Western liberalism to world liberalism | Devcon SEA

[Music] so today's panel topic is Western liberalism to World liberalism uh in order to set up the common ground for this panelist because we have a very mirrored setup of panelist um uh I would love to have each of you to have a quick very succinct uh uh sentence to tell us what do you think about liberalism and what does that mean to you so uh I guess I'll from uh start from uh AIT to me liberalism is a set of values um and it's to be distinguished from Western liberalism because uh I don't think there was anything ever inherently Western about it their values which tend to resonate with uh all of humanity across the world from different cultures and times I think it's it's a bundle of Concepts that includes things like uh democracy individual rights uh Freedom pluralism property rights uh concern about centralization of power and a lot of things that I think resonate with all kinds of people and all kinds of context historically and definitely with this community for me liberalism is the pursuit of freedom and individual dignity and I think that technology here plays a huge role enabling self- Sovereign governance and basically on a global scale yes the the pursuit of freedom but by definition the pursuit of Freedom cannot be done only from one place cannot be imposed from one place that's why like the term World liberalism you know just like World music or or world food it has to include every tradition every culture uh otherwise it's not Freedom otherwise it's imposition from one side to the other all right I appreciate those answers I think no matter how cynical you are um I think hearing those answers you you really think to yourself like these are good things these are good things for human right um and for all of our uh panelists as as well as myself the moderator maybe except from Bruno we're all sort of born in a society where liberalism is not the default um and I was previously talking about how um my story living in China growing up in China had this experience of secondhand liberalism where I learned about liberalism from the internet from the movies from the TV shows um and there's no liberalism practice in the society but liberalism was also very tangible in the online my space um I want to direct the first question to Bruno actually this panel actually stemed a part of from your idea of you know coining this word uh World liberalism so can you maybe give us an overview of how this idea come to you and why you want to add World liberalism on top of liberalism like what's the difference between World liberalism versus this old plain liberalism we we we understand yes so I think um many people are suspicious of the term liberalism and I would I would argue they're suspicious because that we sometimes tend to assume liberalism as being just Western and you know Western liberalism has its limitations so we need to expand the concept and I give you three ways in which it needs to be expanded well first of all if we're concerned about Freedom we have to be concerned about the freedom of everyone but unless you make an effort to see things from the perspective of other people other cultures you tend to overvalue your own freedom and devalue the freedom of others you know we can't just be concerned about the freedom of ukrainians to build their own country we have to be concerned about the freedom of Palestinians to build their own country but I've noticed if you come from a certain culture you see only the the freedom of of ukrainians and if you come from a certain culture you see only Palestinian freedom I think a Global Perspective that includes every single perspective we can be concerned about about um about Freedom everywhere very quickly second way um you know we know that liberalism is supposed to be about overcoming State propaganda and State control but how can you overcome State propaganda and State Control unless you make an effort to see your own state from another perspective well let's try to see America from the perspective of China and China from the perspective of America and do this iteration uh all the time and finally the the third there's no other way to get rid of State propaganda and third even certain kinds of freedoms are not available in our society simply because there are different trade-offs there are certain experiences of nature that you can have perhaps in a society like Japan but not in a society like the United States certain experiences of family of religion that you can have uh in in Muslim societies and you can't have in the west so if we want a really comprehensive sense of Freedom we have at least to understand that there are different experiences of freedoms in different places so my attempt would be to try to have a a much broader understanding of liberalism that is just not just the way to look at the world from one one place right um this the next question is about ethereum um ethereum itself is a aggregation of a lot of things about it's people it's it's it's you guys it's us um it's about thousands of thousand people in this venue it's about technology um it's also about resource um so the questions to vitalic is um how would you describe the liberal aspect of ethereum and uh how does its core mechanism reflect or deviate from from liberalism I think there's uh two levels at which you can look at it so one level is the perspective of just uh what ethereum is technically and what it enables in the sense that it is a decentralized platform that allows people to build um applications and to use Bruno's language that basically means it's a platform that tries to avoid having a single Master administrator but at the same time empowers anyone in the network to create uh their own pieace and to administrate their own peace and even give