 You know these talks where they provide you with that the speakers provide you with answers with how to is with Solutions to certain problems At hack events like mch There are also these talks where they don't provide whether speakers don't provide you with with with answers But they just pose interesting questions The next talk is one of those talks so The next speakers is is going to provide us with questions and directions on how we could encode and What social model in the infrastructure we build so please welcome with a very warm round of applause Eleanor and a freedom ownership infrastructure and hope Hi there So this this will be as noted a slightly different talk Hopefully there will be some interesting questions that you get coming out of it There are no slides instead. You can just view some beautiful. Well, you probably can't see it because daylight but overview effect In the background so first kind of a historical note of how I came to be here giving this talk I'm a kid who grew up with Bucky Fuller and climate modeling and a bunch of other stuff and I spent a while thinking about governance and well, I guess Detour via commercial security world did a bunch of early threat modeling work that kind of thing and I spent a while thinking about Governance and how do we build government? How do they actually get structured? You know, I did a bunch of that thinking was happening in the context of the Arab Spring and Occupy I Spent some time with Smari trying to rebuild the Icelandic Constitution into something more useful and I spent a bunch of time in the NGO world and You know doing security for activists and news organizations who are being targeted by nation states And eventually I get really burnt out and quit and went back to the commercial world because I was tired of not being able to solve The problem, you know, it's it's one thing doing the kind of work where you know that your best case is that you reduce the likelihood That the people that you're trying to take care of die where it's a statistical reduction and that's your best outcome But we weren't even really getting that, you know, we were not doing the work suitable to solve the problem and I've sort of come to think of NGOs as the bards of the 21st century's form of epic tragic poetry, you know they write all of these white papers and You know charts and graphs and presentations and that kind of stuff that chronicle the ongoing decline of human civilization Which is a nice job, I guess, you know, I think they could probably do a bit better with actual poetry But that's basically what they're doing And so let's talk a bit about our current moment So as you may have noticed we're dealing with a massive resurgence of fascism across Europe and across America and really seemingly across most places The US is preparing for its first large-scale queer genocide, which is probably going to start in a couple of years We are dealing with an explosion of oligarchs, right? We have added an amazing number of billionaires over the course of this first half of this pandemic Which is not actually great for a lot of reasons that we'll talk about And if we want to maintain globally organized human civilization, we have about seven and a half years to get to carbon zero now most people say net zero but It's kind of questionable these days because it turns out that most of the offsets are junk and That carbon capture in storage is never going to be viable at scale because it requires wildly too much energy And we can't build reactors fast enough, right? You start a new reactor project right now even if you waive the permitting process and you're just looking at construction It's going to take 20 years So nuclear is irrelevant Regardless of what you think about it otherwise And there's a bunch of other stuff that we've kind of figured out like We finally have an estimate of how much methane gets leaked globally and it turns out that once you account You know once you account methane leakage liquid natural gas is worse than coal We're literally better off spinning up all the coal-fired power plants because that doesn't leak into the upper atmosphere So there's a lot of stuff where are we keep realizing that our situation is is worse than it previously was and And this is you know and a lot of this is also driving a lot of the rising fascism out of this kind of stuff We live in an uncertain world and in an uncertain world people look to strong leaders who are willing to shoot the other Which is great when you're the other so if you look at the There are three estimates in the recent IPCC report which are in the probable window And if you look at the worst of those three estimates, we will cross two degrees in 18 years in 2040 now a two-degree world is Already catastrophic. I'm not going to go into the details. You can read all the summaries now Think about the Syrian refugee crisis. That was 6.9 million people leaving Syria Think about 350 million people in The next 18 years becoming international refugees, right? 