The Blockchain Socialist Are Public Goods Always “Good” and Will Personal Tokens Just Lead to Slavery ft. Annaliese Milano
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 things which extend political communities in time and space and through which people reimagine various economic modes of collective being helps to reveal how the blockchain industry is creating fundamentally different forms of money and social relationships from what has been discussed in academia before. Examples of this including blockchain projects which create different monetary systems and even constitutions for governance on their platform.
We also discuss her other interest in personal tokens which aren't super popular yet but have definitely been growing in the blockchain space. One example of attempts at this include the NBA player Spencer Dinwiddie's attempt at tokenizing his contract on the ethereum blockchain. We also talk about some of the weirder examples of using personal tokens people are trying, discuss some of the obvious contradictions of them, and wonder if this attempt at financialization of the self is akin to slavery.
Annaliese's "public things" approach is inspired by Honig, Bonnie. “Lecture One: Democracy’s Necessary Conditions.” In Public Things : Democracy in Disrepair, 13-36. Thinking out Loud, 2017.
Link to the Community Post: https://www.reddit.com/r/cryptoleftists/comments/hqgv3o/community_post_the_link_between_blockchain_and/
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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.