The Blockchain Socialist

I spoke to Nick Srnicek , author of Platform Capitalism , co-author of Inventing the Future , and most recently Silicon Empires , about why AI is consolidating Big Tech's power rather than disrupting it.  We dig into why the AI upstarts remain dependent on the infrastructure of the incumbents, why the gap between open and closed models may widen as frontier training costs spiral upward, and t...

I spoke to Sean Geobey , associate professor at the University of Waterloo and Director of Groupthink Labs , about collective intelligence, cooperative economics, and what decentralized technology could actually offer the solidarity economy. We dig into how collective intelligence works at scale, from participatory budgeting experiments in Kitchener to the structural barriers that make setting up...

I spoke to Evan Miyazono, founder of Atlas Computing , about the neglected risks of advanced AI and what it would actually take to govern it. We dig into the threats he thinks aren't getting enough attention, from asymmetrically offensive cyber capabilities and economic disruption to what he calls the "intelligence curse," a dynamic where governments lose any incentive to invest in...

I spoke to Scoopy Trooples , the pseudonymous co-founder of Alchemix , about self-repaying loans, the wreckage of DeFi scams, and what ethical crypto finance could actually look like. We dig into how Alchemix works, allowing your debt pays itself off over time and what's new in V3. We also get into the broader rot in the space: meme coin pump-and-dumps, celebrity rug pulls, prediction market...

I spoke to Atossa Araxia Abrahamian , an independent journalist and author of The Hidden Globe , about the world of offshore finance, special economic zones, and network states. We dig into her reporting on a proposed crypto enclave in St. Kitts and Nevis, the history and reality of these zones, and what happens when libertarian ideas about sovereignty and markets collide with real communities pus...

I spoke to Luis Bezzenberger of Brainbot and core contributor to Shutter Network , about MEV and threshold encryption for encrypted mempools. Luis comes from a background in distributed systems and has spent years thinking about how cryptography can level the playing field between ordinary users and sophisticated actors who exploit the transparency of public mempools. We dig into how threshold enc...

I spoke to Victor   Muhagachi , co-founder of NEDA Labs , building digital asset payment infrastructure in Tanzania and East Africa, about what it actually looks like to bring crypto to communities in this context. Victor grew up watching mobile money transform how people transact across Africa but also watching 15-20% of people's money disappear just in the act of digitizing it. We dig into...

I spoke to Nader Dabit , longtime crypto developer and educator who built at Aave, Lens, and Developer DAO, about what it felt like to be at the frontier of Web3 and why he eventually left. Nader spent years genuinely believing in decentralized social and censorship resistant platforms, and we dig into why those ideas haven't found their footing: the brutal difficulty of onboarding people, a...

I spoke to Nick Vincent , assistant professor of computing science at Simon Fraser University and author of the Data Leverage substack, about what it actually means that AI systems are built on the collective output of humanity's digital labor and what we can do about it. Nick has spent years researching how data functions as a bargaining tool, and we get into the nitty gritty of what that lo...

I spoke to UnhappyBen, head of growth and marketing at Peer (formerly known as ZKP2P) which is a service that allows you to officially delete Coinbase and every other centralized exchange account you may have. Peer is protocol that allows people to do P2P trading of crypto assets and fiat through neobanks like Revolut, Venmo, Wise, etc. while providing a high degree of privacy using zero knowledge...

I spoke to Boris Mamlyuk, co-founder of Clean App an AI-powered, crowdsourced environmental app designed for users to report waste and hazards in real-time, essentially a system for reporting civic feedback.  I had him on to talk about the app which boasts over 1 million installs, his critique of the crypto libertarian project's capture by Wall Street interests, and how decentralized technolo...

I spoke to Tan Zhi Xuan , Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore's Department of Computer Science and founder of the Cooperative Intelligence and Systems Lab, a research group confronting the gap between the rationalist AI alignment discourse focused on superintelligence and what is actually happening. I had her on to talk about her work on cooperative AI (designing AI sy...

