# The Politics of Privacy: Autonomy and Power in the Digital Age | Piergiorgio Catti De Gasperi [W3PN] - Channel: [Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress](https://streameth.org/ethereum-cypherpunk-congress) - Date: 2026-07-09 - Duration: 15:41 - Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-Y9PvpLNKY64 - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9PvpLNKY64 ## Description The Politics of Privacy: Autonomy and Power in the Digital Age | Piergiorgio Catti De Gasperi [W3PN] We are in front of an overwhelming revolution. As life-changing as the agricultural (which took millennia to settle) and the industrial one (which also took centuries). Yet this one is unfolding in mere decades. Rather than continuing to think about further technological challenges, we should focus on digital governance, which is largely left to the corporate world. This means that the only logic that is applied to this governance is shaped entirely by market logic โ€” profit and entrepreneurial culture take precedence over public interest. It is an unsatisfactory solution because it is inherent in the constant risk of the colonizing monopolyโ€ฆ we need above all courage to make the right social choices. In other words, there is a great need for good politics. The Politics of Privacy https://web3privacynow.metalabel.com/politicsofprivacy Speaker Piergiorgio Catti De Gasperi โ€” Web3Privacy Now https://new.web3privacy.info/ X: https://x.com/piercattidegas Follow Web3Privacy Now: ๐ŸŒ https://new.web3privacy.info ๐• https://x.com/web3privacy ๐Ÿฆ‹ https://bsky.app/profile/web3privacy.info ๐Ÿ“ธ https://www.instagram.com/web3privacy_now/ ๐ŸŽค 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 [applause] >> All right. Hello everyone. Uh I just noticed that the sun came out today. So I'm very happy about this. Um I'm here to actually share with you some big excitement for a work that has been lasted for more than a year, a year and a half, and so 15 people working on it. And I'm not sure how many of you work with publishers or actually published a book in your life. Can you please raise your hand? Yeah, it's a rare thing. And it's a nightmare, guys. Like it's it's it's a lot of setbacks. It's a slow process. And through this like journey, I've got to speak with a lot of different other authors uh and publishers. And they all share the same trauma there. Um so at the end we decided to actually self-publish this work. Because the time it would have been too long and a lot of different people told me, you know, I wrote all these things and when the book came out, it was already outdated. Uh plus a lot of publishers put us a lot of conditions. Can you please rewrite this? Can you please do this? The blah blah blah. So at the end we did it uh in our own way. Um I'm very excited because this is like embodying a lot the spirit of Web We Want to Know. I'm PJ, by the way, one of the co-founders of Web We Want to Know. And this work actually came to my um imagination 2 years ago because reading a lot of different papers in philosophy and tech and a lot of different complicated things, I was like, okay, but it's like a bubble. Like how many people like really have the time or like the mental capacity or the willingness to be there and read this like super long paper? So why can't we try to convey all these like philosophical, political, and technical concepts in a more easy way accessible for the masses. Um and this is why actually this work um originated by like it's as I was saying it's a collective work because many people contributed to it from the authors to editors to people that just helped with the will help the distribution, helped to bring here the book because we all have also had setbacks with the printer that was late in delivering. So, three amazing human beings bring the book with their suitcase. Uh but yeah, long story short, the goal of this work which is not just a book but is aimed to be a book series. So, every year we will collect 10-15 different essays from thought leaders uh in let's say freedom space um to reach a wider audience making this really tough work of simplifying complex topics and speaking to your cousin, your grandmother, your mother uh in a more like how you going to say emotional way rather than uh all these intellectual and complex philosophical uh primitives that we share with each other in our field. How are we aiming to do so? We are aiming to get to a wider audience through the nature of the contributions to thanks to the distribution a capillary distribution beyond indeed Web3 and and crypto and our events and uh with the tone of voice. What does it mean? I will tell you in a minute who are the contributors of this work. Uh let's first say that again this is like a collective effort to actually put together different pieces of a puzzle where long like high-standing professionals and intellectuals from indeed human rights, politics, law, uh tech, cryptography came together to actually give their own perspective of why privacy is a cornerstone of any free society, of democracy, and why it is very important for the 21st century. And ideally explaining this indeed to their friends and not to their colleagues. For this first volume, which title is Autonomy and Privacy in the Digital Age, we have indeed OG cryptographers as David Chaum, which is inventor of blind signature and one of the basically creator of a lot of primitives that are at the basis of the modern cryptography. We have Judith de Boer and Jochen Schering. Judith was and is actually following the course of Alexey Pertsev, the Tornado Cash case. Jochen has been working with the European Commission as a policymaker for many years. He contributed to the MiCA regulation and a lot of different digitech work with the with the policymaking. Primavera De Filippi and the Felix Beer, two researchers of Harvard. We have Glen Weyl, economist for Microsoft and co-founder with Audrey Tang of the Plurality Institute. Audrey Tang, former digital minister of Taiwan. Denis Jaromil Roio, amazing activist. It's insane because through the years everywhere we with Mikolaj we make the name of Jaromil. Everyone knows him from radio transmissions in South Italy to South America. It's insane. He is the founder of dyne.org and has shipped through this last 30 years a lot of different open source primitives. Naomi Brockwell, educator and influencer, amazing human being that is trying indeed to do this hard work of adapting the communication to this new means of communication, TikTok, Instagram, etc. etc. Indeed explaining how to use GrapheneOS, how to use Tor, what is Tor, why privacy matter. And through this indeed you can see that they all come from different realms and they all came together with the same values at the end. Um, distribution. We have agreements with agreements, let's say informal agreements, but um, with bookstores in Berlin, in Rome, in Barcelona, and in Bangkok to actually showcase this work in where the people are. Uh, universities and high school, uh, we have connections with mainly in Italy with two universities and three high schools where basically professors will uh, showcase the work, actually not showcase the work, but um, have this part of this book as extracurricular activities or actually embedding this into their program for the year. Uh, hubs. We are friends and connected with a lot of hubs throughout Europe, so they are I think between 12 and 15 the hubs that will actually welcome the book. Uh, last but not least for the fancy Berliners, we have also the work on the metal label to have online