You're welcome.

Sure. So I was aware of Bitcoin when it first emerged, but it didn't for whatever reason, didn't really interest me at the time. I wasn't a sociologist of money, so I wasn't really that curious in it about it. But then kind of, I guess, when Ethereum started to emerge and the concept of smart contracts became a little bit more wider known, maybe around, like, twenty fourteen ish, at least for me. I kind of came upon that, and that's when I really started to get interested, mainly because a lot of my work is historical, and it tends to kind of look at the past to see how a lot of struggles have led things to the way they are in the present, and that's where we might see things going in the future. And so knowing that kind of the application of contracts to lots and lots of things, is kind of fundamental to capitalism, particularly labor contracts and those sort of things. I I started to get very interested in this kind of, world of the blockchain, so to speak. And I wrote an earlier paper, I think it came out in 2016, called the real world of the decentralized autonomous society. And that paper was kind of a result of looking at kind of just being, like, in the online space related to blockchain stuff. And, you know, there's a Facebook group called decentralized autonomous society. And I started just interviewing some people and chatting with them. And that what I kept kind of finding, at least in that paper, was that everyone had this very, like, utopian vision of how blockchains were gonna work and that it was gonna solve all these problems. But what I noticed was that when I was talking to a lot of these people, they really kind of it's like they kind of had, like, half of an understanding of how capitalism worked, and then they were kind of missing this other half that actually would probably lead their utopia to be a little bit more of a dystopia, actually, if we got there. So it was that first paper where I kind of I wasn't planning on doing more studies into the blockchain or things like that. It was just kind of a one off. But then when I did that, I started getting a lot more people contacting me and kind of just being, like, drawn kind of further into the community. And similarly, at the same time that I was kind of just, you know, keeping my eyes and ears open and just trying to take in everything that was, in that community, that's when I kinda started to notice that there was a larger, like, academic literature on the blockchain It was also starting to emerge. And so when I first wrote that paper, the, on the property of, blockchains, like, its very first version was actually just gonna be looking at what, big corporations, in particular financial corporations, were doing with the blockchain. Because at the time, I felt that, you know, looking back to that earlier paper, I was kind of going, okay. You know, I think what these people are missing are the way that the corporate sector is gonna be using block chains, and that's that's actually what needs a little bit more investigation. But then when I started to do that, I found that, you know, most corporations are still trying to figure out how they're gonna use it. Right? And and, basically, when you look at the ways that they're trying to use it, it all kinda boils down to either reducing their overhead and automating things that use human labor, essentially. And so for banks and other things, basically, they're using it to replace their old legacy tech infrastructures and things like this. But it actually it wasn't that interesting, to be honest. And so it's kind of at that point where, you know, I decided to shift to looking a little bit more at that academic literature, because, again, it just seemed like there was this massive stuff coming out on kind of both sides of, let's say, a right and left spectrum of politics. But I just felt that a lot of what people are writing about either rested on kind of their hopes or their fears, and that they weren't actually doing kind of empirical analysis of, like, what is actually happening. And so that was kind of where I just started to think, like, how could we start to develop, a different sort of way of looking at blockchains and maybe, like, kind of future framework that we could use to start actually doing more empirical research on kind of the larger, transformations, like, in terms of how blockchains might transform the state or just the larger global political economy, like capitalism, things like that rather than, you know because some people are doing some very close case studies of maybe particular chains or things like that. And I I don't know. I tend to be more broad focused. So, yeah, those are kind of the things that were leading me into it, and then that's kind of what's kept me in so far is this kind of constant stream of stuff that keeps coming out that forces me to have to go back and do more and more research and keep going.

Yeah. Pretty good. I mean, every now and then you just get some people contacting you being like hey I I really agree with you that's like the first thing I've seen. Kind of similar to yourself as well, saying that at the beginning. Sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. And then you know, I had other academics that were working on the blockchain who kind of had similar, criticisms. And so it was nice to actually kind of connect up with some of them. And so we were supposed to have a big conference about it in July, I think, in Amsterdam, but, obviously, that is not happening anymore. So we'll maybe have a a virtual conference about it. But yeah. So it's it's been pretty good. But, I mean, my presumption is in this case that, you know, that's just because the people that like it are sending me emails and all the people that don't like it probably are just ignoring it or something like that. I'm not I'm not getting any hate mail or anything. So