50 times that number of people Think about what Europe think about what fortress Europe is going to do in response to that We're going to see gunboats in the Mediterranean shooting anything that moves automated, right? Who know I mean the the impact of that on our society if we end up going down that trajectory and if we keep thinking about The world from a frame of ownership from a frame of we've got ours is Not good. I do not want to live in a world where the EU kills a couple hundred million people For trying to escape a place where they can't live anymore So there is some hope There's actually a lot of hope because it turns out that the technical transition is entirely possible None of this is a technical problem and even the bits that are a technical problem. We still keep finding new and new cool things Last year a Saudi team figured out that you can extract lithium from seawater So we don't need to mine lithium anymore It's actually all of that whole resource crisis specifically about lithium is gone and the process is so cheap and It produces chlorine and a couple of other things as byproducts that the lithium itself is almost free So yeah, grid-scale batteries not actually going to be a particularly big deal This is genuinely amazingly good news and there's a lot of that stuff out there We finally had a hybrid lift vehicle get its Get commercial funding, right? So, you know air travel. Yes, it's the third the speed but you can carry 20 times as much and Per passenger mile if you're looking at it for for air passengers. It's like a tenth of the carbon, right? And for shorter trips they can run entirely hybrid So we probably get to keep air travel even right like there's there's genuinely a lot of good news in there If we actually act The one of the interesting things One of the complexities of this is that transition requires infrastructure equality, right? We here in this world live in a world where everything works for us That is not how most of the world works things are going to need to get a lot more equal and in most part That means that everybody else needs to get brought up to speed Significantly because that's the only way that we can make a green transition work, right? You know, yes, there's some leapfrogging you can build micro grids you can do this you can do that but the end impact is significantly more equality of structure now The problem is us Basically, right the problem that we are dealing with the reason why we are putting human civilization Into an early grave is that we are a bunch of rich assholes who want to own the world And I say we because I mean us I mean all of us not just here, but across the first world, right? That you know if we were willing to play ball properly There's a lot of motivation around the places that are gonna die first to like fix things and It's not a technical problem. We just have to choose to do the work We have to choose that we would rather live than be rich and And Specifically the problem is all of those new billionaires I mean, it's also us, but it's them to it's them most specifically because the oligarchs are starting to plan for a tradition a transition They're starting to print plan for an oligarchy preserving transition where they keep their position in the power structure and possibly even improve it and That means a genocide right not not necessarily an intentionally shooting people genocide It just you know things happen to populations sometimes, you know Which to be fair humans have been doing for a very long time all of us are the heirs of Literally dozens of genocides and the historical record as my friend Quinn says it's one of the things that makes us uniquely human is that we commit so many genocides just Like dozens of them in the average century, you know and and you know That's that's the thing that is unique from the animal kingdom lots of other stuff not genocides But anyway, so let's so If we're going to make it through this transition we need to start thinking about our lives a little bit differently and One of the interesting things that's happened Which is actually the genesis of this talk and why I decided that I maybe had something to talk about in the governance space again is Some folks have been going back and looking at the archaeological record again because there's a lot of really interesting archaeology and research that's been done over the past 40 or 50 years about Kind of the shape of the world and how we got here and it turns out that the ideas that we have about history and about structures and About the I think it's the pack or something but the the ideas that we have about the history of power and that kind of thing are Really kind of wrong and why they're wrong is a very interesting story How many people here have read Graeber and Wenger's new book the dawn of everything a few okay? So chunks of this are lifted from that. It's a great book the rest of you should absolutely go and read it Also, Jane Scott's against the grain Come up to me afterwards if you want the names again, so anyway, so let's start talking about freedom, right? Freedom is a really interesting concept. It's one of the things that we're very Bent on preserving in this transition. We talk a lot about human rights and all of this stuff So where did our idea of freedom come from? Well, it turns out that most of the original sources for this came from Roman authors like those were the authorities that Enlightenment scholars drew from very directly when they kind of Coined the set of ideas that became modern human rights now every single one of those Roman authors owned slaves and To own something meant that you were allowed to kill them That was the baseline from which they constructed their idea of freedom Freedom is the ability to own things absolutely and destroy them at will So, yeah, we want to own things and that's why we're killing the world because that's our Our idea of freedom is the ability to kill things So maybe we should look at other ideas of freedom because that one seems like it's starting to become slightly problematic at scale So, yeah, human rights showed up in the Enlightenment became the new way that we frame the structure of society Along with a bunch of other ideas like democracy and other things which have panned out, you know better and