The Blockchain Socialist

For this interview I sat down with Hannes Gerhardt , professor of Human Geography at the University of West Georgia and author of a recent piece in ROAR Magazine titled, Blockchains: Building blocks for a postcapitalist future? .  He has published on a wide range of political and economic issues and is currently working on a book exploring pathways to establishing non-capitalist forms of economic...

For this week's podcast I spoke to Akseli Virtanen ( @econaut6 ), one of the founders of the Economic Space Agency ( @ecospaceagency ) (ECSA), an organization for exploring protocols for post-capitalist economic expression. Akseli previously founded the Robin Hood Cooperative Hedge Fund and has been referred as The Andy Warhol of Finance . During the interview we talk about how ECSA is  explo...

This is a teaser of the second episode of the patreon exclusive Q&A series where I talk about the question asked by JB on the differences between socialism based on markets versus planning and how blockchain can influence that conversation.  Get the full version on Patreon . Support the show ICYMI I've written a book about, no surprise, blockchains through a left political framework! The...

This week I spoke to Creston Davis, founder of the Global Center of Advanced Studies ( @GCASCollege ), the first cooperatively run college using their own ethereum-enabled token (called GCASY) that represents shares in the college that can be used for paying for tuition and other expenses. Many well-known academics are a part of GCAS, including Alain Badiou and they've hosted seminars from th...

This week I spoke with Stefen Deleveaux ( @stefdelev ), the president of the Caribbean  Blockchain Alliance (CBA). The CBA is an organization that advocates for the use of blockchain in Caribbean, educates developers , and collaborates with regulators to create regulatory frameworks in the region. One of the purposes of the organization is to help create a more coherent Caribbean alliance based on...

This week I interviewed Andrew Ancheta ( @TrampAbroad1 ), a freelance journalist who previously wrote for crypto publications, but most recently wrote an article in the leftwing journal Current Affairs called The Crypto Casino .  It's a great article, and I don't say that just because I'm featured in it :). The article is in the currently most recent issue of Current Affairs (Issue...

This week I spoke with Morshed Mannan ( @MannanMorshed ), a PhD candidate at Leiden Law School in The Netherlands and  Research Fellow at the Institute for the Cooperative Digital Economy at The New School. His research interest in cooperatives and digital technologies eventually led him to blockchain and he's produced some really interesting research and seminars on its intersection. During...

This week I spoke to Michel Bauwens , the  founder  of the Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives and works in collaboration with a global group of researchers in the exploration of peer production, governance, and property and is known for his work on The Political Economy of Peer Production . Much of his work revolves around exploring peer production as an alternative to currently existing cap...

This week I spoke to Jonathan Beller ,  a professor of Media Studies at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn NY with a forthcoming book “ The World Computer: Derivative Conditions of Racial Capitalism .” He recently wrote “ How We Short Capitalism – And Finance the Revolution ” in CoinDesk. The article is really interesting in that it proposes we invest in "post-capitalist economic media" as a wa...

For this week's episode I took a closer look at the company Blockchains LLC which bought the German startup Slock.it who was working on creating blockchain-enabled smart locks. Digging deeper I found out that Blockchains LLC is currently in the works of creating its own smart city "enabled by the blockchain" next to Reno, Nevada. We start by listening to a news segment aired on a lo...

This week I spoke with  Mark Alizart , a philosopher and the author of The Climate Coup, Dogs, and most recently Cryptocommunism which has recently been translated into English  from French and published by Polity Books. In the book, Mark argues that the significance of cryptocurrencies goes well beyond cryptoanarchism. In so far as they allow us ‘to appropriate collectively the means of monetary...

This week I spoke with Dr. Sarah Grace Manski , she has a PhD in Global Studies from UC Santa Barbara and is now a professor at George Mason University. On one side she’s done quite a bit of work for unions and written for Jacobin and on the other side she’s the founder of the International Society of Blockchain Scholars , Research fellow at the P2P foundation, and collaborator for RadicalxChange...

This week I spoke to Chibu Ichiban, a founding member of afuturemodern , a network of coops delivering liberation tech to the masses through art, culture, and basic services. Their mission is to drive mass adoption of humanity's most radical innovations by shaping them for society's most marginalized and revolutionary communities. They leverage art, culture, service, social justice, and...

