Category: Interviews

My friend and researcher of the politics of tech platforms, Gianmarco Cristofari recently had an extended in my apartment and so we thought it’d be a great opportunity to interview each other. He interviewed me here for the Institute for Network Cultures to talk about my book and the left’s relationship with crypto. We spoke about how platforms are…

For this episode I spoke to James Brennan (@jt_bren) who has been finishing up his Masters at the University of Colorado focused on crypto. As part of his research he took a dep dive into the infamous group behind the Miladys NFT collection, Remilia Corp. During the discussion we spoke about esoteric political ideologies professed…

I spoke to Oisín Kyne, co-founder and CTO of Obol Network,  an ecosystem for trust minimized Ethereum staking that enables people to create, test, run and coordinate distributed validators. Distributed Validator Technology (DVT) enables the duties of an Ethereum validator to be performed across a cluster of nodes in order to improve resilience as compared to running…

I spoke to Mustafa Al-Bassam, co-founder and CEO of Celestia, a modular blockchain network that makes for others to securely launch their own blockchain. Mustafa was also a member of the black hat hacking group LulzSec under the name T-Flow known for hacking the CIA website, newspapaers owned by Rupert Murdoch, and other corporate and state organizations in 2011.…

If you’ve been surfing the tech sphere lately, you may have come across the term e/acc or effective accelerationism as if it was something new. But like most of these tech elite driven ideologies, it’s largely a mutation of more naive and sometimes sinister trends. For this episode I spoke to Adam Jones, host of Acid…

Tokens have increasingly more popular beyond just in the crypto world *gang gang mmm ice cream so good*. Tokens are not new, but how they have been  used and their proliferation have exploded with the rise of digital platforms. I spoke to Rachel O’Dwyer,  writer and a lecturer in Digital Cultures in the National College of…

In this episode I spoke to Afra Wang, a Chinese diaspora journalist who has been in crypto now for a year and a half with Mask Network and organizer of the ZuConnect Decentralized Social Day in Istanbul where I moderated a panel on technology addiction in crypto. Given that usually crypto is often seen through and talked about…

In this episode I spoke to my friend and scholar Tara Merk who is part of BlockchainGov and has been focusing her PhD thesis on Exit to Community (E2C). E2C is proposed as an alternative to IPOs or buyouts for founders of businesses to be able to be compensated for their work while giving ownership of their business to…

In this episode I spoke to Geert Lovink, a Dutch media theorist and founder of the Institute of Network Cultures who has been engaged with internet culture since at least the 80s. We were recently together in Cyprus for the latest installment of MoneyLab,  which he also co-founded. Talking with him was a great way to gain more understanding…

In this episode I spoke with Brett Scott, an independent scholar, writer, and defender of physical cash from a left point of view. Brett was involved in the early Bitcioin communities and one of the first guests of the podcast back in 2020 so it was nice to be able to talk to him again after so…

During this last Crypto Commons Gathering I had the pleasure to meet Zachary Marlow from the Moneyless Society Podcast. We had the idea of recording a joint podcast with Zachary leading to talk about post-capitalism, crypto, and money. The discussion was also recorded in video format  which you can find  here on the Moneyless Society Podcast YouTube channel which I…

In this episode I spoke with Scott Moore, the co-founder of Gitcoin and Public Works. Scott was one of the pioneers in public goods funding through quadratic funding and DAOs. During the discussion we talk about the “everything is coordination” meme, his advice for starting a DAO, and open source development. We also talk about our differences in views…

I spoke to Nick Srnicek, author of ‘Platform Capitalism’, ‘Inventing the Future’ and the ‘MANIFESTO FOR AN ACCELERATIONIST POLITICS‘. Together we dissect the roots of accelerationist politics of which Nick is known for his work on left accelerationism, its controversial implications, and its ongoing interpretation. We discuss why he doesn’t like the term accelerationist anymore,…

In this episode I spoke to David Z Morris, Chief Insights columnist at Coindesk who wrote a really nice book review of Block Radicals and creator of the Crypto Crooks podcast. David’s been following the crypto space since near the beginning when he reported on the gold bug community’s interest in bitcoin a decade ago. He is also the author…

