Trusting the Blockchain, Trusting the Novel

ConTrust Speaker Series

Adam Kelly (Associate Professor of English at University College Dublin)

In the famous 2008 paper announcing the invention of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto justified the new currency on the basis of a need for Internet commerce to eliminate the problem of trust. “What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust,” Nakamoto wrote, “allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party.” The key innovation behind Bitcoin was the blockchain, a distributed ledger technology that ensured that the record of all transactions using the currency would be ineradicable and shared. Ever since the inauguration of this technology, its implications for the problem of trust – in but also well beyond the arena of online commerce – have been heavily debated. Some titles of recent books indicate how close the connection between blockchain and trust has become: The Blockchain and the New Architecture of Trust (2018); Building Decentralized Trust: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on the Design of Blockchains and Distributed Ledgers (2021); Searching for Trust: Blockchain Technology in an Age of Disinformation (2022).

This paper examines the implications of blockchain for, and through, a much older technology that retains an intimate link with the trust architecture of human life in modern societies: the literary novel. Responding to the virtual absence of literary studies from the otherwise rich interdisciplinary debates on trust over the past few decades, the paper summarizes work in the discipline on the novel’s historical importance for embedding social trust in liberalism, a modern political and economic regime that, according to Niklas Luhmann, “attempts to shift expectations from confidence to trust.” Connecting this shift in expectations to the debates around blockchain, the final part of the paper will conduct a reading of Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House (2022). Egan’s novel offers a thought experiment about how the blockchain could impact human life, and how the novel’s own architectures of trust might respond to that impact.

Adam Kelly is Associate Professor of English at University College Dublin, having previously taught at the University of York and Harvard University. His second book, New Sincerity: American Fiction in the Neoliberal Age, is forthcoming in 2024 with Stanford University Press. His articles have appeared in journals including Comparative Literature Studies, American Literary History, Studies in the Novel, and Twentieth-Century Literature. He is Principal Investigator on “Imaginative Literature and Social Trust, 1990-2025,” a four-year project funded by the Irish Research Council for the period 2022-2026.

Please register in advance: office@normativeorders.net