How to radically build in crypto | Joshua Dávila (September 2023)

um hi everyone my name is Josh Dila and I wrote a book um called blockchain radicals called capitalism ruined crypto and how to fix it it's out already um I have 10 copies in my bag if you want to buy a signed one you can do that afterwards um but yeah uh just a little bit more Shilling I got a lot of really nice compliments from people Nath Schneider and couple other people um turns out that huh um turns out that um having a podcast is a great networking opportunity I realized um but in case you don't know me I have a kind of online Persona that I call the blog socialist um it's a Blog and a podcast I've been working on for the past years um it's pretty on the nose so you know I focus on blockchain stuff and the more leftly political things and where they intersect um in my sort of uh let's say secret life um I technically work in the blockchain space for about 5 years um I co-founded a project called brch cooperative and I'm documentary uh lately on the podcast I've been doing a lot of focus on the network state so giving a kind of critique of what BAGI focus on of puts forth and providing a kind of alternative conceptual framework or thinking about some of the things in that book um but yeah you may recognize this apple um and so I came out of the non closet because I was asked to write a book um and they told me that I need to be a public person in order to defend U um so for this talk um I'm going to be giving a kind of expand banded version of what I usually do for the talk about when I present about the book um so this is going to be a little bit focused on how people can build radically um but to start off let's talk about the framework of the book of how I um organize it and it starts with a framework uh or a conceptual idea from Jill duus who is a French philosopher um back in the uh 50 years ago or so and he has a thing called the critique of representation ation thinking and so he stated that often times in order to understand the new we often take models of the old and impose upon it order to understand it right um and this is a way to maybe try to understand something but it's also a very limited way of trying to understand something because usually uh the kind of model that we impose on it doesn't reach the full scale of what that new thing actually is so to give an example of that uh I like to talk about the drum machine the drum machine was a piece of of technology that was created with the idea that you could um buy it and you could play music whenever you're uh the drummer in your band wasn't around to play music with you right you just get machine you put the beats and then you press play and then you can sh your guitar along um and this would be this is a great piece of technology that you can have as a way to uh still be able to practice use it so in this conceptual framework of the creation of the jum machine it was a uh representation of the ideal form of having a jum the drum sets you if you didn't have the drummer with the drum sets you get the drum machine it's not as good as having the drummer with drum sets right um what actually happened in history um is that people took the drum machine and they reved it up in ways that a drummer could never play that type of music right we created new genres of music and we augmented existing ones um so in many ways the uh the drum machine kind of was pushed Beyond its representational model or we could say that the representational model that was imposed on the drum machine in the beginning was never the correct way of thinking about a drum machine it was never uh the way that you could fully comprehend what the drum machine could potentially do um and so this type of representational thinking the describes as thinking like a tree or arboreal thinking um or arborescent and um Del was obsess with potatoes and he was obsessed with potatoes because the shape of the kind of root systems with potatoes were romatic or they lacked a clear Center so a lot of so like potatoes but also like melal networks of mushrooms they all kind of lack a clear Center for you could um habit so we saying that we need to think in ways that don't have this kind of idealized form or kind of clear sensor of what things ideally should be this ideal form comes a lot from platonic uh based philosophy beautiful Plato a lot of Western philosophies like that um but so in the book my claim is that representational thinking is endemic in crypto it's all over the place like if you try and learn anything about crypto the first thing you're going to get thrown at it's like oh it's like money oh it's like this it's like that fcoin was originally proposed of course as a peer-to-peer Cash System but that narrative changed over time and became more focused on this narrative around digital gold right so there was um people saying that it's like gold in gold backed money uh but even better because it's digital and governments can't mess with it um we also have of course in the crypto world you have decentralized Finance we're thinking about the use of uh blockchains for particularly just for financial ends or to emulate Financial products that already exist uh we have the idea of smart contracts which don't really have any clear link to a legal system we have the claim of code is law right we're equating code and law um and even you know before it was called a dow decentralized autonomist organization it's called centralized Aton corporation which kind of I think shows the uh political roots of a lot of the people um that were sort of building like making a reality uh of blockchains and cryptocurrency so a lot of them were very libertarian and a lot of like free market fundamentalists thinking that if we add more markets to the world we'll fix all these problems problems because demand and Supply whatever else um but what actually happened is that of course uh vitalic made the decent suggestion to change that to organizations because not everything has to be a corporation or a for-profit