This session examines how economies and economic objects are designed in Web3. These digital economies arise through the deployment of socio-technical mechanisms (e.g., blockchain, contracts) and financial investments in digital assets (e.g., NFTs, ‘unreal’ estate). At the same time, digital communities capitalize on NFTs and tokens to build forms of self-governance and realize economic benefits. Much of the Web3 economy rests on the simultaneous construction of digital worlds and digital economies that mirror but don’t necessarily translate to non-digital forms of value and modes of exchange. The design of these digital economies involves processes of assetization, commodification, and financialization. The session examines the following questions: How are Web3 digital economies designed? What processes, infrastructures, and practices are implicated in these designs? What forms of ‘new’ value are emerging? What forms of value are increasingly irrelevant? And what methods are applicable to the examination of these domains?

This session focuses on digital twins, which are virtual representations tied to physical objects, processes, or environments. Defined by a two-way flow of information, digital twins feed powerful machine-learning operations capable of autonomously monitoring, simulating, and even modulating the ‘real’ world. The aim is to encompass the physical world within interactive monitoring and control systems that promise novel forms of value extraction based on comprehensive, real-time data capture and processing. While the market for digital twins is predicted to grow in value from $10bn to more than $100bn over the next five years, the nature, scope, and viability of digital twins are unclear. This panel asks: How do digital twins generate value? How are they imagined to reshape labor, logistics, and future planning? What regulatory interventions are needed as government and industry are increasingly drawn to the lure of digital platforms for modeling futures and modulating the real? What multidisciplinary methods of analysis and lines of inquiry are relevant to this emerging domain?

This panel explores value propositions articulated by platform governance models. These platforms mediate interactions between data, content, and value. The panel examines the different ways that value is posited and narrated as precursors to regulatory arbitration. The latter typically manifest as managerial interventions and market-framing instruments – as in, for example, “the data market.” This panel investigates those dynamics through specific examples of platform governance: automated ad-tech blacklisting, content moderation, drone delivery services, and financial transactions between platforms and news media organizations. The aim is to explore different value propositions at play across each of these contexts. This session addresses the following questions: How do particular value propositions justify specific governance and managerial interventions? How do market-framing narratives (e.g., the data market) become dominant? What are their expressions in different contexts? How do these approaches embed diverse strategies for distributing regulatory and civic functions between private and public actors?

The session examines how core concepts, such as commodity, capital, labor, rent, data, and information, operate with reference to specific platform contexts. Each panelist will present a brief case study from their research to outline general questions relating to relevant concepts. The aim is to consider how each case either challenges or confirms conventional understandings of particular concepts and to stimulate general discussion of theoretical challenges and research methods.