This week I spoke to Alleza Howitt ( @aleezagroks ),  a contributor to the Trustlines protocol. Trustlines is a mPoS (minimal viable Proof of Stake) sidechain to Ethereum and stores transactions for a system of decentralized mutual credit. Mutual credit is an alternative medium of exchange to most money that we use today in which "money" is created through lines of credit that are establ...

This week I sat down with  PhD student at the London School of Economics under David Graeber and Laura Bear in Anthropology and occasional CoinDesk contributor, Annaliese Milano ( @AnnalieseMilano ). In this episode we spoke about her current research interests in public goods, or what she prefers to call public things. Her research suggests that studying blockchains and cryptocurrencies as public...

For this episode I spoke with Jonathan Harris ( @jonone100 ) aka Money Burning Guy who was recently featured as a panelist at the Consensus: Distributed conference on their panel Soft Money hosted by Joon Ian Wong and Annaliese Milano and was joined by Brett Scott, who was last episode's guest. Jonathan is the author of The Money Burner's Manual , the ultimate guide to how and why you sh...

This week I spoke to financial activist and author of The Heretic's Guide to Global Finance Hacking the Future of Finance Brett Scott ( @Suitpossum ). His last book was written in response to the Occupy Wall Street protests and is a guide to the world of high finance and the emergent forms of alternative finance, alternative currencies and economic activism that are challenging it in response...

This week I decided to do something a little bit different and go solo. For this episode I wanted to analyze the mindset and beliefs in a lot of the mainstream cryptocurrency discourse. In order to do that I wanted to use someone who is a popular figure and thought leader in the space, Erik Voorhees. Erik is the CEO of ShapeShift, an pseudo-anonymous cryptocurrency exchange turned definitely-not-a...

This week I spoke with Rich Jensen ( @richjensen ), Co-op Executive of Resonate ( @ResonateCoop ). Resonate is a cooperatively owned music streaming platform aiming to give more power to artists rather than corporate record labels and VC-funded tech companies. On average their model gives a larger payout to artists as compared to other music streaming platforms like Spotify. Rich has had a long ca...

This is Part 2 of my interview with Dr. Joel Z Garrod, a sociologist based in Canada and author of a recently published article, “On the property of blockchains: comments on an emerging literature.” The paper focuses on blockchain and property relations in connection to global property relations and the evolution of capitalism.  For this part of the interview we speak about our thoughts on a recen...

This week I sat with Dr. Joel Z Garrod, a sociologist based in Canada and author of a recently published article, "On the property of blockchains: comments on an emerging literature." The paper focuses on blockchain and property relations in connection to global property relations and the evolution of capitalism.  I really enjoyed the article because it really succinctly brings up the po...

This week I interviewed Daniel Kronovet ( @kronosapiens ) at Colony, “An Operating System for Organizations”. The Colony Network is a suite of smart contracts, running on Ethereum. It provides a general purpose framework for the essential functions organizations require, such as ownership, structure, authority, and financial management. Along the way, we talk about organizations and society as sys...

This week I spoke with Paula Berman ( @_paulaberman ), researcher at the Democracy Earth Foundation ( @DemocracyEarth ) which is a tech non-profit that aims to create platforms for decentralized and incorruptible online governance. Their projects have largely been based on Ethereum. In the interview we discuss the identity problem for decentralized platforms like blockchain, the advantages of quad...

This week I spoke with Dardan Isufi (@ DardanIsufi ), COO of the Eva Coop (@ Eva_coop ) which is a cooperative ride-sharing application based on blockchain started in Montreal and expanding to other cities. We discuss taking on Uber while trying to build a democratic and non-exploitative alternative like Eva. Want to stay in touch? Check the site -> theblockchainsocialist.com  Join the communit...

What I’ve done is taken some of the audio left over from the interview I did with Ben Arc or also  known as BTCSocialist on Twitter released a couple weeks ago and mashed it together since some of the good stuff wasn’t able to make into the interview. I hope you enjoy the extra content and if you want full access then consider becoming a patron on Patreon. Some of the things we spoke about include...