Sure. So I think first off, we just have to clarify what we mean by property, because I think both on all sides of these sort of debates, there's a lot of confusion about this concept because we tend to reify it in capitalist societies. We think of property as things because, of course, that's our reality. But more specifically, property usually in a more legal sense refers to rights in our two things. And so that means that there can be different forms of property. Right? So you can have private property. You could have state property, or you could have common property, and you can have lots of different ways of organizing some of those different forms of property. But, of course, when we're talking about capitalism, it's typically defined as a system in which there are private property rights and the means of production. So in other words, not just your personal property, but you can own factories and a river or things like this. Right? Big tracts of land. And thus, the emergence of capitalism is that point to which private property starts to dominate, you know, feudal or other property forms. So you start to have, for example, enclosure movements and things like that that kick all these peasants off their lands, and now they're forced to work for a wage and yada yada yada. You know, the rest is history. So to me, that's really the core of capitalism is private property relations. In other words, a system of exclusive rights to things and in particular, the things that we need to survive, the things that we need to reproduce ourselves as a society. And so that's kind of, for me, the private property side. But, again, there's other property forms. There's state property. So even in capitalist societies, the state has very particular rights to a lot of actual stuff. You know? So for example, in Canada, we have something called crown land, which is land owned by the state. And there are very particular rights that are related to that land, but, ultimately, the state kind of owns it. And then you can go down the line to something like common property, which essentially means that you can't exclude people from it. Right? That everyone, insofar as that community, decides who the people that have access to it are. You can't exclude, like, specific people. Right? So some people will define things like social rights, to, let's say, health care. Like, we have universal health care in Canada. Some people would define that as a form of common property, albeit in this case mediated by the state because the state's the one that administers it. But, ultimately, it exists as a kind of nonexclusive right. Like, everyone who's a Canadian citizen gets access to the health care. There's no other determining factors. Right? So to me, that's kind of if we think about, like, let's say, the goal of where we wanna go with a socialist society, to me, that society looks like one that the dominant property form is common property and primarily common property in the things that we need to survive. And I think that's an open question. I think we've you know, the older Marxist language, it means a production maybe is still valid here, but I think we could add in lots of other things that we might not consider the means of production. You know? Like, for me, having health care that has a common property, I think that's the thing that we should have, education, and increasingly things like Internet access, clean water, shelter, clothes, you know, lots of things like that. So I think it's more that that idea that you can't actually exclude people from these things. They get them just as a right of being part of that community. And, I mean, if we wanna go the full extension of that, that's the the human community. And, you know, the hope would perhaps be that we could even extend that, those rights to nonhuman entities as well, including maybe animals, certain parts of the environment, and certainly in particular countries. They've tried to do that, in terms of the environment, but that's kind of where I would go with, in terms of property.

I think so. At least how I would define it. And I mean, ultimately, it just comes down to the fact that, you know, as it stands today under capitalism, we basically let a birth lottery determine a lot of our position in life. And that impacts so many other things about our personal relationships, our health, our ability to express ourselves in a way we see fit, etcetera, etcetera. And to me, it I don't know. Given the productive, capacity that we have in society today, it it makes no sense to me that we can't feed everyone, that we can't give people adequate shelter, that we can't give them clean water. You know, like like in Canada here, for example, we have, indigenous reserves that haven't had clean drinking water for almost a decade in some cases. And we're a supposedly first world country. Right? So those are the sort of things that I I see is really quite easy fixes, but of course, there's lots of things standing in the way of that. So Yeah. One of those being,