entity which probably was a good suggestion um but I think especially the gold one the gold part I think shows that they it uh was an attempt to identify an already existing kind of conservative libertarian political group that existed around people who believe that uh money back by gold would be a better form of money and it was a way to kind of separate these people with their government back money to sell them you know whatever tokens um so this is a super common way in marketing in order to slice the market and identify your audience so that you can separate them with your mind um you use metaphors and things like that so that they can identify with the thing and they can feel like they're living out their Truth by buying your product right [Music] um and so kind of a couple of aphorisms that I really like uh come this one comes from Alfred ripski says the map is not the territory the word is not the thing it describes whenever the map is confused with the territory a semantics disturbance is set up in the organism the disturbance continues until the limitation of the map is recognized so the map is not the territory right like the map of Peru is not the same as Peru itself a map is always a kind of um abstracted version of what the thing is and it's an attempt to try to understand that thing um but in order whenever we're using sort of bad maps to understand the world there's a need to recognize in the fact that we are using a bat map and that we need to make a change right um so part of the purpose of the book is to hopefully help people recognize that we're using kind of B Maps understand the world and understanding crypto and we need to uh change that um another aism I really like is all models are wrong but some are useful so uh right we I'm not saying that we can never use metaphor to understand the world um a metaphor can be nice to help people understand things but is not um some of them uh are more useful than others right um we just have to kind of choose which models or which Maps we uh choose to understand the world because when we are creating a map or a model we're always abstracting away something from the actual territory from what actually exists uh and that decision of what to abstract the way is a political choice right if we decide not to think about um our the social relationships behind different things then we are making a political Choice whether conscious or not of whether or not to um properly understand something uh and so I think this is very relevant to the work of Antony Rami who was uh killed by the fascists in Italy um he did a lot of work on cultural hity uh so he was saying that often times the Elite Class of people will kind of um impose what is considered common sense amongst the lower classes and this is a way of social control uh society and so I think in the crypto world we have a lot of this kind of cultural hegemony of already existing Elites actually and they kind of make it assume that oh it's common sense of course we need to privatize more and we need to uh add more markets to things in order to fix it um and so in the book I go through in three sections uh from kind of um you know earlier to later types of representational models used in crypto um so the first section is crypto's money the second is crypto's finance and the third is crypto coordination crypto as coordination so I have chapters uh few chapters for each section and so if we look at kind of how this uh kind of relates all to each other I think um we can see that the representation of model has been really expanded upon each time right the focus really at first was money how do we like create a new monetary system how we use crypto as money to replace the entire monetary system and now then after that became like the whole financial system and how we make Financial products that now we have access to just like Wall Street bankers and then with I think really the growing interest in things like Dows coordination became the the new mtic attractor for people and it's attracted different types of people but overall I think you know this is these are all metaphors that are overlaid on the territory right this is a map of a territory uh the territory being something that is always bigger than the map itself right um it may be getting bigger each time you can put money and finance inside of coordination but it doesn't necessarily uh I think describe what crypto is to a it's a full extent um and so this is very important thinking about the internet and building things on the internet with computers um because the internet is not forever and it's something that changes quite a bit the way that we thought about the internet in the past is not the same that we think about it today uh but what has been fairly consistent at least uh lately is the growing kind of like reproduction or social reproduction of the same types of organizations that are um building infrastructure for the internet or how people use the internet uh and so uh uh you know basically Tech startups are the main way that people try and build things over the Internet a lot of time and this has ended up creating an Internet that is like you know something like 90% owned by uh Tech Giants and so now most people's experience of the internet is sort of like being created by the model of the way in which people use it through Facebook through Twitter or through these other you know Tech Giants wal Gardens um and so this is something that I think really really needs to to change or crypto needs to if it wants to continue to exist as a um it wants to become a positive force in society then it needs to provide something different and something better um and so kind of like the the very quick um maybe like takeaway if you want from from this like this tweet from David Morris he said build collectively owned digital infrastructure um the digital infrastructure that we have today is of course owned by very very few hands and it mimics of course the social organization of Corporations and startups and so this is