be surprised, and maybe we do agree. I mean, I'm happy to do it. I have to say, if there is a kind of common pathology among people who really believe in crypto, it's that, if you say you don't believe in crypto, there is a there is an extent to which they are unwilling to contemplate the possibility that you understand what they're working on and just don't like it. And so I kind of hit up a wall on how many times I would have a repetitive conversation in which someone would explain to me that I didn't understand what I understood. But, you know, certainly, like, most of those people didn't wanna talk to me about left wing politics and this stuff, so it was hap I'm happy to do it. This may be the last time I go on a podcast to talk about crypto because as much as I'm skeptical about crypto and I think that there's some really rotten stuff going on in the world related to crypto, I don't actually think it's that important, which may be an area where we disagree as well. But they're like, like, of all the things that I spend my time thinking about, crypto is not among the even top 10% in terms of significance. So it is an area that I'm that a lot of people I care about really give a lot of importance to, which is kind of over indexed it in my attention. But all of the things being equal, I probably wouldn't have spent much time thinking about it.

So it I I I would, start at the end and work my way back to the beginning. Because one of the things that has happened over the last twenty years that I've worked on this stuff is that I've gone from some fairly specific issues to a much more generalized campaign. And that campaign is digital self determination or technological self determination, which when I look back on the things that animated my interest in technology even in secondary school, even in elementary school, when, you know, I was working on Apple two pluses and, pet computers. That it was the fact that there was latent in technology the possibility of giving people and communities the power to decide how the technology around them would work That really animated my view. And so as against that, I started off as an in in earnest with activism on digital rights management. And the first wave of that was the idea that there were undue restrictions being mounted by digital rights management. You know, infamously, Adobe's early digital rights management for books listed read this book aloud aloud as a toggle that rights holders could turn on and off. And, you know, as someone who worked in bookstores and libraries and owns a lot of books and ended up writing a lot of books, it was pretty offensive to me the idea that someone would get to tell me whether I could read my books aloud. And as my understanding of what was going on deepened, the the thing that became much more odious was that in order to enforce these restrictions, the idea was that we would redesign computers so they would run programs that users could neither see nor terminate that would observe the user at all times and interdict the user from doing certain activities that the shareholders, the manufacturer dispreferred. And that this facility was just on its face unjust. Right? That if it's your computer, you should be able to decide how it works, but also carried with it a a kind of pathological danger, which is that if we if we assume that computers are gonna become more widespread and more embedded, which is today a very noncontroversial idea, but twenty years ago, I think a lot of people thought it was science fiction. Then if we design those computers so that the people who use them can't inspect their running processes or terminate them or add new processes without oversight from a third party, that, we would be sowing the seeds of some pretty horrendous failure modes that, you know, there would be the possibility of a correlated defect across multiple devices that would expose users to, malicious programs running in an area of privilege within the operating system or even below the operating system that by design, the user could neither detect nor terminate. And that that's bad enough when it's the laptop that you use to do your banking and correspond with the people you love and, you know, keep your family photos and sensitive information on. But it's really bad when it's, you know, your anti lock braking system and your pacemaker and the thermostat that decides whether you're gonna freeze or roast to death when the climate turns ugly. And, that became kind of the next phase of the fight was this idea of protecting general purpose computing, and protecting the right of people to run programs on their computers, which is very coterminal with the free software movement. I advocate for free software, but I'm not it's not, again, not my primary goal. There are areas where I have some, I don't know what you call them, like some some minor differences, a priority, if not a philosophy with the free software movement. And and that in turn, that struggle over the right to run arbitrary code on your computer became, as the lens widened out, as the frame widened out, became a fight about monopoly in technology markets. And the role that that these proprietary technologies play in, both creating and expanding and maintaining, monopolies in technology markets by literally just getting to leaving dominant firms to decide who can compete with them and under what terms. And, you know, where those terms could be dictated by a broad principle that is basically like on penalty of law, you may not design a technology that enable that helps our users if it hurts our shareholders. That that they could, you know, by mixing together patent and anti circumvention and a bunch of other very abstruse areas of poorly understood law, conjure up a new offense that, Jay Freeman from the sore from the Cydia project, he calls felony contempt of business model that you you could effectively harness the power of the state to literally criminalize people who adapted their technology to do things that benefited them if it came at the expense of the manufacturer. And that in turn led to just a wider debate and struggle and program about, demonopolization of the whole economy because, it is not unique in technology that it that it is so concentrated. I think when economists talk about concentration in technology, they over index on things like network effects. And they say, well, naturally, every time someone joins Facebook, that's a reason for another person to join Facebook. Of course, Facebook would have a winner take all network effect economy. But the flip side of that, the thing that they neglect is the that by design or by by default, technology has very low switching cost. There's no reason that you have to be a Facebook user to communicate with other Facebook users. You could nominally leave Facebook and use another service and it could send messages to those people either over an API or by having a bot that logs into Facebook pretending to be you and exchanges messages with them while all of your activity takes place off the service. And if it's true that network effects are what produce concentration and technology, you would expect that other industries concentration would be dictated by the degree to which they enjoy network effects, and that's absolutely not the case. It's not network effects that reduced all the professional wrestling in the world to one league or all the eyeglasses in the world to one company or all the beer in the world to to two companies, or all the finance in the world to four companies. It it it is a policy, an official policy of tolerating and even encouraging monopolies that arose in the nineteen seventies with the Chicago School and is, until recently neglected area of the critique of neoliberalism that one of the things the Chicago School very explicitly did was argue that monopolies were efficient and that states should not take action to limit them. And, we've had forty years of global antitrust neglect that has produced market technology could be the vanguard of an anti monopoly struggle. That because technology could be the vanguard of an anti monopoly struggle. That because we have new ways, unique sui generis remedies against concentration in digital technology, that we can deploy those to, you know, seize the means of computation to to take control of the technology around us and to set an example of what a pluralized, demonopolized industry can look like that matters to people's lives and that we can make common cause with the people who are angry about monopoly in tennis shoes and monopoly in professional wrestling, monopoly in beer, monopoly in shipping, monopoly in banking, monopoly in hospital bed manufacturer, and monopoly in powered wheelchair manufacturer that we are all fighting the same struggle. And that if technology can be the vanguard of that struggle a broad based cross sectoral struggle, that we will create a a source of power that we can use to dismantle even these vast global corporate behemoths that have cornered so many of our important markets.

