 fun. Great okay so this is I think we're midway through the 2020 semester season of the data together reading a group and the topic this week was trust both cryptographic and human. I didn't realize that piece until I read it again today that we had that like subtitle to it um and yeah so Brendan and I are I will be I guess facilitating it um I guess maybe I thought we could start off if it's okay with like just a go around about what people thought um we had like a bunch of readings but they're quite brief so I thought we might just start with like general impressions around the topic and then kind of maybe try and move through the core ones um and and see where people are at um yeah so does anyone want to go first about kind of like what came up for them when they were reading this stuff? I don't have a whole lot to say but my immediate impression was that that thought everyone piece talking about how people work with technology and whether it's accessible and whether they feel like they have power over it I want to read that whole paper that was really really cool um it really brought home a lot of the concepts that we talked about in the monopolies reading of like there was a quote in there that was along the lines of well it doesn't really matter if I understand the issue my option is to turn it on or off yeah and I haven't I didn't get a much chance to read I was like skimmed everything and I realized I really wanted to read I really wanted to read that um the Brunton one because it's like Story Bay and I haven't been able it's like the longest one so I didn't get to get through it um but I guess the thing I mean the thing that I was from when I skimmed when like the Wikipedia page and um there's that TechCrunch article I guess I'm more interested in the human aspect of trust and the cryptographic part generally um and I didn't see that much yet in the readings or what I could read at the time so I'll chime in I guess because it's uh that might be you can do some connecting work there um yeah because I definitely some of the initial basis for this talk came out of this sort of relationship between cryptographic trust and human trust and specifically we're one of the things we're trying to get at was a little bit of of the co-opting of the phrase trust or the repurposing of the phrase trust as it as it relates to um and and looking at it through both sides of the mirror um or however many sides of the prism or choose your object um but I think the thing that for me really jumped out was that like uh Kelsey is really with you on the dot everyone um just this from one side you're just seeing this like population that just feels completely beholden to to like sort of at the whims of a technology um and like a degraded faith and a sense of a lack of control um being expressed in a number of places and then at the other side you also have the TechCrunch article sort of talking about how oh yes we're going to rebuild the trust web and they're describing something that is at the same time more complicated and and like less uh and and less about trust in the human sense right I think and I think that was what was exciting about the dot everything in juxtaposition to the cryptographic concept trust where uh for me what really jumped out is like if you read the bitcoin white paper that just that first paragraph it sort of talks about how oh we're going to solve the trust problem and but it's a fairly narrow definition right it's it's the double spending problem is really what they're talking about and and the double spending problem is just being able to prove that a single dollar was only spent once um or once at a time um and and how that quickly sort of like spirals into a lexicon that sort of co-ops the phrase trust or leverages the phrase trust um which I found really uh yeah just like I really wanted to talk about that today I wanted to see what others think about the way that the word trust is used and reused and and and what it means to different people uh in this in this space I guess that was more more questions and observations but sort of sort of where my head's at yeah I'll raise some uh just I'll build on that and then maybe that'll help us kind of like go into a direction for discussion um I totally kind of echo uh Brendan those themes you brought up and what everyone else has mentioned is sort of being um I guess on my mind and also when we were thinking about selecting this I think the other thing that we were trying to kind of complement and I think it'd be fun to talk about even if folks didn't get to read it it's like a little bit of that history that came out of Finn Brunton's like um book digital cash about like actually some of the things that weren't going on to like help redefine trust as it got redefined in this like cryptographic way um and then taken up by the sort of like decentralized decentralistas um and I think that other piece of Libra which maybe makes sense to kind of bring up at the end was us like trying to think about those this role of like gatekeepers or like who those trusted parties are and I mean it's sort of skewed pretty financial heavy in terms of like you know like like there's like the bitcoin white paper Libra association is also in this like very financialized like technology like take the social web here comes the trust web I think even though it's sort of broadly trying to be about something else really falls into that like talking about trust in a very specific technology way that's very informed by like currency um but then we wanted to like open that up a little bit and sort of or like do that comparison work or think about the ways that that term is being leveraged in this context and that's why we chose that dot everything dot everyone summary because I think it does a nice like hey like what are people currently thinking about their relationship to technology and then also I don't know if it's helpful but it was helpful to just like take a spend a bit of time looking at that Wikipedia article and being like oh right like what are all of the different contexts that trust is used in and a lot of them are like not about financial transactions so why is this the like dominant like source to mine for inspiration when we talk about technology um it gives a very specific kind of like lineage there um yeah anyway I see a hand go Kelsey yeah um it's all it's impossible to not remember in this moment that edgy got into the decentralized web because of a lack of trust in the state and like I'm reading these articles while like at a protest where we're facing off against militarized police and on the other side of the barricade that the one barricade the police have erected is between them and the peaceful protesters and meanwhile like two days ago someone you know drove from the street into the crowd and every other protest if ever been at there's been a barricade erected by the police to protect protesters from traffic right like there's no trust here and like yesterday a big event in the Seattle protest is that they the the face off they actually left um and so we took we took the precinct they had boarded it up and like all sort of stuff but the street that had been blocked for over a week was now available and like it's really this interesting space where everyone's talking about like well who do we trust like the police are obviously not allowed in this space there are still barricades up controlling access um those barricades are it's really there's no one leader here uh the barricades are controlled by different people who are like just just showing up honestly it could be anyone the John Brown Gun Club which is a far left um second amendments group has shown up to do security um against threats of proud boys that's been a rumor around for like days there's like and everything inside the zone is it feels very burning man to be honest um it's there's just like just incredible amounts of just free stuff and people walking by several times an hour offering you food and earplugs and hand sanitizers and stuff and so there's this really strong outpouring of community trust in this moment especially over trust of state trust of sanctioned authority but there's not this there's not a real strong trust in like decentralization of a concept and it's really hard to believe that this is that we've reached like some kind of sustainable state