# A Conversation with Stewart Brand (Devcon4)

- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2019-10-09
- Duration: 50:34
- Topics: blockchain, smart contracts, distributed ledger, Science & Technology
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-oLGZdLpHl1w
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLGZdLpHl1w

## Description

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https://archive.devcon.org/archive/watch/4/a-conversation-with-stewart-brand

A Panel discussion with Stewart Brand, a pioneer in creating the Personal Computer, featuring Wendell Davis and Althea Allen. Stewart gives a brief history of his life and work spent "hacking civilization," and discusses a variety of topics including: The progress in the "hacking" ecosystem; The role of institutions in decentralization; The overlap of blockchain & climate change; Aging within a movement. A Q&A session follows the Panel.  

Speaker(s): Stewart Brand
Skill level: Intermediate
Track: Developer Infrastructure
Keywords: society

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Devcon is the Ethereum conference for developers, researchers, thinkers, and makers. 
Devcon 4 was held in Prague, Czech Republic on Oct 30 - Nov 2, 2018.
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## Transcript

I am here to introduce the panel Thank You Stuart and everyone on the panel for joining us today I have a passage that I'm going to read off that kind of explains and introduces what we'll talk about a little bit here today so I'll be reading this off feel free to take any notes on some interesting things that you might be able to look into after or might be discussed as this panel continues so there's a really worthwhile book but sometimes it gets passed around and Stuart recommends called the finite and infinite games by James P Carson that is a good philosophy book it's short but incredibly dense and concise in a sort of flowing always going forward kind of way here's a passage infinite players look forward not to a victory in which the pass will achieve a timeless meaning but towards ongoing play in which the past will require constant reinterpretation infinite players do not oppose the actions of others but initiate actions of their own in such a way that others will respond by initiating their own blockchains are about resources applications shared infrastructure individual freedom to act to no social advancement and more but fundamentally they are about coordination we make the world computer and therefore the world computer makes us how much agency do we have and what do we aim for really and using it we'd like to welcome Stuart and the whole panel to the stage for many reasons but the ones we'd like to point out is that he's popularized the personal computer it could have been just called the small computer but it's called a personal computer microcomputers they were yeah and coined the phrase information wants to be free some of the rest of it will be touched on the panel the the other panelists we'd like to welcome our wendell davis and Althea Allen to the stage Wendell is in a theory community member an early member of amis ago and excuse me while Allen is an early member of the Oh music oh community they are here as infinite gamers dedicated members of the etherium community the blockchain community the decentralization space the human race and space in general one more passage from the book before we start infinite players are not serious actions in any story but the joyful poets of a story that continues to originate what they cannot finish thank you all very much and please welcome the controller I'm not here for that Stewart you have been there for many a movement you rarely put your name on things mm-hmm but you have been often behind the scenes behind the camera I had to do some research myself in preparation for this and as I was sort of tracing your story it was rather mind-blowing how many times your name popped up in things that I had heard of things that had influenced me things that had influenced the people who have influenced me so we're hoping that you can bring some of that perspective to us today but before that I would like to let you tell your own story I know that you have some slides and just tell us some of the things that you have lived through let me do that now I would love you to do that right now let's see what we've got I guess it starts with psychedelics [Applause] [Music] clearly it is not finished yeah so I was in the thick with Ken Kesey Merry Pranksters we organized the biggest acid chest called the trips festival in San Francisco and it put together all the creative artistic groups in the Bay Area in one place for one night and set in motion the idea that audiences should not exist as audiences that there should be no spectators and Burning Man carries on that tradition to this day probably I should say that my sense of what I do in the world was i hack civilization I'm trying to figure out kind of ingenious low-effort ways to make a difference that helps civilization go better and I'm sure my best at least most efficient hack was again on the effects of LSD coming up with this button why don't we see in the photograph of the whole earth yet in 1966 and that was sort of strange because we've been in space for ten years at that point in others Soviet Union the US had taken any significant pictures from space so I was trying to you know give a paranoid twist on it and indeed a year later in 67 the first photographs emerge from weather satellite 80s there was the newspapers and nobody paid much attention to it but it was the one that was available when I started my major of hack I suppose exactly 50 years ago the Whole Earth Catalog where the image of the earth was on the cover tried to be comprehensive and the main event of it was access to tools I'll come back to that but what really happened with the Earth image