). The cyberlibertarians echo this desire for anonymity; as noted earlier, the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto is still unknown, but it is also evident more broadly. For instance, the identity of the street artist Banksy is also secret. Indeed Banksy is a particularly good instantiation of someone in the carnival, as he is also a political activist who combines graffiti and dark humour to articulate distinctive subversive messages. He routinely engages in pranks of all sorts that are characteristic of the carnival; perhaps his best-known exercise in dissimulation occurred in October 2018 when one of his paintings, Girl with balloon, was sold at auction for £1.04m at which point a shredder, hidden within the picture’s frame, devoured half of the canvas. While there is a long history of dissimulation in art, going back at least as far as Duchamp’s 1917 Fountain, Banksy is best situated within the street and pop art tradition that only really blossomed in the latter part of the 20th century (Irvine 2012). It, in turn, was influenced by the 1960s Situationist movement, and Debord’s (1983/1967) The society of the spectacle, which argues that the world we see is not the real world but the world we are conditioned to see.

Bullshit also blossomed in the same period, and seems symptomatic of our post-truth /information age (Frankfurt 2005). However, it is a different form of dissimulation in that, while the liar recognises the truth and tries to hide it, the bullshitter only wants to persuade the listener and does not care about the truth or falsity of what is said.

Vulgar language

It is hard to say if bullshit featured in the medieval carnival, but vulgar language, which we have identified as the carnival’s fourth attribute, certainly did. Bakhtin calls this language “billingsgate”, which is a synonym for profanity or the offensive language derived from the raucous cries of vendors in the 16th century London fish market of Billingsgate. Bakhtin emphasized that the coarse language, oaths, and swearing found especially in Rabelais’ novels from the sixteenth century, constituted a special form of communication that was essentially generative. This was very much in keeping with his depiction of the carnival as a site of creativity:

Such elements of familiar speech as profanities, oaths, and curses were fully legalised in the marketplace and easily adopted by all the festive genres, even by Church drama. The marketplace was the center of all that is unofficial; it enjoyed a certain extraterritoriality in a world of official order and official ideology, it always remained “with the people” (Bakhtin 1984/1968, 153-4).

While the vocabulary may have changed since the sixteenth century, the conversation around Bitcoin reprises the informal, foul-mouthed, marketplace speech that Bakhtin highlighted in his analysis of Rabelais’ novels. We do not, of course, find it in this kind of academic text, but it proliferates on Reddit (the social news aggregator) as illustrated by a randomly chosen thread reproduced in Figure 1.[footnoteRef:4] [4: Available at: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/72fn7f/received_an_unexpected_text_from_my_aunt/ (accessed July 15, 2019).]

Figure 1. Screenshot of one Reddit thread discussing Bitcoin.

The conversation is informal and impenetrable to many. It is also crude: in this thread of 145 posts, some variant of the word “shit” appears 13 times. This reverberates with Bakhtin who was well aware of the role of defecation through history, and the way in which excrement and urine were used in practices of debasement and even in solemn rituals (Bakhtin 1984/1968, 146–153). But he also highlights the link between shit and creativity:

the lower stratum is not only a bodily grave but also the area of the genital organs, the fertilizing and generating stratum. Therefore, in the images of urine and excrement is preserved the essential link with birth, fertility, renewal, welfare. This positive element was still fully alive and clearly realized in the time of Rabelais (Bakhtin 1984/1968, 148).

Crucially, Bakhtin perceives the marketplace’s crude language positively, explicitly linking it to the creative life-force as instantiated in the carnival. This is an important insight and one that sheds light on an aspect of the world that is largely overlooked by scholars on information systems and, more generally, social scientists.

Bakhtin also focused on the vital role accorded to humour in the carnival and the particular type of humour – laughter directed at everyone – found in this context. The Reddit threads on Bitcoin certainly have a playful and humorous dimension, echoing Coleman’s study in which she found an abundance of humour and laughter among hackers (Coleman 2013, 67). Similar to Bakhtin’s analysis of the carnival, she notes how humour requires an “irreverent, frequently ironic stance towards language, social conventions and stereotypes” (100) and how transgression, humour and creativity are mingled in the world of hacking:

humor saturates the social world of hacking. Hackers, I noticed, had an exhaustive ability to “misuse” most anything and turn it into grist for the humor mill … Humor is not only the most crystalline expression of the pleasures of hacking … It is also a crucial vehicle for expressing hackers’ peculiar definitions of creativity and individuality, rendering partially visible the technocultural mode of life that is computer hacking. (Coleman 2013, 7)

Here, it is worth noting that the cypherpunks, out of whose culture Bitcoin grew, included a significant cohort of hobbyist hackers (Stryker 2012, 51).