um so there is still need for some something um and it it feels like we want tech to be the answer like in in general space not here specifically that lets us have both can you can I ask you to say a little more about this one last part you said I think you gave us a lot to kind of connect back to the readings but this idea of like there's not trust in decentralization as a concept like what do you mean you mean like people aren't using the term decentralization to think about that space I mean I've seen people on Twitter referring to it as a task like an autonomous zone it's very much drawing on like a set of anarchist literature and you know organizing tactics but I'm very much at a distance yeah I know you're absolutely right and and it's crazy because even when you're standing there you're still getting most of your information from the twitter hashtag um which is part of the issue um but there are people present who absolutely do trust like these anarchy principles that's definitely a thing that's happening but broadly as a society and even as a group of protesters there is not like a consensus of trust more co-opted keywords consensus but does that help um I have like so many places that we could go from there uh in my mind I guess I wonder I think you kind of bring up what is maybe we can unpack this a little more before we kind of like go in a little bit to that like I would say maybe the Finn Brinton reading and the Satoshi Nakamoto like that first Bitcoin paper but like this idea of like I think this comes up so much in all of our previous reading groups is the like wanting to use the tech or like what that needs to look like I mean maybe we could talk more about how we've experienced people wanting to rely on tech for trust or like what forms those currently look like because I mean I would say that the the way that decentralization wants for certain decentralized protocols want to replace trust or be trustless is only one thread in that I think even in Silicon Valley there's like a new mode that we want to use new forms of like technical mediation to like replace or augment how you think about a relationship you have with a trusted party like any reputation system that anyone decides to implement where you vote on people um you know is like an example but maybe we could just like talk a little bit about like that how tech is being mixed up with trust relationships first that might help us like kind of set the stage um I guess my little input on this is that I think in terms of the social perspective on trust it's based on vulnerability and based on whether you feel comfortable being vulnerable with somebody whereas technological or tech-based trust isn't actually based on vulnerability it's based on like in vulnerability so you're not actually trusting it's more that you feel comfortable that nothing's actually going to happen just because of the way that the technology is structured so I just feel like in terms of the experience it's very different so I mean I don't know I guess obviously trust plays a role but I think like um conceptualizing it as trust is like the opposite of what it actually is yeah I like I really I agree with that um I think for me when I was reading through some of the readings I like I got through that um that dot everyone paper and just thinking about how like edgy like I had how I built trust and relationships with people with edgy like because we you know it was mediated through slack and like zoom like through tech technological processes and the only way for me I felt like the way that I built trust with folks here was just was through reliability like people showing up for each other on a you know weekly basically we were always showing up for each other and we depended on each other and I don't see yeah trust is earned exactly and I don't see how like any form of technology like creates that like reliability where I'm like where I can actually say like I trust Kelsey I trust Don I trust Brendan yeah I think the way that I conceptualize trust from a social perspective or an interpersonal perspective is like it's like a feedback loop because if you give a little bit of vulnerability to someone then they will kind of return that and then gradually more trust is built um then there's also like a negative feedback loop to where if you if you let somebody know that you mistrust them then they will be more guarded around you and they'll mistrust you so over time there will be more and more mistrust um so it's it's like a process but in terms of like technological trust it's it's like a first principles sort of approach where it's it's not about the process but it's about like the the rules or the structure yeah sorry I can you know hopefully I can jump in feathers are okay for that um because yeah I think it's really interesting and like a very important I love Masha that the that you honed in on this on the vulnerability characteristics on this sort of like and and the sort of I think I'd like to sort of highlight with or I think highlight that is the sort of way that a relationship a real relationship of trust starts with no protocol and evolves over time right like it's and as you're sort of referring to this cycle of like okay I'm gonna give you a little I'm gonna I'm gonna lead with with a little bit of vulnerability in an effort to sort of like move things forward but from the other perspective you also have like from the protocol design perspective or from like a cryptocurrency a much more constrained definition of trust that sort of has to arrest every possible interaction that could happen and codify it and and sort of and we use the phrase trustlessness right and this and this like assuming bad actors sort of methodology and I think I for me I like Kelsey you've been spending a lot of time thinking about the police and thought a lot of time thinking about our particularly following very closely to Minnesota's defunding uh sort of promise that has come out um and this uh this sort of like stepping forward which is a very human capacity to say look we don't understand what we're gonna do but we know that this isn't working and we're and we've at least had some public commitment on the on the behalf of politicians to sort of like work on a new thing right now and moving a way forward and I think that that's an interesting like like how on earth would that like it's just such an interesting display of trust I think you could one could very much argue that you know the phrasing that we use for decentralization really sort of starts to fall apart here where like there is a there has been a sort of transition of power by by virtue of sort of productive or protests that have managed to sort of produce uh start to achieve the outcomes of the desire um but like I don't know that that we would if we were to call that decentralization that sounds like shoehorning things in a way that doesn't feel right um and so I think there's like an interesting way in which to me that's like a lot of what's been happening uh in the Black Lives Matter movement and in the protests that we're seeing across the world right now just like don't in any way graph onto this um into this sort of crypto digital current like it's amazing how how stale some of these articles feel in the current context and how incredible like all of this fundamentally is about a lack of trust in the police right like a lack of like we don't this there this is a trust conversation it's just not the one that we picked the readings for in some ways and in other ways it really is but I don't know I just think that's really interesting and I just want to highlight this sort of the limit of of the framing here and and how much the current sort of events has kind of really blown that open I know it was a bit of a ramble but no totally makes sense I mean um I would just add like I think we've had these sort of like success in previous readings really trying to like bring up against like pretty disparate things around each other like I remember we were talking about like the relationship to the state and the civic and we like had that no one is illegal reading and you know like I think that has always been really helpful to kind of like open up things um and in this case we actually have a much tighter set of readings that are about like a very narrow take on like a technological technological