worse in different places But we're kind of at the end of the Enlightenment so about 12 12 and a half years ago 11 I remember some time ago at CCC Quinn and I did a talk called no neutral ground in the burning world Where we talked about the end of the Enlightenment and that's basically what we've been living through right the rise of large-scale online disinformation Is kind of the end of that rational society, right? We're going back into the age of gods and monsters where you pick which mythology you believe in and that process happens largely outside of the kind of institutional trust structure all of the other things that were the core of the You know the way that society was supposed to work So now that it's dead, let's look about where the Enlightenment came from and specifically where ideas of the world came from there are basically two models of Two models of how Like what's that? What's the default state of human nature, right? There's Hobbes human nature is you know the the base human nature is the battle of all against all It's red and tooth and claw and there's Rousseau which said that human nature is miraculous and blissful But as soon as you get organization as soon as you get any large-scale population Well, then you have to have power over then you have to have hierarchy it's impossible to have you know even a village without a village headman and That that pair of eyes and Rousseau mostly won right Rousseau mostly won that fight and You know and then Hobbes is pulled out when the fascists need to kill some people But that was basically the philosophical work that was required because this this happened in the context where Europe was leaving The feudal age right and it was starting to move towards early market economies And it needed a conceptual framework to move from the divine right of kings to the divine right of money and This provided the conceptual framework that all of this hierarchy and power over and a strong state with a monopoly on violence Well, these are simply inescapable conditions of the world There is no alternative and we still believe that there is no alternative to capitalism right you have to exist in this Hierarchical structure if you want I don't know sewage removal all of the things that we expect in the world now, right? It's a it's a it's a core of infrastructure so Where did that idea come from? What was were so reading? What was he responding to? So it turns out that at the time the French were spreading out across Quebec and There were trappers and soldiers and priests and and you know all sorts of folks who were talking to a bunch of the natives and they were writing about what those folks told them and Some of those folks even came to France and lectured widely, you know learned French came to France and lectured and There was a very very different model of freedom there And so this is where this is where the dawn of everything like the single set of passages which kind of justified that book for me were a bunch of interactions and and you know even you know translated texts from Kalarondak who was a Wendat statesman in the 1680s or so and This was someone who was you know had had very effective rhetoric was very clear spoken And was clearly very used to arguing his case talking about a different idea of freedom talking about a completely different structure of society and so their idea of freedom was Started with one principle. No one should ever have to follow an order There can be no orders in the society people are gonna agree to do things together. That's totally fine, but no top-down orders ever Now if you take that completely seriously, right? If you build your entire society on the concept that no one should ever be coerced under any conditions to do anything Well, the first thing you have to get rid of is hunger, right? Because a starving man has to follow orders, right? You cannot have hunger and freedom. They are immediately incompatible and there's a bunch of other things you have to have you know care, right? You have to you know, if you if you are hurt you still can't follow an order, okay? Now that means you know Everyone has a duty to provide certain kinds of care and labor to make sure that each other can remain free And they also had an idea that that you should be able to travel and you should be able to build your own social structures your own kind of frames of kind of social combination and so the The travel thing ended up being there's this kind of moedy large system Across most of the Eastern of Eastern North America where you'd have the bear clan and the eagle clan and whatever and Anyone from your clan was had a hospital hospitality obligation to you so you could walk from Quebec to you know like New Orleans and You might not speak the language, but there would be someone there who had an obligation to hospitality to you And it enabled this kind of freedom of well, you know, there are too many people here who disagree So I'm just gonna get up and leave. I'm just gonna walk away If you haven't read Cori doctor his book walk away, it's also recommended and The the freedom of social combinations is another interesting one because it turns out from the archaeological evidence that we have and this is some Of this is guesswork being pieced together the That social structure was an intentionally created reaction to a Somewhere like pre thousand CE dictatorship, you know theocratic dictatorship across most of most of kind of Eastern North America and As that society eventually broke down a bunch of people were like, okay, that sucked That sucked so much that we're never going to let this happen again And we're going to restructure