Story Blocks

Technology and writing

The widespread adoption of the Internet introduced new ways of thinking about communication systems (e.g. Bolter and Grusin, 2000), externalizing our memory and extending our ‘nervous system’ (McLuhan, 1994). Practices of browsing, searching and accessing information online as well as communicating through new online systems have changed the ways in which we perceive and react to the world around us, adopting new information-seeking strategies (e.g. Morris et al, 2010; Walton and Vukovic, 2003). We have moved from mere consumers of content towards producers, documenting not only our thoughts and activities online through social media but also our data through purchasing habits and personal sensors and tracking devices. Open source software approaches and licensing models such as Creative Commons are opening up not just social and commercial sharing of creative media but also in academia; for example, GitHub, an open software publishing platform, hosts some technical white papers (Swan, 2015).

Technology and storytelling have always evolved, and indeed Pettitt’s Gutenberg Parenthesis (2007) offers a framework for considering the changing attributes of creative practice in relation to technology (Figure 1). The introduction of the printing press heralded a new era for transmission of knowledge and, it can be argued, prompted a shift from a mutable oral cultural (pre-parenthetical) to literate culture with an emphasis on the fixity of the written word. As can be seen from Figure 1, connections between pre- and post-parenthetical are evident, suggesting that digital technology offers a post-literary interpretation, resulting in more fluid, democratic forms of communication. These three stages are to an extent mirrored by the three experiments described in this article:

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Figure 1.

Pettitt’s Gutenberg Parenthesis.

The ‘post-parenthetical’ era includes the experimental technology uses employed not only by creative writing academics but also mainstream authors. Recent bestseller The Martian by Andy Weir was originally composed and published in serialized form, hosted on his blog, with versions seeking feedback and input from a technical online audience (Jaggard, 2015). Similarly, Atwood (Biedenharn, 2015) and Pullman (Berridge, 2014) have used social media platform Twitter as a way of publishing, promoting and engaging with readers; at the same time, crowdfunding ventures such as unbound ¹ offer new avenues for publishing and authoring.

Blockchain and blocks of stories

Blockchain is most commonly discussed in relation to Bitcoin and alternative cryptocurrencies. However, there are already examples of blockchain technologies extending beyond the realm of finance, including the decentralization of domain name servers ² that are not subject to government takedown and identity management and governance. ³ Furthermore, Swan (2015) outlines opportunities in education, business and health contexts, through what she terms Blockchain 3.0, seeing blockchain as a ‘new paradigm for organizing activity with less friction and more efficiency’ (p. 29).

The radical invention of the blockchain is notable for two key elements:

Consider the example of emailing an image file, where both the sender and receiver have a copy at the end of the transaction. To similarly prevent users printing their own money, transactions in the value system need to be validated to ensure digital scarcity. This takes place across a network through a process called ‘mining’, using a single ledger that stores all these transaction in blocks. This ledger is freely accessible to miners, any interested parties and users of the system with multiple copies of the same ledger held across the network, that is, a distributed ledger. Miners compete with each other to encode each block into a sequence of bits called a hash. This hash in turn includes the previous block’s hash and so on, back to the Genesis Block, thus the chain metaphor in the term ‘blockchain’. Figure 2 illustrates this chain for a given block n in a system. The blockchain therefore is an encrypted, cumulative, distributed ledger composed of blocks of transactions that are confirmed by miners, which, for Bitcoin leads back to the first Genesis block whose instance is timed as 18:15:05 GMT on 3 January 2009, signifying the start of the Bitcoin currency. The production or mining of these hashes involves mathematical rules that are highly computationally intensive and expensive. Miners are incentivized by the potential reward of currency within the system (e.g. Bitcoins).

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Figure 2.

Simplified diagram of chained blocks in a system.

