# Once in a Lifetime | Cade Diehm [New Design Congress] - Channel: [Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress](https://streameth.org/ethereum-cypherpunk-congress) - Date: 2026-07-09 - Duration: 23:02 - Topics: web3, privacy, now, crypto, cryptography, blockchain, data, security, human right, rights, tech, technology, internet, open source, free, freedom, ethereum, hackers, ethics, cypherpunk, dev, developer, dapp, decentralization, bitcoin, computer, surveillance, cyber, peer2peer, p2p, love, solidity, zk, zero knowledge, education, academy, w3pn, neo, summit, berlin, neocypherpunk - Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-EtZQAqFtkrU - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtZQAqFtkrU ## Description Once in a Lifetime | Cade Diehm [New Design Congress] An Adam Curtis documentary delivered on a stage with visuals, exhibits and receipts: an analysis of the 2025 collapse, who caused it, and a concrete framework for what replaces the institution and why. The audience for this talk has the technical and financial capacity to build those alternatives and lie at night wondering, "how did we get here?". Speaker Cade Diehm — New Design Congress https://newdesigncongress.org/ Follow Web3Privacy Now: 🌐 https://new.web3privacy.info 𝕏 https://x.com/web3privacy 🦋 https://bsky.app/profile/web3privacy.info 📸 https://www.instagram.com/web3privacy_now/ 🎤 Neocypherpunk Summit: https://s26ber.web3privacy.info/ Subscribe for more talks on privacy, cryptography, digital rights, decentralized infrastructure, and the future of the open web. ## Transcript Thanks everybody. Just hiding in the corner there. Uh so hey, that's what I want. So yes, thank you uh for inviting me to speak at this event. is really quite astonishing. So I'm Kate Dee. I'm an adversarial systems researcher who repurposes the tools of digital security as a cultural diagnostic. And I work really in two roles. You sort of talked a little bit about it in the intro, but one is this work that's been talked about with New Design Congress, my research organization. and the other is the head of sociotechnical research at the World Ethical Data Foundation where we are developing a full emergent researcher platform and publishing pipeline. The thing is, I've been listening to a lot of talking heads lately, which is funny because I feel like I'm living inside a talking head song where a man wakes up in a house, looks around, and slowly works out that none of it is his, and everything is unrecognizable. It's wild how fast things change. Hemingway said something like, "An entity goes bankrupt slowly at first and then all at once and collapse is kind of the same way." And I wonder if David Burn was thinking the same things when Talking Heads were putting down their songs. So, I had to cut this down to 15 minutes. I have no idea if my slides still match my notes. We'll see how that goes. But I'm warning you as well, I'm going to go a little bit over. Hopefully not by much. This is a once in a-lifetime opportunity to talk about things such as this in front of a intelligent crowd in this unbelievably beautiful venue. Yeah. I want to talk about these once in a lifetime situations that every one of us gets handed at some point whether we're ready for it or not. And the first came to me when I was very very young. Had no idea what I was doing. It's the exact moment I saw the violence at the heart of the digital system and it begins in January 2015 in the beautiful Pacific Ocean off the coast of Hawaii in Honolulu. So in July 2014 as a board kid in Melbourne, Australia, laughing as a creative director and pushing Adobe PSD designs to an obscure GitHub repo. And now at the beginning of 2015, I find myself on yet more occupied land, unseated Kakana Maui land, because I've been flown in to help someone else finish a secure messaging prototype. It's going to be called Signal. Moxy Marlin's bike is the center of this project. He's this lanky Steve Jobs type, but he's a full-blown cyberpunk with dreadlocks, anarchist leanings, and a trickster hacker's smile. And we're camped in an offse mansion that Moxy has rented through his company. The property spans three stories and it's stuffed with hundreds of square feet of wicker furniture and a massive kitchen full of melee white goods and a private beach that nobody swims at. It's so fancy. I feel like we've broken in and made ourselves at home. And at night, I start to clash with Moxy and argue with him about his threat models and his assumptions about phone numbers as user identifiers. You might have heard about this, but it becomes a defining criticism of Signal. Here I am in 2015. The app is going to be used by people escaping domestic violence situations. Their abusers are going to know their phone numbers. You need to let them sign in with pseudonyms. but he insists on making sure that the signal address book discovery feature works as smooth as butter. Every morning, the Pacific hammers the beach like it's trying to get at us, and I'm trying to work out how I can get Moxy to listen to me. Later in the week, Moxy rolls back my best interface with a shrug while I stand right in front of him. He's the first person I meet who can look at the risk and simply not see it. We're too late to help Edward Snowden. Too soon uh and Chelsea Manning were too soon to help someone else that's coming before them