was the end of 1968 when homesick astronauts orbiting the moon took photographs of their home from our home from a great distance and what made that photograph called Earthrise most powerful for everybody reframed everything replaced the mushroom cloud is the sort of standard icon of our times and of civilization it did that because there's a dead planet in the foreground and a clearly living planet that happens to be ours and it's surrounded by quite frightening vastness of space it's a hard vacuum and you get a sense of finiteness and fragility what I was doing with the Whole Earth Catalog in terms of access to tools and I learned last night from Cory Doctorow that he based sort of the way boinking link does reviews on the way we did it in the Whole Earth Catalog they were just short access to tools to skills the best book on learning how to fly was done in the 40s by languages a really important book that came out in 60s and 70s was Our Bodies Ourselves from the Boston women's collective and basically it went against what medicine had done up to that point it's basically treated woman's body is disease and not female doctors and so on of this group put together a book that was a manual of having a woman's body there's craft too it takes tuning that takes maintenance it takes enjoying at a cellular level and all that was in there in this book it was one of their core books of the women's movement actually 50 years later I discovered after various people came to me and said well you know but reading the Whole Earth Catalog got me out of Nebraska got me out of Indiana got me out of some small place where I was and it got me going on you know what I do now and they tell me these origin stories and in summary what I noticed it does and I think that blockchain is doing this is it confers agency it gives people of freedom the sense of freedom to choose to do Gami or anything and just go forth and try and the opposite of agency is victimhood so one of the things I wrote somewhere along in the process was a good project is to just unmake victims start with yourself branch out from there one of the things that they grew out of the Whole Earth Catalog was the hackers conference in 1984 the bearded guy in the top left there is John Draper known as Captain Crunch he was jailed for being hacker and in jail the mob broke his back to get it secret somehow to do hacking he was out by the time of this there's a brand new Macintosh on the left and two of the developers the Macintosh are leaning forward they're looking at somebody's demo I want to point out that hackers conferences go on all the time this is in a sense one that we're in here but also on the screen is the eye gem Jamboree which is ten years old this is these are bio hackers and they are basically hacking bio code the genetic code currently they are up to you 3,000 participants and 300 student teams that come and create organisms and basically erase them and get prizes and this is the long-term project of ten years of basically making the world safe for biotechnology it's an awesome project there is one of the most thrilling things to go to it feels sort of like this event in terms of just getting a sense of hope and excitement and lots of things you can do what I'm involved in now is partly biotechnology bringing it to wildlife conservation and then partly the long now foundation based in San Francisco where among other things we have been for 25 years now working on a 10,000 year a clock designed by Danny Hillis it is being installed as you can see you're inside a mountain in West Texas and a mountain range to the Jeff Bezos owns and that clock will check faithfully for more than 10,000 years just a permission to think long term one of the things that emerge from all of that is our idea of a sort of a peace layered diagram of a healthy civilization going from very rapidly moving fashion all the way down to very slow moving nature and culture and those are separate layers they need to be respected as separate layers and most of the power yours in the slow part and most of the learning is in the fast part we can come back to this if you want the customer of the long now foundation and I think the customer of aetherium is civilization that's just a local fragment of it there's the kind of a big picture of civilization as a whole that's our that's who we're working for my view that ok hmm we can go back to any of these see you've yeah thanks you've been walking around yeah so this is your first Def Con of course and this is your first blockchain conference yeah and you've come at a great time it seems actually yeah really a very special event you know I know you've been talking to a lot of people as you've been walking around you've seen a lot of talks mm-hmm I'm curious to know I mean what is your impression of all of this is this is this how these things happen hmm back in the day when no we another thing I did is called Global Business Network and we pervade scenario planning to corporations and governmental departments and so on things that were big and slow and had to think ahead in order to decide what to do next and they're always wondering what's going on and one of the things I said is that we noticed is look where there's new terminology emerging and so with hackers for example there were a whole bunch of become hackers firms that merged in fact there was a hacker dictionary that was kind of carefully maintained because newcomers to that world would need to know what what is this shorthand for and I could well imagine there should be if there's an already a blockchain dictionary and aetherium dictionary and you see it in different you know new words DAP new word see it in words they're repurposed wallet and fork and beacon you see it in joke works like hurdle and that's a sign to me that new words I have to it's not just for decoration there are new tools and they need new words to express