Sure. Yeah. So, I mean, part of my research at at a certain degree is always to look at, you know, what people say about a thing, like the narrative that they're painting it with and then what is actually perhaps the reality. Right? Or maybe another way of putting this is kind of in the terms of, the sociologist Bruno Latour is looking at matters of concern rather than matters of fact. Right? So what are these things, these problems that people keep circling around? And in this case, you know, you could you kind of keep seeing a lot of people saying, you know, that like, I don't think anyone would argue that, like, at least in the blockchain space, that capitalism today is great. Right? It seems like regardless of the political position, no one's really satisfied with what's happening today. And so these hopeful supporters to me are various groups of people that come from a variety of different areas within the blockchain community, including the corporate sector, but also academics, also just people that maybe own a lot of Bitcoin or even have just started to tip their toe into the blockchain space, you know, and they're not some big powerful actor or something like this. But there seems to be this kind of idea that if we could really just own our our own stuff, including our data, including our identity, including anything, that really we would have this freedom that was supposed to be part of capitalism all along. Right? Like, it's kind of almost like a return to the emergence of capitalism and some of the discourses against the state and state seizure of property and things like this. And it's almost the dream a kind of renewed dream, but in this new kind of technological clothing, let's say, to be like, you know, if we could just own it all and the government wasn't there, then really we'd be free because I could do what I wanted with all the stuff that I own. And, you know, of course, I think when you kind of investigate that a little bit deeper, it starts to be maybe not something that's gonna happen. And that actually that dream, you know, whether it's a valid one or not, perhaps doesn't even matter given the way that things will develop by virtue of, I think, the way capitalism actually is. Like, the way that capitalism actually works today. And that that's something that's also impacting this development. Because I think they almost see, like, the hopeful supporters see the development of a blockchain almost, like, side by side with existing capitalism as if we're gonna jump rails, and then we're gonna get on the good track, and things are gonna be perfect. But instead, you know, it's all the same track. Right? So it's like, it's gonna be a lot messier than they think. That utopia will never arrive. Utopias never do. They're always, you know, compromised in some way, or they transform a little bit. And so I think this strange version is just kind of a repeat of something that we've had before, but in a term in kind of in global terms. Right? Because there's this constant need to not only, like, protect, let's say, my money from the state or my data from big platform companies or whatever, but that I should also be able to do with my property, my private property, what I want across borders. Right? So I should be able to if I live in Venezuela or Iran or somewhere that has sanctions on it, I should be able to escape those sanctions. And that's kind of true freedom from the government and these sort of things, which, you know, is not I I don't think that that itself is an example is necessarily a bad thing, but they kind of use a lot of this language to, legitimate this idea of, like, a global private property that there can be forms of global private property that don't need states to enforce them, enforce the property rights, and to defend those property rights. And that really they're the ones in control and that, you know, they're kind of relying on this older view of private property is allowing for and this is, like, a an older liberal view, but allowing for kind of some form of equal exchange. Right? That, like, you know, if you think about, like, contracts and so on, liberalism and thus capitalism are kind of founded on this idea that, you know, the worker and the employer enter into a contract that is just a voluntary exchange. Right? And that they're making the choice. But, of course, when you actually get down to the reality of it, well, I mean, if your choice is to sell your labor for a wage or starve, as Noam Chomsky once said, you know, that's not really a choice. It's kind of a choice that is just wrapped around a form of exploitation. Right? So I think that's something that with a lot of this hopeful supporter kind of discourse kind of, you know, kind of veers down that side. Like, they they think everything is just gonna be this equal transaction and voluntary without looking at the actual violence or exploitation that might be inherent in some of those, associations.

Well, it was a pretty short conversation, because I essentially they wanted to know how blockchain could be used in community policing. And I, you know, I have no idea how I could use outside of something that would be horribly dystopian that I wouldn't wanna ever prevent. So I didn't wanna give anyone any ideas by saying that. But, yeah, I think there's kind of this, like, like, I mean, to just go back to kind of the broader, like, let's say, libertarian or neoliberal themes and kind of ideas that tend to underpin a lot of the hopeful supporters of blockchain technology is that there's kind of this idea that you can like, they kind of always they they lack, what I would consider, like, an adequate understanding of the origins of private property. Because, I mean, their whole thought system, everything relies on private property being this kind of inalienable right that we exist. You know, we could take this from someone like John Locke who says, you know, God grants us an original right in our person, meaning that we are private property and, thus, it's kind of a a God granted or it's it's a natural right. It's given to us just by virtue of existing. But they never actually do any historical analysis of the emergence of private property, which when you do that, it's it's super violent. It's super exploitive. You know, it involves basically both internal and then eventually external forms of colonialism and all the violence and stuff that goes along with that. And so the part of this issue is that then when they see this stuff emerging and they see the kind of utopian side that, hey. We could have money without states and all these sort of things, they're also neglecting the reality that, like, right now, states are like, hey. How can we use blockchains? Like and, you know, they might not even like, it's like the government in this case necessarily even has some nefarious thing. You know? It's not like people working in the civil service of various nation states are evil and nefarious people. They're just like, hey. I heard I heard blockchain is, like, a thing that's new these days. Like, hey. I wonder how I could apply that to my little area that I work in. And so I think that's actually for a lot of those people, you know, we can talk a lot, so let's say, about capitalists and projects by big corporations use blockchains and maybe for surveillance or things like that. But I actually think how this is gonna play out is in a much more kind of innocuous banal way of just people trying to apply blockchains to random problems. And then, you know, next thing you know, you're in, like, a blockchain mediated dystopia where everything is controlled by smart contracts. You know? And so I think that's kind of something where, like, with this guy asking me about community policing, like, he I'm sure he was just like, oh, if, you know, I heard about blockchains, and you wrote this article. Like, do you have suggestions? And no, I did not.

you know, get some get some advice on them. Yeah. He wants to be a good fit for his manager. You know? He's like, I wanna I'm in this, like, cool new tech solution that wastes a lot of time on. That's fair. He tried.