our entire society so that it doesn't happen And it's not possible and the interesting thing is that Precise thing of saying, okay, all of the base tenants of our society We're gonna throw them out. I'm gonna start over again has happened so many times It is probably it is one of the fundamental things that makes us human is that we introspect on our system of governance and our way of living together and we change it and We do that Until recently we do that very very frequently. There were in fact a bunch of Indigenous groups in a bunch of different parts of the world that intentionally often seasonally would swap their entire system of governance You know often they'd live in a small band structure that might be very democratic in the summers and then they'd come into a Theocratic or autocratic winter structure But you know the people who were in charge in the winters had no power in the summertime and This was again Our best guess if we look at where those things came from that was that wasn't oh, this is the primitive state of nature That was a bunch of people who were like ah if we build things this way Then those fuckers don't get uppity and try to stick around So we're gonna we're gonna intentionally structure our society to avoid the persistent concentration of power And one of the other things that's interesting that comes out of looking at the at the archaeological research is this idea that Well, you know as soon as you have complexity you need hierarchy So the time from the first city First thing that we would call a city to the first city where there's where there's archaeological evidence of a hierarchical government is About two thousand years It took a very long time For us to start having those two forms go together and even after that point many many many civilizations persisted non-hierarchically in a bunch of different contexts or Tried up just wild panoply of governance styles now The reason this hasn't been you know the reason this isn't more sort of common knowledge is that Looking at the archaeological record in this way requires Syncredism across a huge number of sites and it requires it requires kind of re-evaluation from first principles Which is basically not publishable in an academic context because it's too far out of any of anyone's lane The book that Graeber and Wenger wrote was basically their hobby project. They're well like okay We can publish this in the popular press We're gonna do the work as seriously as we can but it's academically useless because it's it's it's considered unserious, right? It's too big of a it's too big of a picture that we're drawing so we've gotten trapped in this Rousseauian model of how we interpret archaeological remains etc and The interesting thing like if we if we look at what If we look at what oligarchs do right and to a certain extent what institutions do But especially what oligarchs do is they're trying to freeze structures, right? they break down the institutions that support a pro-social world and Then they use you know market manipulation monopoly power etc to create these frozen structures where Where political evolution can't happen, right? They do large-scale many media manipulation like there's all of this this whole set of tools Which is designed to preserve their power over time and This is one of the things that we're now running into But anyway, so The Rousseau looked at this challenge of this. Oh actually power over isn't necessary, you know And one of the interesting things this this I enlightenment ideal of rational debate Well, it turns out when you have a society that Where no one can give each other an order you end up getting very good at convincing people to do things because you still need Collective action like you know, there are still crops that need to be harvested. There's still Population movements. There's still all of this kind of stuff. So you have a bunch of people who basically spend a big chunk of their life in a debate society and Weird right after that contact that's contact that started popping up in European Coffee shops and the books that the books that a lot of this mirrored material came in were read by every intellectual in Europe at the time they were they were kind of the hot new thing the hot new structure and What Rousseau and others created with the Enlightenment was basically Okay, so we have market society and we have this what feels like a catastrophically dangerous philosophical challenge to The structure of power to the idea of power over Well shit, we need to come up with something and what they built was this Enlightenment structure Which was designed to provide just enough freedom To sort of contain these ideas that actually we don't have to be serfs and we could live in in a more radically free way While still making room for at the time the kings and the merchants and the entire Structure of power under that right human rights are sort of a trap They're a trap that's designed to maintain the power structure. It's it's the rights to the bare minimum Not the right to everything So the thing which was really fascinating there was this direct experience of What is the mental state? What is the interiority of someone living in a non-ownership society right of living in a world where you own? Basically, nothing you have you certainly have like the right to use all of the possessions which are close to you But even there there was a whole there was a whole very deeply held Belief that well if someone has a dream about a thing right if someone has a dream about like oh, I dreamt of your Your comb well, then you have to give it to them because you know It's very important that