something that maybe we should be looking more deeply into um and so usually this is like the end of my of my book talk and then I would sell you books but I was asked to go a little bit more deeper into the how to fix it parts of the subtitle of the book so I have um thrown together some extra slides so that we can talk about it a little bit more um I called the book uh blockchain radicals because I wanted to kind of like create an identity for people who want to think more critically about the use of the technology um and it's one that is quite uh uh it's a difficult one because it's something where you have to recognize contradiction you have to recognize kind of the the the the place where we are at at the moment and the place that you want to go um so this is just like the definition taken from from the book um and so this is just someone who believes in the transformative potential blockchain uh to enable new and positive forms of social relations but is frustrated and dissatisfied by the uh current status so they understand that the status Pro exists because marketers and hyp men are stuck in these representational mod modes of thinking that fail to recognize the centralizing aspects of capitalism thus leading to what has happened in the crypto space so far so they're therefore interested in pursuing and building out with fundamentally different models in mind that don't fit within a capitalist Paradigm acknowledging the political nature of such an Endeavor so so um they have the unfortunate burden of being to push it back against both crypto hyen and Gatekeepers so it's been you're stuck between a rock in a hard place it's not an easy question to to take on but it is one that you are willing to take on uh and so building something that is radically different uh or building radically in crypto crypto means using radically different mental models to conceptualize applications that don't follow the status quo of kind of like capitalist markets dominating our entire lives um and so um the so new technical structures allow new possibilities right um if we look at uh how different types of application can be built of course we have the classic like client server model which is more or less the status quo for a lot of things that are built in the way that people relate to the internet and this is a very particular power relationship with those who own the servers and those who only have access to clients right um another types of uh infrastructure that you can build things on is through a peer-to-peer model and the peer-to-peer infrastructure of course facilitates different types of relationships of course you can use peer-to-peer infrastructure to um also dominate others but uh it allows for an opening for different types of relationships that don't necessarily follow the client server model um and I think that this is important because we can see that this technical Arrangement can have uh have real effects in Economic Consequences right if we look back um at the Advent of Napster which use a kind of peer-to-peer Network in order to do file sharing where of course you very legally downloaded music and movies um you can see that this created like a very steep decrease in music revenues um and over time I think how capitalism kind of responded is through Spotify where Now you kind of have a you know just kind of like a nicer UI with access to all the same music that you would have had with Napster you just pay the subscription so that they give you anui um and so this new different different use of a technical infrastructure I think facilitated a like material change in in things um and this is important um when thinking about the uh especially the space of work so I wrote a piece a couple of years ago kind of comparing Dows and the history of anarchos syndicalism uh but uh in short kind of what I wanted to show is that my theory is that um the concept of dows kind of represents a potential to decentralize one of the most centralized aspects of most people's lives which is their workplace so I think this is kind of where a lot of the interest in Dows has kind of come from people uh are often times like forced under economic dictatorships that they call their jobs um and their bosses being their their dictators um and we may not necessarily consciously think about it that way but that is more or less effectively how they work um and we see this in the uh the organization of it right if we look at a traditional Corporation it is like a pyramid at the top you have the shareholders and maybe you have some stratification where there are managers in the middle and then you have at the bottom kind of the lowest class of laborers depending on how large the corporation is of course maybe or the type of Corporation will look a little bit differently um and then when you compare this to a Cooperative or a worker Cooperative which is where the workers own as well the business itself then we see like very very different uh social and economic outcomes due to this ownership structure right um so if we think about this as well as far as like building applications like most applications are built with the uh kind of Corporation in mind right most things are made in a way that is that is topped down we look at Facebook and weever tried to moderate an online community they kind of very heavily rely on a small group of moderators I say this as one myself I am like a benevolent dictator to my little online community but I therefore like am the one who will get the [ __ ] if like I you know whatever something happens and and Reddit or whatever doesn't like it and so uh we think about tools that are built for cooperatives though that they often times need their own types of technical tools because ones that are created with the corporation in mind don't facilitate the type of social relationship that cooperatives need so you can see tools like lumio which is a really interesting one uh which is built by a cooperative for cooperatives in which they use the uh of an online digital space in order to