This week I sat down with PhD student at the London School of Economics under David Graeber and Laura Bear in Anthropology and occasional CoinDesk contributor, Annaliese Milano (@AnnalieseMilano).
In this episode we spoke about her current research interests in public goods, or what she prefers to call public things. Her research suggests that studying blockchains and cryptocurrencies as public things which extend political communities in time and space and through which people reimagine various economic modes of collective being helps to reveal how the blockchain industry is creating fundamentally different forms of money and social relationships from what has been discussed in academia before. Examples of this including blockchain projects which create different monetary systems and even constitutions for governance on their platform.
We also discuss her other interest in personal tokens which aren’t super popular yet but have definitely been growing in the blockchain space. One example of attempts at this include the NBA player Spencer Dinwiddie’s attempt at tokenizing his contract on the ethereum blockchain. We also talk about some of the weirder examples of using personal tokens people are trying, discuss some of the obvious contradictions of them, and wonder if this attempt at financialization of the self is akin to slavery.
Annaliese’s “public things” approach is inspired by Honig, Bonnie. “Lecture One: Democracy’s Necessary Conditions.” In Public Things : Democracy in Disrepair, 13-36. Thinking out Loud, 2017.
Podcast Platforms:
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3geORcile9E1EyPyFiAHhM?si=x7fjsFhURsSBlErXnihh9A
iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-blockchain-socialist/id1501607045
Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-blockchain-socialist
Podcast Addict: https://podplayer.net/?podId=2598359
Deezer: https://www.deezer.com/us/show/961422
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