them and so part of what I've been doing is a guest here is just sort of learning some of the little vocabulary and with vocabulary you start to learn the system that's Robin getting here mm-hmm and since you've been a part of so many different let's call them hacker movements and especially you know you've yourself participated and providing these civilization acts as you start I mean you you've identified some things that they kind of give away the game that say like you're maybe you're onto something give you a little whiff of it but what I'm interested in here is having some of these folks who are doing this now to be able to have a perspective on this to see that you know they're part of a long history of this kind of stuff to take this home what is the what is the thing that connects it together early on we had no idea that the hackers in 1984-85 had no idea that hacking would eventually get industrialized and weaponized that would become a so you know one of the things we're saying well there's blackhat hackers and white hat hackers and don't worry and we did not prepare enough for the problems that might occur I think blockchain is doing a better job of that than we did I think the biotech crowd is doing a better job of that can you elaborate on that a little bit why so well so you know there's not a lot of talk about sex here at all there was no women involved at all we had like a hundred hackers there - might have been female boys that changed none of them were athletic and I see a fair amount of fairly athletic looking characters here so that's changed and it's also a good sign there's a you know across the board helps going on what Steven Levy is the guy who wrote the book hackers he's in the far left there up in the upper corner and he was recently asked to reminisce about this and he said what he remembered was the laughter that basically these young hackers spent three days and all night just giggling away it's the first time they'd come together and these kind of comings together have that quality of Glee about them that I think is is part of what makes it go I want to apologize for over valorising hackers in this tender they tend to be the star of the personal computer show but we were actually you know they thought of themselves as masterless samurai but frankly most of the real engineering was done by people who are narrow ties who worked 9:00 to 5:00 often with federal government money like the Doug Engelbart mother of all demos everybody worked the SR I was in the Department of Defense money and people in the Xerox PARC that was corporate money that was you know devised the the things that became the really graphic interface for what became the personal computer Steve Jobs came over chief Wozniak was that this thing Jobs didn't the jobs wasn't hackers offices marketer but but Wozniak was an actor and Apple then took what was going on and being completely wasted at Xerox PARC by this Yorick's company and then deployed it and then they got copied by Microsoft slash IBM and you're off and running so hackers are important and part of any of these stories and they're the sort of the glory part but they're not necessarily the only part or even the main part so that actually brings up something for me that I wanted to get your perspective on as well which is what is the role of institutions in something like this because on the one hand institutions have of money and they have a lot of power and they have a lot of guys and skinny ties who can just do the work but on the other hand I'm gonna read another quote from finite and infinite games here hmm this was one that really stuck with me that a successful defense of society against the culture within itself is to give artists a place by regarding them as producers of property and I think that extends to a lot of forms of revolution and forms of dissidents you schedule the protest you know it will be happening from 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. so find a different way home and it's a very effective way to sort of disempower a movement to give it a safe place in which to have its revolution so that everyone else can go on about their business and so there's that danger to me when trying to sort of compromise or trying to work with institutional powers that we maybe give up what's most important because it's also what's most inconvenient for them cerium is an institution but that that that's saying that you know what's the solution to bad code solution is better code I think institutions is how humans collaborate on things I mean we see civilization as 10,000 years old and in a sense what that's honoring is the invention of Agriculture and the institutions of towns and then the way that people could collaborated and more levels than just hunting and gathering Oh once you've got towns and you're off and running in the story of civilizations 10,000 years old there's every reason to believe it'll go in over 10,000 and in a way anything that we do as innovators is blending in with that long story a lot of it is institutional and the things that corporate misdeeds and government misdeeds want to be need to be called out need to be answered need to be worked around just you know a lot of it's just class sometimes we try to get well if people would just behave better than we wouldn't have this particular problem and the reason that Whole Earth Catalog had access to tools under the title was that as our function is that I had believed Buckminster Fuller said early on if all the politicians and the world died next week it would be an exciting week but wouldn't change that much but if all the engineers and scientists died next week we would be at a loss how to carry on and that human nature is very difficult to move it's very complicated and rich thing tools are easy to move they're easy to invent they're easier to deploy when they work and so his approach is the