facilitate this and um this is important we also see kind of like the socioeconomic implications of this type of social organizations that we see very different levels of wage inequality when we look at cooperatives versus um in the EU or even in the US so cooperatives usually are from 6 to1 or 9 to1 from CEO to line worker at least in mandon which is one of the largest cooperatives in the world based in Spain um the EU average is 129 to1 where the US is over 300 to1 so we can see that like um the perid social structure kind of facilitates this very large amount of wage inequality um but the coopertive model of course maybe not super common in some places it has proven to be a fairly successful one including REI mun like I mentioned before even Swift which is like the facilitator of international payments is technically a Cooperative of different banks um of course maybe we don't like Swift so much here but it at least works and so cooperatives um for the internet age uh s of the um alternative or the creation of that would be things like platform Cooperative so we do see that uh a little bit nowadays we have uh the drivers coop is largely based in New York City and then you also have fairbnb as an alternative to Airbnb so this is kind of like small growing movement of platform cooperatives that want to facilitate more egalitarian typ of social relationships between the workers between the users um but this requires a little bit more of a um let's say intentional kind of relationship and coordination um but I think what's really interesting as far as relation to the crypto space is that you do see some amounts of a kind of like Proto Cooperative uh behavior in things like Dows and even in defi if you look at Unis swap of course it was the first one to do a um it's called a an airdrop so they they did an air drop based on the use of the platform which is not so different I mean there's some differences of course to consumer cooperatives that give payouts to members of The Cooperative based on their use of the Cooperative infrastructure um nosis safe I think has done quite a bit as far as like creating L people that have J bank accounts um with the collective ownership and governance on it and then you have things like party bid which allows for Collective ownership nfts so I think there is this like uh you know seed of desire for collectivity and uh togetherness in the crypto space even though it does come from a kind of like individualistic uh libertarian kind of political ideology at times um but all this to say that's you know very UMR that you cannot clearly separate social and Technical relationships right whenever you are creating a technical tool or application you are facilitating a particular social relationship or dynamic um and so it's always socio technological and never just a tech thing um or never just a social thing um and so we can see this in in crypto Platforms in web 2 versus web 3 you see that clearly there is a separation you know between identity and application unlike in most web 2 applications and this is creating like new socio technological structures and allows for an opening of new possibilities right um and so I want to talk a bit about um techn determinism so what I find somewhat common or a lot of people I found written a lot about very common is uh in the tech World especially Silicon Valley Elites have a kind of techn determinism to their like IDE logical point of view right usually they'll say that like techn technology determines kind of like the this the way that Humanity will kind of progress that we need to allow technology to uh to be to be free in order to allow us to solve all of our problems and it's usually a way for them to kind of have you not think about trying to solve problems in a sociopolitical way perhaps but instead just to facilitate kind of like the dereg of many things so that technology can run wild in many ways um and so to kind of like understand techn determinism and a kind of um I don't know I try to use kind of like a coding and now like a super simplistic coding thing is that um you know you have outcome a which is a specific set of either positive or negative social structures and the idea is that um you know if we allow technology a to exist then we will achieve outcome a it's a very deterministic uh type of thinking for how very reduction kind of way of thinking of how the future will will be created um and this can happen in both a positive way or a negative way so you can have an optimistic or pessimistic kind of techn determinism um and so in my book I wanted to like create a concept in order to think through this problem um that of like between kind of like determinism or like the idea of structure versus agency or being able to um find sort of like levers of power that you want to push uh and so I created this concept as part of the book called techn probabilism so the idea is that um technological progression can help determine what is and is not materially possible but the extent to which social movements of coherence tips the scales towards particular outcomes in other words it's up to us to save ourselves collectively and seizing these Technologies albe it in the perhaps problematic nondesirable state in which they currently exist should be part of a coherent strategy for political change um so so the idea that uh you can have maybe technology and say that it can facilitate something positive but it doesn't matter because as humans we have to want that actual change and be able to push it Forward um and so the more sort of coherence the social movement is behind something uh the more probability that maybe the more positive outcome here right so to continue that analogy with the coding if the social movement as group coherence above or below threshold X then using technology a or then outcome a right so we have kind of there quite a bit few more uh variables to keep in mind when we're thinking about technology as something to facilitate Progressive political change um and so I went to protocol BG the