them the uh ability to take away their own ability to administer pieces of that if that's what they want to do to give people confidence but and uh like those technical aspects I think are important but I think there's uh another more interesting level which is uh ethereum as a community and as an organism as a whole right because this is an organ a blockchain ecosystem it always has to solve this uh fundamental problem of a 51% attack right if uh you have something that aims to be decentralized and to give people on top of it confidence and stability through that then there's always the risk that at multiple levels consensus research development uh um other levels too that like some actor become gains too much power and then tries to twist the entire platform toward their own objectives and ethereum I think has this really interesting culture of really explicitly trying to create something that is very resilient against that right so there's a very explicit effort to try to build a global Community there is this very explicit effort to try to create multiple ethereum client teams uh so there isn't like one client team that has all of the Practical power to write the rules of the protocol there's an explicit effort to try to involve different all kinds of different new people in research development different levels of uh discussion um and uh this in the ethereum foundation itself right we have this philosophy of subtraction which is basically that the goal of the foundation is not to grow the foundation the goal of the foundation is to uh grow other things that can then enable the success of the ecosystem and uh like the analogy that I would make right is that one of the things that often gets blamed for the failure of democracy in Russia in the 1990s to last is basically that there was pretty much no um Civil Society right you had the Soviet Union Soviet Union suddenly disappeared and there was like nothing there to take over a lot of functions and uh like it basically pretty much immediately entered the oligarch era right and if you want ethereum to be something that actually can be resilient and robust and like that Civil Society layer that layer that is both not a yes centralized thing and is also not just a profit maximizing actors like that needs to be strong right and the foundation's goal is to try to intentionally build up that layer so it can be strong and so I think it's also this really fascinating experiment and like trying to see can we actually create a virtual um organism that's built on these principles and they can actually work based off of them yeah yeah I think in the world where you know you take grow as this inevitable social justice I think ethereum Foundation uh philosophy of substract ction is in a sense like trying to create more you know borrowing Bruno SW uh creating more uh Master game designers in The Meta system um okay uh so in case you didn't come to this space earlier uh amid gave us a really amazing talk about system failure in the Middle East uh and uh uh a part of the the system failure and you know whatever terrible things are going on there uh was due to uh in a sense Western uh intervention uh and for societies like China uh Middle East uh we often or the society often associate liberalism with this um infiltration with the hypocrisy um and in this panel when we're talking about from uh World liberalism to uh from Western liberalism to World liberalism do you think people in the Middle East uh can accept this concept and do you think it it's possible today to infuse new meanings into the term or it's easier for us just to co a newer term I do think that the term is um has become toxic um it's dirty by association with all the things that have been done in its name and the concept of Western liberalism um like being coined as a term two words together was a a huge blunder because what western democracies did was take this set of values that is pretty Universal that you know some attractive to pretty much all people in all societies and try to uh monopolize that within specific societies and to persuade uh the world that this came together with a larger package which it didn't have to so it was basically it became associated with a certain power structure um which is like a postc colonial power structure it has the holdovers of a colonial system in which parts of the world dominated the rest um and that's still what people associate it with today now nowadays people associate it with um you know the genocide happening in Gaza the idea that um Western Nations will claim to uphold certain values but only apply them to for example specific victims it's a tragedy when ukrainians are being uh forced out of their homes or are being occupied or are being ethnically cleansed but that's a tragedy because they're perceived to be Western people and therefore Western liberal ISM applies to them and with non-western people these values do not apply um so when I speak to my uh fellow Muslims about liberal ideas I tend to avoid the word um but I also talk about it in a different way um I don't you know start with John Lock and John Stewart Mill that's not relevant to us I take the the stories which resonate inside our own culture so I'd probably you know start the conversation with uh the life of the Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him and i' talk about how he lived in a Cosmopolitan society and created institutions which allowed um the Jewish minority within that Society for example to have their own legal system which uh they could uh feel satisfied abiding with the way he uh organized intercommunal relations to enable people to kind of uh proceed from a Level Playing Field the way that they were treated equally economically and that resonates far more than um you know starting the story