At first glance, the idea of combining stories and cryptocurrencies might seem outlandish; however, the structural breaking down of stories into constituent parts and formulae is well established – from Aristotle’s analysis of tragedy in Poetics to Georges Polti identifying 36 plots (1954), to Campbell’s monomyth (1993) and Booker’s seven themes (2004). Propp’s (1968) codification of Russian folktales into 31 discrete functions describes the structural elements of a tale as assigned to its characters, and his analysis continues to have a profound influence on the computational production and theories of interactive narrative (e.g. Cavazza et al., 2009; Gervás, 2013; Nakasone and Ishizuka, 2006).

This article does not draw on these formulaic approaches to narrative creation; however, there is clear potential for the application of such techniques that utilize discrete blocks of stories, and which may be helpful when conceptually reflecting on the blockchain (and indeed for future applied research avenues). Additionally, this article does not attempt to provide a full understanding of the complexities of distributed ledger technologies. Rather, an overview of principles is given as they are encountered and presented as simply as possible.

The ledger experiment: Blockchain concept

The ledger experiment explored the blockchain concept of a recorded chain of transactions, drawing on the use of pseudonyms to explore tensions between anonymity and transparency. For instance, in the case of Bitcoin, while all transactions are underpinned by a blockchain, visible and transparent to anyone via interrogation of the ledger, each transaction is attached to a specific user code or pseudonym. Without knowing the real-world identity of the pseudonym, the transactions are essentially anonymous. This attribute of pseudonymity causes some of the criminal and fraudulent activity surrounding Bitcoin as frequently reported in mass media.

Critically however, the movement or flow of the object of value in the system (e.g. Bitcoins) can still be tracked, moving from one anonymous owner to another – back to the creation or ‘mining’ of the object (e.g. the introduction of a specific Bitcoin into the system). The ledger experiment attempted to mirror these movements by physically tracking the ownership of stories (not Bitcoins) across a group of people in a room through a paper-based token system, with the paper token representing ‘ownership’ of a story. Additionally, the paper token illustrated and tracked the number of transactions or movements (or previous ‘owners’) a specific story had. It deviated however from blockchain principles in that the chain of transactions are, in the experiment, tied to each object (i.e. story), rather than as a single, decentralized agreed ledger that tracks all transactions in the network and is widely distributed across the network.

The ledger experiment: Method

A set of approximately 50 first-year undergraduate design students at University of Dundee, United Kingdom, took part in a half-day workshop with talks and activities around ways to write and reflect. As part of this, the final session was a blockchain-inspired ledger activity based on the Two Truths and a Lie game. Each student was given three slips of paper and asked to write the name of a (preferably famous) person on one side and choose and write their own pseudonym on the other side. The three ‘famous’ names they selected were to include two people who they had actually met (the Truths) and one who they had not (the Lie). They were then asked to tell their stories to each other in pairs, afterwards choosing to swap one or more of their stories by trading the story cards, and adding their pseudonym to the back of each new card they acquired. The stated aim was to be the best storyteller or liar, with a card that moved around the room the furthest, with instructions to swap the best story or one that they thought had the most potential. Importantly, students were invited to elaborate elements of the story with each swap.

Once the storytelling began the room became very animated (see Figure 3), with everyone physically moving round the room to share and retell their stories. After 10 minutes, a new rule was introduced to the trading system, where a single highly valued story card could be swapped for more than one less valued story card. After a further 10 minutes, time was called and some of the stories were shared out loud to the whole class. As the story transactions or ownership records were denoted on the back of each card, it was easy to see which stories had travelled the furthest, and students were asked to share the starting point and end point of each of these cards. We also sought to establish who was the best ‘liar’ by who had the ‘best’ truth or lie card.

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Figure 3.

Selling a story: students sharing their stories.