Well, I guess I would say a few things about it. First off, the you know, there are there are lots of examples of contracts prior to the emergence of capitalism. However, they tend not to be contracts necessarily the way we think of contracts today about, like, you know, labor contract or things like this. So it was more a shifting of existing contracts to what we might consider today to be more explicitly economic kind of, relationships or functions. I mean, there's lots of it wasn't exactly legally the same sort of contracts that we have. But, you know, if you go back into Feulism or you go back to ancient Rome, you know, there's certainly forms of contractual relationships. Usually, during those periods, you had to transfer something to be, like like, I will give you this coin to signify the transaction and to symbolize that there is, like, a contractual relationship or something like that. So you have some weird kind of examples like that. And, I mean, you could also think about even, like, vassalage and feudal times as kind of a form of a contract. And, you know, and that got really weird too, where you'd have to, like, you know, the king would, like, put his hands over you, and then you'd kiss each other on the mouth sort of thing, which tends to be we've lost that in our modern, understanding of feudalism.

you know, if we go let's say we bring that up to the present, contracts are everywhere. Right? Like, you literally can do something within a day where you're not engaging with some form of contract, particularly online. Like, we all know the terms and conditions that we all scroll to the bottom of and then click accept. Yeah. I read every single word.

Yeah. Well, then you have a lot of time on your head.

exactly what is going on down there. Yeah. Which is which is true. Because then, of course, you get a lot of people that will be like, hey, guys. This thing that you're doing on Facebook, if you actually look at the little contract you're signing, you're giving away way more information than you thought you were just to have, like, a funny, you know, quiz on your Facebook profile or something. Did you know though if you post that,

Yeah. Yeah. That's the idea. I always think that's funny too. This idea that, like, all contracts are somehow valid. That, like, if I just say that, that's, like, a contract. It reminds me of Yeah. In, I think, the office where Michael Scott, he just steps out of his office and he goes, oh, I declare bankruptcy. And then they're like, you know that, like, you can't that's not what declaring bankruptcy is. You actually have to, like, spill up paperwork, and it's like, oh, okay. And so I always view people doing that on Facebook or somewhere else, like, the same sort of situation. But, yeah, like, we have contracts all around us today that essentially mediate what, for the most part, are some form of exchange of private property. Right? And usually in the online space, it's increasingly, like, our data or information or something about that where we're basically being like, yeah. You can take it. That's cool. Do what you want with it, and we're gonna use the service. And so I think when we're thinking about moving forward, let's say, into a post capitalist society, if that is a socialist one, which would be my preference, it becomes a little bit stickier. Because on the one hand, nothing really in a way is new. You know, like, all the different forms that we come up with to do things, they're often kind of a transformation of an older form. You know, like so for example, if you wanna study the emergence of capitalism, you essentially end up eventually finding yourself going back to all these people way earlier than you ever would have thought possible, trying to mesh, like, canon law and Roman merchant law together in interesting ways to try to figure out how you can have, like, a smooth transfer of what eventually becomes private property. So in that sense, my guess would be that unless we have some sort of situation that is such a radical break that we are like, we need all new institutions. We can't have anything that has a residue of capitalism on it. Then it will probably be different. But my sense is that that's not really how history and just life works. So my guess would be that that society would be a transformation of existing forms. And so in that sense, I do see a place for contracts. Because, I mean, I always think about something like Jean Jacques Rousseau and the idea of the social contract. But, of course, as, you know, when I first read this when I was an undergrad, I was like, what? I've never signed a contract. Like, we didn't all sign a contract to live together. And so in that sense, you know, okay. That's maybe not a good way to, like, legitimate liberalism, but we could actually think about doing those type of things and having contracts like that that provide, let's say, the certain values or principles that we want in a socialist society and embed them in certain contracts. Right? I mean, just like a lot of things, you can use them in different ways, and you can transform the roles that they play. I mean, we even say this to a certain degree about the state, although some people would disagree. Because I mean, you know, on the on one hand, the state is that thing that kind of allows capitalism to exist. But at the same time, at a particular period, for lots of very specific reasons that even include keeping capitalism itself up, it granted lots of social rights to health care and education and, you know, workers' compensation and employment insurance and all these things to allow for, you know, the welfare state and that golden age of capitalism, in the mid twentieth century. So I may be not as, like, let's say, willing to say, we need to throw everything out and we need to kind of have a radical strong break. I actually think it's more about just transforming what exists. And I mean, part of that is embedding socialist values and principles into some of those things. Right? I mean, states could just as easily today kind of enforce, social rights as the predominant form of property rather than private property. Right? And they could say, hey. Everyone everyone gets shelter. And, you know, a lot of that doesn't like, in the actual making of it, yeah, it gets complicated. But, I mean, if, for example, I'm Canadian, if you look at the Canada Health Act, it's, like, six or seven pages long, and it's just a list of, like, principles. It's not anything great. It's not some big, like, complex manual about how to create a health care system. It's literally, like, what are the things what are the values that we're putting into this to allow that system to work? And, I mean, you can do it with anything. So that's kinda my sense about how contracts and property and these things will work in the future. But, of course, any sort of prediction is gonna fail. So Yeah. Of course. But but but I think