hack is just making a better tool that works around the things that you think are not working well in the world and sometimes that is involves inventing new institutions and so you have nonprofits come along and then you have a whole there was the private sector and the public sector of government and then a whole social sector that's emerging in different rates in different societies but there it is it's a basically self-driving service structure so these are all institutional inventions with tools part of what enables them to ideally be more benign or truly beneficial that sounds really general it does and I wonder what happens when they fight back when what they're interested in most is not being benign but just continuing to exist whether or not they serve a purpose it is the case I know with corporations and probably with governments that would you know a lot of us get worked up about how they're just about profits they're not oh when you actually work with these companies they're mostly about a survival and typically wonders for them a very competitive industry whatever it may be and they're all freaking out what's going to come along and just blow them away and they either either just failed and disappear like Cedars is in the process of doing in the US or they get gobbled up by another company and sort of disappear into that so that's survival instinct at the institutional level can get pretty tough and that is worth bearing in mind because they they are legally people but they don't act like people and I think it's its right to call that out so headed off everywhere you can sometimes and one of the things I love about cory doctorow x' book walk away is sometimes just walk away find a way to live separately oh this was the thing that was done very much in the 60s and it gave us a fair amount of one education we went out all started communes which failed it was highly educational and how they failed and it also gave us a sense that we there were a lot of things we thought we were dependent on that we were not actually all that dependent on and so you you find your own freedom from these institutions that's an ongoing process and it's not gonna stop and I think what you want to do when you're building an institution is haven't mind the institutions that have gone somewhat harmful or even pathological to notice how that happened there and see if you can head it off recognize it early on the head off the things they're moving in that direction but civilization is an argument and sometimes blood is shed in that argument that is probably with us for a while so on the topic of walk aways you know the people here are building I would say like the next generation of human coordination tools mm-hmm think it's a good general life saying ashtray yeah and the thing about that is it may end up empowering a million subcultures governance finance for all these kinds of things which means that coordination itself amongst those groups may be more difficult in the future before it's easier but I know that you're a big concern your greatest concern for the world right now is for example climate change mm-hmm and we don't have much time according to you about about this topic so how do these things work together well it is a question I keep asking watching people what if you got to help it off climate change and what have you got well it's a good question good question yeah yeah I bet I think the question is more about this this narrative of let's say mass walkaways and everyone walks away who's gonna steer the ship so this week mm-hm yeah walkway is a it's what adolescents do that's what being or 20s is about it's you know the origin of a lot of all institutions Babylon governments are bad I'm going to invent my way out of here and cryptocurrency is my escape from all those things and then you get a little over and forms of collaboration you can start reasserting themselves is absolutely necessary and you're fine you get into politics and in order to get anything done you actually have to find ways to compromise with the opposition or you have a non-functional government which we currently have in the US as a failure to do that and that is not a diminution that is a growing into a form of responsibility and maturity and public service that just acknowledges there is no way fair enough scattered applause so that does get at something else that we talked about briefly leading up to this but and it's what happens as people age within a movement because as you said it's it's young people it's people who get upset at their metaphorical parents and go off to do their own thing and after a while maybe they get tired maybe they have other things to worry about maybe they worried for their own safety or that if their families or maybe they just sort of stopped caring what happens as people age who have started a movement and like is there a way for movements to carry on even as they lose their youth most of the well this happened with these hackers counts the pictures still up here and they're my rule back then was never do a second annual anything which speaks to what you're talking about but the people at the high-res common conference loved you so much that they two years later did their own and then another one who goes on to this day and it's an old folks gathering which is kind of great and you know it's like a class reunion or something they never the web came along without really engaging them so other entities come along and but frankly what happened is good scientists good artists good engineers keep moving we live longer longer lives I'm 79 and their health and you know my parents pretty much checked out by the time they were in their 70s so you know just into one generation we're getting seen never longer and I should say your generation is killed with a lot longer than that you're gonna have three-digit lives 100 plus and 4 there's children there's gonna