But yeah. But I'm curious your thoughts on, like, this relationship between DRM, like, property in the digital world and, like, digital exclusivity. So I I I I wanna roll back to the start of that question and and quibble with your characterization of what DRM was for because I don't think it was about property in the sense that we normally think about it. And I think that you know, I don't wanna get into the tedious debate that people have about whether the term intellectual property is a good term or not, but this is definitely an area where it misleads. The term intellectual property, if you don't know, was not a widely used term. It was really it was coined in the thirties. It wasn't I mean, there are historic examples where people have called things literary property, but it wasn't widely used. And in the thirties, intellectual property became a a term, but it wasn't used in the industry. Instead, people talked about copyright, patent, trademark, trade secrecy, and these other realms. And they did so because each one had a completely different regime that was really distinct from the way that we think about property. And we think about the the bedrock of, like, you know, Anglo American property regimes, it's it's Blackstone on property. You know, it's, property is that which man enjoys, soul and despotic dominion over to the exclusion of all other people in the universe. Right? This is this is the thing that they teach you if you're a first year law student about what property means. And it's never been what copyright, patent, trademark, trade secret. None of those have ever been even remotely like this. And in fact, we used to call those different things. We used to call them regulatory monopolies, authors' monopolies, creators' monopolies, publishers' monopolies. And, of course, if you're the beneficiary of one of these monopolies, calling it a monopoly is not something you enjoy. Right? Like, it kind of chafes because if you're if you feel like you need some adjustments to the contours of your monopoly and you go to your legislature and you say, the monopoly you gave me isn't expansive enough. Expand my monopoly. People point and laugh. Right? Right? But since the state religion of Anglo American, you know, liberal order is property rights, if you show up and you say my property rights are being trampled, I'm being trespassed upon, then property becomes a thing that, the state will intervene to to rescue. So with that, by way of background, DRM was a way of terminating property rights. Because under the historic regimes of copyright, if you were to buy one of my books, right, and so you go into a shop and you buy the book and and and you get it. There's a thing that that's called the doctrine of exhaustion that kicks in. It's now your book. Copyright complicates that. You can't photocopy and distribute the book but you can also you can, like, photocopy the book and paste in a page that's falling apart and that's allowed even though copyright nominally restricts you from making duplications. It also has this fair use side that has all these, exceptions to those exclusive rights. But you could sell it. You could give it away. Libraries could lend it out. You could start a library and lend it out. You know, people sometimes, especially these lawsuits about the Internet archive, they have these debates about what's a library. Historically, there was no debate about what's a library. A library was a thing that called itself a library. That's all a library was. And so if you joined a Learning Society of Engineers or the Science Fiction Club at your university or, the Explorer Society or, a cooking class, they would have a library. And you could borrow the books, and you didn't have to certify as a library with the International Federation of Library Associations to get the right to loan out books. So that property right was transferred to you. It was yours. And it was yours to do with what you would within the contours of copyright, which tried to balance the interest of the public and the interest of rights holders and their investors. What DRM does is it says you're a licensor. You did I never made a first sale. There was no exhaustion of my property interest in this work. You are the tenant of that work. And so, you know, when John Deere goes to farmers and says, the copyright in our software means that you can't repair your own tractor. What they mean is that you can't own a tractor. In fact, they went to the copyright office in 2017 and said, you cannot own a tractor. Right? You can only be the tenant of that tractor. Maybe you own the husk of the tractor, but the soul of the tractor, the thing that makes it move, the software can never be yours because we never sell it to you. We only license it to you. And the terms of that license dictate your use of it and they are unilaterally handed down, not negotiated and so on. And so this is a regime in which property is the exclusive purview of an elite of, you know, transhuman colony organisms that we call limited liability corporations. And where natural persons literally don't own property, cannot own property at all. Full stop. Because everything that you buy that has some intellectual property interest in it can be characterized the transfer can be characterized as a license, and the license can be terminated. It can be, changed at will. You can say this license is subject to change at thirty days notice or whatever. You know, all of that so your your ownership disappears. There is no property in a DRM world except for the corporation and not for the user. And so the question of NFTs to me is orthogonal to this. It's like someone says my house keeps catching fire, and they say, have you thought about a burglar alarm? Yeah. Burglar alarm might be great if my problem was burglars, but that's not my problem. Right? My problem is is orthogonal to burglars. Burglars are bad. If I had a burglar problem, I'd be in the market for a burglar solution. But if every time I complain about my house catching fire, you tell me that I need a better burglar alarm, eventually, we're not gonna have anything to talk about.

