Re-Enchanting Disintermediation: Exploring Techno-Spirituality, Hindu Cybernetics and the Fetish Character of Blockchain Imaginaries in Digital India

The speculative frenzy among cryptocurrency promoters and investors is commonly associated with the financialized worldview of neoliberal realities, economic anxiety, and market positionality. Broadly considered as a social movement and an epistemic shift, a cultural analysis of Cryptocurrencies or Crypto-Assets is usually confined to macro-questions of monetary trust imbricating the micro-politics of non-state digital currencies/alternative financial futures. The polysemic locus of financialization thus seems to come always already attached with the spatiality of limited (banks) or radical disintermediation (state) in Crypto, considered archetypically as Bitcoin. Mainstream cultural critiques of the design ideals of cryptographic disintermediation thus reproduce Bitcoin's monetary pragmatics, or the countervailing tendencies (utopia vs dystopia) of its anti-state realist politics. Thus, existing literature applying relational approaches to Crypto-finance usually offers a disenchanted critique of the fetish character of all Crypto tokens – critiquing its techno-economic imaginaries and Manichaean tendencies in light of its this worldly effects.

This paper utilizes the extended case method and grounded theory to illustrate that magic, spirituality and techno-religious iconography are ever-present in blockchain's cybernetic ideal of disintermediation - assuming distinct historico-cultural forms. Utilizing William Pietz’s problematization of fetishism in the interplay of religious and economic orders of social trust, along with David Graeber’s thesis on the social creativity of the fetish, the paper will illustrate how religious, mythological and hierarchical ideals shape and vivify the imaginaries of distinct blockchain dreams, in both its cypherpunk design ideologies and specific (Hindu) cultural practices.

By comparing the techno-evangelist slant of Crypto’s originary network cosmologies with the spiritual force of Hinduism, Digital Hindutva and techno-populism driving NFT adoption in contemporary urban India, I will illustrate how relationality and social metaphysics get deeply embedded within culturally specific notions of disintermediation — thereby re-enchanting cyberlibertarian ideals of anonymity, privacy and digital integrity that undergird Crypto's social and cultural reproduction.