The ledger experiment: Discussion and speculations

The movement and mutation of stories in the experiment is reminiscent of more traditional forms of knowledge exchange, such as gossip, word of mouth or oral culture more broadly. In the world of traditional Scottish storytelling, there is a saying that when you tell a story those who have told it before, the story ancestors so to speak, are standing just behind your shoulder, one behind the other going back to the first tale teller (the very first, or Genesis, block in our blockchain analogy). The image of previous tellers watching you demands a sense of gravitas and respect for both the stories and the practice and reflects the community ethos, acknowledging both the sense of time and tradition as well as its contemporary nature. In comparison to the spoken word, written texts have an air of permanence – of disembodied voices transcending space, time and death. In some ways, oral communication is more immediate and essentially alive; ‘sound exists only when it is going out of existence’ (Ong, 1986: 25).

While the definition and even term ‘oral culture’ sparks debate among scholars, a universally accepted attribute of oral cultures is that of malleability. In preliterate cultures the amount of information that can be stored by an individual is finite. Thus ‘collective memory’ is codified in narrative using rich, descriptive language and stored by the group memory as a whole. This collective knowledge is not necessarily passed on unchanged ad infinitum, much like our stories in the ledger experiment. Goody and Watt (1963) describe how genealogies vary as even collective memory has limits. Similarly, they recount how the Gonja of Northern Ghana explains the subdivision of their state into seven by relating it to their founder’s (Ndewura Jakpa) seven sons. Due to British colonization, two of these divisions vanished and the number of Ndewura Jakpa’s sons in the narrative correspondingly reduces to five. In a similar vein, it has been noted that verbatim recitation does not necessarily warrant the same attention in oral traditions as in literate. Meaning, or sense, is the criterion against which expressions are judged, that is, two expressions meaning the same are deemed to actually be the same without using the exact wording (Olson and Torrance, 1996).

The story card ownership records (the list of pseudonyms on the reverse of the slips of paper) indicated that cards had between one and six owners, that is, some story cards did not change hands at all, while others were swapped several times during the activity. The less popular cards included the Queen and local footballers as well as the names of two members of staff in the department, including the module leader who was present at the workshop. Taking into account that the participants were first year undergraduate students on the same course in a relatively small city, as might be imagined several story cards had the same name on them, for instance of well-known, touring comedians. It would be easy to hypothesize that students had been to these events as a peer group. Setting aside the limitations of the participant group, the value of this activity was in its means to reflect on the movement of narrative and the spontaneous rewriting of anecdotes across a network.

In oral storytelling, it is said that the only time a story can truly belong to or be owned by an individual is in the act of telling (Yashinsky, 2004). Yet even that statement is potentially contentious, for it is actually shaped and therefore belongs to the grouping of listeners and teller as a whole, bound to that instant in time. In Scottish storytelling culture, once a story has been told or heard it is free to be retold by the listeners, perhaps with acknowledgement of the previous teller, but the ownership of the tale is fluid, precious in its existence but a folk tale, owned by the folk who hear and tell it, altering subtly in each rendition. In essence, this is what the experiment sought to do, making the provenance of each story card explicit in each state of mutation (Figure 4).

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Figure 4.

Mutation of a story across its network transactions.

As often cited, a potential application for blockchain-related technologies is the verification of ownership, for example, proof of purchase of a car, deeds of a house or a last testament and will (Swan, 2015). But what if the nature of the ‘thing’ being owned changed with each transaction? If there was indeed a blockchain of stories, each block containing a subtly altered or augmented version of a story, what would that look like? Could this form a new way of writing, reading or understanding of the process? Lost in Track Changes (Capp et al., 2014) provides a print-based example of a chain approach to writing – a series of authors were commissioned to sequentially remix a vignette that ‘takes the personal and intimate craft of memoir and turns it over to the wild cut-and-paste aesthetic of remix culture’. The reader is also given permission to take part in the remixing – by physically removing or annotating pages using the book’s spiral binding.