with uh well these ideas were invented by the ancient Greeks and then passed to Western civilization and now we have to take them from them because it turns out they have so something so much better than uh you know what we always had yeah thank you thank you for the answer um so uh just following you know we we talked Amid and I know Diego uh you you part of you um previously we talk about this like you you you agree with um amit's uh point point where you know those Western institutions need some radical Transformations um what do you why do you think that way and also I know your background so can you please paint us a picture of Argentina's complex relationship and complex interplay between State crisis crypto's proposition and liberalism itself yeah I agree with arent that uh Western governing institutions will change and mostly as they had changed in the past because of Technology when writing appeared fism and the church control information and govern Humanity then that was replaced by nation states basically because of the appearance of a new technology of the printing press and I think that current institutions are not suited for the digital world that we live in we have so much better ways of potentially governing ourselves and the institutions that today rule us and I think they in I don't know years from now I hope to see it institutions will start to evolve in a new Manner and I think that the way that ethereum is govern we we were Ching that before is perhaps a test a way of showing how to govern large scale projects on a different way as we govern our society today and Argentina is this strange case in which we are an extremely rich country from an objective perspective regarding natural resources we have a huge talent pool in Argentina but we have been failing as a nation since I don't know the last 70 years we haven't been able of providing prosperity to the inhabitants of Argentina and that is because of failing institutions and that created this particular model in which we argentinians were always forced to survive in extreme economic conditions in extreme unst ility from political institutional Powers just to give an idea the other day this guy publish a website in which you enter your date of birth and calculated how much inflation you suffered in a lifetime I enter my date of birth and he suffered a 30 trillion per inflation that is I mean we argentinians are economic Navy Seals we need to survive we're under attack constantly so when crypto appeared Bitcoin ethereum appeared it was not something to speculate oh this let me try it was a need for survival we need to get out of this Fallen economy in whichever way we can let's explore this and on the second hand we are used for institutions to fail we know that institutions are not trusty hence we embrac this idea of trying to govern ourselves and and and gaining personal agency in different matters and I want to be pretty clear clear although the the Argentinian pass has been so awful I'm extremely optimistic regarding its future extremely optimistic and precisely because of this precisely because of in of we have been under such harsh conditions that we developed kind of a landscape in which Innovations in how we govern ourselves in institutions in economic means in adopting decentralization have a very very good ground to evolve and to grow I appreciate I appreciate the answer um next question is for vitalic I guess this question can be divided into two parts uh following your first answer U if World liberalism for the sake of for the lack of better word uh we'll stick with world liberis for now if World liberalism represent certain values and speak to the ethos of ethereum how can we make it more legible and how can we make it more uh visible uh and the second part is so for a lot of Western uh liberal uh countries they they often have this independent or third- party Institute like Gallup or human right watch uh those institutes they would use you know although sometimes problematic and over abstract metrics to measure their liberalness uh it goes to ethereum do you think it's possible for us to establish some ethereum human right watch or ethereum Gallup to study and quantify how ethereum's projects uh contribute to world socially economically and ideologically uh in your in your uh blog post about how to make uh ethereum value alignment more legible you also talked about you want to see more projects like L2 Beats to to appear uh can you maybe like imagine uh another L2 beats but Focus Beyond just Technical and decentralization aspects yeah I think I me one of the challenges that ethereum has right is that there are these values that Everyone likes to talk about and there's this Challenge and like there's often this gap between what gets talked about and what actually is for people right and you know everyone talks about being a rollup but then some of those rollups like actually basically the provider holds holds your coins and they can do whatever they want with those coins at any time and and other rollups actually are not that way and uh if they shut down like you actually do have an onchain mechanism that you can use to take your coins back out right and uh like that like that second aspect like those uh values actually being reality is really important right it's I think like just like liberalism in politics it's the sort of thing that is uh very easy to just completely forget about in a uh normal situation when things are in equilibrium but there's always some key moment that arises when it suddenly becomes clear that it's everything and uh the and so L2 beat I think is definitely one of those good examples that basically tells tells you you know is a rollup actually a rollup or is it one of these systems where the operator can just take coins out whenever