Yeah. So, I mean, that's where I think the notion of, like, democracy or to maybe put it in, like, Foucaultian terms, a democratic governmentality might need to emerge where, you know, we need to think about ways in which we can still have forms, let's say, of certain forms of authority. And I don't mean that in a negative sense, but rather in terms of maybe expertise or something like that. But that is still democratically figured out and determined. And so in that sense, you know, like, a good example would be someone like, Eleanor Eleanor Ostrom, who's an economist who won a Nobel Prize, for studying common property. Right? And she because she was, kind of responding to, this older idea of the tragedy of the commons, right, that has become the kind of basis for kind of modern, libertarian and neoliberal thought is this idea that when you have a common property, it's always gonna get over exploited because there's nothing keeping in check people from exploiting it because it's common. We all have access to it. So someone basically, this in, like, more modern terms is, like, the freeloader problem. Like, someone's gonna be freeloading and taking more than they deserve from this thing. Which is why pay for someone else's health care? Exactly. Yeah. And it gets people on the right, like, really angry. They're like, oh, someone's using that thing that is mine too, but they're using too much of it. But when Alstrom actually started to examine, actual examples of common property and common property government governance, she found that, no. Actually, common property, that tragedy never happens because the people that have some interest in that common property, which, you know, is essentially, like, whatever the definition of the community is that uses that property. They basically figure out ways to manage it themselves. Right? And they're typically democratic. They typically change over time because obviously circumstances change, how its use changes. So there's all these sort of things that go on that actually allow for a much more democratic process and then also to still have everyone able to have access to that thing. And in many cases, that access or that, governance might be about figuring out, okay, how much of this let's say it's water. How much water can we use without depleting the well? Right? And those sort of things. Right? How can we actually have this be sustainable? So I think there's lots of actual examples of this, in reality with real people, particularly, for example, in various forms of indigenous governance, in various countries around the world. You know, indigenous people have been doing this since, you know, forever, and they're great at it. You know? And they're they managed to not create horrible wastelands of, you know, tailing pawns and other things and all these things that are related to kind of our horrible environmental practices. So I feel like that's kind of when we think about how to use contracts, and then maybe eventually we're thinking about how to use blockchains in some sort of socialist way to mediate all these things. It's really about figuring out some of those democratic mechanisms, which I know lots of people are working on right now. And then figuring out, okay, how do we actually apply them in a way that isn't based on an individual exclusive exchange of private property, which is kind of, I think, the the common way a lot of stuff in the blockchain space is developing. But instead, do it the other way where it's like, can we use that stuff to actually democratically mediate our access to something that we all have access to, that we all have a right to, you know, that you can't exclude me from. But could we do that in a way where, you know, we're all able to share that thing? So, you know, a good example might be, like, there's a lot of, cases of, like, solar power being, mediated by blockchains where someone's able to sell it to their neighbors or things like this. But I'm like, why sell it? You know? Like, why can't we have a system where I just share the solar power that with, like, my neighbors, and maybe they have something else that they could share with me, and it's mediated by, like, you know, apps that are run on blockchains or things. So it's like we don't have to have lots of meetings. We don't have to have talks, but it's kind of all automated. Right? Like, I really want you know, it's kind of a meme these days, but I really want that fully automated communism. You know, that's my that's my view. I I want that. Yeah. And I it's like we might as well move towards the things that we want. Obviously, we'll fall short, but hopefully, we'll get some of those things.

decent things. And I I mean, certainly her Nobel Prize helps. But one thing I will say, like, even about, you know, a lot of people in the blockchain space that are, you know, maybe those hopeful supporters, and they're maybe coming from a neoliberal or libertarian background or whatever. But I am actually very impressed by a lot of those people and their ability to actually you know, as much as they're reading, like, Hayek and whoever, they're also sometimes reading people like Ostrom and other stuff. So what I actually find very interesting about their kind of intellectual background is much more than a lot of other kind of areas, they they kind of are just mishmashing stuff and to me at least strange ways that don't necessarily align with the politics because obviously they're trying to solve problems and they're coming at it as typically like engineers and computer scientists and these sort of things. So that's something that I just think is is a very interesting development that will maybe as you say, maybe it's a maturing process. I don't know. Maybe it will reap positive, at least for us, dividends later or maybe not to us. So Yeah.