be you know not just grandchildren great grandchildren maybe great great grandchildren to deal with that if you're still doing the same goddamn thing through that whole period you better be doing it very well but most people that move on and actually being an artist in New York back in the day was the great releaser for me that if you're not you know if you get stuck in a blue period you're not Picasso you're gonna move on to something that is much more dangerous and much more interesting one of the Nobel Prize winners in economics that I got to know said that basically he changes his discipline every 7 years and the thing that you're worried about getting into a little prize is that would stop you by the way it stopped so many Senatus you've gotten a prize like that so it's not walk away it's keep moving well if it's the question I think some questions say again when I take some questions from the audience oh yeah all right does anybody any questions if you do please come up to the microphones yeah there's microphones cheering yarn these guys will call you out we got one ready over here hi Stuart really enjoyed this talk I just want to tackle perhaps you asked a very pertinent question what's blockchain doing about your global change or climate change and purp so many Jim point if you look into it to make things more efficient SERPs cut down processes cut down wastage the other point as well which is you know how do we look now for all these people in the world we're now getting more efficiently producing goods and perhaps you digitized in the economy so people will have more chance to create stuff and create a digital economy which involves moving electrons around rather than atoms maybe that's very abstract but we have to you know we can't get creating more stuff because they're running out of stuff in terms of you know I know sort of natural resources so perhaps there's a way out for us that we create a digital economy where people can still create in different ways and yet we serve each other without actually using a more of the earth resources so does it make any kind of sense to you at all I'm not as worried about because I'm a lifelong conservationist and and I suppose environmentalist I think we overstate the limits of resources you know the bet that was made long ago by Julian Simon with my old teacher Paul Ehrlich as to whether the prices would go up or down of a old basket of things that they were looking at and Julian Simon one the prices stayed down and Paul they're like lost on that as well as on population there's you're seeing a version of that now and sort of extrapolating from where you're going on this finite earth thing existential crisis there is an existential danger from a is there's an existential danger from climate change there's an existential danger from extinctions which are not happening as rapidly as people think any minute now somebody is probably going to point out the existential danger or plog gene they already have what's the house at work oh you know it's uh I I don't think that's actually a real existential danger but it's the personal it's the danger of you know being able to for example move value freely uh-huh no that's that's that could be a danger for someone that it could be yeah the idea of say a private transaction is rather terrifying so many people or just the idea of putting more and more machines on the blockchain like what happens when they start to think without our help mr. to have be love and money without our help when they just start buying things from each other I think that there have been many fears expressed a lot of them have to do with just sort of fear of the unknown because black chains make a lot of things unknown by design yeah what's the AI gonna do but I think there's also something very scary about allowing people to interact with each other without sort of coordinating powers without authorities telling them how they should do so and actually I'm just gonna exercise stage privilege right now and bring this to a topic that I think I would like to hear you speak on a little bit as well which is informal economies slums and squatter cities this is something that you've written about quite a lot and I think it's something that's extremely applicable to what we're doing we're talking about tools for you basically for coordinating in in a situation where there is no authority or anything maybe the authority is unnecessary mm-hmm orange agonistic or antagonistic and I'm curious whether you see any assumptions being made or sort of any conceits being held that might find us building the wrong tools or those tools in the hands of the wrong people hmm I wound up writing about it's a book called Hortis discipline which begins saying there's sort of three long long-term narratives that are playing out in this century that I was focusing on of the book its urbanization biotechnology and climate change those are not stories they're gonna be over in a week or a year or a decade they're gonna go on all century and the urbanization aspect I sort of started with because that's the main event and the villages of the world are emptying out and you go oh my god those wonderful villages well you know subsistence agriculture is a big drag it's a that's why the communes failed uh-huh in part it is a ecological disaster often because they're in marginal land it's a poverty trap and they're not in the cash society and so there's no way out people go to town and they go to town and where you begin in town if you don't have any money because you're coming from a village is to go to the squatter cities to the slums and then there's this informal economy going on there of talk about microfinance I mean these are you know rickshaw ride fees that you're working with and swapping something into a teacher so that your kids can go to the private school 100 yards away from where Shack you're living in and