if we're talking about creative works because I understand that people wanna attach NFTs to, you know, cars or houses or whatever. But if you're if you're talking about creating no ends to dumb ideas about NFTs. That would be But if we're talking about NFTs in the sense that, like I mean, I guess there's two senses that we can talk about NFTs in. The first one is, here is a URL. Here is the identity of one user. Here is the identity of another user. User a says user b is connected to the URL. And then we socially interpret that to mean user a is the proprietor of whatever copyrighted work is at the URL and has transferred some interest to that user. That's or or or acknowledges that user in respect of that work. And that's basically what Anil Dash was thinking of when he invented pleasing compliment or a cash donation or some other benefit from an audience member to memorialize that, like, by screwing a little plaque on the side of the building that says, you know, Corey Doctorow acknowledges Fred Flintstone for his contribution to the book that's at this URL. And there's a problem with that, which, you know, we've run up against. There are actually a bunch of problems with that, which are all the problems of copyright itself and which NFTs in no way solve and can never solve and are completely irrelevant to. And again, this is why I'm talking about burglar alarms and fires. So the first problem is, what's at the URL? Is that gonna be the same thing tomorrow or the next day or the next? The second problem is, does the person who minted the NFT have I don't wanna use the word own because that's the wrong word in copyright, but have rights to that work that they can transfer. And how do they prove that? That's not a thing you can do on chain. Right? That's a thing that you then have to go to a court or some other registry and or or some oracle whose betrayals are punished by civil authorities, right, who you can sue for fraud not on the blockchain but in the courthouse if they make bad attestations. And and so that part needs to be resolved. Right? And and so those big problems oh, and then there's the third problem, which is even if I'm the proprietor of this copyrighted work and I post a copy of it at a URL that's like book1.html and I mint an NFT to you, what's to stop me from uploading that book and calling it book2.html and minting an NFT for someone else? Right? Except for some contract that you and I make that we then get to enforce. Again, not in chain, but in a but in a, you know, the Chancery Court of Delaware or something.