whenever they want and it's basically just a a glorified centralized exchange I think uh but it's only measuring a few things right I think other things that could be measured are um open source is one right if something is open sourced and other people can build upon it also other people can inspect and it also limits the providers own ability to abuse their power if they get too powerful um Open Standards is uh another one right there's uh value in building on Open Standards and there is sometimes a phenomenon where people claim to be building on Open Standards but actually they are the ones that are pushing a standard in a way where they're the only ones that are really on that standard and uh this becomes a way to create a a wall Garden and dominate an ecosystem um decentralization and also contribution to um both the ethereum ecosystem and to the outside world which is starting to happen more and more and and the the whole regen side of the etherum ecosystem is really fascinating there I mean I think for all of those things there's uh definitely value in creating more metrics and in tracking more metrics I think my philosophy on Metric is that like zero metric is not the answer because if you have zero metric then it is too easy to for anyone to just virtue signal and basically like say that the thing they were going to do anyway actually is the way to instantiate the value one metric is not the answer because this is like uh it becomes like a social credit score it becomes this like standardized uh thing that just accumulates a huge amount of power um and to me the only answer is is pluralism the answer is to have many metrics that are all kind of competing with each other on an uncertain playing field for legi if I could just add to that question um there's a term I heard a couple of days ago I'm not sure if I'm using it right but the term was credible neutrality one of the things that's gone wrong with Western liberalism is basically abandoning even the pretence to some kind of uh neutrality in the rules of the system and how they're applied um is there some way of measuring the number of different perspec Ives from which the rules being written uh in this system are coming from that is a f a fascinating question I think one of the challenges is that uh perspectives is so hard to Define right because uh you can look into you know you can do GitHub archaeology and allore devs archaeology and even try to figure out who was responsible for a particular EIP getting included although actually possibly much less of that information is being it could be and then the next question then is like what you can then look and see are there perspectives that actually have been um included and often it's easier to identify specific failures than it is to identify success right so for example one type of specific failure that of that has been identified sometimes is when the perspectives of like researchers who care about decentralization and who also about like Queen and mathematical Pur and certain like software engineering Aesthetics get taken into account but the uh perspectives of users do not get taken into account and that's something where there's increasingly like different Community groups trying to figure out how to correct for um so I think it's uh like to me like perfect neutrality for some like complicated decision making is not achievable right it's the analogy I use it's like imagine like you have a chess position and you know imagine you're in the middle of like some game between like Magnus Carlson and G Kasparov right and like you ask what is the credibly neutral chess move and like there is no answer but the thing that you can identify is you can identify when you have specific biases right you can say well this player clearly overvalues material and undervalues position right and that's a thing you can say and that's a thing you can uh correct for but then it's a an endless projects to try to like keep uh identifying those biases and keep improving thank you um uh the next question I I guess uh primarily I want to ask for uh Bruno but I would love all the panelists to answer it uh is Bruno um in your latest book you argue that American liberalism isn't failing but rather undergoing this metamorphosis and you also uh sort of position that America is developing what you call political virtualism um this this is uh uh so given America still welding its immense power um and just take just to take a case of any G Gadget in your hand uh the code the the the rules of writing the code and the rules of Designing such machine is perhaps originated from the United States uh my question here is uh how can we Foster a less America Centric environment for one political discussion and uh next for ethereum based technological innovation and I would love to have all the panelist uh to more or less answer this question so starting with ethereum um you know I I I believe u quite firmly that the ethos of ethereum can be applied outside ethereum so it would be perfectly conceivable I think that someone who spent the teenage years uh developing within the ethereum framework would go on and work at the UN say and take those principles I don't think vitalic 10 years ago was thinking about how to solve the problem of the UN so I don't think we should assume that ethereum as it exists now will solve the very serious problem that we don't have a global framework for stability and and and cooperation but what would be quite possible and I think desirable would be for people to take those principles that U vitalic talked a little bit about uh to other areas that ethos that culture um in fact that discipline because I think it's a lot about discipline uh you got the idea by now that I'm very interested in in in this notion of virtual reality and that