Wessel Reijers
Biographic Data
| ID | 462142 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Wessel Reijers |
| GIVEN NAMES | Wessel |
| FAMILY NAME | Reijers |
| SIGNATURE | REIJERS W |
| AFFILIATIONS | Dublin City University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2505-1587 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 33 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 17 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
How to Govern the Confidence Machine
Emerging technologies pose many new challenges for regulation and governance on a global scale. With the advent of distributed communication networks like the Internet and decentralized ledger technologies like blockchain, new platforms emerged, disrupting existing power dynamics and bringing about new claims of sovereignty from the private sector. This special issue addresses a gap in the literature by focusing the discourse on the issue of trus…
Technology and Civic Virtue
Today, a major technological trend is the increasing focus on the person: technical systems personalize, customize, and tailor to the person in both beneficial and troubling ways. This trend has moved beyond the realm of commerce and has become a matter of public governance, where systems for citizen risk scoring, predictive policing, and social credit scores proliferate. What these systems have in common is that they may target the person and he…
Who Deserves Credit? Banks for the Virtuous in Rural China
While cities piloting China’s Social Credit System attract attention, rural areas in China are experimenting with reputation-based credit systems called ‘banks of virtue’. These local institutions unlock cheap loans and other benefits for citizens who prove virtuous character. Based on empirical data, this article investigates how banks of virtue combine techniques of metrics known from capitalist credit systems with an inherently localized and p…
The rise of cybernetic citizenship
The global COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates how states and companies mobilise new sociotechnical systems to track, trace, evaluate, and modulate the behaviour of citizens. This development illustrates an already-existing transformation of citizenship governance, which this article captures as the move to ‘cybernetic citizenship’. First, the article explores the concept of cybernetic citizenship, providing an overview of the concepts of ‘cybernetic’…
The alegality of blockchain technology
Similar to the early days of the Internet, today, the effectiveness and applicability of legal regulations are being challenged by the advent of blockchain technology. Yet, unlike the Internet, which has evolved into an increasingly centralized system that was largely brought within the reach of the law, blockchain technology still resists regulation and is thus described by some as being “alegal”, i.e., situated beyond the boundaries of existing…
Blok, Vincent
This review discusses Vincent Blok’s book Heidegger’s Concept of Philosophical Method. Blok’s daring and important argument is that Heidegger has been misunderstood by contemporary philosophers who dismiss his thinking as correlationism; but that at the same time there lies something at the core of Heidegger’s thinking that prevents it from unleashing its true innovative potential; namely a logic of unity. To move beyond this logic of unity, Blok…
Interpreting Technology
Paul Ricœur has been one of the most influential and intellectually challenging philosophers of the last century, and his work has contributed to a vast array of fields: studies of language, of history, of ethics and politics. However, he has up until recently only had a minor impact on the philosophy of technology. Interpreting Technology aims to put Ricœur's work at the centre of contemporary philosophical thinking concerning technology. It inv…
Responsible innovation between virtue and governance
Recent developments in responsible innovation have focused on the governance of innovation processes. The dimension of virtue in innovation processes has thereby been largely overlooked, and more significantly the constitutive relation between virtue and governance that enables responsible innovation. To understand responsible innovation in terms of this relation, this paper turns to Hannah Arendt’s ontology of the Vita Activa. First, it problema…
Blockchain as a confidence machine
Blockchain technology was created as a response to the trust crisis that swept the world in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Bitcoin and other blockchain-based systems were presented as a “trustless” alternative to existing financial institutions and even governments. Yet, while the trustless nature of blockchain technology has been heavily questioned, little research has been done as to what blockchain technologies actually bring to the ta…
Beyond Postphenomenolgy
Digital commoning and its challenges
This article is a reply to Kostakis’ paper ‘In Defense of Digital Commoning’. It welcomes the criticisms raised by Kostakis against our initial account of the Illusion of the Digital Commons. We argue that we can largely defend our initial account by (1) justifying our choice for discussing ‘hybrid’ forms of digital commoning, (2) explaining the strategy of our approach, and (3) offering an additional critique of the digital platform as a basis f…
Towards a Philosophy of Financial Technologies
The Blockchain as a Narrative Technology
In this paper, we engage in a philosophical investigation of how blockchain technologies such as cryptocurrencies can mediate our social world. Emerging blockchain-based decentralised applications have the potential to transform our financial system, our bureaucracies and models of governance. We construct an ontological framework of “narrative technologies” that allows us to show how these technologies, like texts, can configure our social reali…