take on trust but that like yeah I think current events um and you know witnessing state violence police brutality you know the murder of George Floyd Regis Khrushchevsky and her death here in Toronto has like really like yeah it's just like forcing it's kind of showing the paucity of some of this to explain like what I would say is more at stake in most people's relationship to tech but I do want to say that I don't know if you've noticed but there are absolutely some Bitcoin people on Twitter who have tried to make a case for cryptographic protocols in this moment I'm not even joking I wish I was joking they are like wild ride Twitter threadreads like you're like I don't even know where you're going with this they involve like handwritten charts they're about the financial system and then at the end they're like oh and this is why it will solve police brutality and you're like what like this is ideology this is pure ideology at this point like you can't even like drop your your thing for a moment uh and like actually like engage separate from that with like what's going on um sorry I saw a couple of those yesterday uh and like I'm still thinking about them um okay so that is a as an aside I actually thought something that you said and that builds up what Basha said would be the thread that would be more meaningful to carry forward uh was this idea of like uh first principle structure over process um and and Brennan you said this idea of like a real relationship of trust starts with no protocol and evolves over time I don't I mean like I think both of what you said it opens up some really interesting possibilities and this is not to agree or disagree it's just to offer more to that conversation um I absolutely think there's something about how stuff evolves or like the process side that is very under considered and how um like say a design gets like specced out or implemented and like the format of a white paper is like this like oh I've made an argument that will like hold up over time as like the final instantiation of like this thing this proof of concept that maybe has like an intellectual lineage that sets itself up to be bad like that but that actually I think that protocol in different contexts and say and like um you know in indigenous communities in the way that some labs that are like indigenous STS labs have drawn on protocol um like I think allows for an evolution or actually allows for a structure that builds trust so I kind of feel like there maybe are models to think about like what a scaffold is that like provides that space that you can like build relationships in um that's different than this weird like rigid like oh we made a protocol that's like not flexible and like didn't consider a full range of things and now everyone has to operate in the narrow confines I think I saw a hand from Kelsey yeah and I I really appreciate my strategy brought in there were a bunch of frameworks and I'm like spinning them all around in my head this may not come out super coherent um I especially really liked the truth default theory concept where it's saying that people by default think that other people are telling the truth and I feel like there is a really interesting place where the protocol aspects plug in like ma she talked about positive feedback loops and negative feedback loops for trust but I'm not sure like I think there's got to be nuances in there that are that are um kind of kind of the problem like and I'm yeah I'm not not like to pick it up or anything but like the like trust the specifically you call that vulnerability and I think that that's really really accurate but I think that we often take following a protocol as a proxy for uh being of actual goodwill I guess um and then we have this problem of like like I guess a classic a classic abusive relationship of any kind whether it's like state with people or you know person with person um is where that negative cycle doesn't kick in right so it's where you keep trusting them even though they never or they rarely or they often betray your trust um so like that's kind of a failure of our trust mechanisms and then there's sort of this this part where protocol comes in and I've kind of been formulating phraseologies that I haven't thought all the way out um in the chat of like well what if protocols are our guidelines for how you can how you can earn trust in this specific community because it absolutely is part of what goes on in terms of like if you dress a certain way if you know how to act at a certain kind of dinner the community that cares about how you act at that certain kind of dinner can use that as a proxy for you being of the community trustable by the community um but then when you have different protocols I mean this is this is conflation pure conflation here but you know if you have UDP try to talk to HTTP like you're just not going to have a success at all there's nothing there I think there's something interesting though about there's something about that site of like protocol and the way that that word is used in different areas I think that does open up something like again this idea in kind of like a narrow technical sense or how it's used I think maybe in particular around like a current wave of decentralized projects is very different than even I think that broader history of protocols and computing and digital communications to be honest because most of them are old and grow and like weird and over time in the history of how they get defined and redefined is quite interesting and intense um not totally my area I made a BGP joke not very well but we know some people are really in the BGP we're like dated together friends um I wonder actually if maybe this does help us segue a little bit into talking about that kind of like like like cryptographic trust and maybe that we can rely on front end but we don't have to exclusively to kind of like think about that um I think he just provides a couple of anecdotes and like moments from this early history of when it was getting developed that are helpful to kind of understand some of that intellectual underpinnings or like what was motivating those folks which I think definitely like inflect how those concepts get used in the technologies that are built with them I want to sort of connect what Kelsey said with I watched the video of your last month's um talk and somebody brought up the idea of um of the blockchain intersecting with medical data um and like my bad so like I think it um Kelsey brought up like this idea of like the switch of when you switch into like in the negative feedback loop or the distrust cycle um and like it kind of conflicts with the sort of ledger aspect of blockchain um and how like if you if somebody abuses the trust in that type of system the information that like if information is supposed to be private and it becomes public as a result of an abusive trust then there's there's limited recourse in terms of what you can do to um well I mean you can't undo it but then also you can't um I guess like how would a negative feedback loop work in that kind of a context is what I'm asking totally like go ahead sorry no no great I was gonna say maybe Brendan can respond yeah totally I think um I think it's interesting like the it's not this is a another misappropriation or a phrase but the notion of being like sort of outed when you're using a permanent append only log is uh by outed I don't mean that's sort of like uh sort of the closet sense I mean in the like uh denonimization sense right if we're um and when we sort of start intermingling I really I think you can abstract past uh medical data and really any kind of um person-identifiable information right even your transaction history itself is forms of sort of unique behavioral pattern um then like Bitcoin has struggled with this for a long time it's it's not it's never never claimed to be anonymous but it did it's sort of like implied it um and I think that I don't think that that means that a blockchain is sort of there are it's a data structure at the end of the day and so you have mechanisms for you can control for that a lit to some degree um by moving things off of the chain that don't need to be on it um and really sort of and I think we see a lot of stuff like Zcash which is like a really great example of of trying to take anonymization to the nth degree um in a