Looking outwards to the distal carnival, we see that the latter part of the twentieth century witnessed a remarkable rise in the distinctively dirty and crude language of the carnival. Figure 2 depicts the result of a Google Ngram search which shows how the obscene words “shit”, “fuck”, “cunt,” and “piss” increasingly appeared in print after 1950. It is not clear why this happened, though it is probably linked to the sexual revolution of the early 1960s, the feminist activism of the early 1970s, and the corresponding diminution of prudish sensibilities (Pinker 2008).

There is, of course, a long history of swearing and obscenities, and dirty words can become sanitised over time while “clean” words can become dirty. Here, what interests us is the particular language of the carnival, that is to say the vulgar words associated with the body’s lower stratum, “the area of the genital organs, the fertilizing and generating stratum” (Bakhtin 1984/1968, 148). What we now see is that this vulgar language is acceptable in many contexts where it was previously prohibited. If the medieval carnival was a time and space where such language was both sanctioned and contained, the spread of vulgar language more widely is another indication of how the carnival came to be unconfined during the information age.

Figure 2. Screenshot of Google Ngram word search.

Excessive consumption

The carnival’s fifth feature is excessive consumption. In the Middle Ages, the carnival was a period of feasting, celebration, and consumption before the spiritual rigours and fasting of Lent. Since the consumption of meat was forbidden during Lent, it was consumed to excess during the carnival – the word carnival is derived from the Latin “carn” (flesh) + “levare” (to put away) – but there was also profligate consumption of alcohol and other foods, as well as deliberate wasting of food in food fights. This excessive consumption is manifest in Bitcoin in two ways. First, Bitcoin facilitates increased consumption as it is designed to enable cheaper and easier monetary transactions. Second, Bitcoin is designed so that the miners who invest most in computing power are most likely to win (bitcoin) in the mining game. As the price of bitcoin went up, the miners were motivated to invest more computing power in mining and would continue, basing their decisions on calculations factoring in the probability of winning bitcoin, the price of bitcoin, and the price of energy. The result – not unlike the way game theory guided decisions in the the Cold War arms race – is an escalating investment in computing power to the point where the power currently used for Bitcoin mining is variously estimated as comparable to Ireland’s or Denmark’s electricity consumption (Deetman 2016; O'Dwyer and Malone 2014). This, by any measure, is excessive consumption, especially given the link between energy production and climate change. The Bitcoin community is well aware of the phenomenon, but, by and large, considers it an unfortunate but unavoidable externality that someone, in time, might address.

Looking beyond Bitcoin, we again see excessive consumption as a significant characteristic of the last half-century. Again, the roots are deep. Marx was perhaps the first to clearly articulate that capitalism has an inbuilt tendency towards overproduction, which can only be addressed by destroying capital (through war, for example) or increasing consumption (through, as Keynes would later argue, also by government intervention) or both. But regardless of the theoretical debate, the empirical reality is that the second half of the twentieth century has witnessed enormous increases in consumption. It is also clear that these increases are excessive, given the well-documented decline in natural resources and wildlife, and the profound consequential changes in climate and ecosystems.

What we have seen by looking beyond Bitcoin is that the distal carnival of the mid-to-late 20th century is unconfined, which marks a significant difference from medieval and earlier carnivals, which were always contained in both time and space. For instance, in the Western Christian and Greek Orthodox tradition, the carnival season occurs before the liturgical season of Lent, which was a period of abstinence and solemn religious observance. And the medieval carnival also occurred in a designated place, as Bruegel vividly depicts in his 1559 painting The Fight Between Carnival and Lent (Figure 3).

Figure 3. Bruegel’s 1559 painting, The Fight Between Carnival and Lent

Bruegel’s painting depicts most of the elements associated with carnivals of the time: feasting, drinking, inversions, grotesque and exaggerated bodies, game-playing, and masks. It also foregrounds the carnival’s dialectical relationship with its opposite, Lent, which we are likely to miss if we only consider the proximate carnival of Bitcoin. In medieval times, this relationship was articulated empirically through mock battles at the liminal moment when Carnival ends and Lent begins, and in a particular place such as the town square. Bruegel’s painting shows such a battle between figures representing Carnival (the fat man atop a barrel) and Lent (the gaunt woman, dressed as a nun, sitting on a cart drawn by a nun and a monk). Importantly, the medieval carnival was confined, with strict temporal limits dictated by the length of time food could be preserved after the harvest. Today, globalisation has dissolved these ancient temporal and spatial boundaries and so today’s distal carnival is best understood as unconfined. In particular, the distal carnival is not delimited by the annual agricultural cycle of food production, harvesting, storage and consumption, or by religious festivals.