presence and distribution there. Tone of voice. Uh, the real challenge is of this work has been to actually as I was saying simplifying complex topics, complex technologies, and making it more accessible and practical. Um, also something that we've been telling to all the authors is to try to move, shift attention from the problem and so talking about surveillance capitalism, authoritarianism, and all the evil that you can name it um, to the solution. So having this more proactive approach, uh, which means empowering people with like path to freedom, path to better habits in privacy, better behavior, um, and also actionable. As uh, you will see in a minute, uh, there are sections of the book that are actually practical suggestions to what are the alternatives that are currently uh, functioning that you can use to indeed disempower the Big Tech ecosystem and actually use some more open source grassroots bottom-up beautiful solutions that are actually competitive because sometimes you know you're like, yes, but my friends are not on Signal so I'm keep using WhatsApp. >> [sighs] >> In the book you will have seven essays written by the authors you saw before and the topic span from indeed how cryptography can finance democracy through voting, through a lot of different like very complex mathematical primitives that have not are not in the book but in the book is just the result. So how privacy is like the cornerstone of democracy and how to actually re-empower democracy in this century. We can use these primitives without even naming them. Natural nations, so how basically sovereignty is reconfiguring itself beyond borders through the digital means. We talk about plurality, how to chart the future, how to come together for finding a third way from technocracy and libertarianism. We talk about the founding values of Web 3 because in the space, I mean, it's a very evident that from the founding principles that in the '70s and the '80s and the '90s mainly cypherpunks upholded for protecting and advancing civil liberties, we drifted a little bit away from that. So we are just remembering what is Web 3 in terms of how crypto is in cryptography has been developed and why it has been developed in first place. We talk about digital enlightenment which is basically remembering ourselves that we through history had a lot of struggles with authoritarianism, fascism, basically power structures that just leverage the power that in this in this case is data is and so actually how can we inform activists and people and normal people with these lessons how did we win these battles with enlightenment with the Renaissance when we indeed through the printing press and other technologies we managed to disempower the church and other indeed big entities institutions that were just imposing their version of truth to the many last but not least we also have a tools section and a glossary section tool section is basically a way to showcase that privacy is a choice and there are a lot of primitives that are out there that can be used and this is valid for the last 30 years because it's funny that we keep like projecting we will build a perfect chain the perfect messaging system but we have amazing privacy tools for the past 40 years that are not that used you know some of them are complex I get you but some others are not so basically the the aim of this section is like 40 pages filled with indeed instead of this tool you can use this one and why the reason why why this like for example Google or Apple are not the best if you care about certain principles and what you can use in alternative and why we have also a glossary at the end of the book to indeed help people navigate the book itself but in general like a lot of different terms that are not contained in the book but that are coming more and more popular this is a QR code where you can actually I mean the book you can find it downstairs you can have a look yourself scanning this QR code you can actually access a web page where you can actually pay for the book, donate, and your donations actually will help us to have a more capillary distributions, print more copies, and start working on the second volume of this chapter. The more support we will receive, the more we can bring forward this initiative and a lot of others that are actually around and in parallel to this one. For example, I was very surprised that we also have an online academy where we basically interview again like experts of the field and we basically compose some courses without AI. And a professor of high school in Sicily reached out to me and said, "Hey, I found out this course on privacy 101 and it's very nice and I would love to present this to my students and incorporate this into my teachings." And the sad thing is that we do so many different things that we don't have enough bandwidth to do so because as you can imagine to actually formulate a whole program for students is not something that you can do like this. So, the more actually you can support us also connecting to schools, connecting to other professors, but also with actually money, which is energy, so that we can actually have more people with us and carrying on all this educational work. Last but not least, this is a beautiful sentence in the Cypherpunk Manifesto by Eric Hughes and Hughes which is we cannot expect governments, corporations, or larger faceless organizations to grant us privacy out of their beneficence. And why? Because it's not their it's not their interest. There is a lot of corruption. And the message here is that we should actually stand up and do something for privacy because privacy needs us as much as we need privacy. And privacy is not easy. Privacy is not free but it's a choice that we can make. It is not also a matter of It's not just a matter of what tool you are using or what primitive you are building, even if this is very important that we have a lot of young developers coming to this space and they are just, you know, mesmerized by a lot of different distractions. But privacy is like an internal orientation towards what we really care about and how we intend to indeed communicate with each other and populate this new dimension, which is the digital space, which has new rules and a lot of different protections that we actually developed throughout centuries that actually protected us, maybe not that well, but still they did for the physical world are to be written in the digital one. And I think this is a collective effort. So, the message here is that with Web 3.0 now, we are trying to advance a culture of contributing to privacy, which is not just by building yourself something, but is also by throughout a network effect helping each other to indeed take more conscious decisions to go beyond the technicalities and the very complex matters and connect as humans and understand that these freedoms are indeed the cornerstone cornerstone of any free society, of any democracy and it's our own collective and shared interest to uphold them. Thank you very much. >> [applause] >> And I want to thank you again, all the people that contributed to this work because indeed without every single piece of this chain, the book would not be here today physically. The would The book would not be here because a lot of indeed thought leaders contributed to this work believing in us. We never published anything, you know, we had just a vision and thanks to the time and the effort that they put into the work, we are now able to start this book series and I'm very thankful for this. Thank you very much. >> [applause]