In considering what the workshop revealed in connection with the blockchain, one key observation is that the concept is dependent on the links and transmission across the network. In this instance, there was a preexisting trust relationship and common shared knowledge among the students. Conversation flowed easily and stories mutated, in some instances dramatically, for example, a (real) meeting with a Swedish princess on a plane became a murder mystery style plot. The role of reputation or popularity in the experiment was not accounted for either. In an increasingly flooded and competitive publishing marketplace (Holman, 2015), authors live and die by their name – their name is their brand. Blockchain technologies could propagate and authenticate a transaction/author across a network. Purse.io ⁴ , a third party means of converting Bitcoin to a government-backed fiat currency (e.g. US dollars or pound sterling) via real-world goods, hinges on trust and development of reputation, where the incentive for the Bitcoin seller is to be a ‘good’ seller' thereby increasing reputation and commanding a better price for their selling services (i.e. the ability to command higher discount rates on real-world goods). Subsequent research might consider how a similar platform could be developed for authors and readers to promote, propagate and publish work.

The blocks experiment: Blockchain concept

The blocks experiment, not dissimilar to the Exquisite Corpse or Consequences Victorian parlour games, explored the blockchain concepts of discrete ‘blocks’ of transactions. The aim of the blocks experiment was to focus on the cumulative qualities of the blockchain as it validates and builds up a collection of transactions before being ultimately sealed as a block (see Figure 2). This ‘sealing’ of blocks confers a sense of permanency, that is, events that have taken place in previous blocks cannot be changed or undone. This permanency is essentially maintained for as long as the system exists (for further information see Zohar, 2015).

In the example of Bitcoin, the construction of a new transaction block takes place approximately every 10 minutes, a timing that is calibrated by the Bitcoin network rules – if blocks are completed quicker, the difficulty of the mining is increased, and vice versa. Each block provides an opportunity for transactions to be verified and thus take place within a reasonable and anticipated amount of time. This process is verified by miners who compete to complete ‘proof of work’ functions, that is, computationally intensive algorithms, which can be considered to be similar to maths puzzles. Once a miner has completed the proof of work, the block, encapsulating the set of transactions, is sealed and the latest sets of transactions are broadcast and propagated across the network, enabling the next block of transactions to begin. As illustrated in Figure 2, each new block references the previous block, creating the chain.

The blocks experiment deviates from the blockchain in that it created a set of stories within each other, conceptually nested rather than a linear chain (Figure 5). However, the sealing of each story was significant and suggests that the materiality of paper, books and ledgers perhaps implies a serious and earnest nature of its content. In comparison to experiment 1, the ledger, the blocks experiment employed the written word, situating the experiment within the Gutenberg Parenthesis. This emphasis on permanency of the written word and exact phrasing as proof of authenticity also resonates with the use of hash functions in cryptocurrencies.

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Figure 5.

Nesting of stories within the blocks experiment.

The one-way hash functions used in cryptography (e.g. SHA-256 as currently used in Bitcoin) transform blocks of data so that an input of an arbitrary length results in an output of fixed length. This is essentially a one-way mapping, that is, it is computationally expensive and prohibitive to work out the original input given the output. A useful analogy might be that of mixing paint, where it is difficult (and costly) to work out what two exact original colours might be given a mixed third (output) colour. Additionally, in hash functions, any change in the original input text produces an unpredictable hashed output. This concept is central to the mining process of Bitcoins and is explored further in experiment 3. One of the benefits of such a one-way hash function however is that the owner or holder of the original data block can prove that they do indeed have the original data, as running the original data through the hash function will result in the same stored hashed value, that is, exact data or wording is considered a mark of authenticity.

The blocks experiment: Method

The blocks experiment was designed as part of a larger residential workshop that took place in Edinburgh, United Kingdom, in February 2015. The overall workshop brought 24 individuals together from different backgrounds, including designers, academics, developers and technology start-ups and businesses, using creative thinking as a catalyst to generate new business ideas around a central topic, in this instance alternative currencies, including cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. Consequently, some participants had extensive and in-depth understanding of blockchain and related technologies. Post-workshop, seed funding was available to support these new business ideas.

