RadicalxChange Replayed

Radical Markets was only a first step in radically improving social technology. But it propagated the central mistakes of assuming an atomized individual identity. By formalizing human identity's fundamentally social nature, truer to the richness of our diversely shared lives, Glen Weyl sketches how we can build better institutions to create systems for facilitating cooperation across difference. SPEAKERE. Glen Weyl is a political economist and social technologist whose work focuses on harnessing computers and markets to create a radically equal and cooperative society. He is the Founder and Chairman of the RadicalxChange Foundation, a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, and a lecturer at Princeton University. Glen was recently honored as a Bloomberg Top 50, one of Wired Magazine’s 25 leaders shaping the next 25 years of technology, and one of Coindesk’s most influential people in blockchain for 2018.

The Covid-19 has thrown into sharp relief, just how vital the work of ‘key workers’ or ‘essential workers’ is for our lives and survival. Among those workers are domestic workers, who are disproportionately female migrants and women of color. These workers, who have long been underpaid, overworked, and under-resourced, have suddenly become visible and seen as essential. What narratives about domestic workers have circulated during the Covid-19 pandemic? What can we learn from them to maintain and foster the visibility, recognition, and valuation of domestic workers after the pandemic? How can we change the narrative about domestic work to support and value the 68 million workers worldwide? And how can new stories about domestic work be mobilized to garner public and political support? The panel brings Dr. Maïmonatou Mar (Gribouilli, France) and Shani Orgad, Professor of Media and Communications at the LSE, to share their reflections on these questions and discuss the importance of changing the narrative about domestic work. SPEAKERSCarlotta Gradin is the Vice President of Advocacy for UN Women France. She holds a Master in International Administration from the University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne and is also a graduate of Sciences Po Strasbourg. Currently, she pursues a thesis on the European and International legal framework for the prevention and the penalty of cyberviolence at the University of Paris II Panthéon-Assas. Carlotta is a legal expert, researcher, and lecturer on legal issues regarding human rights, gender equality, and discrimination. She worked for the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) in Rome and the High Council for Gender Equality in Paris.  Maïmonatou Mar, Ph.D., is the co-founder of Gribouilli, the French social venture empowering domestic workers. Gribouilli launched the first community for nannies in Paris. They are key workers but invisible: mainly middle-aged women with migration backgrounds who suffered from isolation and the digital divide. Nearly a thousand nannies benefit from information, P2P learning, basic learning, and soft skills class for their economic inclusion and decent work access. Gribouilli offers leadership programs through an Ambassador program for nannies. Ambassadors of Gribouilli, therefore, collaborate with public-private partners to improve public policies. They also develop a coop with more inclusive and accessible commercial services to the benefit of the families. Gribouilli is a 3yr multi-award winning organization (Prizes from Paris City, the Foundations JL Lagardère and Deloitte...). Maïmonatou is an A. de Rothschild Fellow, CXC/Ashoka Fellow, and a 2020 Paris Talent. Professor Shani Orgad is a Professor of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Her research and teaching focus on media representations, gender, care, and inequality. She is the author of numerous articles and four books, including her most recent book, Heading Home: Motherhood, Work and the Failed Promise of Equality (2019, Columbia University Press), which examines the stark gap between the promise of gender equality and women’s experience of continued injustice. Orgad has won numerous awards, including the 2019 LSE Teaching Excellence Prize, the Sociological Research Online SAGE Prize for Innovation and Excellence (with Rosalind Gill), the 2018 LSE Excellence in Education award, and the LSE Innovator Award. Orgad is the Director of the social sciences program of the Ariane de Rothschild Fellowship.

In the 1930s, many worried that the new medium of radio--with its ability to deliver the voices of autocrats to millions of listeners--had fueled the rise of fascism in Europe. Responding to this worry, US intellectuals during World War II sought to invent new media experiences that would inoculate audiences against fascism by encouraging the development of democratic and participatory values. These efforts were shockingly influential. They shaped everything from mid-century U.S. propaganda, to the aesthetics of the 1960s counterculture, to the ideas that structured the early internet. Yet, the notion of democracy baked into these media experiences was deeply flawed. It failed to take account of key democratic values, including diversity. Fred Turner's books and essays tell the story of how media and technology (and the ideologies baked into them) helped construct the present moment. They are indispensable to anyone interested in the politics of cyberculture, and of central importance to RadicalxChange. SPEAKERSFred Turner is the Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University. He is the author of three books: The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties (University of Chicago Press, 2013); From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (University of Chicago Press, 2006); and Echoes of Combat: The Vietnam War in American Memory (Anchor/Doubleday, 1996; 2nd ed., University of Minnesota Press, 2001). Before coming to Stanford, he taught Communication at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and MIT’s Sloan School of Management. He also worked for ten years as a journalist. He has written for newspapers and magazines ranging from the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine to Harper’s. Matt Prewitt is the President of the RadicalxChange Foundation, a writer and blockchain advisor, former plaintiff's side antitrust and consumer class action litigator, and federal law clerk.

