Kelsie Nabben
August, 2025
My PhD is finally public!
After being under stoppage for book arrangements, my 2023 argumentation is currently openly offered: https://doi.org/ 10 25439/ rmt. 29614595
Abstract:
This thesis concentrates on just how teams of individuals build, make use of, and experience facilities in the digital era by examining the durability of decentralised modern technologies for individuals that use them. Below, strength denotes the capacity for adaptability and transformability when faced with external risks, inner susceptabilities, and chances, in relation to shared goals. The concept of strength includes adaptivity throughout both social and technical measurements of a system. Public blockchain networks and linked distributed protocols can be thought about socio-technical facilities, meaning that social and technological parts form one-another and are totally linked. While much academic interest on decentralised innovations concentrates on technological aspects of resilience, such as cyber threats and security, decentralised modern technologies additionally serve a making it possible for framework for social coordination. Regardless of their significance, there is a lack of empirical research worrying the development, application, and utilisation of decentralised modern technologies. This study deals with the gap by examining the infrastructural techniques happening within decentralised modern technology neighborhoods. It determines the affordances of these devices in fostering strength by discerning the circumstances, implies, and level of their resilience-building capability for individuals.
Drawing on framework research studies literature, which contends that the purpose of framework emerges during its usage, this study takes a look at decentralised technologies in method. Via three ethnographic instances, the thesis illustrates individuals’s conceptualisation, construction, and experience of durability, as well as the aspects leading to its malfunction or failing. The cases mapped are a “Decentralised Self-governing Organisation” (DAO), which crowdfunds grants called “GitcoinDAO”, a “crypto state”, which makes and disperses open integrated circuit hardware called “Kong Land DAO”, and a peer-to-peer information monitoring procedure, which is used to “content address” information (as opposed to Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) that “place addresses” data) prior to it can be kept in a range of contexts called the “Interplanetary File System” (IPFS).
This study determines an unique technique in decentralised innovations referred to as “self-infrastructuring”. The term “infrastructuring” explains the ongoing processes associated with framework administration, including developing, building, operating, regulating, and preserving. Self-infrastructuring takes place when people and teams of individuals have the capacity to take part in designing, having, operating, regulating, and/or keeping their own infrastructure in regard to perceived threats, chances, and goals, by adhering to pre-determined regulations. This practice needs attention fully technological pile of both software program and hardware, in addition to a solid motivation and dedication to navigate the substantial time and effort intrinsic in running and keeping one’s own infrastructure.
For a decentralised technology community to think about an infrastructure as resistant, the capacity for self-infrastructuring should be feasible. While self-infrastructuring can boost resilience versus certain dangers, it can also limit durability by presenting new vulnerabilities. When self-infrastructuring does not occur or is inadequately integrated across the technical and social-institutional aspects of decentralised infrastructures for communities to both produce and adapt their very own boundaries, strength breaks down. In various instances, there remains unsettled challenges in terms of how to implement self-infrastructuring, in terms of both technological and institutional aspects of decentralised organising and infrastructure.
This thesis offers an empirical payment to expertise, notifying the enhancement of resilience in the development and use of electronic framework. It likewise informs both scholastic discussions and plan conversations concerning the purposes of, and methods within, decentralised technology neighborhoods.
See: Bailey (Nabben), Kelsie (2025 Decentralised Technologies: ‘Self-Infrastructuring’ Strength. College of Media and Communication, RMIT University. https://doi.org/ 10 25439/ rmt. 29614595