after them. But whatever we built here now, it's way more dangerous than what we had before any of us got to this island. It's been infused with a weaponizable design. By the end of the week, I'm done. I love these people, but they're a team who can force silicon, lithium, and code to bend to their will and political reality. Some of you here might appreciate that because you do the same thing. But I can't stand the compromises that we've made in the name of this hubris. I slip out before dawn. No goodbyes. And I take a 30-minute twin prop flight back to Honolulu. My connection to Australia is 24 hours away, and I'm too angry to care at go sightseeing. So, I open the Airbnb app. I filter by cheapest and tap the first option I see. A bunk on a yacht for $40 a night. When I arrive at 6:30 in the morning, my Airbnb host greets me at the boatyard. She's a sunblasted Californian transplant, leathery late60s, perfect teeth, blonde straight hair. She's hurrying towards me as apologies fall out of her. her she and her husband have decided to take the boat out sailing for the day and she'll pay for any hotel I want hostile bohemian five-star no limit if I rather cancel because of the inconvenience but then she pauses and leans into me and says unless you want to come with us I'm in my response is instant chartered boats can cost thousands of dollars per day in Hawaii and my $40 bunk has just turned into a private cruise there is No way I'm passing this up. My host grins and she hands me a Ziploc bag full of uh boiled egg sandwiches because she already knew I'd say yes. So, at the helm of the boat is her partner. He's in his 60s, greater than a hospital cafeteria pepper shaker, and built like an infantryman. He's warm but distant, and he gives me a stern nod of approval as I clamber on board, like I'm about to ask permission to marry his daughter. We're sailing today at the behest of one of his friends. This tall guy about the same age, mustache, cargo pants, polo shirt, rail thin, very pale. He's interested in buying the boat. We motor out of the harbor. We lose cell coverage almost instantly. By 7:30 a.m., we're several kilome offshore. The sun is impossibly bright and so gentle on my skin. I've never felt anything like it. The water is so clear. I can count ridges in the sand 30 m down. It's alive down there. The sky is blue. The air is free of pollutants. It's a beautiful day. Once once the engines settle, the two men recline in their seats and start to bond like all American dads do over their tech jobs, their tours, and their tenacity for the hustle. Both are employed in Honolulu's tech scene, but they won't say where, so they probably work at intelligence. With that single shared fact, these guys might be brothers at this point. They talk of their military tours. Both served in Vietnam, and they rattle off company names, tour dates, re uh regions, same vintage, different ballays. One's an Army Corps engineer, the other is a field medic. But it's their entrepreneurship that they are most eager to bond over. The captain goes first. After the Vietnam War ended, he returned as a businessman and rebuilt the very roads he and his countrymen had created. He won an exclusive reconstruction contract covering all of the roads in Saigon. It's the highlight of my career, he says, and it sets him up for life. The buyer prospect nods with approval before sharing his road to riches. He and his brother, a civil surgeon, partner up and set up a logistics firm on the West Coast. Using the brother's connections, the pair buy obsolete 1940s pediatric prosthetic limbs at 1970s scrap prices and they shipped them back to Vietnam by the container full fitted thousands of kids, maybe hundreds of thousands. The man beams the country paid for them all. I eve dropped from the front of the deck. These two men are folding their entrepreneurial stories into the familiar Silicon Valley reframe made the world a better place. These are good people who have treated me with absolute kindness. They're well paid. They've acted properly, absolute in their unwavering belief of their good. But in spite of this gracious sunlight, I feel a true evil on this boat with me. Because these men aren't aberians. They're a template I've seen everywhere. They're saying the same words I'd heard all we can imagine. The same words I'd hear in the copycat San Francisco transplant co-working spaces of Melbourne, Sydney's Silicon Beach, and the Apple developer conferences I'd been invited to. Violence then rebuild profit then re philanthropy repeat. Different war, same business model, new interface, same shining eyes. We're making the world a better place. I suddenly see clearly in front of me the next several decades and automated war, digital rights managed food, not so precision strikes. It all comes crashing over my young psyche, drowned in the same bloodstained, morally coded rhetoric. And I realize everything that I've been arguing for. Sudan and safety and friction. All of it lives downstream from this mindset. Fish dance in the most clearest ocean I've ever seen in my life. And a seagull snatches what's left of my egg sandwich. The captain offers me a beer. I barely notice any of it because I am realizing in real time that tech demands an uncompromising and smooth path to scale. Even if that path is laid over someone else's ruins on that boat with no signal