those kinds of dreams are realized now now this obviously this could be abused But you know this is you know This is baked into a very deep social contract that no you you would never do that falsely right that would be Completely unjustifiable and you know runs counter to a lot of our ideals But it means that yes your possessions do kind of come and go But because you are exist in this social milieu, which has an incredibly strong contract that says that you will be taken care of it doesn't matter and One of the interesting things as we look at moving into this time of massive Ecosystemic geopolitical ecological disruption is That our stuff isn't gonna keep us safe No one in here is going to be safe because you own a tells a Tesla with a bio weapons grade air filtering system That's not gonna fucking keep you alive And it's not a question of oh you own an AR-15 guess what you can still fucking starve asshole You know none of this stuff is going to keep you alive what is going to keep you alive is Adaptive work with the people around you with the community with the infrastructural context that you live in and Whoever else ends up needing to move into that because if you try to maintain that hard border You're back at your stuff keeping you alive again and eventually that's gonna fail and Eventually when that border does fail, they're gonna be a bit less happy about the genocide bit So you probably are better off Figuring out how to actually live together and I think that you know Knowing that we knowing that it is possible to do large-scale coordination without power over Knowing that it is possible to live a life where you have that feeling of of deep personal safety without Without the hard governance structure is incredibly powerful Now we are in an era of automation we are in an era of Permissionification and security of vacation of all infrastructure right if you go to a refugee camp you are required to use biometrics if you want to eat if you're not identifiable you starve right and You know and it's a small step From that to well, you know that post you made we don't like it So you don't eat today and it doesn't take it doesn't take not eating for very many days for you to change your You know opinions on what you're willing to express politically So if we want to keep freedom we probably need to start rethinking and rebuilding some of these infrastructural systems that allow that kind of power over if you look at the history of European colonialism One of the interesting moments was the introduction of the telegraph because the telegraph turned colonies into empires Because it allowed for the centralization of power It allowed for the centralization of information at a speed where governance decisions could be made in one place in Europe instead of You know every every colony every you know outpost etc being basically Kind of on its own you know sure that you'll get a letter in six months telling you what you should have done But it's not like the guy can you know can sack you in any practical way Whereas if you can just send a telegram to the you know separate Separately commanded security force that he has on site. It's a very different story in a very you know much shorter shorter enforcement window so The and the other thing is that reinvention of governance right that idea of change that idea that we should Change our social combinations not because the new one is going to be better but Because the difference Disables that accumulative function of power right changing like you know if we Let's say every every other generation we completely changed the inheritance structure for property You know we all agreed that like oh, you know now it's collective now It's this now it's that who knows right and it doesn't matter which system we picked but it changes right now It's a lottery you inherit somebody else's property whatever You don't get Dynastic wealth then right you've immediately eliminated dynastic wealth but and there were there you know so many different versions of this where Reinvention is a critical function And so anything that we build that mid that works against Reinvention is probably going to be used against us because yeah, we are we are a 1% room here almost certainly But we're not a tenth of a percent room or a hundredth of a percent room or a millionth of a percent room Which means that we're not yet with the people building the tools that are going to be used to hurt us We're not the people who are going to benefit from those tools You know first a first in the periphery and then in the core, you know, we've watched the US do this with You know policing tactics that they first used in Afghanistan and Iraq and now they use you know Now they use them at home and now they increasingly are using them against you know shock white people sometimes with money Yeah, we shouldn't be shocked about that because that's what power does that's how it works So we should maybe think about building those tools in the first place So I am an anarchist but And I'm also a communist but it turns out that revolutions are Generally bad They do not work very well the historical record for them is pretty awful and You know the the the personally viewed very current record for them is also pretty awful on average And that's basically because people still need to eat right? So you have an immediate governance problem right the day of the glorious revolution and then the next day We need to move a lot of food around Shit, how do we do it? Okay, who knows how this system works this system is designed Infrastructurally around an assumption of hierarchy the railroads need to run the factories need