blockchain and really and and have those two sort of ideas sit in the same space at the same time and and be relatively cohesive um but I think that um I guess there's the the it intersects with this like do I trust the technology and do I and then what am I what what types of trust does the technology enable I think are the two questions that that jumped to mind for me and the reason I brought it up in the last call was I think that contact tracing and and blockchain adjacent technologies are are have some merit right where you would you really one of the things that if you wave a magic wand and sort of assume that the Zcash approach works and you can have an uh sufficiently anonymous blockchain it does it help you create a situation where because you don't have the central authority sort of governing a ledger are you able to sort of prevent the NSA problem when it comes to sort of like managing a contact tracing framework um because I think that when we look at our our own health data and and I think it's really what it is at the end of the day is a collective a collection of of individually owned things is the way I sort of perceive it um like which is your own health information right like everybody sort of has their own health record but there's a collective interest in us being able to trust each other and and share important moments of intersection right the classic like when I have been in the same space and not no classic while talking like things that are three months old or life um but you know you and I it's you and I've been the same space and we both sort of would like to to sort of like have some sort of zero knowledge method of exchanging that information um I think the Libra paper really sort of speaks to like the antithesis of this where you sort of like have a blockchain for the sake of just saying word blockchain um and and I really that's part of the reason I wanted to assign some of the super dry reading for this uh of of the Libra thing because like I thought it was really important to look at like oh Libra networks is a company and Libra association is a is an is a there's a Libra board that is inside of the Libra company and they govern the network and the blah blah blah blah and you're supposed to just sort of look at all this and say yes we can trust this um and I think that that's this like very interesting intersection there and the reason I bring it up in an answer to the question about healthcare data and blockchains is like governance right and protocol and process where we have this the the section on governance of a lot of these projects is really where I think we have a lot of questions of this is really centralization is that is that um uh a lot of sort of like questions of history as we show up there um wow that's a bit of rambling how do I sort of make this into something cohesive I mean if it's okay I would actually see maybe we could start there's a couple really succinct but kind of like opinionated takes that um Finn Brinton has in the section the last section I recommended which might be like cool to respond to um which kind of will get us into thinking about both those sort of three readings um if that feels okay if there's more maybe I'm actually you want to directly respond to him what Brendan said like I will leave it to you but otherwise I thought I could start I could give us a couple quotes um okay cool so I think I said that we had a short section in chapter 10 which is like kind of the synthesis of I think Finn Brinton's argument and then sort of like that background in cryptography in chapter three so the the parts that I wanted to surface from chapter 10 are like his analysis of like I guess Bitcoin um which I think is like compelling in an interesting way so his argument is this is like on page 155 Bitcoin is an incremental technology so the actual technological advance is small but had a striking theoretical breakthrough so it combined a lot of work that came out of cryptography and computation um from digital for peer-to-peer networking and also like ways that they dealt with digital time stamps um that kind of like connected it to this like larger history of like digital cash schemes which very much came out of like a libertarian background and then he um has where oh I've just lost it I have like my notes are way too long for this so it's hard to find them out oh here okay so um the coin in Bitcoin this is on page 161 from Nakamoto the direct quote from that paper is like and um Bitcoin is an electronic coin as a chain of digital signatures um and then I think this is a Brenton quote it's a system for collective verification of ownership with no existence outside the system of verification um so it's kind of like a both a structure a technical structure and then an ownership convention is part of what Finn Brenton like what Brenton wants to make very clear um and to that point that Brendan said about anonymity so there's this notion of like an anonymous sort of but it's like using money that's unconditionally visible traceable and public always so what anonymity means there it's like fallen down over the years in terms of how people use it or can like review those like public transactions um but uh this is where I think there's this sort of two more really interesting arguments he makes so how he sees that there is a form of trustworthiness operating in the system sort of different than trust on a third party again like so Bitcoin is really responding to a very narrow take on like a type of trust before that was like in financial context um which is um on page 68 the process of policing transactions and preventing double spending and thereby the perception of trustworthiness confidence and value of currency in the eyes of its holders required turning the physics of computation into a kind of friction or a break so a deliberate inefficiency in a system as a replacement for a trusted third party and how that was done in bitcoin is through hash collisions so it's a trust in scarcity rather than a trust in the value of a currency that would rely on others like what the system has set out to do is prove to you how difficult it is to make more of it and that it's verifiable um that this amount was that amount of difficulty to make um and so I think it's sort of like concluding take is that this whole apparatus the appearance of the ledger the verification of ownership the proof of work process and for knowledge of the introduction of the remaining quantity of new money are actually designed to produce a predictable amount of scarcity that you would call verifiable distributed and trustless but it's actually putting this as like a scarce object into a set a specific infrastructure so it's like the ledger of the blockchain and how it works um and and it's sort of like this I mean one that is like kind of relies on as I think folks have seen in like the development of the actual technology like new types of trust are ways to like relate um a set of people to each other so it's sort of interesting that it's like a trustless system but it's a system that has a community and like maybe you could not say good things about its governance but has a governance around like the underlying um production of that system so maybe that was like a little heavy I'm realizing too that I always read things that are like academic and like it's like in my brain so I think I sometimes say things really densely um but I thought that that was such a great like like it's an opinionated take on Bitcoin but I think it's very interesting about like what trust was removed and then like what a new form or infrastructure that it created I think Kayla agrees yeah sorry I'm glad to hear you can hear that we're having dinner now um yeah I sorry I just wanted to say that I think that that really is such an interesting it's the beauty of the Bitcoin paper and the beauty of the history of this I think that it's really interesting that this came out of sort of libertarian groups and the sort of bringing up of this sort of origins of this thinking and and I think that and the contextualization is an incremental technology I think it's quite interesting right it's often heralded as this revolutionary concept um and then at the same time if you connect that to the like trust the trust web article from TechCrunch it's like no no no you know digital currencies are infrastructure