EDITOR’S NOTE: Lithopy, curated by Denisa Kera and Petr Šourek along with a second project entitled Out of Power Tower, represents the Czech participation in the XXII Triennale di Milano, Broken Nature. The projects arise from a survey centered on the significant mineral resources of the Czech territory––in particular, lithium. Lithopy questions the practice of this mineral’s extraction and its use. The Czech pavilion was commissioned by the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague with the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic.

Lithopia Design Fiction movie scene.

The Lithopia Project1 offers a design method for anticipatory governance7 of emerging blockchain and DLTs that goes against the current hype of anticipatory and frictionless design promises of full control over user decisions2,11. Instead of predicting user needs that ultimately serve one version of the (industry defined) future, anticipatory prototyping involves the users as stakeholders in the adoption of the emerging technology. It offers templates of blockchain services that present the future scenarios and dilemmas, which can be modified and iterated to support inclusive and democratic “future-making”14,15 that combines prototyping with deliberation.

The Lithopia prototyping templates consist of a dashboard featured on Figure 1 and a design fiction scenario (Figure 2 and 3). While the dashboard integrates the existing social and technical infrastructures (social institutions of marriage and property ownership on the ledger with data from satellites, Hyperledger Fabric REST API, and various open APIs), the design fiction presents exaggerated and artistically rendered use cases that hint at the potential (mis)uses. In this fictional village, some common gestures have unexpected meaning if caught by satellites, and the Lithopians are forced to invent bizarre strategies of hiding under umbrellas to escape their satellites and the blockchain. They also indulge in various techno-superstitions, such as horoscopes of satellite locations, which they use to interpret geopolitical events.

The scenarios are intentionally ambiguous and exaggerated to provoke creative uses of the Lithopia templates on the Github. In the Lithopia context “Sunny days are made for transactions. No clouds prevent satellites from keeping an eye on contracts being made and assets changing hands. People exchange goods, make payments, marry and divorce. All the hustle and bustle of sunny days is recorded by the decentralized digital ledger of the blockchain. Hugs are big and kisses are many to make sure satellites recognize and the blockchain records affection, love, and friendship. In Lithopia, all social contact is a smart contract.”8

Figure 1: Node-RED dashboard for Lithopians connecting various open APIs (Twitter, OpenWeather, and Sentinel2) with the REST API of the Hyperledger. On the dashboard you can follow the current position of the satellite, weather conditions for transactions, communicate with the blockchain (proposing a sale of property, marriage or partnership), follow cryptocurrency exchanges and Twitter sentiment analysis related to Lithium that help business decisions.

Anticipatory prototyping
The Lithopia project serves as an educational tool, but also a participatory probe to critically evaluate the promises of DLTs’ future, in which governance will merge with automation over smart contracts, and we will have a tool to control data tempering, fake news, or even AI simulations. The anticipatory prototypes explicitly connect design with ethical deliberation and policy negotiations by engaging the public directly in the design process rather than predicting user behavior and promising “anticipatory” design.
The prototypes utilize existing open source tools (Hyperledger Fabric and Composer for the blockchain contracts; Node-RED and various open APIs for the dashboard) to create templates on GitHub that support creative and exploratory uses of such technologies. The goal is to help the general public and various stakeholders to understand, experience, experiment with, and deliberate upon the future of blockchain and its integration with other existing technologies.

Blockchain governance and design
While the first decade of blockchain and DLTs was mainly on transactions between humans (Bitcoin blockchain and numerous crypto-alt-currency projects), we are entering a phase that emphasizes integration of these emerging technologies with existing infrastructures and corporate and institutional actors (Ethereum, Ripple, and Corda platforms and protocols) along increasing machine-to-machine transactions, including AI and IoT scenarios (IOTA). The original, libertarian, and crypto-anarchist emphasis on privacy and anonymity of the individuals is transforming into a pragmatic search for convergences of the DLTs with existing social, but also technological, infrastructures (satellites, IoT, banks, and supply chains)4,13 .

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