to run We're gonna put a lot of the same people in charge because they are the only ones who claim to know how the job works, etc and It's very difficult to have a revolutionary structure that recapitulate that actually changes the form of society Without people starving in the meantime now if you're willing to have people starve You can actually change the form of society and we have done this a bunch because we're good at genocides And we like them, but maybe that's also not a great idea a if you don't like genocides But also if you're trying to manage an incredibly complex resource transition where you cannot afford To fuck shit up like that right we have an amazingly narrow window where we get to keep globally organized human civilization and if we spend it all on revolutions and wars things are not looking good Things are not looking good So and then the then there's so that's the communist way and the anarchist way is well We're gonna tell people about the possibility like I'm doing right now We're gonna tell people about the possibility that you could all just live freely in your own combinations And once we've told enough people about this then the day will come where everyone's just like well Yeah, let's just go do that and There's a little step in there, you know, we've gotten a lot better at telling people about things, you know I am seeing a lot more anarchist propaganda online these days. It's lovely, but also and Then a miracle happens if you remember the old New Yorker cartoon is not actually a plan for social transition That gets us to carbon zero in seven and a half fucking years So it's gonna be a muddle right we know it's the best case is this is a muddle and we get some things massively wrong Because this is a wildly complex problem, right? We can't solve it. It's not a problem that has a solution It's a problem that has an ongoing set of maintenance actions that we will find out if it worked after the fact and You know who the fuck knows maybe we get lucky So but we also Need to do something about the oligarchs and we need to do something about hypercapitalism that is the beast that created this entire thing in the first place so Well, what do you do when you need to solve a problem and you don't know how to solve it and You're kind of making shit up as you go. Well, you generally build a prototype Because prototyping works pretty effectively now. We don't have a ton of time So probably what you do if you have a bunch of people and a bunch of problems is you build a lot of prototypes all in Parallel, you know, it's the shotgun method you throw a bunch of shit at the wall and some of it sticks and then you do that and So we should perhaps consider that like if you are in this room you probably have Either financial or lifestyle flexibility of a certain kind also because you can come and live in a field for a week and You're probably interested in sort of weird shit and you have a life For a short period of time before the ecosystem breaks down and you probably die starving along with everybody else so why not spend that life fucking around and finding out and You know, whatever you've been told about the structure of the world Take a look at it and see if that thing that you've been told Supports the oligarchs continuing to grind us all into dust because it probably does because that's what we're all told all the time And then maybe go try something else. I don't know. I don't fucking care what you try. Just do something different right prototype a new way of interacting with power and the structure of the world and see what comes out of it and One of the things that will come out of it and this is this is also very relevant for us because this is a roomful of tool builders, right and there is such a thing as the revolution of the tool builder because tools encode politics They encode ways of thinking about the world the telegraph encodes empire, right? You know one and we don't necessarily know what those tools mean when we build them, right? It turns out that Al Qaeda is basically a Facebook page with a bunch of IEDs, right? It's it's not that much more than a meme To the extent that the United States government's standard of whether or not you're an Al Qaeda member is whether or not you say you're an Al Qaeda member That's it. That's literally all you got to do. It's like anonymous Al Qaeda is anonymous. It's the same fucking thing, right? so if I to steal another thing from Quinn if I if I say that well, this is the This is the the radically queer Branch of Al Qaeda appear all our bombs are glitter bombs. I'm now an Al Qaeda member because that's how it fucking works Right, that's literally the way the governance structure works So we don't necessarily know what the tools work bill we build are going to mean And we're gonna have to do some finding out But it's very difficult to find out if you also don't have a lived context in which those tools work So maybe go make friends with a bunch of people who aren't in this room who are very different from you and try doing Weird shit in your lives together and then try figuring out what are the tools that we need that we don't have Right, what are the you know? What are the capabilities that are missing in our technical ecosystem that happen to be within? Your grasp or the grasp of whoever you happen to know And then see where that takes you One of the things so I've I spent a while working on the Briar project Briar is an asynchronous messaging tool that deals with latencies roughly between a microsecond and a month designed for very hard security contexts and that came out of Watching the student protests in London. So there was