other day and I was listening to the talk from the guys from the other internets and they kind of propos propos three potential futures of how they saw at least in Rel in relation to regulation and they said there are kind of three things that could potentially happen one they said you know we have this idea of fully regulated cbdc crypto world is one second one being unregulated Anarchy scammer freefor all where everyone's kind of like the Wild West trying to steal from one another and then the third potential option is that we have self-regulation or that we decide consciously to choose to self-regulate so that we don't have the problems of either one so I think that would be the think the implication is that that would be the ideal way of handling things um and so I want to talk a bit about kind of like my project bring cooperative and how we're kind of thinking through this problem um Brad chain Cooperative is a Federation of different projects in the crypto world that are trying to um trying to think through how to use these uh Tools in a post capitalist way um in a way that thinks beyond the status quo of capitalism so we share labor power resources all types of things um and uh yeah the the the point is to help fund these kind of structures for post capitalism and use the technology as something to help at least begin the experimentations of these different types of economic models um and so the idea behind it is that you know it's kind of a bit of a bit of a gamble saying that probably blockchains will become more consequential uh in the world and therefore uh if nothing sort of happens then most likely the powers that are already be uh under capitalism will be the ones who kind of facilitate or decide how the uh technology will progress and evolve right um without any sort of uh intervention likely like you know we'll see chains from giant corporations and probably see the uh a bad future um so the idea is that we want to be kind of the organizational infrastructure and preparation of that potential future um it's first and foremost trying to take the strategy of a federation to be a point of reference for post capitalists in the blockchain space um and it's meant to kind of think about this problem that I think ultimately like the problem that a lot of people need to think about if they do want to see system change especially as far as changing capitalism is that we need to be both at one side within the system because that is a current reality but we need to find ways to fight against this right so you're in a rock and a hard place you're both within and against um and so on one side uh the enemy has the money on our side we have the people which means that we have to uh think about the way that we make change through the like lens of people and how we coordinate with other people to make that a reality um and so uh yeah and and bread chain is just kind of like this mtic attractor for people to explore this space um it's not NE necessarily about creating an application that will solve capitalism but is a you know multifaceted kind of effort for exploring many different types of mechanisms that can be uh useful um and so yeah this is kind of the Federation at the moment the we have BR in itself where we focus mostly on building applications pacal labor Dow and the crypto Commons Association are three other projects part of it um but kind of the idea that we've been trying to push a concept we we've been trying to push is called solidarity Primitives um so in defi you have this idea of financial Primitives right where you can have kind little block Lego blocks of financial you know uh configurations and you can put them all together and create different applications by mixing up these Lego blocks the idea for us is that this is a rethinking of financial Primitives and instead of using blockchains for profit maximization we're trying to instantiate in in code and solidarity to forward solidaristic relationships between individuals and collectives um and so we wrote a piece just here if you want to read more about that on our blog on mirror um but the first kind of uh solidarity perative that we built is called the bread crowd saking application and essentially um you know we can talk about it a bit after later so we don't spend too much time on it but users will send D which is a US dollar back stable coin to the contract the contract will then forward it to a lending pool on a not compound um and then they will acrw interest that interest goes to the Cooperative at the same time as a user you receive back bread so it's a erc20 token you can send and receive just like any other erc20 token um and you can use that uh we kind of think of it as like a digital Community currency so this is kind of like the the currency that we want to use inside of our economic Network to try and keep wealth within our Network and the similar way that a local currency uh attempts to do that we're just using the affordance of a smart contract with which would automate the uh accumulation of interest rather than having to manually kind of like make loans out as many local currency projects do um and so yeah you can then use that bread or you can burn it at the contract and receive back one to one the same amount of die so you're not donating you are simply in the same way as like a think of it as like a post capitalist Credit Union you're giving us the right to the interests and the Brad token acts as a kind of a proof of the deposits that you have in there um and so the idea would be that then we were we would be able to very passively very low risk and be able to help Bond our efforts within the project um just wanted to show this is kind of like the upcoming we have the the application is already out uh we have like our our B1 or v0 what call it um but we're kind of working on making making a little bit nicer and then what I would want to talk about is this kind of like next uh thing that we're trying to build right now which is a dashboard uh kind of dashboard using onchain information