The Blockchain Socialist

It's feeling like we're living in a very strange moment in time where liberal norms of openness have been shattered by the same class of tech industry titans who expressed these values just a decade ago. In this episode I spoke to Nick Houde and Severin Matusek from co-matter, a research and strategy studio based in Berlin, who recently published an incredible memo that is chock full of incredible analysis and insight int...

The one and only Slavoj Zizek published a piece on Network States and of course I had to read it and share it with you all. It's normally behind a paywall on his Substack but was put on Fileverse by recent guest Naomi for all to read.

Check out  the article on Fileverse here.

I really want to know who is in Zizek's ear talking about crypto stuff so much that he knows what DAOs are...

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In this episode, I talk with Adina Glickstein — Master’s student in Media Studies under Nathan Schneider at UC Boulder and editor-at-large at Spike Art Magazine — whose recent Compact Mag article, The Rise and Fall of Urbit finally gave me the excuse to talk about Urbit on the podcast and why its failing.

We unpack what Urbit is trying to be (although many don't seem to agree), its creator Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug, ph...

About a month ago I spoke at Dappcon about Solidarity Primitives we've been building at Bread Cooperative. Before my talk, Naomi Oba gave her own wonderful presentation titled Crypto Culture and its Discontents that unknowingly set the stage quite well for mine so I had to ask her on the podcast. 

We discussed the issues with crypto culture including obsession with quantification and financialization, and how to feel emotions i...

They say on the internet no one knows you're a dog but this has created a digital space that is dominated by more bots than humans and crypto space that is easily sybil attacked. Worldcoin, a project led by Sam Altman, is purporting to tackle this issue as AI (ironic?) proliferates content by scanning our eyeballs into an orb that they totally aren't taking your data from! Personally I don't trust them.

So I...

How can digital cash truly be “trustless”? What does it mean that blockchain offers a new paradigm of the “rule of code”? How are decisions made when a blockchain system faces an emergency, and who gets to make those decisions? 

I spoke to Wessel Reijers and Morshed Mannan, both great thinkers and recent authors of the book Blockchain Governance (by Primavera De Filippi, Wessel Reijers and Morshed Mannan). 

We discussed the history o...

How in the world is anyone meant to derive the "real" value of a crypto token? Especially in THIS market?? 

I spoke to Vasily Sumanov, founder of Valueverse and inventor of the Token Value Capture Mechanism Framework to share how he sees it. Valueverse is a utility-centric token tracker that helps you understand the demand-side pressures for token value. Part of the neoliberal ideological turn which has also continued into...

I spoke to Thomas Heremans, CEO of the Obol Association. Obol is an ecosystem for trust minimized Ethereum staking that enables distributed validators (DVs) across a cluster of nodes in order to improve resilience as compared to running a validator on a single node. Previously I spoke to Osín Kyne, the CTO of Obol Network and they had plenty of updates since last time.

Thomas gave us a refresher on what DVs are and what they can ena...

I spoke to Ferran Reyes and Pau Escrich, co-founders of Vocdoni, a blockchain based voting protocol used by several non-web3 organizations. They were born out of the Catalan independence movement in Spain from which they have designed Vocdoni to be censorship resistant and friendly to your average non-web3 user.

During the episode we discussed some of the elections  where Vocdoni was used, the cryptographic primitives that make it a...

I spoke with Paul Glavin, contributor to 1Hive and founder of Gardens v2, a platform for communities to manage assets democratically using conviction voting. 1Hive was one of the first projects in the crypto space to explore alternative governance mechanisms on Gnosis Chain which is the chain where we've build Breadchain Cooperative.

We discussed what conviction voting is, how to better fund public goods in crypto with it and t...

While at Devcon 2024 I spoke to Beth McCarthy, program director of Funding the Commons which I also spoke at in Bangkok about our progress on building on-chain post-capitalism with Breadchain Cooperative. Beth is also my co-author for the Katabasis crypto science fiction series and we spoke together at Devcon about the meme power of capital and why it's bad.

We discussed Beth's suggestions for building community when thing...

While at Devcon 2024 I spoke to Andreas Tsamados, cofounder of Fileverse and anime gif connoisseur. I highly recommend trying out ddocs.new as a decentralized alternative to google docs.

We spoke about the issue of radical communities using google docs, the importance of decentralized and censorship resistance knowledge sharing systems, and how this is all possible on Fileverse.

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While at Devcon 2024 I spoke to Josh Tan, the founder of Metagov, a laboratory for digital governance and lead of DAOstar, a DAO standards body (that I have also been doing some work with as well).

We spoke about making democracy just as available as autocracy in digital systems, making alternatives to venture capital, and AI as collective intelligence. We also spoke a bit about the DAOIP-5 web3 grants metadata standard that I'...

While at Devcon 2024 I spoke to Sarah Friend,an artist and software developer from Canada and based in Berlin. In 2023, she was a research fellow at Summer of Protocols, led by Venkatesh Rao and the Ethereum Foundation, studying the death of protocols and published a paper on "Good Death".

We discussed her findings in her research on how and when protocols are considered dead, how different human cultures view death and th...

In Thailand at Funding the Commons I spoke to Jake Hartnell, co-founder of Layer, a modular tech stack to build decentralized protocols using Eigen Layer's shared security. Jake is also a contributor to Juno and DAO DAO in the Cosmos ecosystem.

During the discussion we simplify how Eigen Layer works, what new affordances it brings, and what it means for collaborating across state lines. What is something that is norma...

While at Devcon I spoke to Anuj Das Gupta, co-founder of Smart Transactions with Vlad Zamfir. Smart Transactions offers advanced blockchain solutions with context-aware, decentralized, and customizable transaction capabilities.

We spoke about how MEV (maximum extractable value) gives someone the ability to control time for a split second, how the control of time has influenced the transition to capitalism and why we must n...

In Thailand I spoke to Florian Glatz, probably the first crypto focused lawyer in Europe and possible the world and co-founder of Common Ground, an on-chain social network. Florian also helped author some part of the MiCA legislation in the EU which lays out the legal framework for cryptocurrences.

We spoke about his experiences in the early days of the ICO boom, the unpreparedness of the legal system for crypto, and how C...

To finish off the year I spoke again with Chainleft, a pioneer in the on-chain art world and my online dopple ganger. We spoke about his newly released piece Crimson Echo (codename: Blood Journey) which is "A generative film, built by Ethereum Virtual Machine, compressed and stored fully on Ethereum, exploring how stories emerge through permanent acts of individual and collective conscience."

Be sure to be a part...

While in Thailand during the Funding the Commons design jam, I spoke to Tony Lai a co-steward of Mothertree Labs with Susanne Aichele who I spoke to in the last episode and Founder of the Blockchain Group at CodeX Stanford and an Edmund Hillary Fellow.

We spoke about Tony's interest in how to embody being a post-capitalist, Buddhist vs. Christian imagery, as well as his recent trip to Bhutan where he and others advis...