a tool or my involvement in it There's a tool called Suki and Suki was an anti-kettling tool because it turns out that cops are great dealing with 100,000 person March because that's kind of the way they think that's an institutional hierarchy. Yes There's a problem We will throw bodies at the problem and they're really really wildly bad at dealing with 20 simultaneous 5,000 person marches all around a city when it's a bunch of college kids who can run out a fair clip and just like as Soon as the cops show up they vanish so Suki came out of there was a really bad kettle and Somebody built the tool to basically just let people you know phone in reports and watch where the kettle happened And then they told people hey, there's a kettle forming here Don't go there and so they didn't and it was mayhem in the most glorious way possible And I took a look at this. This is very interesting, but this is like a Google Maps mashup They're gonna fucking hammer you the next time you do this. Okay, so how do we you know What would a tool look like that was Fully decentralized that was actually just running on everybody's phone uses, you know local Wi-Fi or Bluetooth or whatever You know GSM up links if it's if it's there And it makes the source of all this data pretty intractable and then a friend of a friend was already working on briar I was like aha, that's an RPC layer. That's an RPC layer that deals with this kind of you know hard systemic problem And the tool is moved very slowly. We still don't have that version. I'm not super involved at this point But someday I would like to go back and take that tool and say okay So what if we had what would it look like to take the doD common operating picture? Which is a battle space sensor fusion system that takes you know information off a bunch of different war fighters This is their way of talking about it, you know literally everything from a heart rate monitor to you know and a GPS location off an individual grunt to space-based radar and figures out What is this picture build together who needs to know about this get them the information in the form that they need to understand it Right, so what does that look like for anarchists? I don't know What does that tool do in the world? No fucking clue Might build it and fuck around and find out So That's kind of what I'm suggesting that we do is Fuck around and find out but the problem with fucking around and finding out is that the oligarchs are still there And they're looking at these tools that we're building and they're being like well, that's an interesting tool I wonder how I can make that a tool that helps oligarchs Has anyone here heard of web 3? Fuck those people entirely we used to have 15 years ago 10 years ago We used to have this really cool burgeoning decentralized text scene that was looking at all of the cool things that we could do if we Turned the internet inside out again, and you know that take advantage of this permissionless innovation and break down all these silos and Then the Bitcoin assholes moved in and now anytime somebody says decentralization. Oh, but where's your token? So fuck around and find out shoot a web 3 developer today Build a new system in the world and possibly we might get to keep globally organized civilization So I think we have a bit of time for questions Or comments or wild rants, please no vegetables So we we do have time for question and answers if you have a question or a comment or whatever, please walk up to the microphones and Ask a question I see from we don't have a question from the internet yet. Unfortunately. Yes, please come up to the microphone Walk closely to the microphone and speak into it. Thank you Hello You said that Revolutions are kind of a bad idea because doesn't work but you also said that Societies in the past used to change every time and we would try many different things Do you not think that the revolution is the way to do that? Like if something breaks down bends down Then there is space to create something new if there isn't how can something new come up? So Partially what I'm proposing is that we build parallel things next to it because part of the problem with revolutions And like a revolutions do work if you're willing to accept a genocide as the cost of the revolution I am generally anti-genocide. I feel fairly comfortable in that position But also the problem is that revolutions successful revolutions with genocides are incredibly infrastructurally disrupting and While we might have one right now. It makes it very unlikely that we're gonna hit carbon zero in seven and a half years So it's probably a bad idea right now But in parallel like where's the space like we we everything is built like there's no land Where would that in parallel be I don't know But like like I said, I do not have answers for you today Maybe I have interesting questions although one of the things is as large-scale societal structures start breaking down You get cracks you get places where you can do things for a little while. Is it enough? I don't know. Let's find out Thank you Hi, so my question is the following statement Briar has been used on protests in Poland already great as a As a backup for regular several communication any other I am Just just in case the cell towers were shut down or anything like that, right? So this thing is already happening. The area is already being used as as this tool. Yeah, no It is like things are moving. It's just you know, yeah have you seen how the Ukrainians manage their crowdsourced resources No, I haven't but I I I have some guesses and Like I've seen what Occupy Sandy did for instance, which is another fascinating case