Category: Interviews

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…

I interviewed Vitalik Buterin about his thoughts on the political aspects of crypto. It was a candid discussion about his book “Proof of Stake“, the evolution of Ethereum, and the dangers of the far right. Although our discussion happened just before the current scandal with FTX, there were many relevant threads. History has shown that similar types…

I interviewed Vitalik Buterin about his thoughts on the political aspects of crypto. It was a candid discussion about his book “Proof of Stake“, the evolution of Ethereum, and the dangers of the far right. Although our discussion happened just before the current scandal with FTX, there were many relevant threads. History has shown that…

For this interview I spoke to Eli Zeger (@ezeger16), a  writer, editor, and musician. He is also a worker-owner at Ampled and a member of the Exit to Community Collective.  He recently published a piece for the Zora Zine titled Appetite for Redistribution: Budgeting for All  talking about how blockchains and quadratic funding could be used to…

For this interview I spoke to Joshua Citarella (@JoshuaCitarella on social media), an artist, researcher, and Twitch streamer who studies niche online communities. He authored the book the Politigram and the Post-Left exploring esoteric online political beliefs. He’s done a lot of work exploring various “e-deologies” and the very online young people who create and subscribe to them. We discussed…

I spoke to Primavera De Filipi (@yaoeo), one of the earliest scholars on law and crypto, Internet activist, and artist. She is permanent researcher at the CNRS and Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. She is author of the book Blockchain and the Law published by Harvard University Press. During the…

You may have heard of Maximal Extractable Value, or MEV, which refers to the extraction of value from Ethereum users by reordering, inserting, and censoring transactions within blocks by block producers. It’s become a hot topic of debate on how best to deal with it, however these types of conversations can become very technical very…

I’m not much of an art NFT collector myself, but I do dabble in at least appreciating some NFT art that I find to be interesting in one way or another. So for this episode I spoke to Chainleft, my potential anon online doppelganger, who has recently started a new NFT collection he calls ART PONZI. Having…

For this episode I spoke to Kelsie Nabben (@kelsiemvn), a qualitative researcher on resilience in decentralised technologies and governance at RMIT in Australia. She recently co-wrote a piece titled Aligning the concept of ‘Decentralized Autonomous Organization’ to Precedents in Cybernetics with Michael Zargham whom you may know from a previous episode. Kelsie also publishes on her Substack about  decentralised digital infrastructure, security,…

About a month ago I did the first live podcast interview in Paris at an event hosted by EBB with two members of Black Swan DAO, a Berlin-based collective pursuing horizontal and decentralised approaches to art-making. Penny Rafferty (@pennny_rafferty) and Calum Bowden (@calsbot) are both artists and the members of the DAO who came to speak with me…

Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) is a long time digital rights activist, author of many book on technology and sci-fi, and a journalist. You can find out more about him as well as his books on his website. Well known for being one of the most vocal left-of-center activists in the technology space, he has also expressed several…

Nathan Schneider (@ntnsndr) is a professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder and the editor of “Proof of Stake: The Making of Ethereum and the Philosophy of Blockchains,” a collection of essays by Vitalik Buterin that will be published this September. He is also one of the most prominent thinkers on cooperativism and…

A case for crypto for the left would undoubtedly have to include the potential for creating resilient methods for digital democracy. However to make real democracy of one person one vote is incredibly difficult without having a very good system of sybil resistance, or for a way to tell that a single account is a…

In this episode I spoke to Quinn Dupont (@quinndupont), an  early crypto academic, founder of Alumni Labs, and author of the book Cryptocurrencies and Blockchains.   During the interview we spoke about his recent publication through Alumni Labs on A Progressive Web3,  some of the ethical issues around studying cryptocurrencies that people should be aware of which he’s written extensively about,…

In this interview I spoke to Jonathan Mann (@songadaymann), also known as the Song A Day guy, who has, in case you can’t tell, published a new song every day for the past ~14 years. There’s a good chance you’ve heard one of his songs at some point since many have gone viral in the…

For this episode I interviewed Danny O’Brien (@mala) , current senior fellow at the Filecoin Foundation and special advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Danny worked with the EFF for a very long time and has a podcast called How to Fix the Internet. During the interview we talked about  his experience of the early internet and…

For this episode I spoke to Jaya Klara Brekke (@jayapapaya), an academic researcher on crypto and Head of Strategy at NYM who recently gave the keynote speech for the Haus Der Kunst DAO Summit. During the interview we spoke about her skepticism and cautious optimism she mentioned in the keynote speech, the contradictory feelings on the market…

For this interview I spoke to Dr. Paul Dylan-Ennis (@polarpunklabs), professor at University College Dublin, and Rose O’Leary (@lunarmining), previous writer at CoinDesk and now a programmer for DarkFi. They are both also the editors for a new philosophy journal called Agorism in the 21st Century which recently published its first issue.  Agorism is a heterodox libertarian political tendency…

For this episode I spoke to Dr. Tina Rivers Ryan (@TinaRiversRyan), Assistant Curator at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, art historian, critic, and educator. She’s been involved in digital art on the internet well before NFTs were ever a thing but has written some interesting critiques about it all. During the interview…

For this interview I spoke to @againstutopia he’s known as on anarchist and crypto Twitter. He has a background in working in tech, platform cooperatives, and is one of the stewards of PrimeDAO. We  had followed each other online but finally had the opportunity to meet in person during The DAOist in Lisbon a few months ago. During…

For this episode I spoke to James Muldoon (@james_muldoon_), a researcher at Autonomy in the UK, senior lecturer at University of Exeter, and author of the book Platform Socialism , coming out with Pluto Press on January 20th.  You may have seen that I also reviewed Platform Socialism on my site so check that out as well if you want to…

For this episode I spoke with Harry Halpin (@harryhalpin), open internet advocate, professor, internet researcher, and the current CEO of Nym. Nym is  a project trying to build a global privacy commons for the internet using mix nets, crypto, and anonymous credentials. During the interview we talk about the current issues with privacy on the internet…

This week, after a a few delays, I was finally able to interview  a couple of the masterminds behind DisCO (Distributed Cooperative Organization). I spoke to Stacco Troncoso (@StaccoP2P) and Natalia Avlona who are both members of the crew working on DisCO, also called DisCONAUTS. A DisCO is an alternative / critique / complement to DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations)…