The blocks experiment was conducted at the start of the workshop as an icebreaker activity that would propagate across the room when participants arrived at the venue. Participants were invited to take part in the parlour game, which created a chain of interactions that resulted in a fragmented set of nested stories. The game began with a small envelope in which the first participant was invited (privately) to place a piece of paper containing a sentence responding to the prompt ‘the best bargain you ever got?’. The sentence was placed within the envelope and handed to another participant who read the sentence, sealed the envelope, added a further sentence on a fresh piece of paper and placed this, along with the first sealed envelope, into a marginally bigger unsealed envelope. This cycle was repeated, building up the Russian doll layering of envelopes inside each other. Each participant was able to open and read the previous author’s sentence only and interpret and respond to this only (see Figure 6). After a series of rounds, this cumulative cycle led to a bulging final envelope that encased the previous envelopes. This anonymous set of stories involved approximately 10 participants. The final act involved everybody sharing in the opening of the envelopes to reveal the different responses and evolution from the initial question.

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Figure 6.

Participants writing their individual responses and sealing them in the envelopes.

The blocks experiment: Discussion and speculations

As discussed, the blockchain consists of an encrypted, cumulative ledger composed of blocks of transactions that are confirmed by miners to prevent double spend within the system. In our experiment, each previous story block was sealed within an envelope, leaving only the latest sentence unsealed for the next round’s participant to respond to – somewhat similar to the folding of paper in the Exquisite Corpse parlour game to hide the previous segment of the drawing. This enforced linear, processional writing down of ‘transactions’ or story fragments was of particular interest to the paper authors, and in particular how this might relate to traditional creative acts that use an incremental device towards a piece of text or drawing. The written, sealed, and unchangeable responses were created as individual activities, undertaken in a group setting (Figure 2) with participants who had not met each other before. While no authorship was sought or added to the notes, each one was uniquely handwritten and could therefore be identified by the author if not by anyone else.

The context, or concatenation, provided by the previous story offered a set of design constraints for the next author to respond to. This ‘restrictive space’ might, we anticipated, not only lead to an interesting thread of interpretations and linked stories, but also, as described by Sharples (1996), provide ‘the source material for creativity’. Unlike the parlour games that formed part of the background for this activity, the story blocks game did not impose any rules on the stories created for each layer (e.g. the ‘He said’, followed by ‘She said’ instructions in Consequences). Each nested story was therefore a microfiction in its own right, drawing on the context of the previous layer for its inspiration.

The experiment could have easily been conducted using mobile technology such as Twitter, and indeed social media platforms have been and are being employed to push the boundaries of contemporary storytelling (e.g. Biedenharn, 2015). However, in this case, the use of handwriting was intentional. Although hidden in the case of the story block envelopes, the instantaneity of feeling and weighing up every previous transaction in the clutch of an envelope carried with it the significance of what you are about to write, rather like the stress associated with having to write something witty in a colleague’s leaving card, or the pressure of making an acute observation in the visitors’ book of a bed and breakfast hotel.

The broader implications and value of literacy, relating here to the written or typed word, and its associated technologies are complex and subject to debate (e.g. Brandt and Clinton 2002; Street, 2003), and the authors of this article do not attempt to delve into them. However, the sense of permanency that the experiment and related inscribed writing activities imbue, where mistakes are not easily hidden or rectified, is a world away from the world of word processing, where misspelled words are often autocorrected as we type. Indeed, handwriting can be considered a dying art (Birkerts, 2006; Hensher, 2012) undergoing, according to Kress (2003), ‘…changes in its uses and in its forms as significant as any that it has experienced in the three or four thousand years of its history’.