If we see the contemporary distal carnival as a phenomenon of the second half of the twentieth century, then a contemporary form of Lent, as a period of abstinence and austerity, is likely to follow on a similar temporal scale. While predicting the future is perilous, there is ample evidence that the decade-long “short carnival” of Bitcoin and the last half-century “long carnival” are coming to an end, to be replaced, presumably, by a “long Lent”. Most obviously, there have been well-established anxieties about the planet’s capacity to house an ever-increasing population, and, while we have not yet suffered a Malthusian catastrophe, the evidence of climate change is incontrovertible, as is the inexorable and alarming depletion of natural resources and wildlife. Economists like Piketty (2014) and Gordon (2016) have also presented compelling arguments that the twentieth century’s historically unusual period of high economic growth has ended and that the twenty-first century will be characterised by low or negative growth.

Discussion

The carnival metaphor opens up a number of different research trajectories for understanding information infrastructures and, more broadly, the information age. First, the phenomenon of the carnival itself and its various manifestations warrants more in-depth study. Here, the question is essentially ontological, focusing on the nature of carnival as a phenomenon, and how it relates to cryptocurrencies, other information infrastructures, and the information age. This line of inquiry would go well beyond Bakhtin’s analysis, where the focus is on medieval carnivals, to alternative interpretations and instantiations of the carnivalesque. For instance, Bernstein (1992) highlights the carnival’s negative and bitter strand which Bakhtin rather overlooks, while Stallybrass and White (1986) show how the church, the state and the bourgeoisie of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries embraced and appropriated the medieval carnival tradition for their own political purposes. These interpretations are important as they help counter overly-romanticised readings of contemporary exercises in transgression and carnivalesque resistance. They also help situate our understanding of the information age in a much longer historical narrative, wherein information infrastructures are best seen as the product of an inexorable civilizing process in which the carnival was an important site of contestation.

A second approach would be to consider where the metaphor is helpful – and not helpful – in understanding the emergence of new infrastructures. For instance, there is no sense of the carnival in Hughes’s (1983) well-known description of the development of the electricity infrastructures in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nor in Standage’s (1999) story of the telegraph in the nineteenth century. This apparent absence of a proximate carnival may also indicate a similar absence of the distal carnival, though further research would be required to investigate this, and indeed to further explore the distinction and relationship between the distal and proximate carnivals, especially in the context of information infrastructures.

Third, each of the five characteristics of the carnival – play, anarchy, dissimulation, vulgar language, and gluttony – offers a distinctive and potentially rich trajectory of inquiry. For instance, what tools of inquiry and modes of representation might we use to study vulgar language? Is there a link, as Bakhtin would suggest, between vulgar language and creativity? Does the notion of gluttony make us think of information infrastructures in new ways, and if it does how might we study any putative relationship between them? Or is the interest in “frugal innovation” (Zeschky, Winterhalter, and Gassmann 2014) a harbinger of a new Lent?

Fourth, if we are to take the carnival metaphor seriously, then we are confronted with significant epistemological and methodological issues. For instance, is it appropriate to be serious about the carnival, or does this place us in a particular subject position in the carnival’s orbit? Can one theorize the carnival, given that the carnival refuses to distinguish between actors and spectators, while theorizing is premised, based on etymology and tradition, on precisely this distinction? Have we the conceptual apparatus, disposition, and methods to make sense of the carnival? At a minimum, the carnival requires us to reflect on our current preoccupations, approaches to inquiry, and preferred modes of representation.

Conclusion

Information infrastructures are typically thought of – when they are thought of at all – as serious things, and are usually understood through concepts that privilege linearity, networks, utility, and efficiency. This article has taken a different tack, arguing that the carnival metaphor takes us beyond arid conceptualisations of information infrastructures and instead centres our attention on those practices that create a particular form of life at a particular historical moment. We see the carnival as a rich, complex, hybrid, and contested practice and set of ideas, where the central motifs are play, anarchy, dissimulation, vulgar language, and gluttony. In addition, we have argued that Bitcoin is a particular instantiation (a proximate carnival) of a much wider phenomenon (the distal carnival) that characterises this period of history. The metaphor is especially appropriate to this journal because, as we have sought to demonstrate in this article, we live in an information age and the age of the carnival.

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