Making Ends Meet by Mining on Blockchain: Subalternity, Materiality, and Yearnings of Chinese Amateur Crypto-miners

Abstract

While public narratives indicate that blockchain is widely used in developed societies among privileged elites, either from socio-economic, ethnic, or techno-cultural perspectives, this study examines how some disadvantaged marginal others, specifically the subaltern shehuiren in China, survive in the increasingly precarious post-socialist Chinese society by engaging with blockchain and cryptocurrencies. Literally translated as “society people”, shehuiren are the socio-economically and techno-culturally disadvantaged others who face marginality due to various post-socialist institutional inequalities. This study aims at unpacking how, on the one hand, the blockchain scene has been reconfigured by the disadvantaged in the local context, and on the other hand, how subalternity is actualized in post-socialist China, where blockchain-related technologies deeply intertwine with various forms of social inequalities. By tracing a group of shehuiren crypto miners through ethnography, I demonstrate that this subaltern scene of blockchain not just reshapes the shehuiren individuals’ notion of time, space, and value and the social relationship among themselves, but also profoundly impacts the power dynamics between the subalterns, the more privileged others, and the state authorities. Specifically, I underline that, despite being treated as losers, outsiders, and potential wrongdoers due to the existing social structures, shehuiren miners are neither victims nor rebels opposing either the authoritarian state or the global neoliberal order. Instead, they are actors who harvest limited profits through their unacknowledged creativity, adeptly making use of various resources within their reach and weaving their differential aspirations by attaching themselves to the larger technology-mediated networks in an unequal post-socialist society where a united subaltern hardly exists.