This history of the corporation is a meandering and expanding one but one thing that is common among them, more often than not, is that the profit motive overshadows the potential negative impacts they have on society and the place we all call home. While today’s landscape of corporate structure has broadened to include more mission driven, or worker owned structures, there remain mechanisms in place and questions left unasked that keep the corporation fundamentally flawed. In this session we will hear from leading experts who are asking those questions and are developing mechanisms that can radically move the goalpost. SPEAKERSColin Mayer is the Peter Moores Professor of Management Studies at the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and the European Corporate Governance Institute, a Professorial Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford and an Honorary Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford and St Anne’s College, Oxford. He is a member of the UK Competition Appeal Tribunal, the UK Government Natural Capital Committee, and the Board of Trustees of the Oxford Playhouse. He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2017 New Year Honours. He was chairman of Oxera Ltd. between 1986 and 2010 and is a director of the energy modelling company, Aurora Energy Research Ltd. He leads the British Academy enquiry into “the Future of the Corporation” and his most recent book Prosperity: Better Business Makes the Greater Good is published by Oxford University Press. Michelle Meagher is a Senior Policy Fellow at the University College London Centre for Law, Economics and Society and co-founder of the Inclusive Competition Forum, a think tank focused on democratising corporate power and the enforcement of competition law. Michelle is a UK- and US-qualified lawyer, specialising in competition law and corporate governance. Michelle sits on the corporate governance committee of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales. Michelle's first book, Competition is Killing Us: How Big Business is Harming Our Society and Planet - and What To Do About It, will be published by Penguin Business in September 2020. Nathan Schneider is an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he leads the Media Enterprise Design Lab. He is the author of Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition that Is Shaping the Next Economy, published by Nation Books, and two previous books, God in Proof: The Story of a Search from the Ancients to the Internet and Thank You, Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse, both published by University of California Press. His articles have appeared in publications including Harper’s, The Nation, The New Republic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and others, along with regular columns for America, a national Catholic weekly. He has lectured at universities including Columbia, Fordham, Harvard, MIT, NYU, the University of Bologna, and Yale. In 2015, he co-organized “Platform Cooperativism,” a pioneering conference on democratic online platforms at The New School, and co-edited the subsequent book, Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet. Follow his work on social media at @ntnsndr or at his website, nathanschneider.info. Jennifer Lyn Morone is the CEO of RadicalxChange Foundation and a multi-disciplinary visual artist, activist, and filmmaker. Her work focuses on the human experience in relation to technology, economics, politics, and identity and the moral and ethical issues that arise from such systems. Her interests lie in exploring ways of creating social justice and equal distribution of the future. Morone is a trained sculptor with BFA from SUNY Purchase and earned her MA in Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art in London with Dunne and Raby. Her work has been presented at institutions, festivals, museums, and galleries around the world including ZKM, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Ars Electronica, HEK, the Martin Gropius Bau, the Science Gallery, Transmediale, SMBA, Carroll/Fletcher Gallery, panke.gallery, Aksioma, Drugo more, and featured extensively on international media outlets such as the Economist, WIRED, WMMNA, Vice, the Guardian, BBC World News, Tagesspiegel, Netzpolitik, the Observer.

