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OTNS: Critiques and Alternatives from a Former Professional Libertarian
For this episode of OTNS, Primavera and I spoke to Chris Berg, a cryptoeconomist, co-director at the RMIT Blockchain Hub, and a “former professional libertarian”. During the conversation we spoke about Chris’ revisionist history of blockchains, the shortcomings of TNS from a libertarian point of view, and Balaji’s state envy. Like we mentioned at the beginning of the series,…
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BONUS: Join Monetary Activists at Collaborative Finance!
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…
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OTNS: Institutional Design and Recognizing the Value of Politics
For this episode of OTNS, Primavera and I spoke to Jason Potts (@profjasonpotts), a professor of economics and co-director of blockchain innovation hub of RMIT. This is the first episode in the series where we’re talking to someone who is still a fan of Balaji. During the interview we spoke about his disappointments in the…
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Inside the Cybernetic Forest: Terra0’s Vision for Nature to Own Itself
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…
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OTNS: Maximum Freedom in Complex Social Organizations
For this episode of OTNS, Primavera and I spoke to Eric Alston (@IncompleteRules), a researcher at Block Science and Scholar-in-Residence at the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado Boulder, focused on the study of institutions, namely property, constitutions and blockchains. During the interview we spoke about formal vs inform institutions, organizational complexity, and…
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OTNS: How to Optimize for Reality
Michael Zargham (@mZargham), the CEO of Block Science comes back on the show to help us continue to overthrow the ontological framework of network states from the perspective of complex systems engineering. During the discussion we talk about how network states don’t optimize for reality, not confusing the map with the territory, and how an alternative to…
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Lens Protocol: Creating a Web3 Social Ecosystem with Stani Kulechov
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…
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Overthrowing The Network State: Dictatorship by Tech CEO with Nathan Schneider
Nathan Schneider comes back on the show to speak to Primavera and I to continue Overthrowing The Network State. During the conversation we talk about his experience at ETH Denver, the issue with using tech venture capital as a model for governance, and being intentional when exploring new political possibilities. Mentioned Writing from NathanWeb3 Is the Opportunity We…
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Overthrowing The Network State: Colonize the Memes, the Narratives, and the Land
Primavera and Morshed Mannan from Blockchaingov join me to speak to Raymond Craib, a historian of modern Latin America who recently published the book Adventure Capitalism: A History of Libertarian Exit, from the Era of Decolonization to the Digital Age. We spoke about the neocolonialism inherent to network states and previous attempts at utopian libertarian exits, the colonization of history,…
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Overthrowing The Network State: Untangling Balaji’s Helical Theory of History
For this episode, I’m joined by Kelsie Nabben from Blockchaingov to speak to Quinn DuPont (@quinndupont), a historian of technology who recently gave a talk about his criticisms of TNS at the Commons Stack Unconference. He also recently published an article titled A Progressive Web3: From Social Coproduction to Digital Polycentric Governance. During the episode we interrogate Balaji’s misunderstandings of history…
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The Commons Engine: Collective intelligence, non-monetary currencies, and Holochain
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.…
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Overthrowing The Network State: Survival of the Richest with Douglas Rushkoff
For this episode, Primavera and I speak with Douglas Rushkoff (@rushkoff). Named one of the “world’s ten most influential intellectuals” by MIT, Rushkoff is an author and documentarian who studies human autonomy in a digital age. His twenty books include the just-published Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, which we found to be relevant…
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Overthrowing The Network State: Forming New Publics and Pluralism with Glen Weyl
In the second episode of OTNS, Primavera (@yaoeo) and I are speaking to Glen Weyl (@glenweyl), the founder of RadicalxChange and a co-author of Vitalik Buterin and Puja Ohlhaver’s article on Decentralized Society. During the discussion we spoke about Balaji’s oversimplifications in the book, how TNS was not written for human beings, and Glen’s alternative for a Networked Society differs. Overthrowing…
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Overthrowing The Network State: An Initial Critique and Alternatives
NEW SERIES: Overthrowing the Network State in collaboration with Blockchaingov In the first episode of our series ‘Overthrowing The Network State’ (OTNS), we dive into the world of Balaji Srinivasan’s recent book The Network State. The purpose of this series is to critique The Network State while also pulling out the salvageable parts and concepts in discussion with a…
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Socialist Tokens: There would be no taxes under socialism
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…
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An Anticapture framework for left organizing
For this bonus episode, I dive into the Anticapture framework by Spencer Graham which professes a taxonomy and structure for creating “capture-resistant governance” for an organization. While the piece itself was meant for DAOs, I think there were some interesting things said in the piece that are very relevant for socialist organizations. The piece also…
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The Question of Funding in Palestine
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…
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Algorithms All the Way Down: People Die, Capital Does Not
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…
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SBF proves we live in post post post-modernism (clown world)
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…
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Techno-Utopianism vs Class Struggle Technologism
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…
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Talking Politics with Vitalik Buterin (Part 2)
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…
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Talking Politics with Vitalik Buterin (Part 1)
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…
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Participatory Budgeting, Real Public Goods, and why Bernie would’ve won with quadratic funding
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…
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Why Socialists should NOT cede crypto to the Right
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…
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Extitutional Theory: No Rules, No Roles, just Dynamics
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…
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MEV: existential threat to blockchains or solvable problem?
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…
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How to make a good ART PONZI
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…
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Review of Decentralized Society and Soulbound Tokens Paper by Vitalik
In this bonus episode I give my review of the recent article published titled Decentralized Society: Finding Web3’s Soul written by Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, Glen Weyl, and Puja Ohlhaver. The paper received a bit of attention as it goes into some high level details about how the authors view a potential future with the…
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Aligning DAOs and Cybernetics
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,…
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Interview with Black Swan DAO (Live in Paris)
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…
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Crypto and the Left with Cory Doctorow
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…
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CCG Chronicles #12 – Origins of the Crypto Commons
During the CCG I interviewed a co-founder of the event and organization that runs it, the Crypto Commons Association, Felix Fritsch (@FelixFritsch2) . Felix is a PhD student who focuses on the synthesis of cryptocurrencies with commons theory and has written articles like “Challenges and Approaches to Scaling the Global Commons” with many others including those who have…
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CCG Chronicles #11 – Designing systems without fetishes, the frame, and cups
During the CCG I had a long conversation with Pekko Koskinen and Michael Zargham about systems design, avoiding fetishizing objectivity when designing systems, and cups and spoons. It was an extremely cerebral discussion! Pekko Koskinen is a game designer, artist and developer specialized in gamification of social conventions and currently, he coordinates the Economic Space…
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Democracy as a Design Space (Interview with Nathan Schneider)
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…
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Idena: Digital Democracy without a Centralized Entity
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…