in order to show to users kind of what's going on in the bread economy or like in order to like show people like what is their spot or their place in the bread economy and maybe point to things that they can maybe do in order to help that economy go a bit stronger so this is coming from this idea for me of you have you know on one side you have the capitalist subjects or you have the person you have homoeconomicus the person who exists in capitalism to maximize their utility right and this is someone who plays on information asymmetry in order to Advantage themselves on the market right a lot of very large corporations investment firms they have like privileged to certain information in order to be able to make better Investments better than anybody else and they can therefore make more money um the idea is that we need to create something like a post capitalist subject so you to think about who in our post capitalist world like what will they do what how will they interact and relate to the economy so the idea is that the post capitalist subject is one that engages in a kind of collective intelligence and is aware of their place in the system so they are able to they receive the information that they can um that they have access to in order to uh work to take action in a way that is collectively more beneficial in a world where you don't have much information the only thing you can do is think about like how do I do the best for myself right we're all you think of yourself as almost like a a lone saor at Sea trying to fight off uh the waves of of the market we're in this um kind of like thinking of of the subject we're trying to give them a place where they can know uh where they are what they can do and what is the current health of the economy right so this way we can improve collective intelligence um and so now what um we have recently created it's called quest chain so it's just like a series of things that you can do includes reading our uh some of our blog articles uh baking some breed on our application doing a couple of other things um and if you were to go through and uh do all the tasks um you would receive an nft right here at the top and it would give you if you do that now just like a special kind of thing if you want to know we can get 5% discount on cryptocom Association events the cryptocom association or the The commment Hub where it's based in Austria so it's about an hour away from Vienna so not too far away from Berlin I highly recommend coming to their events they have the crypto Commons Gathering um it's one of the few places where you're able to explore at least in my experience able to explore the intersection of a lot of these uh different ideas of thinking about uh crypto and blockchains in a of different economic Paradigm I mean a couple of people here I know have been there before which uh it's uh like an hour outside of vien Pak right now no P it's in Pak but I think the village is called ra now and to like middle of nowhere it's actually really nice it's got like M there's a huge mountain in front there's like we swimming in the river that's like out in the country it's really nice um and it's a place where you can like kind of uh uh practice commenting in real life rather than having like everything catered to you in a lot of these you know kind of conferences you make go too it's a very fun time so if you get the nft you get a discount and this is kind of like you know showing how you know projects in the Federation try to kind of help each other um and so now this is just the last bit of the um of the presentation I'm kind of just throwing some spaghetti on the wall of different things that I think I want to point people's attention to as things that could that should potentially be built out um more explicitly in the crypto World um one is is more tooled for what's called exit community so exit Community is a really nice concept created by Nathan Schneider um and essentially the idea is that we only have more or less two ways in order for a Founder to be able to um you know make some serious money off of their company either you sell out an initial public offering and you um sell your stocks or you do a corporate acquisition and you sell yourself to Google um there should be a kind of third option which call as Community where you can share what you've created with the people uh who value it the most or your users and give them a chance to also own um the thing that you've built out since they're the ones who uh have kind of like the the interest in wanting to keep it St keeping it alive uh and keeping it going well um another thing that I think is would be very interesting to think about in a sort of like a an idea that I that I'm still kind of thinking about at the moment is the idea of social wealth funds so Norway has a very large social wealth fund um and my thinking is that would be very interesting to see if we can uh create kind of similar structures as social wealth funds but in a more decentralized uh state so the Norwegian uh wealth fund of course only helps those who are nor um not for others um and I think it's a very interesting kind of example or like seed of an example of what I think maybe you can call it like Collective capital or the like kind of spreading the ownership of the means of production or Capital uh to more people so that is more democratically owned and it's uh kind of the the the profits are uh distributed more equally um I think Pension funds kind of is in that same AG we need to be creating uh these types of structures and tools that kind uh do similar things as many state infrastructure does already um I think if you are someone who wants to see kind of like a maximally crypto world at the moment right now the crypto world is not offering something better uh to a lot of people if we can't give someone the the kind of assurance that they'll be taking care of whenever they want to retire then they're not going to be convinced by your vision um I think there's a lot of kind of interesting examples that