Narrative technologies meets virtue ethics in alternate reality
Virtue ethics offers a promising starting point for thinking about ethics of technology. Usually, virtue ethics of technology focuses on explaining how we can cultivate our technomoral virtues to cope with technological change. However, it is not clear yet how exactly technologies in turn mediate technomoral virtues, or more precisely how the technological practices that cultivate these virtues do so. Inspired by Ricoeur and MacIntyre, this paper…
The illusion of the digital commons
Digital commons such as Wikipedia, open-source software, and hospitality exchanges are frequently seen as forms of resistance to capitalist modes of production and consumption, as elements of alternative economies. In this article, however, we argue that the digital commons cannot by themselves constitute genuine forms of resistance for they are vulnerable to what we call ‘the illusion of the digital commons’, which leads to a form of ‘false cons…
Cryptocurrencies as narrative technologies
Transitions in monetary technologies raise novel ethical and philosophical questions. One prominent transition concerns the introduction of cryptocurrencies, which are digital currencies based on blockchain technology. Bitcoin is an example of a cryptocurrency. In this paper we discuss ethical issues raised by cryptocurrencies by conceptualising them as what we call "narrative technologies". Drawing on the work of Ricoeur and responding to the wo…
Narrative Technologies
Contemporary philosophy of technology, in particular mediation theory, has largely neglected language and has paid little attention to the social-linguistic environment in which technologies are used. In order to reintroduce and strengthen these two missing aspects we turn towards Ricoeur’s narrative theory. We argue that technologies have a narrative capacity: not only do humans make sense of technologies by means of narratives but technologies …
Blockchain as a confidence machine
Blockchain technology was created as a response to the trust crisis that swept the world in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Bitcoin and other blockchain-based systems were presented as a “trustless” alternative to existing financial institutions and even governments. Yet, while the trustless nature of blockchain technology has been heavily questioned, little research has been done as to what blockchain technologies actually bring to the ta…
Narrative Technologies
Contemporary philosophy of technology, in particular mediation theory, has largely neglected language and has paid little attention to the social-linguistic environment in which technologies are used. In order to reintroduce and strengthen these two missing aspects we turn towards Ricoeur’s narrative theory. We argue that technologies have a narrative capacity: not only do humans make sense of technologies by means of narratives but technologies …
The alegality of blockchain technology
Similar to the early days of the Internet, today, the effectiveness and applicability of legal regulations are being challenged by the advent of blockchain technology. Yet, unlike the Internet, which has evolved into an increasingly centralized system that was largely brought within the reach of the law, blockchain technology still resists regulation and is thus described by some as being “alegal”, i.e., situated beyond the boundaries of existing…
The rise of cybernetic citizenship
The global COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates how states and companies mobilise new sociotechnical systems to track, trace, evaluate, and modulate the behaviour of citizens. This development illustrates an already-existing transformation of citizenship governance, which this article captures as the move to ‘cybernetic citizenship’. First, the article explores the concept of cybernetic citizenship, providing an overview of the concepts of ‘cybernetic’…
Beyond Postphenomenolgy
Cryptocurrencies as narrative technologies
Transitions in monetary technologies raise novel ethical and philosophical questions. One prominent transition concerns the introduction of cryptocurrencies, which are digital currencies based on blockchain technology. Bitcoin is an example of a cryptocurrency. In this paper we discuss ethical issues raised by cryptocurrencies by conceptualising them as what we call "narrative technologies". Drawing on the work of Ricoeur and responding to the wo…
Narrative Technologies
Contemporary philosophy of technology, in particular mediation theory, has largely neglected language and has paid little attention to the social-linguistic environment in which technologies are used. In order to reintroduce and strengthen these two missing aspects we turn towards Ricoeur’s narrative theory. We argue that technologies have a narrative capacity: not only do humans make sense of technologies by means of narratives but technologies …
The illusion of the digital commons
Digital commons such as Wikipedia, open-source software, and hospitality exchanges are frequently seen as forms of resistance to capitalist modes of production and consumption, as elements of alternative economies. In this article, however, we argue that the digital commons cannot by themselves constitute genuine forms of resistance for they are vulnerable to what we call ‘the illusion of the digital commons’, which leads to a form of ‘false cons…
Digital commoning and its challenges
This article is a reply to Kostakis’ paper ‘In Defense of Digital Commoning’. It welcomes the criticisms raised by Kostakis against our initial account of the Illusion of the Digital Commons. We argue that we can largely defend our initial account by (1) justifying our choice for discussing ‘hybrid’ forms of digital commoning, (2) explaining the strategy of our approach, and (3) offering an additional critique of the digital platform as a basis f…