that is where the main demographic event of our world is going on it is where women are having fewer children because in the country you need seven kids in order to run a farm and in town you want to have two kids and they're gonna be high quality kids gonna try to get them education so they can prosper in town two or less and then the women if they're with a jerk in the village they're stuck with a jerk but they get to town they don't have to put up with it anymore you know they're gone they take kids with them and start things and women are doing the urbanization into the world as near as I can tell so then what helps that well I usually got all these personal computer conferences back in the 80s and not into the 90s and they would always end with this last session would be about how we're going to fix the digital divide where us rich people have all these cool tools and those darn poor people they don't get to have these cool tools but we'll make sure that we get them and vollis would be bowed and all that Kevin Kelly pointed out you know thank John for the rich people who will spend insane amounts of money for a new tool that doesn't work yet and will help it down with their extra money help it down the learning curve to where it actually works at which people at which point important people grab it and run to the horizon with it and so when cell phones hit the developing world they proliferated and you can get a better cell signal in most of Africa than you can in most of the United States and there's more stuff going on with cell phones and now smartphones than in many other places and they invented them they're ways to do money with empathy and in Africa and so on there is so much resourcefulness there's so much ingenuity it is it takes a lot of skill to be poor to manage poverty to manage yourself out of poverty these are very able people and they will take any tool that helps them get up in the world and if you if you can generate tools and sort of make them accessible and they get invited in and you don't come in saying hey yeah we're here to fix your cooker situation or the way you do commerce here and in Mumbai that usually doesn't fly unless it's really good so get invited and then watch it transform by the locals into local businesses into whatever it is that works with their culture with their situation and when it works it can fly fast like cell phones there and I think potentially blockchain if it really really can deliver value in an easily leverageable way people will grab it as they grab cellphones and if it doesn't it won't we take another question yeah nice I wanted to ask what is underpriced or what do we not understand the value over the importance of whether that's culture or technology what are the things that we're not really getting the fundamental relevance of I'm so hard of hearing I need that repeating he asked what are we what are we under valuing what are we under valuing or under pricing or misunderstanding the importance of what are the things that we should be really focusing on that we're not paying enough attention to I don't know enough to answer that well I'm still at the oh my god this is astounding level and so I see nothing but glory in all directions here and so I can't do critique yet probably ever but there boy are there people here who can I know it's not what the hell invited newbies gonna just be all Gaga and that's me hey one more question thank you so this is a room full of people endeavoring to build very powerful tools historically those who have created powerful tools in earnest goodness have then seen those tools immediately weaponized by those who don't really care about that mmm and then a power power taken away from those with good will and moved into those who will use the tools for their own self improvement is there any advice you have to the people in this room actively building on how to create a create a nuclear reactor without creating a nuclear weapon [Applause] this may be one of the functions of good government is a kind of a regulatory oversight and a book I'm recommending along with finite and infinite games is a new book by Michael Lewis called the fifth risk it happens to be about the US government but it tells astonishing truths for people that didn't know things were out there the government government's very but a lot of amazingly valuable stuff goes on a government that is not actually taking enough advantage of data collection in particular and of course we all worry about data collection in terms of invasion of privacy and so on but a lot of us just what's the ground truth of the Society of the Irian and and then with that ground truth you're the tools you're making weekly coordination tools like yours can reflect can learn about reflecting stuff that's real in the world so working with government helping make sure that transparency is part of the deal one of the reasons this book of Michael horses is pretty angry is that the current administration in the United States is trying to shut down access to this information because they disapprove of it because it's science basically and that's the thing for fighting so you know a funny situation so don't need instead of fighting government or trying to fight for government at its best and I think this kind of is one of the things the etherium group is better at and say the Bitcoin crowd is figuring out what are the points of already existing institutions like governments that are worth not just honoring but really engaging in helping and helping keep non destructive not harmful it is you know there's lots of ways things can go wrong and one of the functions of government yep one of the things the government's view is collect weather data and people are much less killed by hurricanes now than they used to be because weather prediction has gotten good in the last 20 years really good likewise medicine a lot of medical research