The Blockchain Socialist

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 about  decentralised digital infrastructure, security, and society.During the interview we spoke about her previous work in one of the first crypto applications to do an ICO in Australia, her switch to academia to study decentralised systems more closely, and how cybernetics can be used as a framework for understanding and designing DAOs. The article she co-wrote is probably one of the most interesting pieces I've read on DAOs and highly encourage people to check it out!If you liked the podcast be sure to give it a review on your preferred podcast platform. If you find content like this important consider donating to my Patreon starting at just $3 per month. It takes quite a lot of my time and resources so any amount helps. Follow me on Twitter (@TBSocialist) and join the r/CryptoLeftists subreddit and Discord to join the discussion.Send me your questions or comments about the show and I'll read them out sometime. Support the showICYMI 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.

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 collective approaches, their quadratic voting tool, Cygnet, and much more.If you liked the podcast be sure to give it a review on your preferred podcast platform. If you find content like this important consider donating to my Patreon starting at just $3 per month. It takes quite a lot of my time and resources so any amount helps. Follow me on Twitter (@TBSocialist) and join the r/CryptoLeftists subreddit and Discord to join the discussion.Send me your questions or comments about the show and I'll read them out sometime. Support the showICYMI 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.

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 discussion. During the interview we talked about his vision for the future of technology, what he thinks are the biggest issues (it's not crypto), and  his skepticisms about blockchains. I of course did my best to present the best case forward for crypto and the left. Unfortunately the interview took place before the Tornado Cash controversy although I was really curious what he would have to say about it and so emailed him afterwards and this his response: "Code is speech. Sanctions for writing code - as opposed to using that code to take unlawful actions - are a danger to us all. Just as we can understand why someone who writes proof-of-concept code that *can* be used in malicious ways is not the same as someone who *does* use that code in malicious ways, writing code that *can* be used for money laundering is not the same as laundering money."If you liked the podcast be sure to give it a review on your preferred podcast platform. If you find content like this important consider donating to my Patreon starting at just $3 per month. It takes quite a lot of my time and resources so any amount helps. Follow me on Twitter (@TBSocialist) and join the r/CryptoLeftists subreddit and Discord to join the discussion.ICYMI - The first documentary teaser was just released! You can watch it here. Be sure to subscribe to the channel on YouTube and follow the account on Twitter.  You can read a lot more information about the documentary on the website at www.cryptofuturesdoc.comSend me your questions or comments about the show and I'll read them out sometime. Support the showICYMI 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.

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 podcast before. During the interview we spoke about his story for getting involved in the crypto commons movement, starting the Crypto Commons Association and Gathering, and Autonomist Marxism. This will be the final installment of the CCG Chronicles.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.If you want to financially support our efforts in making the documentary, you can donate so far with bitcoin, ethereum (any layer), or NEAR at the addresses listed on the website. We’re still unsure when exactly anything will be published, but we’re hoping within the next year although that will depend on the amount of support we can get from the community.Send me your questions or comments about the show and I'll read them out sometime. Support the showICYMI 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.

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 Zargham (@mZargham) is a data and decision systems engineer with over a decade of experience designing and evaluating decentralized algorithms and is the founder of BlockScience, a research and analytics firm for blockchain networks.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.If you want to financially support our efforts in making the documentary, you can donate so far with bitcoin, ethereum (any layer), or NEAR at the addresses listed on the website. We’re still unsure when exactly anything will be published, but we’re hoping within the next year although that will depend on the amount of support we can get from the community.Send me your questions or comments about the show and I'll read them out sometime. Support the showICYMI 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.

Nathan Schneider, a media studies professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and an expert in cooperativism, dives into the fascinating world of crypto. He shares his journey into cryptocurrency and discusses encoding human rights on the blockchain. The conversation examines the role of cooperatives in social movements, challenges of decentralized governance, and the reimagining of labor. Schneider critiques the notion of neutrality in blockchain tech while advocating for inclusive frameworks that enhance democracy and empower marginalized communities.

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 not really that democratic. You have some projects that try to provide a layer of sybil resistance, but many times it includes a loss of some amount of privacy. Idena (@IdenaNetwork) has come across to me as a blockchain that has seemed to found a good balance between privacy and sybil resistance.For this episode I spoke to two community members of the Idena community that go by LTraveler and TravCrypto. In the interview we spoke about how Idena works, the different types of use cases it enables related to digital democracy, and how it protects users' privacy. More ResourcesUnderstanding Idena Article Quadratic Staking calculatorDecentralized AdvertisementsIdena DiscordLTraveler's Github pageIf you liked the podcast be sure to give it a review on your preferred podcast platform. If you find content like this important consider donating to my Patreon starting at just $3 per month. It takes quite a lot of my time and resources so any amount helps. Follow me on Twitter (@TBSocialist) and join the r/CryptoLeftists subreddit and Discord to join the discussion.Send me your questions or comments about the show and I'll read them out sometime. Support the showICYMI 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.

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  (@CirclesUBI) Cooperative based in Berlin. We spoke about why they believe platform cooperatives to be better solutions than what the sharing economy was and their experimentations of CirclesUBI in Berlin. I've previously spoken to Julio Linares to talk more deeply about how CirclesUBI works here. The project has recently announced some planned changes to the system which you can find the details of here. If you want to financially support our efforts in making the documentary, you can donate so far with bitcoin, ethereum (any layer), or NEAR at the addresses listed on the website. We’re still unsure when exactly anything will be published, but we’re hoping within the next year although that will depend on the amount of support we can get from the community.Send me your questions or comments about the show and I'll read them out sometime. Support the showICYMI 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.

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 about, as well as post-Marxist philosophers. If you liked the podcast be sure to give it a review on your preferred podcast platform. If you find content like this important consider donating to my Patreon starting at just $3 per month. It takes quite a lot of my time and resources so any amount helps. Follow me on Twitter (@TBSocialist) and join the r/CryptoLeftists subreddit and Discord to join the discussion.Send me your questions or comments about the show and I'll read them out sometime. Support the showICYMI 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.

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 experience of introducing Trustlines in Venezuela. Trustlines is a mutual credit system built on blockchain that I spoke to Aleeza about in the past here. While the full report about the study has yet to be  published, some of the results can be seen here.If you want to financially support our efforts in making the documentary, you can donate so far with bitcoin, ethereum (any layer), or NEAR at the addresses listed on the website. We’re still unsure when exactly anything will be published, but we’re hoping within the next year although that will depend on the amount of support we can get from the community.Send me your questions or comments about the show and I'll read them out sometime. Support the showICYMI 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.