like, premise for their entire reason for why they're mad about, like, them right clicking their monkey. Whenever both, like, both of them are it's kind of like two two idiots kind of, like, arguing with each other to me. Well, neither of them understand copyright. Right? It's like Either. It's like someone it's it's like if the house is on fire, you have the one person who's arguing about why burglar alarms are the right answer, and you have the other person who's arguing about why, flood detectors are the right answer, and then the house is still on fire. Right? Like, not they are both engaged with the wrong thing. So I wrote, something about this. What did it what was it called? It was like, crypto plus copyright equals clown poop, for medium, where and it was about the the people who said you could own colors, who were dumb. But it was also about the the Spice DAO. It was but it was about the Spice DAO. And the thing about the Spice DAO is not only was the Spice DAO wrong, but so were the critics of the Spice DAO. Because the Spice DAO Yeah. I mean, the Spice DAO assumed that you couldn't make essential essentially fan art, even commercial fan art, unless you owned a book, which was, like, clearly wrong. And then the other people said the critics said you can never make commercial fan art, unless you have permission. Also totally wrong. Right? There's a really important Supreme Court case about this about a book called The Wind Un Gone, which was a remix of Gone with the Wind told from the perspective of enslaved Africans. And, the Margaret Mitchell estate sued and the author said, even though I am failing all four of the so called fair use tests, which again is an area that nobody understands because they think those are the four tests that you have to pass and not four examples of tests that judges might apply but need not, that the the even though it was using the whole work, even though it was a creative work and not a factual work, even though the purpose of the the work cut of the new work, was at odds to the first one, and even though it cut into the commercial market for the first work, it was intended to undermine the commercial market for the first work. In other words, it fails all of the things that if you if you read the the copyright statute as though it were a series of if then statements, you would assume that the else at the end of it would be terminate. The judge said, no. No. No. This is good. Like, the Supreme Court said, this is fine. And so, you know, there are many circumstances in which Spice Dao could have made the Jodorowsky movie of Dune totally orthogonal to whether they went to an auction and bought a book. And they were wrong and their critics were wrong. And, again, like, you've got the people arguing about whether you should have a a burglar alarm and the people arguing about whether you should have a flood sensor and, the house is on fire. And they're just they're they're, like, they're arguing about things that are irrelevant to the discussion. And so, again, like, when people say, oh, well, we've if there was some way that you could determine whether a URL was, the copyrighted work belonging to a person, you could, affirmatively identify that person, affirmatively identify a second person. You could then transfer that interest and commemorate it on a in an in an immutable ledger, then you would solve a bunch of problems. It treats those first like if you could if you could if you could as though they were a series of trivial problems. Those are the hard problems. Right? The part where you can just transfer the interest and move it around and, you know, have pretty, easy facilitation in market terms. That part's the easy part. It's it's it's like if I'm, you know, trying to learn how to drive and I I keep, you know, grinding my gears and you show up and you go, like, you know, one of the things that makes changing your gears hard is if you're trying to address the radio at the same time. So here's a voice interface for the for your car stereo. Now you'll find it easy to change gears. It's like, oh, maybe there's some benefit at the margins, but you have misunderstood what I'm trying to do here.

Well, yeah. I mean, I think that that the copyright wars probably were as divisive because there were lots of technologists who were on either side of the copyright wars. And I think there's a similar there were similar concerns about enclosure, and enclosure at the network level, enclosure at the hardware level, and enclosure at the software level where you had this this combination of, laws, technologies, and cartel formation that were aimed at, foundationally changing who could make things on the Internet and what duties they would have having made those things. Also, I guess that, you know, to the extent that the free software open source, movement and the split between free software and open source are distinct from the copyright wars. They also created a a really significant split among, technologists.

