For this interview I spoke with Alexandra Elbakyan (@ringo_ring) the founder of Sci-Hub, the first pirate website in the world to provide mass and public access to tens of millions of academic research papers for absolutely free. As you can imagine, what she's doing is illegal and has had countless issues with government and privately owned journals that paywall science funded by the public. This means that she cannot create a bank account to accept donations to continue her work and only accepts cryptocurrency.
DONATE SOME CRYPTO TO SCI-HUB BECAUSE SCIENCE SHOULD BE FREE
Alexandra is also a Russian speaker but can understand English so I was lucky enough to get a translator to help me with this interview. You'll notice that I edited out the majority of Alexandra speaking since I assume most people who listen don't understand Russian and fade to the translator. During the interview we spoke about the difficulties she's faced upkeeping the project, why she considers Sci-Hub to be a communistic project, and why she thinks the left should be taking cryptocurrency more seriously as a tool.
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ICYMI I've written a book about, no surprise, blockchains through a left political framework! The title is Blockchain Radicals: How Capitalism Ruined Crypto and How to Fix It and is being published through Repeater Books, the publishing house started by Mark Fisher who’s work influenced me a lot in my thinking.
The book is officially published and you use this linktree to find where you can purchase the book based on your region / country.
