Vinay Brandon

Vinay Brandon's PhD research looks at the cultural processes through which Crypto-systems and blockchain technology are getting embedded into the wider social economy. Focusing on attendant processes of digitalization and tech-entrepreneurship in urban India, he aims to locate how the institutional dynamics of trust, mistrust and power unfolds as the social ontology of money gets recast in the age of datafication and automation. His dissertation ethnography will focus on how India's coders, speculators, fintech professionals, and imagineers make Crypto and Web3 work through modes of sociation, relationality, futurity and off-chain governance, thus culturally reshaping the design principles underlying crypto-assets and blockchain infrastructures. Vinay's intellectual arc took him from mathematics to economics to the social sciences, informing a critical interest in the history and philosophy of formal systems of thought. His professional experience in consulting made him acutely observe how models and measures get socially embedded within processes of economization. He's committed to understanding the unfolding merger and acquisition between forces of finance and technology, and its implications in disrupting social and material life, from the ground up.