Not not really. I mean, the the best argument I've heard about why people get so angry at NFTs was, I was arguing with someone who I think is probably now a former friend because every time I interact with them on Twitter, they're they're being quite, dismissive of me. But when I had written something about about cryptocurrency and been dog piled by a bunch of cryptocurrency people, many of whom were saying things like, are you Jewish? You know, you know Jewish bankers are running the world and we're threatening them with our new money. He came along and said, well, the reason they're so angry at you is you're threatening their, money. And, you know, that that was you know, to the extent that people get really worked up about crypto, I don't think it's about technology. I think it's about people who, have believe themselves to be in possession of some wealthy things, who in some in who in some kind of maybe non explicit way understand that the value of those things depends on people believing them. And so anyone who says these aren't as valuable as you think you are isn't just disagreeing with you about whether they're valuable, but actually might make them not valuable disagreement. Right? That that, there's a term actually for this. John Kenneth Galbraith coined it. It's the bezel. And a bezel is the magic interval in a confidence game where the confidence trickster has your money, but you don't yet realize that it's a confidence game. And in that moment, it's a kind of suspended moment of shared disbelief, mutual mutual suspension of disbelief, you think that Bernie Madoff is gonna give you 20% year on year ROI. You know, you you've you think you found the the perpetual yield farm and they know that they have taken that money and used it to buy ivory handle backscratchers. And, both of you are very happy. Right? And if if someone comes along and says, I think all of your money has been converted to Ivory handle backscratchers and your yield farming is about to end, you get really, really, really angry. And and, you know, the the only explanation anyone's ever given me why a disputation about whether NFTs are valuable or not should evince such a savage response, which again, like you say, you know, this is the it's divisive in a way that is, hard to overstate and not divisive in the sense that people firmly disagree with you, but in the sense that if you say a thing that is critical of crypto, you will be dogpiled by people who's who threaten your life, and who, you know, throw antisemitic slurs at you and who accuse you of being a shill. Like, as I said at the start of this conversation, one of the weird things about arguing with people about crypto is not only that people don't believe that you understand it and still disagree. Right? That there's just this, like, foundational idea that if you disagree, you must not understand it. But also, that if you appear to understand it and still disagree, that someone must be paying you to disagree. And and again, like, that is a thing that I really only encountered in arguing with, like, Scientologists. And sometimes, you know, when I when I argue about, the Modi regime in India, I've couple of times I've had, these these big kind of cyber militias descend on me, who and and again, like, once they pivot from you don't know what's going on in India to someone is paying you to say mean things about India. And there's never, like, an intermediate step where it's like, I think you're wrong, but at least I think you're sincerely wrong and that you understand it and that you and I have a foundationally different worldview.

I guess, release their their steam or whatever. I mean, I think the same is true of, like, cyberpartisans from in Modi's, you know, Hindu nationalist army and Scientologists. Right? You don't become a Scientologist because you're happy and things are going well in your life.

Sure. Sure. But, I mean, if you follow the idea that, that there is I I mean, I think that we're I mean, we're we're getting away from substantive things. But but just to put a button on this, if if you understand that, for example, like, there are certain people who get into certain belief systems who talk a certain way about it and react to other people in a certain way, that that is different from peep so if you're, like, in an MLM and every time someone talks about anything, you're like, well, have you thought about buying some tights from me? Or, you know, have you have you thought about drinking chaga mushroom tea or whatever? The the fact that people whenever you bring up Chaga Mushroom Tea, go, oh my god. Is this an MLM pitch? Is fundamentally different from the people who are selling the Chaga Tea wanting to make every discussion about Chaga Tea and getting very angry when people don't. Because that there is, it is it is not a a symmetry. Right? That it is not a symmetry that you have some people in your life who whenever you bring up an issue that's going on in your life, they say, have you thought about Scientology? And then whenever you talk about Scientology, people go, oh my god. Are you a Scientologist? Those are not symmetrical. Those are those are really different.

I I well, so the shilling and the spam, whatever. Right? That that is what it is. There's there's always shilling and spam. I remember when, you know, when when Internet telephony came along, there were all kinds of scammy, like, just cut your long distance bill. I actually got sued by one of them, for making fun of his dumb thing and won. But, you know, it took, like, seven years. Right? You know, so that's always there. I'm not talking about that. Right? Like, so the people who are working on VoIP and SIP, when you said, hey. VoIP connections are shitty or I don't like talking on the phone, they didn't show up and go like, who's paying you to say that phones aren't good? Right? Like, that's that's fundamentally different from the people who are like, I can cut your long distance bill. Right? That that that is a it's a different kind of thing.

No. It was oh, did I yeah. No. You're right. I did. No? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sorry. I was thinking of the 2019 thing in Prague. But yeah. No. You're right. I did a thing in 2021. It's all time is a blur, but yes.