The use of writing (and in particular sealed records as in this experiment) leads to, as:

…Plato’s Socrates complains, a written text [that] is basically unresponsive. If you ask a person to explain his or her statement, you can get at least an attempt at explanation: if you ask a text, you get nothing except the same, often stupid words which called for your question in the first place. (Ong, 1986: 27)

Although the blocks game was played only once, there was an interesting effect upon the writing of each author as they wrote into an envelope of increasing size, as though the legacy, and history, of the ledger weighed upon them. This material weight of the envelopes appears to have an interesting cognitive effect on people that perhaps the actual blockchain does not. The distributed, immaterial nature of the blockchain is celebrated because it avoids the bottleneck of traditional centralized banking systems in which the flow of fiat currencies is controlled and conversely offers a flexibility and freedom to pursue transactions without the oversight of a central bank. Although the blocks experiment was also intended to explore the ledger aspects of the blockchain, of course it was never really distributed, and in the end became a very traditional, centralized record of all transactions. This nested envelope connoted the heft of an old ledger, one whose very presence infers truth and security – held by a trusted third party, in this instance, the authors as workshop facilitators.

The concatenation and sealing of blocks could enable an end to the saying that history is written by the victors. Distributed ledger technologies could enable the creation and recording of timestamped, network-validated documentation as historical events unfold, revealing a richly complex set of histories for perpetuity (or as long at the particular cryptographic blockchain system remains active or archived at least). This would of course be subject to human inconsistencies and bias as much as any other form of recordings but would represent the actual data created at the time of its validated block. Already journalism is changing – citizen journalism plays a critical role in contemporary reporting (Khamis and Vaughn, 2011), while artificial intelligence technologies are being harnessed to automate news reporting, for instance in sports journalism (Wright, 2015). With the advent of smart contracts, where events are triggered or enabled when some condition is met (e.g. inheritance payments to dependants on confirmation of benefactor’s death), the blocks experiment suggests that future research should consider the implications of revealing archival data in the aftermath of events at some predetermined time or condition. Subsequent research should carefully consider the ethical and moral implications and dilemmas of such practices.

The mining process experiment: Blockchain concept

The third experiment explored writing as mining. In the context of blockchain technologies, mining is used as a metaphor for the labour-intensive process of finding rare commodities such as gold. In systems such as Bitcoin, mining is equally power-intensive, or more specifically, computationally intensive and acts as a way to introduce more currency into the system at predefined and predictable rates. More than this however, mining is the process that sustains blockchain technologies, as it verifies and adds transaction records to the blockchain ledger.

As we have seen, in the case of Bitcoin, transactions are recorded in a ledger in sequential blocks, created every 10 minutes. The list of transactions for a given block is encoded (an analogy might be that of a compressed file), added to the header of the previous block to form a chain and verified (Figure 2). The verification takes place through mining, where miners (dedicated computer hardware and software) compete to encode the block using one-way hash functions until they find the correct outputted hash string. The required output hash string has known features that signal that the correct input has been found (e.g. a sequence of 60 zeros in the first 60 bits of the output string). The finding or mining of the correct input string involves mathematical rules that are highly computationally intensive and expensive. While a number of miners work towards finding the answer only one will be successful in adding the block to the distributed ledger. In Bitcoin mining, this winning miner receives a prize of new Bitcoins (25 Bitcoins as of time of writing) as an incentive to do the computationally expensive work of mining. Our mining experiment attempted to reproduce aspects of this process in the context of storytelling.

The mining process experiment: Method

The mining process experiment explored the power-intensive work of mining through a creative collective text competition to find a keyword and ‘seal’ the block. Eight participants took part in a half-day workshop in Edinburgh in June 2015 having been recruited through an open call to research mailing lists. Participants were a mix of experienced writers and copy editors (undertaking doctoral studies) and postgraduate students in design. Each participant had access to a laptop with Internet access, and everyone, sitting in the same room, used Google Docs to produce a text in search of a control word in a way that mimicked the process of mining for a specific hash in the Bitcoin system. The Google Docs document was made public, and once publicized via Twitter, a number of anonymous participants also joined in. Before the writing started, one participant secretly chose the initial control word for the story as well as a loosely related word that would be the starting point of the writing activity (this was used to give some contextual guidance for participants, as finding a randomly selected word would have been an inordinately challenging and time-consuming process). The other participants were directed to start simultaneously typing their texts into the single document to construct a story and eventually find or ‘mine’ the chosen word. There were no predetermined rules for this writing. As well as being visible on individual screens, the collaborative Google Docs document was also projected onto the wall in the room for everyone to see (Figure 7). When the chosen word was finally written, the story was considered ‘mined’, and the block of text was encoded into a hash.