Glen Weyl wrote, "While technical knowledge, appropriately communicated and distilled, has potentially great benefits in opening social imagination, it can only achieve this potential if it understands itself as part of a broader democratic conversation." My talk will lay out what kinds of technical knowledge have these benefits and under what conditions. It will provide some historical context going back to the Technocracy Movement, which arose at the beginning of the twentieth century. Most importantly, I will elaborate what is required to ensure that democracies can take advantage of the best scientific and expert knowledge without undermining democratic decision-making and accountability processes. SPEAKERSMargaret Levi is Sara Miller McCune Director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) and professor of political science, Stanford University. She earned her BA from Bryn Mawr College and PhD from Harvard University. She is the 2019 recipient of the Johan Skytte Prize. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the National Academy of Sciences. She was a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow. She served as president of the American Political Science Association from 2004-5. Her books include the sole-authored Of Rule and Revenue and Consent, Dissent, and Patriotism and the coauthored Analytic Narratives; Cooperation without Trust?; In the Interest of Others; and Labor Standards in International Supply Chains. She is general coeditor of the Annual Review of Political Science and an editor of Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics. Avital Balwit studies political and social thought and cognitive science at the University of Virginia. She wrote her capstone thesis on regulatory questions concerning the Big Five technology companies (Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft) in the areas of privacy, antitrust, and taxation. She also writes short stories, personal essays, and poetry. She has work published in Kanstellation, and New Reader Magazine, and forthcoming in World Weaver Press. She won the Atlantic's 2020 poetry contest.

The culture wars are reascendant. Prof. Taiwo argues that the wealthy and powerful will take every opportunity to co-opt activist energies for their own ends. How does one build collectives in the midst of this. SPEAKERS Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University. He completed his PhD at University of California, Los Angeles. Before that, he completed BAs in Philosophy and Political Science at Indiana University. Emmanuel Midy is the Community Lead of RadicalxChange Foundation. He is a writer and consultant on the intersection of media and technology.

Data Dignity is a realignment of the economics of the internet that will improve the outlook for people as algorithms and robots get better, while at the same time making those technologies work better. The basic idea is paying people more often for the value they create in the online world. Right now consumers typically barter their efforts and data online in exchange for services, but the advertising model which finances this arrangement has motivated poor quality results and has not been robust during an economic downturn. Instead, we propose to pay people in more situations, in order to expand the economy and make users aware, able, and motivated to make the online world better. Data Dignity is the ultimate win/win design for computation. SPEAKERSJaron Lanier coined the terms Virtual Reality and Mixed Reality – and had the first VR startup, manufacturing VR headsets and gloves for the first time, and creating the first surgical simulators, vehicle prototyping, and other apps – all in his youth back in the 1980s. In the 1990s he was chief scientist for Internet2 (the academic consortium charged with making sure the internet would scale) and then of the first company to do AI processing of faces, such as changing identities or adding ornaments; that company went to Google, alas. He’s also known as a constructive critic of technology. He was concerned about how the internet was turning out from way back before it was popular to do that; has written a number of bestselling books on the topic. Plenty of awards and accolades, including an IEEE Lifetime Achievement Award, the German Peace Prize for Books, one of the highest literary honors, and multiple honorary PhDs. In 2018, Wired named Jaron one of the 25 most influential figures in tech from the previous 25 years. Jaron’s also a musician specializing in unusual and obscure instruments; in the last year, he played with Sara Bareilles and T Bone Burnett on a #1 single, appeared on Colbert playing with Jon Batiste, and collaborated with Philip Glass. Officially, Jaron is Microsoft’s “Octopus”, which stands for Office of the Chief Technology Officer Prime Unifying Scientist. Avital Balwit studies political and social thought and cognitive science at the University of Virginia. She wrote her capstone thesis on regulatory questions concerning the Big Five technology companies (Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft) in the areas of privacy, antitrust, and taxation. She also writes short stories, personal essays, and poetry. She has work published in Kanstellation, and New Reader Magazine, and forthcoming in World Weaver Press. She won the Atlantic's 2020 poetry contest.