and nowhere else to go, that logic shortcircuits something in my head. Nothing really dramatic, just a quiet snap. Months earlier, the former head of the National Security Agency, General, Michael Hayden, declares defiantly in a public debate at John Hopkins University, "We kill people based on metadata." Once in a lifetime, you find yourself, you may find yourself fighting with a successful cryptographer over something that becomes the defining criticism of the world's most famous messaging secure messaging app. And you may find yourself on a boat with war criminals. Much such a downer version of that song, isn't it? Another once in a lifetime moment began at the start of the decade and it hit its inflection point last year. I'm sure you've felt it. You already know the world has changed completely in just a few short months. The organizations that some of you have worked for, funded, or depended on have either uh they've either ceased to exist or are unrecognizable. The people responsible are game show hosts and podcasters and seemingly irrational, terminally online billionaires. You wake up in the house and the house is not your house. You wake up and wonder what the is going on. The truth is two arcs collided. The apparatus that swore it was ready for this fight. Civil society, the foundations, digital rights world, open source, and even web 3 itself turned out to be in some ways brittle, wobbly or collapsed altogether when they were pushed against. There will be long postmortems about this. But the autopsies began even before the collapse of last year. The Ford Foundation, for example, in the first half of the decade completed their own evaluation, finding that fewer than a quarter of nonprofits in the United States held more than 6 months of cash. An entire ecosystem built to confront systemic power operating on less liquidity than a food truck. The other side of that chessboard sits the people who flipped it. The historian Peter Turchin calls them the surplus elites. What this is is where decades of wealth pump value upwards and produce a class of people with the money and the credentials and expectation of power, but nowhere near enough real positions in the institutions to hold them all. Some surplus elites express their desire for power by building alternative infrastructure like those in web 3. But some surplus elites have everything except the one thing they really want, the ability to personally press the button and bomb a foreign country. They too built their own infrastructures and then they took or destroyed the originals by force. Like us, they bet everything on the digital because the new technology is uninterpretable by design. AI, cryptography, cryptocurrency, all of it reaches everything while staying illeible to democratic oversight. In my work, we call this emergence and its consequence boom, extract, and force. Invent the new domain. Capture its value through artificial scarcity and control. Use its complexity and reach to lock the door behind you and enforce it on others. By the time it lands on a funers's desk as a viable grant proposal to fight back, it's already too late. 15 years of impossible right-wing victories, a dress rehearsal through CO in 2020 that caused a funding freeze. And still when the money pipeline finally ran slammed shut and the uh soft power institution was collapsed, nobody had a plan. And some of those institutions fell to earth without a whimper. and others, and I say this from intimate, painful experience, turned cannibal, and they devoured their own allies and their own children to survive just another quarter. Here's the path that's difficult to admit to. A lot of people here have probably felt the effects of the second once in a lifetime. I've been very publicly critical of the institutions that missed it and that crumbled as a result. But the truth is that was almost me as well. My team at New Design Congress spent eight years confronting the gap between what is said to be happening, what is actually happening in digital societies. Last year, while we were publishing our largest piece of research on digital identity, which you can see on the screen behind you, a hostile US-based entity ran what I personally believe was a targeted campaign against NDC and specifically me, strangling my staff finances and suppressing the work right at the time when the European Union started to implement the digital identity wallet 2.0. The research was c central to an eventual cease and desist. It's a 5-year study of the failings of all forms of digital identity, including the ones in web 3 with my colleague Benjamin Lyer and dozens of anonymous participants of everything from CEOs to uh high members of uh the intelligence community and beyond. The fact that someone spent real money and time sending real legal threats after we started publishing is the strongest endorsement I can give this work. So, I invite you to read it. But the second once in a lifetime was for the established institution to make or break as a result of actual attack. And it's one that they all failed to meet. I was almost a casualty myself. There are people in this room who were affected. It' be very easy to miss the threat that's coming right for you. That's a newspaper article about me with the most unflattering midseason desist photo of any imaginable. I'm like so sick I end up in in hospital