we live in virtual reality and I argue in the previous book that America had moved to virtual reality and when it comes to virtual reality I think there's a uh a decisive ethos that we have to embrace do we create virtual worlds for our private enjoyment to sort of pursue our most hidden desires Without Limits or to create ual worlds of great complexity that can Encompass the highest possible number of possibilities and experiences so if you think about West world the series and the movie there's something very perverse about how many of those people regard Virtual Worlds you enter the virtual world only to express your desires what I see in ethereum is in fact from the beginning when I got interested in it is that it's the other way around that uh the communities sees itself as made up of builders that the Richer the virtual world being created is the better this not a virtual world being created only for the sake of experimenting in one particular thing and I think in the community there's this permanent criticism of is this open enough is this General enough is this uh capacious enough and so on both at the level of the system as a whole but of different applications that are developed um so I like the idea italic just expressed now at the end that one has to correct for biases and always be attentive to biases now imagine if these ethos were taken to other areas of our life where it's so sorely needed that I think would be very important I would add to what Bruno said that uh and answering to you alfra that I think that what we see today in in for example the etherum ecosystem is that there's no such thing as in my perspective as America dominance is Builder dominance if you build a great IDE a great product a a great feature whatever nobody cares where you come from nobody cares who you are I mean they care about what you build and uh I completely agree with with with what Bruner said regarding that in the upcoming years most probably the the ethos of ethereum will get exported to other realities and that will start tapping that change in in governance which I planted before young people that have been living in this ethos in this community for the last 10 years would Mo most probably pursue to change realities in which we govern ourselves and makes basically no sense in today's world mhm yeah and I I think think uh for ethereum there's uh like there's always different uh different things that we can do right and I mean to give like some concrete examples one thing that the foundation tries to do more and more is to explicitly involve different support builders in different kinds of different parts of the world and even try to get them involved in areas that are closer to ethereum core development right and like one of the interesting statistics is that 80% of the of psse right the ethereum foundation ZK team is from East and Southeast Asia and this actually happened even without my involvement right this happened and at some point I just learned about it and uh like I was just as amazed as anyone else to hear this statistic and I think there is definitely this pattern right when you have a new wave of technology it has this resetting function where like there is no such thing as someone with 10 years of experience writing Groth 16 code right because 2024 minus 2016 is less than 10 but at the like and so but like that just shows that it creates an opportunity right but then that opportunity still needs to be claimed and there's this uh question of like what kinds of seeds can be planted to make sure that every time one of the is opportuni appears it actually does get claimed and I mean I think for us right now this is still like an open and ongoing problem so I think it's important to be unequivocal about what our values are but also to resist the attempts to uh control the epistemological sources of those values because we can reach those values from different perspectives and and um one of the enemies is also a form of uh values nihilism where we just decide that you know Western liberalism has been so trampled upon that there's no such thing anymore and therefore it's a free-for all and and it's the law of the Jungle that the most powerful win um that's the the risk that we fall in is that we fall into that and um I think by developing This Global liberalism which uh implicitly accepts multiple perspectives um we can um void that Temptation so so no dark Enlightenment but um with more positivity um and the next one is uh again go goes to vitalic is H for me there is one particular World liberalism moment in ethereum which is actually coincide with the the the moment I started to work in in crypto that was back in 2022 February uh when uh Ukraine's official Twitter uh shared two cryptocurrency wallets one for ethereum one for uh Bitcoin um and later on um as all of us know ethereum's Community has contributed uh a huge amount of resource and uh and capital to to help the situation in Ukraine uh so vitalic what is your most memorable ethereum's World liberalism moment and and why I think I mean if I had to give an answer that's uh like very different from like that like one instance of doing something really valuable for Ukraine in the world I would actually just say this conference and I think the reason why I say this is that like the like I think this particular one actually even more than any of the previous ones I've seen it uh really shows and makes obvious the fact that etherum as an ecosystem really is bringing people from all kinds of different parts of the world from all kinds of different perspectives uh to come in to participate to share their thoughts um one piece of feedback that I actually got is that other blockchain conferences often tends to look like Web Two trade shows and it's organized top down and uh like