we can look at in the labor union world where there is a lot of historical examples of the uh of the labor movement kind of doing transnational uh labor action so the I mean the iww is one that did in in the past uh and crypto being a kind of transnational uh infrastructure would be very interesting to kind of facilitate this type of coordination since often times labor unions are kind of stuck within the legal system of their uh whatever country that that that that company is based in or the workers are based in um I also think we should be building things that expand democracy a whole lot more um not necessarily just in terms of electoralism I'm not talking about voting you know often times people say like oh voting is the worst democracy doesn't work um I don't think that a world where we vote once every four or five years is really a particularly Democratic one um it should be one where we have democracy as like an ingrained part of life as something that people do all the time we should always be doing democracy than we are kind of just like voting once and every once in a while um and so I think you know with the creation of more cooperatives for example would be clear that people would be engaging more in democracy in that type of social structure um and this one I couldn't find a picture but I think kind of like a really big problem in the long term that blockchain people um will potentially need to solve is uh finding consensus mechanisms that don't rely on a profit incentive um right now proof of work and proof of stake have the same problems uh as just capitalism in general it's probably why they work in many ways but it's also like a problematic thing in the long term where uh wealth will be concentrated into fewer and fewer hands over time most likely um so if any smart people have thoughts about that I'd love to hear it uh and yeah thanks I thank you so much for that uh are there any questions in the Ence um when you proposed the um the new movement of uh radicalism you showed a flag and just wanted to dig into the symbolism there it it reminded me of the anak flag but it had some pixels in it so just want me that like this one yes yes that's just the that's one of like on my book that's like one of the that's also like I I asked the graphic designer to use my logo so it's not the proposed flag for blockchain Radicals I mean maybe it could be you can make it up I was on dring about the uh bread economy thing um it sounds very reliant on that first of all and second of all it um yeah how does it benefit this select group of individuals could you uh I mean yes so right now the idea we made this before kind of maker had kind of few recent changes to be honest um but uh yeah I mean the idea is that we need to kind of look at the way that kind of BFI exist is existing right now and that is kind of like the reality and the idea is trying to think where can we find those spaces where uh we can plug into as it exists to begin these kind of small experimentations uh we're not a venture like a BC backed startup we're not getting like Millions from uh from BCS so it means that we have to be careful with our resources and like where we our time and being able to like do these experimentations so the idea is still though that like the benefit comes from being able to receive interest um and in a way that is very very low risk so we're not asking people to give us like uh very risky assets the idea for die is that to to $1 so you're not taking so much risk the the interest is not so high but the idea is that we were wanting to allow a space to bring people who are not interested in the risk taking parts of def5 and are instead more interested in kind of like exploring uh and experimentation with these like economic designs and tool sets so like the idea the future is of course like you know I'm also interested in like uh expanding on how the application works or making different variations of the application uh it just requires I think more people to be involved like I think one of the questions for me is like what if we want to do things that are more risky um right now I cannot like say for a lot of people what is exactly the amount of risk people are willing to take on uh but is something that collectively I think needs to be decided upon and if we have those like in that structure in place to kind of figure that out then that's something that I would be interested in um yeah so mostly just as a kind of a way to fund without extracting money away from those who give that any other questions thank you for the talk and it's great to hear alred alred csky cot uh quickly it might be out of scope of your talk what's the criticism of the network stage is it a two technocentric or um yeah so I mean I have like uh many many hours of talking about this on the podcast but um yeah the network state is uh um pretty problematic in my eyes as far as like the what he's what BAGI is proposing as being an alternative um it is very very techno cented in that it is kind of taking like it's using the model of building a startup for State creation so the idea is that you like you know invest in a piece of land and with some people who are aligned with you um and the idea is of course like the implied that you have to make the profit as well off of this investment um you're also buying land in a Sovereign Nation that has its own legal system and sovereignty over its land um but you're wanting to create a state within that so what you're doing is essentially a kind of like Colonial project what often is the case is that they choose third world countries in order order to uh find a place to buy that land and then they use the influence of their money and power to kind of coers that government to give them really what is ultimately just a special economic zone right so it's usually just like a zone for deregulation so that they can you know do whatever it is they want to avoid paying taxes or whatever else um yeah there's like a really long history of of this kind of like libertarian movement