Locating Infrastructural Agency: Computer Protocols at the Finance/Security Nexus

How can tensions and contradictions in digitally-mediated practices of anonymity and identification be made sense of? This article calls for foregrounding computer protocols as key sites for locating how agency amongst increasingly complex sets of relations between human and non-human actors is impacting contemporary (in)security. We distinguish agency within and between contemporary finance/security infrastructures by tracing the development, application and updating of a particular set of computer protocols, blockchains. Locating agency at the site of these and other computer protocols, we argue, exposes security politics that have remained largely overlooked in the on-going engagement of Critical Security Studies with Science and Technology Studies. Widening engagements with security devices, this article also broadens the interdisciplinary engagements of CSS with New Media and Software Studies.