goes on under the National Institutes of Health and things like this and that is why medicine that used to be a flip a coin whether going to a doctor was going to help or make things worse now is pretty much across the board it'll mostly help so find the institutions that are doing valuable things burrow in to where the good stuff is and help the good stuff and do what you can to head off or work around the bad stuff and you know eternal vigilance but don't solve a problem just because you can imagine it this is Jimmy Wales tells the the fable of the steak knives where he was finding that with the programmers that were coming around Wikipedia when it was starting up they would figure out all different kinds of problems would happen and they were designed software that wouldn't I would see that problem and immediately head it off well the problem didn't exist yet and Jimmy Wales said is you're you are making the steak knife problem this is you hire an architect and you're gonna run a steak restaurant and the architect says I hear you're gonna have these sharp knives on every table well that's obviously very dangerous anybody could go berserk and kill not overly everybody at their table but everybody at all the other tables we've got to put these little cages around each table and sort of modularity that'll have you know at least isolate the bug yeah except nobody actually does that in these restaurants and so Jimmy says wait till you have a problem be really alert for the problems ask people to tell you about the problems early and often and you know go right after them but if you over anticipate them you will design freedom out of the system thank you I think that time for one more question hi my name is Matthew de Silva and I'm a journalist for courts first I just want to say I feel privileged to be in the same room as you I just finished reading the innovators and I was astounded just by your history and I'm just I'm so feel so lucky to be here my question is about the kind of inequality even within the blockchain space even in the blockchain space there's a lot of economic inequality there like from the very starting point of a project whether it's in governance or distribution of tokens or just in you know social power and I was wondering how you might suggest addressing those kind of inequalities as projects grow hmm I don't know enough I really try not to opinionate I'm hopelessly ignorant this is one of those cases but thank you for the praise and it's a nice book that Walter Isaacson wrote thank you for being here well that was disappointing I wanted to challenge you a little bit though maybe we can end on this instead about not building for problems that we haven't discovered yet mm-hm I think Wikipedia is the best example of what can happen if you don't build for problems that haven't happened yet Wikipedia is like one of the shining beacons of what can happen when Humanity gets together on the internet I think that there are other things where we didn't anticipate problems that we maybe should have I think social media for example is a terrifying place and there are things that maybe weren't inevitable but that feel in evitable now given the decisions that we made and like is there a balance between anticipating the horrible things that could go wrong without building so many walls around ourselves that we can't have any fun I happen to live an early version of social media with the well back in the 1980s and we discovered trolls see you we were there for everything and we discovered the main role which is never feed the troll we discovered flame wars we discovered a mob action I got mobbed at one point and became so disgusted I left the well I felt like was a failed experiment but it was a better experiment than many and here I will get into I think somewhat controversial area here which is that anonymity is way better in theory than it is in practice and to the extent that blockchain can give verifiable identity that's going to be one of its great values in the world not only in the developing world where people need an ID in order to own property and get loans and things like that but that BOTS can be bots on social media I mean the original idea of Facebook as I understood it is is that you know you were basically verified by mutual friends who said this is a real human being within this his real name and I wish that we had done that with well we had pseudo anonymity in the well because I'd already seen anonymity be really really pathological on other systems and I as near as I can tell there are special cases where anonymity can be important where privacy can be important for private conversations are important but general a lot of anonymity in general discourse is destructive and a whole part of blockchain is protecting privacy but I think a whole part of it is going to be in a sense the opposite of being to really be who you are and and the thing I try to make clear on the well when we started is you know the byline I put out there was you own your own words I didn't want to be sued for people you know it's holding each other that got missed taken into thinking that you had property rights over your own words which is another stupid question you have a responsibility for your own words but there needs to be a responsibility bearing creature behind that for that to actually hold and so that's where I come down on that one and I think would try to the end of everything all right of time you want it you want it yeah I just was like to thank you again Stuart for being here it's been really a pleasure getting to know you and I'm really glad that this was the DEF CON that you came to because it has been amazing and to the organizers you are amazing this thing that you created has really it's been extremely special and so thank you and thank all of you and we'll see you next year yeah thanks guys [Applause] [Music] [Applause] you