Towards a Philosophy of Financial Technologies
The Blockchain as a Narrative Technology
In this paper, we engage in a philosophical investigation of how blockchain technologies such as cryptocurrencies can mediate our social world. Emerging blockchain-based decentralised applications have the potential to transform our financial system, our bureaucracies and models of governance. We construct an ontological framework of “narrative technologies” that allows us to show how these technologies, like texts, can configure our social reali…
Narrative technologies meets virtue ethics in alternate reality
Virtue ethics offers a promising starting point for thinking about ethics of technology. Usually, virtue ethics of technology focuses on explaining how we can cultivate our technomoral virtues to cope with technological change. However, it is not clear yet how exactly technologies in turn mediate technomoral virtues, or more precisely how the technological practices that cultivate these virtues do so. Inspired by Ricoeur and MacIntyre, this paper…
Beyond Postphenomenolgy
Responsible innovation between virtue and governance
Recent developments in responsible innovation have focused on the governance of innovation processes. The dimension of virtue in innovation processes has thereby been largely overlooked, and more significantly the constitutive relation between virtue and governance that enables responsible innovation. To understand responsible innovation in terms of this relation, this paper turns to Hannah Arendt’s ontology of the Vita Activa. First, it problema…
Blockchain as a confidence machine
Blockchain technology was created as a response to the trust crisis that swept the world in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Bitcoin and other blockchain-based systems were presented as a “trustless” alternative to existing financial institutions and even governments. Yet, while the trustless nature of blockchain technology has been heavily questioned, little research has been done as to what blockchain technologies actually bring to the ta…
Blok, Vincent
This review discusses Vincent Blok’s book Heidegger’s Concept of Philosophical Method. Blok’s daring and important argument is that Heidegger has been misunderstood by contemporary philosophers who dismiss his thinking as correlationism; but that at the same time there lies something at the core of Heidegger’s thinking that prevents it from unleashing its true innovative potential; namely a logic of unity. To move beyond this logic of unity, Blok…
Interpreting Technology
Paul Ricœur has been one of the most influential and intellectually challenging philosophers of the last century, and his work has contributed to a vast array of fields: studies of language, of history, of ethics and politics. However, he has up until recently only had a minor impact on the philosophy of technology. Interpreting Technology aims to put Ricœur's work at the centre of contemporary philosophical thinking concerning technology. It inv…
The alegality of blockchain technology
Similar to the early days of the Internet, today, the effectiveness and applicability of legal regulations are being challenged by the advent of blockchain technology. Yet, unlike the Internet, which has evolved into an increasingly centralized system that was largely brought within the reach of the law, blockchain technology still resists regulation and is thus described by some as being “alegal”, i.e., situated beyond the boundaries of existing…
Technology and Civic Virtue
Today, a major technological trend is the increasing focus on the person: technical systems personalize, customize, and tailor to the person in both beneficial and troubling ways. This trend has moved beyond the realm of commerce and has become a matter of public governance, where systems for citizen risk scoring, predictive policing, and social credit scores proliferate. What these systems have in common is that they may target the person and he…
Who Deserves Credit? Banks for the Virtuous in Rural China
While cities piloting China’s Social Credit System attract attention, rural areas in China are experimenting with reputation-based credit systems called ‘banks of virtue’. These local institutions unlock cheap loans and other benefits for citizens who prove virtuous character. Based on empirical data, this article investigates how banks of virtue combine techniques of metrics known from capitalist credit systems with an inherently localized and p…
The rise of cybernetic citizenship
The global COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates how states and companies mobilise new sociotechnical systems to track, trace, evaluate, and modulate the behaviour of citizens. This development illustrates an already-existing transformation of citizenship governance, which this article captures as the move to ‘cybernetic citizenship’. First, the article explores the concept of cybernetic citizenship, providing an overview of the concepts of ‘cybernetic’…
How to Govern the Confidence Machine
Emerging technologies pose many new challenges for regulation and governance on a global scale. With the advent of distributed communication networks like the Internet and decentralized ledger technologies like blockchain, new platforms emerged, disrupting existing power dynamics and bringing about new claims of sovereignty from the private sector. This special issue addresses a gap in the literature by focusing the discourse on the issue of trus…
Sociology (13 works) · Epistemology (12 works) · Political science (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Blockchain Technology Applications and Security (6 works) · Economics (6 works) · Narrative (6 works) · Computer security (5 works)