Devcon was not this right and there's just rooms where you can basically just like go in and you can book it and uh I mean I'm sure sometimes people don't even book it can just start a session and uh like a lot of the attractiveness of the of the conference was uh that and I think like to me the key thing right is the combination between like that freedom of anyone to participate and start and to contribute together with the a positive sub mentality right and uh avoiding what was criticized at ECC as being like the Side Event Zoo right where everyone would just uh make their own events but then they up like destructively competing with each other and everyone was stuck in traffic even more jumping between them for like between one hour and the next um so I think uh just like events like this as uh in-person demonstrations of both the facts that all of these diverse uh communities within ethereum exist and also that there's all of these different sets of topics that people talk about out right there's tracks workshops um Sub sub events of uh all kinds of different themes all kinds of different know like academic disciplines and uh intellectual um emphas is like it really proves uh for me personally that ethereum continues to be the kind of ecosystem that like actually has the uh ingredients to keep generating the solutions that people need going forward appreciate that this is a quite a positive note um and [Music] [Applause] uh uh I have one last question is for all the panelists and before asking this question and before opening uh the floor to the the the audience to to ask questions I want to make a very awkward attempt to to to give a little bit hope um so um we know that the uh existence of non-liberal yet economic successful models worldwide are are are quite significant examples such as uh we previously mentioned Singapore as this liberal democracy and China very successful economy with socialism with Chinese characteristics those two models are uh not only hostile to uh Western liberal democracy but they're just indifferent in terms of accepting or or getting you know a lot of values we talk about uh and we also see uh non-liberal and uh in a sense struggling models uh we're in Thailand Thailand is a country uh has a complex relationship with liberal democracy uh this country's power is still concentrated in a monarchy and Military um and then the Middle East uh Argentina uh Russia which is currently in the war each of those cases present a miror of conundrum as liberalism doesn't necessarily make make the sense but disregard any of that I think I want to go back to V Al's hopeful note is I think what makes me feel hopeful is um is is is really this stage is is is about us a bunch of nerdy people come here and and listen and learn about War liberalism um as this archaic word um it is oddly hope for to me and sometimes when I see the contradiction of ethereum itself we're talking about mem Corin greedy mem coin Traders but we're talk we're also talking about indepth very idealistic cyphr punk people building stuff here so I think the breath of the th's discussion and the breath of those practices give me hope so my question here is hopefully everyone can leave this room with with a little bit hopeful note is um what what makes you feel hopeful I think that we're very deeply scripted in uh the Paradigm of um centralization uh the nation state Paradigm uh in organizing in a command and control hierarchical way it's the way like it's the system that we were raised in it's the the water that we swim in um and it tends to replicate because it's just your default um so when I see people really actively trying to come up with you know decentralized nony Hier archical voluntaristic methods of coordinating um like here at Devcon that's what really gives me hope I um I think uh there's a sense in which the uh you know the thing that we're fighting against is weaker than a lot of people think and my own theory is that the dangerous ideology of this decade is actually not fascism per se but nihilism and uh and I think you can see examples of this everywhere right even know when you look at how the invasion of Ukraine gets Justified right it's not Russia building a glorious Thousand-Year Empire right Germany in the 1940s where you know the narrative was that it's building a glorious Thousand-Year Empire here it's not the narrative is yeah we suck but we're allowed to suck because other people suck too right and like you see n i mean we see nism you know within crypto and I think it's actually encouraging to remember that like to see that it's not just a uniquely crypto problem this is something that all of humanity is going through um and I think the and you know there definitely are things that are not just anism like there definitely is the phenomenon that like there's portions of Silicon Valley who 10 years ago were libertarian because they thought they had no chance in hell of getting the government to listen to their concerns but they're now much more Central as ation friendly because they can think they can become the ne the next group of Chief advisers uh but at this like at the same the nihilist part of it it's uh ultimately self-defeating like it's not like it's something that eventually eats itself it's not something that can really motivate and inspire people and bring people to like actually put um put their souls into a project at a very high standard of quality for many years and uh I think uh the fact that on the other hand people who do care about a a brighter future are working hard and are putting in the long-term work and are willing to increasingly find each other and and support each other means that I think uh this group is likely to [Music] win I feel pretty optimistic about the future mainly because 50 years ago when you