like they're they're a thing that you can use to get to smart contracts which we didn't really talk about a ton but I think are also really interesting when you use the word smart contract it often like invokes the notion of law which which is closer to sort of some of today's thinking or today's problems but I think that the beauty of the Bitcoin as a project is its scope it's it's a contained thing its definition of trust is centered around digital scarcity and that digital scarcity is applied to creating a ledger and that's it's clean it's it's straightforward it has it's it has what it can do and what it can't do and that's that's kind of that and I'm my concern is that the the aura that that has the specter that that has invoked people showing up on twitter saying that bitcoin can solve problems of racial tension is is is somewhere in there the dish ran away with the spoon I'll stop there I mean I think it ran away from the beginning to be honest like I I mean I like I take the point of like it is in one sense it was it is it was a system that said out to do a very specific thing like Bitcoin but you point correctly to like how quickly smart contracts developed as a way to think about um I guess like ledger and blockchain technology which is like Ben being like oh but if we write a contract and put it on a blockchain it can be applied to everything like that explosion happened immediately and also if you look at and it was great that you suggested this friend and like even the intro of the bitcoin paper it's like it wants nothing less than to replace the entire financial system like you know like it was always uh grandiose you know or it was always like escaping at the seams of like a narrow scope um like I think it's just quite interesting because or I mean I think it poses a question to me because um um you know it's a set of different under like ideological assumptions that I'm comfortable with right I would say they're largely not in a laboratory um and so I'm into like utopian dreaming like imagine the better future of my ability to tell us just exactly on that that's kind of what they did but it's just that a lot of the like the need to go where those things are coming from are not things that I down yeah mine too sorry Don you're kind of cutting up a little bit towards the end of there apologies can you hear me okay oh yeah that's me I'm sorry absolutely yeah um yeah I think that I think your rights is sort of point to the opening paragraph of the Bitcoin paper um I want to ask the group uh it's to me I think that the crypto cryptographic definition of trust implicitly seems to direct us to believe that like economics can save us there's some there's some notion of like of using money to solve our problems and and if we can if we can just engineer digital money if we can arrest control of money from from classic old school structures like governments and Facebook then we'll be able to like move forward and design better futures for ourselves that that's my read of the like crypto space a little bit and and I feel like we're right now we're really in like a I don't know I don't know how well that argument holds up in the context of billions of people at home very angry about their relationship to certain governing structures um does anybody want to take the bait on that I mean I put abolish money in the chat and you know it's not something I ardently believe but we have talked again and again in these discussions about the corrupting of finance as it entered the system and it's not even necessarily money itself right like it's not even necessarily the power that it I guess both is and represents it tends to be like the conflation of something intangible for something tangible and I think that that's where we get hung up with the technology as well totally the notion of digital scarcity for me is like a really interesting and how that creates a tangibility of fungibility is a really interesting notion right at the same time I think there's like a project that would be interesting to bring up here to something of a counterpoint is like the like the crypto Harlem project that here in New York which is sort of really focused on on uh fenced like communities sort of leveraging digital currencies and and cryptography and and techniques to both evade the surveillance states and to sort of like empower themselves to sort of catch the next wave of of of economic prosperity um and so maybe this is like a double edged sword maybe you can sort of engage with it for your own good but I don't know I don't know how I just want to put that on the table because I'm not sure I don't know I don't I it's really hard to think about things these days in context of what's going on outside our windows and in the streets Don you had a point oh yeah you're yeah I'm sorry I can't make my internet less terrible I'm going to drop the video hopefully that helps um yeah I was just saying in jet um I think there are these examples of people actually like subverting kind of like almost the HTSS word affordances of these technologies um we can park that conversation later until never um I think you mentioned one or a group run in I think like the bail block fund where people use crypto miners in the browser I forget the name of that is it uh it wasn't I'm sorry I forget the name of the underlying publication it was like a progressive publication they built this crypto miner that helped raise funds to pay for people's bail if you like visited their website in the browser and like allow them to use it um I also mentioned the black socialists of America have this um decentralized organizing app that's called a dual power like also builds on the concept of dual power sort of thinking about building alternative cooperative economies um and and this idea of like how you can use these technologies in ways that like kind of subvert the premise of like markets and money as the site for for change or something um yeah I I think those are all really interesting as like uh kind of cool examples but I don't know if they like well they're like interventions in a space but they might not like rework trust I shouldn't say that I think maybe something like bail block is more like an intervention I think some of the other ones that you mentioned and I think the dual power app maybe is really trying to fundamentally rework trust um through how it uses those technologies um and then I'm interested in like how they think how they're seeking to accomplish it and like wondering what they have to you know like what they're going to change to get there because it can't just be like an off-the-shelf way of using these things the whole concept is there's so much about it but the really the really hard to get around one is that you're literally giving money to the state that you don't think should be imprisoning people yeah I mean like I think we should have a topic oh shoot Kevin I'm sorry I'll just say this next who's with me next semester abolition down I just wanted to kind of just add to the money question that Brennan brought up and like for me like and how it ties to trust is like I feel like money is money is this thing that we've been taught that you know represents value and can be traded for resources and it feels and it's like put you know you're born to the system that you didn't choose so it feels like the system of court origin more than trust like we like can exchange money not because we trust each other because like we've been like forced to do so um and so like how you're saying like yeah these systems that are just trying to not reform or revolutionize financial systems aren't enough because like it doesn't take into account the things that Kelsey was mentioning like at the protest where like people are giving hand sanitizer stuff for free like there's not this monetary transaction that's happening that's like slowly building trust that's all yeah yeah I deeply agree with you Kevin you I think some of you have heard me on this topic but my chief concern with with the design of some of these systems that co-opt the language of trust is I think that it points back to what Masha you were saying of my definite my personal definition of the word trust is something that is very open and free form and while I completely want to sort of honor and respect Don the the importance of protocol here because I really