of like Seas setting and like buying land in third world countries and and doing this and yeah as you said said is a cool thetic that's yeah yeah I'll say at at zalu I think what gave it away is that they they combined uh the network state track with Charter cities um I feel like that gives away the game I don't think they really care that much about States hey um so thank you so much for the great talk I'm so sorry but at the very end you proposed an idea and I miss that the thing that smart people should talk to you about this one consense uh consensus mechanism that doesn't not built on the profit motive yeah proof of work and proof of stay kind of have this like uh assumption that miners or stickers will continue to do the action that they're doing doing because they will all of be incentivized by profit that because they will do the thing because they're going to make money off of it um kind of like a a very like simplistic kind of game theory uh type of thing it's a very it's a homoeconomicus kind of like way of thinking that people will behave I guess okay well um I have something that maybe aligns that so um there's this uh green pill movement in blockchain right um and basically what is very um seductive to many people about that is that it aligns a lot with appeti istic ideas so I think a lot of project in that space um aim at a at this idea that the more money you make with that system the more you help the environment and the world and all that what do you what do you think about those kind of vectors yeah that you don't like re yeah yeah because like a lot of what you said today um seems to be contradicting yeah um yeah I don't I mean I think there's I have I have plenty of criticisms about kind some regenerative Finance type of thinking and projects um it is a bit of like a like the logic of neoliberalism is sort of like oh well if you make money by doing it then it must be a good thing because someone is paying for it right it's like this this assumption within the system um and I think that's kind of a bit of what quite a few repi projects are doing yes um and there's I think a I need to be a little bit more critical to be honest um of that space and also a lot of them tend to be focused on carbon credits and I think we've seen kind of like a failure of carbon credits so far yeah there there's a lot of times there's a very like forceful attempt to um link the environment was something that people would possibly be paying for and there's a good point to be made that that's not a good idea to try to jam those two things together and I think you are on that is that correct yeah kind I mean there's like this um like almost like if we can modify nature enough therefore we internalize kind of like the effects of nature because right now they're considered like as an external uh externality uh by commodifying it at a certain coins that therefore it becomes part of the economic system itself I don't really agree with that so much that the by doing that that would improve things uh personally I think it really that doesn't change the the the profit motive um because if you're still able to make money off of it then it's not going happen I think there is like a space to play around with like you know finance and and nature what you want to call it um I just think has to be like got to be very very careful with this like my feeling cool okay thank you so much really really interesting project you might be interested in is Terra zero which is like an artists uh Collective they did some really interesting uh work there Rel yeah I'm definitely highly interested in your book too thanks hi uh great talk um I want to ask you so doing the last couple of months or years and see how many people were driven into blockchain um because of the nft hype and at least from what I've seen most people being driven because of profit motives and this being able like before the nft hike most people didn't even care about blockchain and most people were driven into blockchain were able were driven to install something like media mask and understand transactions definitely because it was only profit motivated like something working so good nothing have been working that good before why do you think we should move away from that to motivate people it seems like the only reason people actually care yeah I mean I think the I think this is like a a factor of like we already live in a world that is so marketized and where like imagine if you're someone who um maybe someone in this room like dependent on their like very shitty job in order to like bake dense meat and like you know you don't see a clear like safe future for you like taking a kind of Financial Risk and like trying to flip jpegs is like not that not that bad because you're going to start right back off the where you were anyways you just you take that risk of course you're going to engage in hyperspective Behavior because that's like you know it's like your last shot you feel um so I think like I don't think for me crypto didn't make that problem that problem already existed uh and it just found a kind of like place to manifest itself in a in a larger way um so I I think I don't think that people entering though most of those people who entered in order to like make money off of jpegs likely many of them stayed for very long or like did things that were particularly useful with it um so yeah I think if instead we were trying to you know use the technology for things that are useful um maybe it is a case that we won't have like as large of an influx of users coming in um but we will be actually solving problems which I imagine most people in this room probably agree that's more important than having more users yeah yeah take your point one last question no that's not the case give a big round of applause thank you so much for this I have 10 like 10 books right buy his book I forgot buy book and get it signed we have pants at the end nice yeah wonderful next up is uh Ori shimoni uh and he will talk about new directions and mechanisms