Sure. So first off, I'll say I I actually really enjoyed Robert's book, that some of my my critique came from. But similarly, like with some of the other, more critical authors I talk about in the paper, I found that a lot of it was kind of maybe, yeah, a little bit more future looking as to what could happen rather than what is happening, and that's where I kinda wanna keep binding us back to actual things. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think I think he's right. But but, yeah, as you say, like, there's some other spaces where those kind of discourses in the blockchain space, like yours truly, you know, don't exist. So, yeah, I think there's something there that needs to be examined a little bit more. And so in that, that phrase, this kind of, novel geography of the self, the idea is kind of, again, like, it's it's kind of related to private property in the constitution of ourselves as individuals. Right? So, I mean, under both law and in a lot of earlier liberal discourse, we're constituted as private property. And indeed, in many legal systems today, things like assault and so on are actually treated as such because it's presumed that you have a private property in yourself. And so if I go and punch you, I'm assaulting your private property and doing something to your private property, which you have in yourself. And so that sense of the self, that individual sense of our self in that way, because, of course, if we actually look further back in history, we find this modern idea of the individual actually fades away. And that surely, of course, people knew that they were different than the person next to them and so on. But they didn't really think of themselves as individuals the way that we do. They thought of themselves typically as part of larger either classes or estates or groups or status levels, things like that, And we're much more related in their conception of themselves in terms of that group. Whereas we, of course, think we're all amazing unique snowflakes and that there's, you know, we're the only one of us that exists and all that sort of stuff, which is, of course, also very, related to capitalism too. But the development of that individual self happened in one case at the same time, I would argue, with the emergence of national identities, at least modern national identities tied to modern nation states. And so, there's a sociologist called Craig Calhoun that points this out, and I think it's a very good point, in that there's kind of the those develop developments happening at the same time, it's not really an accident in a way because, you know, one of the central kind of tenants of your national identity is that you engage with it just directly as an individual. You know, it's not mediated necessarily through your family or, like, what religion you're part of or whatever. It's the idea that, like, if you're a member of that nation state, like, you you have that national identity. Right? Like, it's it's an individual identity even though it's, of course, a group identity that covers lots of individuals. And so to me, this, like, the way that private property is developing, particularly in the the blockchain space in this concept because it's not just blockchain. I think this is happening elsewhere, but blockchain is a very potent example of it. It's, again, trying to spread property private property relations across nation states. So in other words, borders should be increasingly meaningless for our exchange of private property. But then that similarly, I think, also kind of reflects on the self as well, that we start viewing ourselves as, like, you know, I'm not just, Canadian, let's say. You know, that that kind of, like, I'm a citizen of the world. And so just as we're, you know, a lot of people are fighting for this kind of global private property, I think it also speaks to a little bit of this sense of, like, maybe not losing your national identity as, you know, some, like, late 1990s globalization scholars thought it would, but rather that you shouldn't be restricted globally. Right? Like, I should be able to move freely around the globe. My property should be able to move freely around the globe, and that there shouldn't be those restrictions. And my presumption is that in doing that because, I mean, I think you start to see elements of this already in certain areas. But you start to see a kind of, like, almost transnational self emerging. Like, this idea that we're, you know, with globalization, we're kind of almost moving towards a global society. And to me, that doesn't necessarily mean, like, one global government and we're all part of the same country because that's again, that would be like someone in under feudalism being able to imagine a world of nation states. Right? They couldn't have even imagined that the world would look like that. So I think we're kind of in that space where we're trying to figure out and see how things are going to transform at that level, at the the level of the global political economy. But that's one that's also gonna change the way we think about ourselves And kind of, again, even think about ourselves as, like, as we are as private property under existing legal systems and so on, and then how that eventually gets kind of transnationalized, so to speak.