think that's a massive piece but I'm protocol not in the digital sense in the in the human interaction sense in the way of the way of moving through the world sense but setting that aside for a second I think that like Kevin you're getting at the point that I care about the most is that like I trust for me comes from a system that feels like I have both agency and freedom to do whatever I want and that that for me personally really is one of the reasons I really gravitate toward barter economies and why I think that like the central principle of open source is like such an important thing here where like I don't have to do anything I don't have to exchange value by any specific predetermined means I can sort of I can participate according to different skill sets I can make contributions that are not necessarily fungible and to me that's a really important deaf part of my definition of trust and part of my definition of a framework in which a genuine definition of trust can emerge and part of the reason that I was so infuriated by that tech crunch article that sort of claimed that the next thing that was going to emerge was the trust web and that it was going to be a collection of cryptocurrencies like to me that is just a total co-option of language that starts with the bitcoin paper paragraph one and ends with people on twitter claiming that money fixes everything and we should make it digital um sorry that's my rant that's great I agree with you I just wanted to throw that in there and like kind of like the idea of revolutionizing barter I'm like really interested I've been like reading about certain things like circular trades and how that solves the problem of gosh what's that you know that the need for like the the people exchanging to want things from each other and if you have like a circular trade it like facilitates like larger you know possibilities of trade um and so looking to that I should find some stuff to share about it but I'm I'm curious about that type of stuff right now myself there's um to be read this at a previous reading group um there's a great book it's very accessible called taking back the economy by jk Gibson Graham it's all about like actual concrete forms that are not the market as the sole way of thinking about economies or like the free market in the sort of narrow capitalist sense so like it talks about like local currencies which are similar to like building circular economies through like bartering form it does mention like gift economies and it kind of like has I guess a bit of like a transition approach in that it thinks it like identifies concrete steps that like maybe aren't totally all the way like are like also the ways you get there without requiring you to like a mat like justify that you're gonna build a new system that's like coherently gonna pop up and be fully formed like from this to that tomorrow which I've been reading and listening to a lot more about abolition like not obviously but in light of everything that's happening and um there's a great podcast justice for america with mariana kava kava or kava I actually don't remember the economist um no um this is a prison analyst and organizer I'm totally thinking of the wrong person yeah she talks about um this idea of like how you think about abolition it's kind of like a process like to go back to what mashah said of like um you ask yourself this question at each step which is like is this meaningfully dismantling the system or working towards dismantling the system if so then we do it if it's something that could like make the system quote unquote more humane and like get us stuck in like a way that like actually perpetuates it then we don't do it and like that's how they like a lot of people who are abolitionists like make arguments for or against certain types of reforms like so some people like some would maybe align with abolition but other ones would not like so that's why a lot I think almost all people who are into abolition are like against body counts because they're like that's not going to do anything that's actually like putting more money for specific things it's like you know like what you should do is like have police stop showing up at certain kinds of calls like disarm them cut their budgets you know like because these will actually move in that direction even if it's not like tomorrow there are zero police I'll try um yeah that is the sorry uh to the link that was posted in chat that is the book and what was the podcast that you mentioned I'll take it up too it's called it was justice for America it's like a prison abolition podcast and this is just an excellent interview from last year I'll post a link in chat I mean okay so I think we have time right we have half an hour hour a little less you're so great at googling faster than me that is the link yes it's a it's a great episode um and I wonder in that time if there's more that we want to take from any particular beings I actually think kind of what we're continuing to return to is the possibility of the readings to explain like the kinds of ways we need to think about trust right now in relation to technology um so yeah like what do we want to talk more about is there any is there anything from those readings we need to say or do we just want to ski together for a better future with a different way we think about trust and technology I guess I'm curious about ideas of like constructive trust um like we just had the abolition conversation briefly um it's a lot easier to oppose something than to build something good and if it's not cryptographic economy what is it I'm a big fan of that and I'd like to I'd like to ask the question of like using Masha's characteristic of vulnerability or others can put in fourth other phrases but what systems actually can we think of that actually allow some degree of vulnerability um I've had a very interesting like relationship between the uh protesters in the mayor of Minnesota who is the recent interaction ad where it was just like are you going to abolish the police yes or no and then he was like agh hesitation and then we're just like shame shame it was like oh my god this is game of thrones like this is a very like well I very much agree with the end goal it's it was like and then you contrast that with the like nine people nine uh city council members who come forward with a much more cohesive plan and sort of present I think there's a degree of vulnerability there but I don't know systems I think that there's I'd like I'd love to just pivot to talking about everything non-cryptographic Kelsey I have no suggestion for you other than the hard work of of people with concerns and people who are the subject of those concerns sitting at the same table um and I would submit that there are others far more equipped than me on the call to talk about processes that may sort of surround that mediating that conversation well and I do think that it's interesting to bring back into that space of the current moment because right now there is this really intense trust and really intense solidarity and it's it's super multiracial and like super like from from the protesters in movement and I've never felt anything quite like it um and the reason is people are bodily vulnerable um and people have needed to really use that bodily vulnerability it's not like a it's not like a fake thing at all it's it's very real and it's a very very real community solidarity and very real like identifying problem elements surrounding them and having them exit the crowd or helping somebody up off the ground who's been hit with a blast ball or any of the stuff like it's because of this extreme vulnerability like that that's the point of nonviolent direct action right is because you're extremely vulnerable you are suddenly much more trustworthy yeah I mean it kind of makes me think of like mutually assured destruction where you know part of how like de-escalation happens is the possibility of harm to both sides and the it becomes incentivized to de-escalate because of that possibility of harm um and again that kind of plays into the idea of like equity and power and you can't really de-escalate if one side has all the power because they don't have any vulnerability um there was something else I wanted to bring up I guess I'll think of it later just to build on that like they abandoned the precinct and