As the political polarization divides the US population, the once ideas of social progress turned again into securitarian attempts to protect the borders, the job market, the national identity, therefore reviving the White Supremacy mindset. The acceptance of violence, racism and social injustice nurtured the institutionalization of the fears depleting the State engagement to dignity. George Floyd's death crystallized the wrath of the minorities seeking for a systemic change with the unprecedented massive support of the majority. As a Muslim clerical and human rights activist, Imam Dr Omar Suleiman will share his perspectives on the renewal of the new Civil Rights movements. In a discussion with the French activist Dr Maïmonatou Mar, he will talk about the need to tackle the democratic crisis through a two side strategy: radical and human of reformation (top down) and community empowerment (bottom up). From an updated narration of State racism, Imam Dr Omar Suleiman will point at the urgent need for institutional reforms to collectively break free from social injustice. If rooted in a racial American story of White Supremacy, his description of social injustice will echo with other types of nationalisms worldwide, all of them being threats to life of the most deprived. Imam Dr Omar Suleiman will highlight as well the crucial importance of smart intersectional alliances to restore power and dignity of each and everyone through communities. He will illustrate it with his multiple experiences, including the Faith Forward Dallas at Thanks-Giving Square, a multi-faith coalition of clergy for peace and justice operating at the Border.  SPEAKERSImam Dr. Omar Suleiman is a world renowned scholar and theologically driven activist for human rights. He is the Founder and President of the Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research and a professor of Islamic Studies at Southern Methodist University. He's also the resident scholar of the Valley Ranch Islamic Center and Co-Chair Emeritus of Faith Forward Dallas at Thanks-Giving Square, a multi-faith coalition of clergy for peace and justice. He frequently writes for CNN, USA Today, The Guardian, Huffpo, and The Dallas Morning News.His career started in his hometown of New Orleans where he served as the Imam of the Jefferson Muslim Association in New Orleans for 6 years and directed the "Muslims for Humanity" Hurricane Katrina Relief effort. It was in this time that he was noted on a national level as being a strong advocate of community service, interfaith dialogue, and social justice. Most recently, he was recognized by CNN as one of the 25 most influential Muslims in America and included amongst the Fredrick Douglass 200 most influential Americans whose modern day work embody the legacy of the great abolitionist. Maïmonatou Mar, phD, is the cofounder of Gribouilli, the French social venture empowering domestic workers. Gribouilli launched the first community for nannies in Paris. They are key workers but invisible: mainly middle-age women with migration backgrounds who suffered from isolation and the digital divide. Nearly a thousand nannies benefit from information, P2P learning, basic learning and soft skills class for their economic inclusion and access to decent work. Gribouilli offers leadership programs through an Ambassador program for nannies. Ambassadors of Gribouilli therefore collaborate with public-private partners to improve the public policies. They also develop a coop with more inclusive and accessible commercial services to the benefit of the families. Gribouilli is a 3yr multi-award winning organization (Prizes from Paris City, the Foundations JL Lagardère and Deloitte...). Maïmonatou is an A. de Rothschild Fellow, CXC/Ashoka Fellow and a 2020 Paris Talent. 

COVID-19 has dramatically shown the failure of political institutions in the West to facilitate rapid and responsive consensus in the face of crisis, leading to millions of avoidable deaths and unprecedented economic calamity. As these political systems increasingly lose legitimacy and dissent moves to the streets, we must resist the natural turn the towards technocratic authoritarianism of the largest country that responded successfully. Despite the limited success of some authoritarian regimes, the digitally-enabled radical participatory democracies of countries like Taiwan and Estonia have shown us a far more effective and appealing path, one that can unite us across traditional political divides. RadicalxChange should be seen as an effort to spread, live, elaborate on, formalize and port these stories across the world. SPEAKERSE. Glen Weyl is a political economist and social technologist whose work focuses on harnessing computers and markets to create a radically equal and cooperative society. He is the Founder and Chairperson of the RadicalxChange Foundation, a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and a lecturer at Princeton University. Glen was recently honored as a Bloomberg Top 50, one Wired Magazine’s 25 leaders shaping the next 25 years of technology, and one of Coindesk’s most influential people in blockchain for 2018.  Emmanuel Midy is the Community Lead of RadicalxChange Foundation. He is a writer and consultant on the intersection of media and technology.

The Ethereum ecosystem has been an excellent initial testbed for quadratic funding, through the Gitcoin Grants project, which has directed over a million dollars of funding to Ethereum projects over five rounds in 2019 and 2020. It has effectively demonstrated the basic effectiveness of the quadratic funding mechanism; it has funded projects that are genuine public goods, and often projects that previous funding mechanisms missed. At the same time, the tests have shown some of the more subtle non-economic properties of the mechanism: how it affects people's feeling of being part of a community, how it helps the community learn more about itself, and how different variations affect these issues. In this presentation I go through what the Gitcoin Grants quadratic trials are, and what we've learned from the results of the last five rounds. SPEAKERSVitalik Buterin is the creator of the Ethereum Foundation. He first discovered blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies through Bitcoin in 2011, and was immediately excited by the technology and its potential. He co-founded Bitcoin Magazine in September 2011, and after two and a half years looking at what the existing blockchain technology and applications had to offer, wrote the Ethereum white paper in November 2013. He now leads Ethereum’s research team, working on future versions of the Ethereum protocol. Pia Mancini is a democracy activist, open source sustainer, co-founder & CEO at Open Collective and Chair of DemocracyEarth Foundation. She worked in politics in Argentina and developed technology for democracy around the world. YC Alum, YGL (World Economic Forum).