Yeah. I mean, who who knows in in reality? But I mean, I think a good example to a certain degree is, you know, if you look, for example, at today's capitalist class, which some people argue is a transnational capitalist class today and that we've kind of moved from a world of national capitalist classes kind of competing with each other to one where that still exists and that's still happening, but there's certain members of the capitalist class that are almost fundamentally transnational. And Yeah. This starts to actually kind of express itself in a lot of different sociological ways. So, for example, there was a a book by, Christiana Freeland, who I think is our deputy prime minister here in Canada. But before she, you know, joined the Liberal Party, she was a journalist. And so she wrote this book called, the plutocrats, the rise of the super rich and the fall of everyone else or something like that. But, essentially, given, you know, she was a high high level journalist, so she had lots of access to a lot of billionaires and their families and, you know, things like the World Economic Forum and other kind of very high level meeting places for billionaires and so on. And so the book is roughly all about her experiences with these people and interviewing them and just talking about their lives. And what she talks about in the book is, in a certain sense, this kind of transnational self that, at least for that class, is emerging. It's not emerging yet for us because we don't have the same mobility. But, you know, you would have people that they were born in one country. They went to school in another. They own condos in, you know, Paris, like Rio, London, wherever, multiple places around the world. They fly in private jets anywhere they wanna go at, you know, very easily. And they constantly meet at these certain, like, high level forums, again, like World Economic Forum or some others that aren't necessarily for work, but are more just play, and also engage with other people that have the similar types of backgrounds. Right? That, you know, their kids speak, like, four different languages. Because, again, you grew up here. Maybe your nanny was spoke this language and taught you this, and then you went to school here. And you you know? And so there's almost a kind of to me, like, with at least that that segment of class that is a little bit similar to, like, older ruling classes. Like, particularly, if you think about, like, under feudalism where, you know, royal families, they wouldn't even speak the language of the people they were ruling over. And they would often, like, you know, the lingua franca, of course, we get the term because, often, like, you know, the lingua franca, of course, we get the term because French was the lingua franca for the nobility of Europe for, you know, a couple hundred years. Right? And so all the royals, regardless of even if you were a, you know, a small noble in some backwater German, you know, territory, you would still aspire to speak French and to model your dress as to what the French, aristocracy was doing and all these sort of things. And so I think we see elements of that happening with the capitalist class today, but I also think there's kind of this desire or at least movement towards with, again, these people that see kind of Bitcoin and Blockchain as being this, like, liberating force by allowing us to move and exchange private property everywhere around the world, that it's also kind of a a self transformation as well. Right? And I think you see this too when you like, for example, and we can talk about it in a bit, but that, Dystopia Labs conference Yeah. There was one, one talk with, people from Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran, talking about how, you know, cryptocurrency can allow them to, let's say, move around, what they consider to be brutal regimes. But part of that is also the sense of, like, being a transnational, you know, it's like everyone else gets to use Amazon. Why can't I use Amazon? Right? Yeah. Yeah. So I think in that way, there's kind of a bigger transformation of ourself at foot where national identity, yeah, it's maybe maybe not getting unimportant, but transforming in a certain way that I can't quite put my finger on yet. But I think there's something there.

Yeah. The the bearer of freedom is is being able to buy things on Amazon.

Yeah. I mean, I don't know. I flip flop on this myself. I would say that, you know, the pessimistic side of myself says, like, well, that would be nice, but it's probably unlikely. However, that being said, I mean, you know, again, if you look at the way that other kind of radical transformations of societies have evolved, sometimes it is those things that are moving in that particular direction that do allow for that wire consciousness to emerge and that allow for, you know, maybe not the sort of socialist utopia we want, but for more progressive things to happen. And so I do think that in kind of continuing the expansion of, let's say, a global consciousness, that there's benefits to that, particularly in terms of, at least for myself, things like common property. Right? Like, you know, I think, for example, when you have lots of places in the world that have, you know, various levels of, universal health care, when you have, like, let's say, that emerging, that kind of consciousness, it becomes very difficult to to continue to legitimate, like, for example, The United States, a system of, like, private health care insurance. Although somehow they're still able to keep keep legiting me. Somehow, I don't Yeah. I don't know how. But well, I I do know a little bit. But, I mean so I think in that sense that yeah. Like, that would be my my optimistic sense would be to agree, with, is it SAMP? SAMP 85?