were born you had kind of tattooed your area code in your life you were I was born plus 54 in Argentina and uh that gave centralized power nation states a lot of control over how you live what what music you listen to what things you read how you were able of work in or that and today in this new digital world we're much more humans that from this or that nation and that Embraces us in a global society in which liberalism values maybe applied regardless of whatever nation states try to impose on you and that makes me feel so good about the [Applause] future got got curious about this idea of nihilism in in ethereum I have to askal what that is exactly uh but um on on the question of of optimism you know for me uh the main source of optimism is looking around and seeing that the systems of control that exist in the world and I think you all see them and perhaps some see some systems better than others uh and that U sometimes look so scary sometimes looks so powerful and so scary they do tend to be self-destructive they do tend over the long term to undermine themselves precisely because they are so incapable of seeing the world around them incapable of understanding other views in the end they become weaker with time you may well be a rule of history that the systems of Oppression and control cannot be permanent and if that's true okay then there's hope right because the opposite of Hope would be if these systems of Oppression and control could become permanent and I you know I don't see that in history and I don't see that in our own time thankfully [Applause] [Music] [Applause] uh two senten are quite memorable one is nism is self-defeating and second is the thing we're fighting against is probably weaker than we think those are I'm going to memorize those two lines for for a long time uh I'm going to uh wrap the the the the Talking part for now and now we can enter the the question answering stage uh for all the panelists so shall we pull the um the questions up and if you want to post a new questions you can scan the QR code yeah I was just going to say so uh thank you very much for the questions lots and lots of questions have already been received as you can see so given that there's so many questions of course it's especially valuable if you vote uh as you can get the questions that you really want answers up to the top yeah and with that um I hand over to the uh Q&A okay I'm going to uh read the first one which get the uh the most votes is liberalism truly so Universal um aren't their collectivism cultures were explicitly de priortize individual expression as such uh as such do ideas of pluralism subsume liberalism that's a really good uh question and um I actually would uh ask if you pose a question maybe like tag someone a panelist you want to you you want to hear the answer from uh and I guess for our four panelists who wants to answer this question you can you can jump in than I think that um this tension between like uh a pluralistic ethos and uh individual rights is something that's happened in multiple cultures over time um it existed in uh European cultures um it's existed in African cultures it's existed in the Far East and it's uh tension that communities uh tend to navigate and it also tends to be an excuse used by authoritarians when they say oh individual rights doesn't work for us because we have a very pluralistic culture and we don't think about the individual um so i' I'd be cautious about believing people when they say that uh a specific culture is uh does prioritize like the the collective over the individual okay the next one is um is quite humorous and uh and and sharp speaking of eum efforts to make ethereum International Community is eth Moscow possible it's a it's a permissionless ecosystem we we shall head to East Moscow if if if there's one uh next one um The Losers of meritocracy in the USA are white and uneducated um they mainly voted for Trump who promised even more mocr Y how does this make sense so yeah thego or Bruno want take the answer honestly that that would mean understanding people psychological decisions on a global basis I find it quite impossible honestly I don't know how does make sense I I don't think people tend to assume uh Trump to be a phenomenon of extreme meritocracy so just because he promises it I wouldn't um take that very seriously I agree I I did go to a trump rally a month ago and it was uh quite interesting what I one thing I discovered is that his supporters are really going through very difficult times economically uh we we have this idea of the United States as extraordinarily prosperous but there are so many people left behind and struggling uh and I think the other side has to realize that more more yeah I I could I want to ask to add my my grain of sand on this because Argentina has now president melee and we have a very similar situation I mean on one side you had maybe a candidate which proposed that state was was going to be more supportive of people and on the other side you had a candidate which proposed basically an extremely libertar Aran agenda and president M won and I think that that's mainly because struggling people in harsh economic conditions think hey this system as it as it is now is not working we need to change it then let's Embrace a change uh next one is humans seem to require religion as a source of identity on the other hand religion on the state level leads to a bad B outcomes for human rights Iran for example do you have to get rid of religion um a source of meaning as well as identity uh I do agree that it leads to bad outcomes on a state level and therefore we shouldn't have it on a state level it should be um a permissionless like voluntaristic ecosystem um and States should have free expression and be credibly neutral Bruno you talked about