In this episode I spoke to Eric Annan, founder of Aya, a startup in Africa trying to bring more Africans into the crypto space I met while at Zuzalu. We had some very interesting conversations together while there and I thought he would be great to have on the show to discuss crypto from one African perspective.…

In this episode I spoke with Ashley Buck, the founder of ReSource Finance and was also the first employee of Consensys. ReSource Finance is a decentralized mutual credit protocol and ecosystem building more regenerative economies by enabling growth without capital. ReSource is innovative in the mutual credit space because it adds a built in system for managing risk…

For this episode I spoke to Ethen Buchman (@buchmanster) and Tomaž Fleischman (@T_Fleischman) in person while at the  Commons Hubin Austria from May 22nd to 28th for the Collaborative Financeevent with the Crypto Commons Association, one of the projects part of the Breadchain Cooperative. Ethan is one of the co-founders of Cosmos and works at Informal Systems,…

In this episode I spoke with Richard Bartlett (@RichDecibels), a co-founder of tech co-op Loomio, non-hierarchical management consultancy The Hum, and director of the social impact collective Enspiral. His most recent endeavour is a community building network called Microsolidarity, Although I’ve followed him for a while now, we met in person at the Solarpunk NOW event in Austria organized by the Crypto…

BONUS EPISODE I spoke to Matthew Slater (@matslats) about an upcoming event happening at the  Commons Hub in Austria from May 22nd to 28th called Collaborative Finance that he is helping organize with the Crypto Commons Association, one of the projects part of the Breadchain Cooperative which I co-founded. We spoke about what Collaborative Finance means, how money actually gets created in the private…

In this episode I spoke with Paul Seidler (@brachlandberlin), a member of the Terra0 artist collective. Terra0 has been around since 2016 when it released a whitepaper outlining how a technologically enhanced forest combine with blockchain could own itself and exert autonomy. Since then the collective has organized several exhibitions exploring this theme including Flowertokens, an experiment with…

We all know that the current landscape of social media is not ideal for various reasons, but one of those reasons is because the revenue model is based on the client-server model giving companies access to massive amounts of user data. For this interview I spoke with Stani Kulechov, founder of Aave and Lens Protocol, a new…

For this interview I spoke to Ferananda Ibarra (@fer_ananda), the Director of the Commons Engine, a Holochain Ecosystem service agency aiming to create a community of Regenerative Economy practitioners capable of designing ethical tokens and currencies to enable healthy flow, incentives, and feedback loops in order to evolve the economy and culture of their own communities and organizations.…

For this interview I spoke to Dr. Phillipp Dapprich, a post doc at the University of Potsdam in political theory who did his doctors thesis on socialist central planning studying under Paul Cockshott. He recently published a paper titled Tokens make the world go round: socialist tokens as an alternative to money.During the interview we spoke about…

I spoke to Yazan Khalili and Sami Khaldi, Palestinian activists who started a project called The Question of Funding which is an art collective that presented at Documenta 15 this past year.  They had a discussion on Outland with Monalisa Gharavi in November about their project as well. During the discussion we spoke about how Israel has forced a reliance on  financialization in…

For this interview I spoke to Ian Wright (@ianpaulwright), the author of the Dark Marxism blog which explores Marxism and the occult. Ian is also a programmer who has worked in machine learning and artificial intelligence. During the discussion we spoke about what Marx means when he refers to capital as a “real God“, how capital is…

I’m sure most reading this probably have heard the news about the collapse of FTX and the ensuing crypto financial contagion it’s caused. A lot of strange and bad analyses are being spread around crypto Twitter and elsewhere so Ben Basche (@basche42) and I try to describe a more reasonable account of the situation that…

For this interview I spoke to Izzy Meckler (@izmeckler), the Chief Science Officer of 0(1) Labs which is currently building the Mina Protocol. Mina is a blockchain that utilizes zero-knowledge proofs to be as light and scalable as possible. Izzy is also an active member of East Bay DSA and has a blog called Parametricity. During the…