boarded it up and they publicly stated it was a show of trust because they were like they're probably just going to burn it down is like the obvious and we were like is this trust like you abandoned the building assuming we would burn it that doesn't feel like trust I guess not it's not like a cryptographic system but I kind of like the way that Facebook thinks about trust I mean obviously there's many criticisms of Facebook out there but I think like the way that it conceptualizes human relationships in terms of like rings of trust um you know because you can like designate people as close friends or people who can even like verify your account but then you can also like have lists of people that you trust like I personally I have I should post on main but but I have like a a list of people that really get my actual like like random memes I post but then I also have like more like family friends who I only post like appropriate stuff too so I think like having but the thing is the user has control over the rings of trust and they can move individuals between rings at their own discretion um maybe that's sort of a way to conceptualize trust from a technological perspective because like the technology facilitates that as opposed to like Twitter where you're kind of posting publicly I mean I think they're gradually are introducing a little bit more control but like it's not this to the same degree I mean I would just add to that um there's kind of a way though or that that is like a maybe an imperfect read on trust because it's like if it's if it's only one sided as like how that relationship gets represented you know there's something about how that gets codified in social networks which is very interesting I think I've brought this up before on calls but I'll say it again I think the way that um SSB really tries to think about interdependence uh or like a way of thinking about how things are related to each other in a way that's like not one-sided offers something I also I mean honestly I think we could do we could design much less operationalized technology like things could be so much more speculative in my firm belief um or experimental in these ways but I think we're kind of stuck in a very narrow narrow way of developing things is that a characteristic that's like no go ahead yeah I just think that that's a really interesting point this like this emphasis on experimentation and uh what was the phrase you used on specularity speculation no what was it it's speculative yes speculative like this this yeah this lack of canonical it's they like this method of codependence and I think that like the phrase disintermediation really jumps out to me here where like um scuttlebutt is like really a disintermediated platform right like you don't have but you know we we'd often use the word centralization but I think if you substitute that for disintermediation like I think some of what we're seeing here is a is a technique or is a situation whereby like we have a lot of people who are now disintermediated like we have people in the political system speaking directly to people in uh to citizens um okay interesting an example of disintermediation but like you also have like uh the opposite of that which is just like this heightened amount of contact between police and protester which is like I don't think that there's any disintermediation happening there but this I think there's something really interesting about the capacity for failure or tolerance for failure and the varying expectations of tolerance for failure that all come to the to the mix in a in a group setting that is like really important to highlight in these in these conversations because I think when you when we talk about trust like like one of the hardest expressions of the form of trust is like hey trust me we're going to abolish the police we're going to like take a bold step forward and really we don't and we and we're going to do this knowing that we don't know the answers we absolutely do not like fully understand what's on the other side of this but we know that it's not that like we know we know that what we we personally believe in what's is or we believe that what's on this side is bad and I just think that that's interesting where SSB like sort of like on the technical side gives us a mechanism for saying no no no you don't have to complete record there's no such thing as a complete record the whole thing is predicated on like you know whatever it's your network is who you see you know you interact with and like who cares what every transaction ever is and why are we so concerned with like this sort of like digital consistency or consistency or consensus I think that's like creates a much more interesting space for failure states and I think that it's interesting that like the users of SSB are so much more willing to take risks and not and not concerned about you know I don't know whether tweets are delivered inside of two milliseconds which I think is an interesting sort of like characteristic to look at here in the group settings I just for me it's really interesting to think about the scaling factors of this trust phrase and I think to me the tolerance of failure is a biggie I don't know if this intermediation is always a good thing because sometimes if you have like in the case where there's an imbalance of power and you have interactions with somebody then the fact that it's a direct interaction it's not mediated by anything kind of means that the imbalance of power is kind of presented in the pure state whereas if you have something that's mediating the interaction then it's a little bit more balanced you know it's kind of like how if protesters are interacting with police in the flesh then they're very vulnerable but they can yell at the police department on social media and then everyone is because it's a public thing everyone can see um what they're saying and so everyone can understand like oh wow the police department put just posted some bullshit and everyone's calling it out on it so I feel like maybe sometimes it's not a bad thing to have an intermediary oh whoa I was thinking a funny I think just because I'm preparing for an ATM for a cooperative I was thinking in the other direction like the ways when like by design you need to like um I guess yeah like like you need like well the principle that was in my mind is like one no no voting by proxies one person one vote are like it's like kind of baked in as like this way that you kind of help keep folks closer to each other or or like to help with governance where it's like well everyone's going to have one vote no one's going to have any proxies um that kind of closeness is like I guess of a closed community is actually like super I think important to like uh that's baked in in one of their seven principles but I take the point I mean I think though you're flagging an intense um power asymmetry like between the state and uh people individuals and like you know folks who may be non-citizens in some cases I just wanted to add real fast like thinking about that the interaction between the protesters and the police and like how there can be any trust there I think one aspect of it is the anonymity like the police are covering up their badges and their names and they're just like this like they're not really individuals anymore you know um there's just like this blob of force um and besides those just like the outright brutality is that like like how can you like know them you know ever in that context um they're not they're not creating like even an environment for trust because of that uh-huh there's some I mean this is something that I don't know a lot about I wonder if other folks on this call have some of this context I listened to one interview with someone who wrote a book about kind of like the like history of policing and like obviously its connection to slavery and the slave trade but then also its connection to like its long connection to militarism and imperial you know I guess actions abroad um but but there was a specific piece of that story which was kind of like the way that like that kind of blue coat wall of silence or however people refer to it where like you don't know nark on other cops basically like became a thing I think maybe speaks to that like like how that is used tactically what you pointed out Kevin yeah but I think there's