But then what I also in that quote, the notion of the global emerging out of the national, and this is a concept that comes from the the sociologist Saskia Sassen, who is a globalization scholar. And essentially what that means and kind of where I think it applies to the blockchain is the idea that all the things that we typically call global or transnational, they don't exist in some global space. Right? There's no, like it's like they're not in thin air. Right? We also live in a world of nation states. We're all governed by particular laws in those countries. Those national governments, they're, you know, the enforcement wings of the state, like the police and the military still operate, and those things are still in existence. Yet, of course, we see the development of certain forms of transnational capitalist activity, for example, or things like, the platform economy. You know, the the rise of big platforms that just like blockchains are kind of they seem inherently global. Right? There's nothing necessarily that would restrict them from applying all over the world. And certainly for, you know, companies like Facebook or Amazon or whatever, you can access them almost everywhere in the world with the exception of the, you know, a small number of countries. So this idea that the global emerges out of the national in these kind of very material concrete concrete cases is one that speaks to the fact that for those things to work in this supposedly global way, it means they they still have to deal with the reality of a world of nation states. Right? They still have to adhere to national regulations, or they have to transform them. Right? They have to they have to use lobbying efforts in different countries to get what they want. Maybe there's a law that's restricting some aspect of the way that they wanna do their business, that they need to transform. So in the paper, for example, I use Uber as an example, where, you know, in my country of Canada, the the application of Uber across the country is all over the place. Right? Because different provinces and different cities have different rules as to how that works. So it's not like Uber is everywhere. Right? Even though it's kind of fundamentally or inherently global, in practice, it's not. Right? There's lots of places where it doesn't operate, and that's because of this existing system of nation states, national institutions, laws, regulations, etcetera, etcetera. So to me, it's kind of more interesting to look at how those things actually get transformed to then allow for these, let's say, global or transnational spaces of accumulation to emerge. And so in the case of the blockchain, for example, like we were discussing earlier, you know, as part of the, that dystopia labs, conference, you know, there is a commissioner from the Securities and Exchange Commission in The United States talking about Blockchain and, basically, some of the struggles of regulating it and how they were really supportive. And they wanted this to emerge, and they wanted people to be using it. And then but it still needs to fit under the existing regulation. So how do we do that? And how you know? So there's this whole big system where, again, people are kind of circling around just like a problem. Like, okay. We want the blockchain to work, but it needs to fit under the regulations and the laws. So how do we do that? How can we tweak them? And then, you know, you get various congress people or other people saying, no. We support blockchain, and they bring up things, you know, in various governmental forums. Right? And so that's, like, the the way that this all emerges in terms of this global is actually a lot, let's say, lower to the ground than we think it is. And it involves all this kinda messy, you know, people just trying to solve what they see as or just kind of concrete problems. But then, you know, down the line, we actually see a radical transformation emerge. Right? That totally changes how our existing, let's say, system of capitalism operates and thus has lots of implications. And obviously, for us, those are implications that relate to things like social justice and democracy, etcetera, etcetera. Right? So that's where that kind of quote and that concept is kind of speaking to you in the blockchain space and where I think maybe some of the other authors in that world, even though if they're they're quite critical scholars, I think sometimes they miss a little of that. That, like, we're in the process, and this is all continually in process. And it's a matter of kind of fitting things to the existing system rather than creating something that's revolutionary or is gonna cause this radical break. And it's actually the transformation in small little bits that eventually Yep. Kind of leads to a a huge overhaul. I mean, I think we only need to take the example of modern nation states, which, you know, you only go back, you know, in some cases not even, like, fifty years from the emergence of those initial modern nation states to find out that they were actually absolutist monarchies, right? And that the boundaries of those countries were boundaries created by, you know, a king and their various their family being able to conquer the land in a very specific territory. And then they start to emerge a kind of proto state. And then whether there's a revolution or maybe in, like, in other countries, the monarchy kind of just gave way to capitalists and merchants and so on, and kind of was incorporated within it. You know, places like England and so on, where you stole the monarchy, you didn't have a, like, cut their heads off revolution. And so in that case, that whole political territory and the the way that the state functioned, its actual role in terms of what it did in that that community, like the rights it enforces, how it does that, all those sorts of things transforms radically. Right? You know, when you compare, like, a capitalist nation state to an absolutist feudal monarchy, it seems quite different. Yet this one, like, the borders and some of them in some cases are exactly the same. And it was actually this transformation of something that already existed. And so that's where I think with the blockchain in terms of how it's getting incorporated today, that's a more likely scenario than some sort of big radical break or revolution

Yeah. And certainly, like, that's, you know, that's the history of capitalism as well. Right? Is this a much longer process that, you know, we think about those big revolutions, but in actual fact, you have to go back many hundred years years previously in the various places where those revolutions start to happen to start to see some of the dynamics, some of the kind of contests and struggles that would eventually play themselves out in that way. Where if we just focus on the revolution, we're kinda missing everything that led up to it for, you know, hundreds of years. And to me, that's actually the more important thing because if we're looking to the future, then that means what are the little small indicators that we can start to see now that might later lead to something like that? And then, you know, if we can highlight some of those things, how or in what ways can we then hope to maybe, you know, shift the the tracks a little bit and maybe do something that's a little bit nicer rather than the the distillate, you know.

Yeah. And some of that too is just like consciousness raising as well. You know, I think like we talked about earlier, one of these interesting things is that a lot of these people that are maybe more neoliberal or libertarian or whatever they wanna call themselves in the blockchain space, but that they're also now starting to look at a little bit more like, you know, Elinor Ostrom or these other people. It's like that's part of that process too. Right? So that's something where, you know, for a lot of they might just not have ever been really exposed to a lot of socialist literature. And, you know, they probably haven't read Marx in any great depth and or at all. And, you know, so I think that's something where, at least for those of us on the left, if we can be like, hey. Actually, like, they have some pretty good insights. Here are a few that maybe relate to the blockchain. Check it out. And then they do that and might be like, oh, yeah. That is true. You know? So Yeah. Who knows though? We'll see. We'll try best. That's my optimistic side coming