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Figure 7.

Screenshot of the story ‘mining’ – note the multiple visible and overlapping cursors, indicating where participants were working into the text.

The first word chosen in the mining exercise was ‘butterflies’, and the word defined to seal the story block was ‘garden’. Nine minutes into the exercise, one participant typed butterfly, and the story block was mined:

The garden was full of enormous orange carrots and green weeds that were now beginning to climb the kitchen window, like spider’s web. As she woke up one gray Saturday morning, walked to the window to see what she had to do. To her amazement, six foxes had appear from a nearby bush. Ha! she exclaimed. It was an amazing sight. She quickly grabbed her digital camera to take a few shots before they discover they were being watched. The carrots had started to grow so large they began to up-root. Then it was the turn of the Flowers, which bloomed beside that. Two huge white rabbits jumped into the garden. Birds were flying around. One landed on the bird table, while the others start eating the butterfly.

The discovered word (butterfly in this case) was used to start a new story block, providing a means of linking, or chaining, to the previous block. The mining process experiment differs from blockchain mining in that the solution or keyword to the writing activity is unknown, requiring a third party to confirm that the keyword has been found. For the purpose of continuing the game, the participant who mined the keyword won the right to choose the next keyword, which was again mined by other participants through the production of text, creating a new story block, and so on (see Figure 8). Butterflies was then used to start the next block of the story, and another participant secretly chose ‘daisy’ as the second control word. This word was mentioned in 13 minutes, through the production of the following text:

Butterflies are pretty creatures. They flutter and dart about the countryside, sipping nectar and distracting children. For some people though, butterflies are objects of terror, randomly flapping with no way of knowing where they will land. Flying flowers others call them. Most of us have experiences of butterflies. We go through many not so pleasant phases in our lives too, like living in a cocoon before we finally metamorphose in a beautiful butterfly. Change may not always be pleasant, but enduring it brings out ‘something’ really good.

Butterflies might hide in the clouds, they can be blown away with strong winds. They may live in the grass or in the fields. They flap their wings, skimming over ponds and water, floating on a breeze, dodging tall grasses and buttercups. In the greenhouse, they sometimes get trapped, weaving through the plants to find an escape. Back in the garden they land on the vegetables, roses, tulips, dandelions, bluebells, daffodils, petals, leaves, carnivorous flowers, nettles, honeysuckle, daisy.

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Figure 8.

Overlapping and complex path to each keyword or ‘sealing’ of a block in the mining process experiment.

The workshop concluded with a group discussion.

The mining process experiment: Discussion and speculations

The mining process experiment attempted to reproduce the network approach of finding solutions to problems, playing with words and narrative construction. The experiment revealed a subtle difference between competing and collaborating in online environments. Blockchain mining practices are strongly connected with the amount of computational power in the network and are easily defined as a competitive task. In text production, however, the boundaries are less clear. Human relations expressed in collective practices of writing and the desire to collaborate challenge the metaphor – participants found the writing process challenging and were uneasy with the speed of text production:

I write slowly. It is quite unnatural to be forced to write competitively – quickly. (P1)

The enforced linearity of the writing process that the experiment created caused disparities between participants' conventional writing patterns:

this way of writing is linear, there are not multiple versions. That is not my way of writing at all. I might write the ending first. Here it’s like a flow, I don’t know what the end will be. (P1)

The mining process experiment was obviously a gross simplification of Bitcoin mining, however, had the blockchain mining principles been followed more closely, perhaps some of the participants’ challenges may not have arisen. For instance, each ‘miner’ could have worked on individual Google Docs documents, and as soon as any one miner found the solution, the hash and keyword of the completed ‘block’ would be published and propagated to the rest of the miners.