another thing though but like who gets rendered visible right it's like they get to be like a uniform forced like a wall but then they have all these technologies and tools that render and individualize each person they're facing um and so you know people who are protesting then bear that weight of being like in like visible yeah that's what Kelsey just put in the chat I agree so there is some pretty interesting crowd like they're trying to have that asymmetry but I'm not sure to what extent they actually do because the twitter versus real good at identifying license plates immediately and like found out who the shooter was the other day before cops did that kind of thing uh I mean I think that that just reopens like the conditions of possibility it's like a you know beyond police realism like we don't need these systems this doesn't have to be this way like they're spending all this money to convince us it's impossible for them to be otherwise but it's not we don't need that like institutionalized violence yeah there's also something really interesting in this concept and like I don't know if this is the conversation to have this but there's I guess this comes from the same argument as folks who talk about nuclear power and their waste and whether that could ever be safe and like you know there exists ambient radiation in in the uranium ore that you don't mine so if you set your limit for tolerance like if you ignore that then just say it can only be zero and not like below the ambient unmind like you create an impossible situation that's a long way of getting to my long way of getting to my point which is like we the public are fallible definitely but our guardrail shouldn't be whether we're fallible it should be whether we're better than the fallibility that is like already inherent in this system I want to kind of bring back what Kevin said about um and also what Kelsey said about anonymity and like I think part of what I don't think trust is really possible I think I think there's really there's some context where anonymity is very important but I think that for the most part we can't really have trust in an anonymous situation because trust kind of depends on continuity of relationship you know if you're I guess I mean there are I guess there are contexts where there where there is like a one-time trust but I think like sorry I'm just another oh okay um but like I think like even in terms of I think like like social experiments about altruism and things like that where if you have if it's a one-time interaction you're less likely to be altruistic but if you know that you are going to have to collaborate with a person again and again in the future then you're kind of necessitated to act a little bit more prosocially in order to kind of gain the possibility of trust later in the future and the idea of I think I think also something we talked about a little bit maybe like sort of in the middle of the discussion was about the the monetization aspect and how it kind of facilitates a quid pro quo or tit for tat mentality whereas I think trust there's an element of ephemerality in it and an element of of a eternal aspect of it because like when I'm if I am building a trusting relationship with somebody I mean I mean I guess like a lot of people do conceptualize it as like there has to be a balance in terms of give and take but there's also an element of of the trust itself being valuable and not just the individual transactions that are happening and so I think in an anonymous context you don't have that to facilitate it and so like and again bringing back the police thing like the anonymity anonymity has to be symmetrical in order to have trust or it has to be completely no anonymity because yeah yeah yeah I agree they shouldn't be having themselves and the other thing what you're saying is like yeah I don't keep a ledger of my like how I spend time and like help my friends and stuff like that you know like they bought me a meal this one time I owe them meal another time you know we don't do that so like the idea of transactions and ledger like does not factor in like how I like build relationships and trust with like my family and my friends for sure I agree with you can't say David Graver is so good on this oh go ahead done um no you go ahead oh yeah so I'm just gonna say like the concept of money that so if you haven't read debt the first 1000 years by by David Graver I super recommend it but he talks a lot about the origins of money as like what's what's important is not the money but actually the debt and the importance of like you build a community by not ever canceling the debt right so like if you always owe each other something you know that the relationship must continue so there exist cultures even now where if you fully pay off a debt that's a huge insult because it means that you may now part ways forever so really tell your socials but not your your credit score goes down if you pay off alone I was gonna say actually this is like a little part that I found really helpful that the Wikipedia like take on like the different domains that use trust is sort of spoke about how in most social context trust is kind of more used like a heuristic like it's a way that or it's like a stochastic it's like a type of process that allows for like a quick register of like how you act in a situation but it's not codified so like granularly like as you all mentioned down to the transaction level which got like I think there's something to that that I wanted to reflect on more but also when you were talking about anonymity and trust I wanted I'm sorry voting on my mind is a GM is like a lot of work but um I was thinking about the alternative which is not anonymity but secret and how that relates to trust as being very valuable so say like thinking about voting mechanisms like open ballots and open balloting is one but in many cases you always also have provisions for when you do secret ballots and um that that is a part of a way that you maintain like community cohesion and like trust and like if you do a democratic participation that's actually a way to build trust in a democratic process in like a larger scales is that people know that they can express their opinions without folks looking over their shoulders as they do it um anyway so I don't I don't know exactly how to unpack secret and now and we don't have time but I think there's something really cool there uh and how that relates to building trust but but that is quite distinct from like anonymity I think it kind of made me think of like um you know if you're buying federal bonds um treasury bonds or whatever like there's sort of um I guess that's commonly accepted that they will eventually be paid off no matter what it's like the most secure bond or whatever um and I think part of that kind of echoes that idea of like a future expectation that's always in the future which creates trust because like it kind of forms a sort of economic backbone in a certain way I'm not sure I was going to say that but I just want to point out that we're almost at time um and I feel like this has been a really wonderful conversation and we went in some really cool directions but I also kind of cognizant that it's okay to not keep ourselves on this call for very long for longer than we were planning to unless there's like a really strong reason that people want to continue so maybe I'll just ask if people have like some final thoughts or things they want to flag or future topics that we want to read about but also I just want to say like I appreciate that we brought everything that was ourselves to this call and it wasn't about cryptographic trust and that was okay okay that's great yeah I really enjoy this conversation I think one thing I'm really curious about because Kelsey has been like you know involved in the protest so much and I really want to hear from her sometime later that like how is she building trust with like folks that she's meeting on the ground you know over time now I would be really interested to hear yeah I want to know too I have no idea I got together I watched this the other day and it was just like this cat opened the doors yeah but everybody everybody privacy yeah go on oh I was gonna um I was just gonna say uh privacy is our next topic I think abolition is a topic that should come up soon and maybe we can stop recording