Continuing the publication of interviews from DevConnect in Buenos Aires, I sat down with Kate Stapleton , a former member of Anonymous and privacy advocate, now able to speak publicly after the statute of limitations expired. In this interview, Kate recounts the origins of Anonymous in early internet culture, IRC, and the Church of Scientology protests, while challenging the myth of Anonymous as...

Continuing the publication of interviews from DevConnect in Buenos Aires, I sat down with Theo Beutel (academic secretariat at the Ethereum Foundation, researcher at Centre for Democracy Studies Aarau, University of Zurich) to reflect on attempts at democracy with DAOs. As someone who has worked as the governance lead at several DAOs, Theo had a lot of insight to share. We discussed his recent pap...

In this episode recorded at DevConnect in Buenos Aires, I sit down with Eugene Leventhal (researcher at Metagov , podcaster at Governance Futures , new head of governance at Octant) to discuss the current crisis in crypto governance. The general feeling is that governance has been declared dead, foundations are being pushed aside, and the decentralization theater is being abandoned now that Trump&...

Note that this is from a video essay published on YouTube here . For over a year, I've been helping people send aid to Gaza via cryptocurrency because traditional banking systems have failed Palestinians. PayPal and GoFundMe freeze accounts, banks block transfers, and those that go through can take weeks or months. Cryptocurrency offers instant, censorship-resistant transfers that offer highe...

In this episode I spoke to Jarrad Hope, founder of Logos , and Peter Ludlow, philosopher and research advisor at the University of Hong Kong, and co-authors of the new book ' Farewell to Westphalia .' In the book they detail the historical trajectory of nation states and what they perceive to be their failures as well as propose an alternative to Network States through Blockchain Communi...

Dr. Christoph Sorg is  a social scientist at the Humboldt University of Berlin. He researches theories of capitalism and post-capitalism and the new debate on economic planning in times of digitalization and the climate crisis. During the interview we spoke about his work around understanding economic planning and his recent publication Finance as a form of economic planning . His work shows how e...

I spoke to Cade Diehm ,  Head of Research at the World Ethical Data Foundation and founder of New Design Congress , an independent research group confronting the gap between what is said to be happening and what is actually happening in digital societies. His career also involves working at Deloitte Australia, as leading design for CoinJar, the largest crypto exchange in Australia and Tactical Tec...

I spoke to Leuts.eth , CEO of Aragon , a DAO tooling protocol that gives organizations the tools to build, govern, and accrue value effectively onchain. Aragon was probably the first organization I became interested when I got into crypto since they were the first to take seriously the potential for DAOs and onchain governance, We spoke about the history of Aragon, their latest feature enabling pr...

It's feeling like we're living in a very strange moment in time where liberal norms of openness have been shattered by the same class of tech industry titans who expressed these values just a decade ago. In this episode I spoke to Nick Houde and Severin Matusek from co-matter , a research and strategy studio based in Berlin, who recently published an incredible memo that is chock full of...

The one and only Slavoj Zizek published a piece on Network States and of course I had to read it and share it with you all. It's normally behind a paywall on his Substack but was put on Fileverse by recent guest Naomi for all to read. Check out  the article on Fileverse here . I really want to know who is in Zizek's ear talking about crypto stuff so much that he knows what DAOs are... If...

In this episode, I talk with Adina Glickstein — Master’s student in Media Studies under Nathan Schneider at UC Boulder and editor-at-large at Spike Art Magazine — whose recent Compact Mag article, The Rise and Fall of Urbit finally gave me the excuse to talk about Urbit on the podcast and why its failing. We unpack what Urbit is trying to be (although many don't seem to agree), its creator Cu...

About a month ago I spoke at Dappcon about Solidarity Primitives we've been building at Bread Cooperative . Before my talk, Naomi Oba gave her own wonderful presentation titled Crypto Culture and its Discontents that unknowingly set the stage quite well for mine so I had to ask her on the podcast.  We discussed the issues with crypto culture including obsession with quantification and financi...

They say on the internet no one knows you're a dog but this has created a digital space that is dominated by more bots than humans and crypto space that is easily sybil attacked. Worldcoin, a project led by Sam Altman, is purporting to tackle this issue as AI (ironic?) proliferates content by scanning our eyeballs into an orb that they totally aren't taking your data from! Personally I d...