liberalism as a way to resist propaganda where is the delimit her between force propaganda and free exchange of ideas well sometimes you only recognize it is propaganda if you make the effort uh of looking at things from different perspectives um in fact in my own experience without giving examples it's sometimes the things that I the things that I thought were most obvious that upon further examination I discover were really propaganda but again the effort here has to be the effort of stepping outside looking at things from other cultures living in different places meeting many different people and then the world opens up but beforehand before doing that yeah I guess it is not possible to distinguish the two yeah well Network States leads to a global Elite that attracts most resource such as energy water uh ithium clean air and lets the poor suffer I I love this question and I guess vitalic wants to answer it yeah I mean I think uh realistically there's good and bad outcomes from Network States but there's also good and bad outcome States for I guess you might call like the uh existing approach to like territory and to how people live right and uh the bad outcome there is basically like what we see with AI where like the entire industry concentrates B like largely in San Francisco and it's a a very small group of people that are in a bubble that basically assume that AI is going to decide everything and like they're in charge of AI and like basic implementing it according to a fairly narrow set of some not not even just principles but even just narrow like individual interests right and uh like the in uh with network states of course uh you know the risk is that basically this turns into another way for like small El leads to essentially wall themselves off and uh you know become like elium and and support each other and protect each other and then not actually have any incentive alignment with the outside world anymore but uh you know I think it's also important to remember that the nation state order to a large extent is exactly that as well and uh the positive side of this is uh you know if uh something like Network States actually does lead to creating new connections between people uh who have resources and have power be and who come from those existing centers but then actually making positive connections with people in a much broader set of uh uh set of regions and people who have a much broader set of needs and I think there have been Proto examples of of that starting to happen and so I think ultimately like which side it turns into is going to depend heavily on the kinds of people that actually uh like that actually run these things and like what what decisions they make and what they prioritize okay the next one is I also love this question is the good times to make weak people weak people make Hard Times Hard Times make strong people just a funny Trope or real if real where are we are we in a uh hard time or or or good time if it's just a meme I'd say it's a very old meme because uh the the oldest articulation of it I'm aware of was IB khaldun who was uh uh an Arabic philosopher who's considered the founder of modern sociology uh and he wrote this several hundred years ago he basically observed that um human societies tend to last um something like three or four generations and are often taken over by new communities Who come out of uh who who basically come from the margins um so yeah maybe there's something there in ancient Greece I forget if this was uh Lucidity or heraus or someone else there is the progression coros hubis a nemesis right that Prosperity leads to huis and then that leads to destruction um so I think uh there's definitely been similar themes that people have observed for a long time how to make ethereum Community not explicitly pro-western despite the fact that most of venture money come from the US another really good question are we positive that most vure money comes from the US there are tons of money coming from a as well I don't have that metric honestly do you want to answer the question with I want to hear other people's answers what's your answer you haven't answered a question yet I shall volunteer my labor to to to to uh to read the questions um my answer is um I think um um a lot of the Venture money come from the US and uh and Asia of course are coming from a subset of Hyper Elite people and um and I think they are the problem this is my answer okay um did anybody know that the first attempt at getting rid of a fiat currency was made by the USSR in 19 1929 why does nobody see the many intersections between crypto philosophy and Marxism I mean lots of people do right there's an entire account called the blockchain Socialist yes I was well say that hosted by Josh he's a he's a great guy uh okay I think we have uh 30 seconds for the last question um on popular take does liberalism lead to better outcome or is collectivism better or is collectivism better uh looking at climate change crime rates Etc you know but I think in the end it has to be about human Freedom so Freedom can be experienced collectively you can organize collectively that's a misperception that liberalism has to be against all that um I don't I don't know many people who would say you know the important thing is the the really valuable thing is the state or the nation in the end even the state and the nation have before the sake of individual experience and I do think it's a false dichotomy because you it it's not liberalism versus collectivism it's maintaining individual freedoms whilst having institutions that enable you to coordinate effectively for the greater good uh solving the problems of the commons okay yeah so uh the I guess the the the God of Devon give us 5 minutes more or what's the or oh it says hand overtime so I