after this from the stress. It I'm just saying that because I just look like hell. That's that's the thing. We'll move on. The third once in a lifetime is yours. It's downstream from 2025. There's only been one truly successful web 3 infrastructure project at a civilizational scale. This one unqualified success exists at an intersection between El Salvador and the United States. The the details are complex and I don't have enough time to name all of the actors, but the cliff this is these are the cliffotes from the report in which we detail this further. It goes like this. After well-known Bitcoin advocates supported the Salvadorian President Bali's election in 2019, Web 3 became entrenched in the country, companies like Tether moved their headquarters into El Salvador, generating millions and hundreds of millions in revenue. legislation passed making Bitcoin legal tender and introducing a statebacked biometric wallet called Chevbo which then immediately leaked the full identities of more than 5 million Salvadorian residents in a single dump. The Bitcoin project was a success. But another successful project was the expens the expensive cuttingedge 40,000 capacity mega prison known as secot where men are held at 6/10 of a square meter each and where 238 asylum seekers most with no convictions were deported to from the United States where they disappeared under an administration supported openly by cryptozars who are bffs with those in El Salvador who now inhabit senior government positions within the new administration. Bitcoin, biometrics, and a massive mass-roducible mega prism fused into a single cryptocarial machine. And this is web 3's civilizational achievement. If you work in web 3, you are implicated in this accomplishment. But it is very clear that this fact exists in direct painful opposition to the cipher punk politics that lie at the center of many web three movements and especially here today. But the truth is we can't be separated from our material bounds. John Perry Barlow the EFF um co-founder described the cyber p cyerspace home of mind as separated from the world where influence from politics is considered unwelcome at best and hostile colonialism at worst. But you are always only one design decision away from CCOT every time you build in ways you cannot see. Precisely because the culture of cybernetics and the aspirations of cyerspace have blind spots that render their threats invisible. And because the foundations that used to stand between you and anyone worth funding, skimming 60 to 80% of overhead ideological compliance have been obliterated. The world is a lot less forgiving than it was 2 years ago. The age of fail fast, fail often, and iterate from the failure is over because we are more or less on our own now. Which means that if you fail, you might not be around to learn from your mistakes. There might not be anything left of you at all. The third once in a lifetime is a demand for action, but it begins in the vacuum of the desecrated institution. We do not need to debate whether alternative institutions after the collapse from 2025 will emerge. The current elite overprouction and the the political response to that suggests that they're inevitable. But without our own interventions, the inevitable won't be good either. The techno athoritarians who demolished civil society already moved fast and broke things wielding digital surveillance and information warfare wrapped in liberation rhetoric. careral systems funded by cryptocurrency institutional capture disguised as disruption. So the third once in a lifetime relies on the post institution a structure designed to withstand direct and unexpected attack. To answer this the work that we do in our uh we keep coming back to these questions. Is it venulous? Do you know that you are not safe? Does it demand consent rather than participation? Does it allow for revision, distortion, contradiction or deletion? Can it survive data loss? Does it allow for decay? And how much of your post institution protocol governance structure system can be rebuilt in the hands of its participants when all systems failure? In both of my roles, we wrestle with these questions. As a new home of mind enters its long sundowning arc, the most vulnerable citizens of cyerspace have been and always will continue to be subjected to the chaos of its neurological decline. You may find yourself on the wrong end of the large automobile traveling straight at you. The good news is that the techno athoritarian brutalizing car is as brittle as the institution it destroyed. If you are truly building another world, but you must anticipate this blowback. Everything we need for this once in a-lifetime moment is already before us. What we need to do is reckon with it truly, regardless of it unpleasant truths or what may surface when we look. If we shed these blind spots, move beyond cybernetics and into the realm of socio techchnical security in other places, we will collectively be able to build the post institutions that are no longer vulnerable to those who seek to take it all for themselves. Do not believe anyone who said the future is set. There are exits everywhere, but you must build them yourself. This QR code will take you to our website. Come and find me if you'd like to connect via signal. And thank you for your time and for letting me run over six minutes, seven minutes.