The analysis of this paper is based on a qualitative interview with Morris Marah, owner and manager of the Freetonian technology centre ‘Sensi Tech Hub’. Initially the reason for this was to expand insights into the discourse away from sources that could only be accessed online. With an internet penetration of only 15% and the majority of news spread through radio, a review of online sources would provide a skewed perspective. Hence, interviewing someone who has been actively involved with the technological development of Sierra Leone, would increase my understanding of the issues at hand. As manager of the Sensi Tech Hub, Morris Marah implement and reviews initiatives in collaboration with Sierra Leonean government, private sector parties and other non-governmental organisations.

A critical remark on this approach would be that the perspective of this interviewee would not help answer the question on how the concept of trust is problematic in this context, as a review of the news publications already reveal this. However, apart from the argument mentioned above that these digital sources only represent a fraction of sources that could convey the discourse, it is important to know that these texts were portrayed from a western news perspective. Therefore, the news texts served as a base for enquiry, not as proof, and Morris’ Sierra Leonean perspective would provide insightsoutside of this cultural framework.

The second critique is that presupposed cultural differences would complicate the enactment of a sound qualitative interview. Concepts such as digital communication are interpreted differently in a Sierra Leonean context, and proximity issues forced me to conduct this interview over a (often poor) internet connection. This also urged me to be selective in my choice of interviewee’s. Knowing the cultural contexts I was aware that as a young female asking questions to a senior male would yield little results, and my pre-emptive avoidance of this issue did steer me towards finding a respondent who was familiar with western culture and communication. This does question the objectivity of this method, and whether it is useful to apply in contexts where cultural differences are involved.

Before exploring the dynamics of trust relating to blockchain technology, it is important to understand how these technologies work. The relationship between trust and blockchain technology ask for a clarification of how these technologies work. In the literature discussing this relation, blockchain technologies were often discussed and defined in association with cryptocurrencies. This problematised finding a definition of the stand-alone technology, removed from its (potential) applications. Hayes (2019) and Hütten (2018) discuss the potential effects of blockchain technologies through researching cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, and place notions as distrust against actualised usage.

The first reason for this is that practical applications of blockchain technology to date remain dominated by cryptocurrencies, or digital currencies using blockchain technology. Hence, studies of the actual effects of the blockchain technology are limited.

The second reason relates to the difficulty in viewing blockchain technology separate from the ideological context in which it emerged. Hayes (2019) describes the development of Bitcoin in relation to technological-utopian ideals of anonymity and privacy through technological solutions (p. 57-62). He argues that cryptocurrencies should be studied not for their impact as alternative currencies, but instead should be seen in light of what their enabling technology (blockchain) accomplishes (p. 62). However, the argumentation that follows does not reveal actual accomplishments, but potential accomplishments.

Consequently, if blockchain technologies are studied in light of their potentiality this makes difficult to distinguish the actual technology from its prospects. Therefore, I use a definition of blockchain that only describes its technological function removed from its potential or from its link to cryptocurrencies. Following Atzori (2017) and Sandbeck, Kingsmith and von Bargen (2019), blockchain is a distributed ledger, or database of all accomplished transactions (Atzori p. 45, Sandbeck et al. p. 15). What distinguishes this from traditional ledgers, is the fact that instead of having a central actor that provides information on the ledger, multiple nodes now work collectively to confirm and construct the transaction process. This confirmation is necessary to ensure that a transaction has happened and only once (the double-spend problem) and is enforced through a complex mathematical process called proof of work. Hence, it lies within the architecture of the technology that tampering with a file is almost impossible which Sandbeck et al. (2019) describe as trust less architecture (p. 20 & 24).

This is where notions of trust disperses through discussions surrounding the potentialities of the technology. Four streams can be distinguished; technological utopianism, capitalist utopianism, technological dystopianism and capitalist dystopianism. The first, as Hütten (2018) distinguishes, is technological utopianism, which refers to the ideology of a group of Cypherpunks who popularised Bitcoin, and thereby blockchain technology (p. 15). The concept of trust less architecture describes how, by design, the technology can be trusted. From this perspective, technologies have the potential to provide alternatives to social, economic and political issues embedded in their construction. Briefly put: trust in technology. Which is how Bitcoin and blockchain technology were described when they came to emerge in 2009, as solutions to corrupt capitalist institutions.

The second, capitalist utopianism, refers to a ‘trust in the trust of technology’, and builds on this assumption. Hütten attributes promises individualism, technocracy and meritocracy to this idealism (p. 15). The ‘trust in the trust’ arises when those capitalist institutions that would be rendered unnecessary through the technology, use blockchain technology as ‘trusted’ technologies. The critique of this capitalist utopianism brings the third view of a technological dystopianism. This ‘distrust in trust of technology’ describes the position of Sandbeck et al. They raise concerns over an intermixture of trust-in-architecture with socio-political processes, because the design of the technology is in itself political (p. 24). However, they do not see problems in assumptions of trust, but in our current socio-economic environment in which the technology is applied. This does not deem blockchain as devoid of positive potentialities; they believe that in the right context, blockchain does still function as a trusted technology (Sandbeck et al. 2019).

The fourth position, capitalist dystopian, describes authors such as Atzori and Hütten. Atzori (2017) views blockchain technology from a political perspective. Concepts such as trust-by-computation, or decentralised trust, have the potential to disturb state workings. She warns for ‘technocratic reasoning and determinism’ and goes as far as to claim that due to the ideological context in which blockchain emerged, it is ill-suited for e-governance. In the end, blockchain technologies seem to cause exactly that which it was set out to avoid; the economisation of politics. Hütten (2018) goes a step further, placing ‘distrust in trust of trust-of-technology’. He claims that blockchain has the potential to, by professing technological utopian promises and conflating these with socio-economic realities, aids capitalist oppression (p. 17).

Although these ‘four levels of trust’ portray multiple perspectives on trust in relation to technology, they all exist within the same western ideological framework. Blockchain technology cannot be viewed outside of a social, economic, cultural and political context, but none of these perspectives question which of these their analyses apply to. Therefore, my aim is to explore notions of trust away from this western ideology by analysing this in relation to an African context. This is relevant because adoption of ideological notions of trust have had grave impact on Sierra Leone in the past. Colonialism required an adoption of a western ideology. Does an adoption of the ideology of trust in a specific technology risk the potential of digital post-colonialism?

The study of the ethical implications of technology can provide an alternative solution to the Collinridge Dilemma. When a technology is to be implemented, it is too soon to foresee potential negative effects and interfere, but reviewing after a technology has impacted society can be seen as ‘too late’ (Kudina & Verbeek, 2019). Ideally, there would be an in-between approach, or halfway reflection moment that outlines the opportunities and risks of a technology. For practical and economic reasons, with large, high-impact technologies this is not feasible. What if we were to study the translation, import and adoption of a technology in a radically different contexts? Can the analysis of the NDIP untangle complex dynamics of trust that reveals an ideological, subjective interpretation of the technologies’ potential?