of a horizontal resource distribution network so what happens is that you have organizations that collect resources from all over the world and the way they distribute those two groups is They look at your reputation on social media You're a group you post some videos of you bombing fascists and That makes you a credible group to send resources to So what I'm hearing is the Russians are gonna start gaming YouTube a lot more Just DMCA take down all the bombing videos and anyway, but yeah, no that means that makes a lot of sense I mean reputation systems are complicated They're fine as long as you don't try to formalize them because the first rule of building a reputation system Is that no one who has a reputation has time to interact with a reputation management system? So they kind of don't work when you formalize them, but informal ones we use all the time And thank you for a thought-provoking thought Talk I should say so I was wondering if you are aware of the work of Philip Betheth who has a particular conception of freedom No, so it's a We of course knows the two conceptions of freedom that Berlin told us talks about sort of liberal Ideas so the liberal idea freedom is that you are only free if you are free of people Interfering with what you want to do very liberal idea and his idea that is a very old idea as well Is that you're only free if you're free from domination? So that's very similar to what you said I think slightly different because I think he believes that that that is possible In a democracy so there can still be orders probably but the but the orders can never be arbitrary They should be Organized in a way that is non arbitrary so that you can count on it So I don't know in a state with a rule of law all these things that I guess is a slightly Different from your anarchist point of view. So I'm very curious to hear your thoughts about is this Non-ownership society possible maybe in a democratic state or what are your thoughts about democracy in general? I mean, I think I Believe in the idea of obligate geographic Infrastructural collectives right so if you are trying to manage water you have a problem Which is at the scale of a watershed you cannot manage that via a group that is smaller than everyone who lives in the watershed Right because that is the shape of the program. Similarly. We have a we have an atmosphere shed, right? So we have a you know we will you know We have a global obligate resource management problem that requires cooperation from everyone However, that doesn't mean that we need a global government that manages everything in our lives It means that we meant we need a global government that manages everything that we put into that global commons so I think the One of the biggest problems with the state is that we each only live in one of them We should live in hundreds of different states that are structured around hundreds of different problems That are actually independent of each other, right? Yes, it means wildly more overhead However, if we stop spending all of our time making marketing videos and doing whatever the fuck other stuff We do you're gonna spend a lot more time in well You're not gonna spend more time in meetings You're just gonna spend the same time in very different kinds of meetings, right? It's not like we don't have the social capacity, you know the the joke about the problem with socialism as it takes too many evenings That's fine. Do it during the day instead So yes, we we probably do need Structures that for instance. Yes, the the global atmospheric collective probably needs to have recourse to coercive Violence around things that people put into the air be great if they didn't need to but they're probably gonna need that However, they shouldn't have it anywhere else How we achieve that fracturing is left as an exercise to the reader Last question, please. Unfortunately. We're running off time So yeah, so my question is kind of related to the first question Sure So my question is kind of related to the first question It basically boils down to the idea is is it possible to do an anarchist revolution, right? So when I when I look what happened To in Arab Spring, for example, all the revolutions fell basically But what came out of it was basically what you were describing like anarchy and people learned about a different way and I Think and a lot of people think it will you know pay off in like 30 40 years or something Maybe I like I'm I'm I'm I'm definitely not against the idea But we have a very short-term problem right now I don't know that I don't know the answer to the larger question. I have no idea I think that if you It feels very likely to be messy unless you've done some of the prep work in parallel, right if you have a set of social structures that Could provide an alternate organizing mechanism for whatever set of infrastructure you need to run That you can swap in relatively quickly, right? You know your first hundred-day plan for after the revolution, right is well Okay, we allow certain forms of hierarchical organization for critical infrastructure to continue and then we transition them through into you know whatever right but And and this is the this is partially the exigent nature of revolutions, right you spend all of your capacity Planning for how do you get to the revolution? And it's very difficult to have the practical hundred-day plan and the transition team ready when you haven't started doing the shooting yet but that's kind of when you need to do it and so I Think what I would want to see from an anarchist revolution is a lot more organization Because that's what makes it actually fucking work. Thank you all