The Blockchain Socialist

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 why socialists are interested in economic plann...

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 paired well with a book I'm...

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 Palestine, how thi...

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 like an algorithm controlling our lives in ways we o...

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 doesn't flirt with fascism. During the interview we review and...

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 interview we spoke about his journey from making a startup to...

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 of events can create openings for ra...

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 of events can create openings for ra...

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 facilitate and scale participatory budgeting . During...

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 has done a lot of work exploring various "e-deologies" and the very online young people who create and subscribe to them. D...

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 interview we spoke about some of the bi...

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 fast. In order to break it down, for this episode I spoke to...

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 been involved in the NFT space quite early, he is using this collection as a critique o...

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 use of blockchains for more non-financial uses. This inclu...

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 abo...

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 in Paris. We spoke about the need for collect...

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 doubts and skepticisms on blockchain and so I invited him to have this disc...

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 been on the...

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 Agency. Dr. Michael Zar...

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 the creator of the term Exit to Community . He has to be...

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 single person. This is why so many projects rely on pure token governance, which is no...

This episode is a continuation of the CCG Chronicles series which is a collection of interviews conducted during the Crypto Commons Gathering (CCG) in Austria back in August 2021. The interviews were also filmed to potentially be a part of a documentary I'm making with a few others. During the CCG I interviewed Blanka Vay and Andreas  Arnold who are both members of the CirclesUBI   ( @Circles...

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...

This episode is a continuation of the CCG Chronicles series which is a collection of interviews conducted during the Crypto Commons Gathering (CCG) in Austria back in August 2021. The interviews were also filmed to potentially be a part of a documentary I'm making with a few others. During the CCG I interviewed Aleeza Howitt ( @aleezagroks ) and Daniel Knobelsdorf ( @KnobsDAO ) about their ex...

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 past! He has also turned all of his songs over the years into NFTs which has formed the basis for the...