No. I mean, I I would do that talk again, and I'd say the same thing, which, is about the importance of of actual decentralization. And, again, like, in thinking about blockchainism and socialism, there are a lot of people there there's a lot of contestation about the extent to which Blockchain projects are decentralized. But the two strongest claims I think you can make about about Blockchain projects, is that first, there used to be a small number of things that looked like banks and now there are a lot of things that look like banks. And I think I think that's an uncontroversial statement and it's a product of of the blockchain. And then the next part is that the number of people who are very rich, right, the the the Gini coefficient of the people who use those banks is not markedly different and may in fact be worse than the Gini coefficient of people who use banks. And as someone who is I I don't know if I call myself a socialist or not. I was raised by Trotskyist. I'm definitely some kind of leftist. I'm not a liberal. I'm a leftist. As some as a leftist, I'm not particularly interested in how many bank like things there are. I'm interested in how widely distributed wealth is. And, you know, that's that's a thing that I and so when when I stand up in front of an audience of people who say they care about the distribution of power, the the decentralization of power. That's the decentralization of power I'm gonna talk about. And that was the theme of my talk at DevCon too, which is that if your service exists to skirt financial financial regulation, one of the primary beneficiaries of that is going to be the people who are undermining the rule of law and democratic accountability off the chain. And since all the important, things all the important benefits claim for blockchain require that you live in a civilization of the rule of law if the design of your project and your theory of human action and the outcome of your project weakens the rule of law by increasing wealth inequality, then you are not advancing the either decentralization or liberty. I mean, you're decentralizing the number of banks, which, again, is not important. Right? The important thing to me is the decentralization of power. If there's five billionaires using a 100 banks, that is to me an indistinguishable outcome from five billionaires using one bank.

Yeah. That makes a lot of sense that there's I mean, I often have noted a a gap between the description of what's going on in Blockchain land and what is actually going on. And, it's fine to have aspirations beyond your existing point, but there's a the difference between aspiration and delusion is whether you describe what's going on as, what's happening in a transitional stage or whether you describe what's going on as, something that is really distinct from reality. Right.

Yeah. Totally. So you know what this is like? This is like the people who who think that the problem with ad tech is that Google secretly invented a mind control ray. Right? And that and that the reason your uncle is a QAnon is that the mind control ray was invented to sell your nephew fidget spinners, but then Robert Mercer stole it and made your uncle a QAnon. The reality is your uncle was like a racist cook all along and material conditions, you know, let's just a socialist here. Right? Agreed. The material conditions, created a circumstance in which his most odious beliefs became most most salient to his life. And and that's the that's the real, like, story of what's going on. And, you know, the the people who say, well, if only we would pay for everything, right, if we could just put it all in the Apple App Store, then companies wouldn't wouldn't, treat you so badly anymore. It's, I mean, it's errant nonsense. You know? If you wanna see that paying for something doesn't make a company respect you, ask any farmer with a John Deere tractor. You spend $700,000 on a tractor and then John Deere says, hey. Guess what? You can't fix your tractor yourself. In fact, you can. You can put the new part in it, but it won't run until you pay $200 and wait for a technician to come out and type an unlock code in your console because we need those $200. Right? And and, you know, Apple says the same thing about fixing your own screen or or getting your your battery replaced by a third party. You know, the idea that if you're not paying for the product, you're the product is is nonsense. You are the product unless there is some force, maybe competition, maybe regulation, and maybe both that forces companies to treat you with respect. All of the things being equal, the companies will treat you like a product whenever they can. And so, you know, I agree. And and so, you know, you have people who wanna support the media industry who say, oh, well, the problem is that Google News is stealing content from the newspapers, and that's why our journalism sucks. And the reality is that, like, the fair use quotations, the snippets that Google puts up on the, on its Google News site is the only part of Google's relationship with the news industry that's good. The part that's really bad is that they're part of a collusive duopoly that steals billions in advertising money from newspapers. And, you know, like, getting fixated on whether or not your content is being stolen is a great way to distract you from whether or not your money is being stolen. And I I I think that that is very similar. Right? You have, you have unsophisticated critiques of of Bitcoin and blockchain and and cryptocurrencies and NFTs and DAOs that assume that the hucksters are telling the truth about how their their technology works. And in fact, they're lying about it. And this is what I always say when I argue with people about surveillance capitalism. If your evidence for Google being really good at convincing people to do things with ads is that Google sells its ads to its customers by claiming that, you're you've really made a giant mistake because Google lies about everything. And the idea that the only time they would tell the truth is when they were pitching their products is heartbreakingly naive.

money. So Molly White did a really good essay on valuations in crypto and in which she urged us and and also admitted to to herself having done this of taking the valuation statements of taking the valuation statements of crypto projects at face value. And, you know, you exchanged a token for a dollar. There's a billion more of those tokens. Therefore, the token, the the whole group of tokens is worth a billion dollars. It's obviously untrue, and this is how you get these eye popping numbers about, you know, a $100,000,000 stolen and whatever. Happens that happens in in, like, the normal in normal financial market as well. But there's liquidity in the normal financial market. Like, people don't say that about, what's a good duct taped banana for a $100,000 at the Basel art fair and then someone steals or a million dollars at the Basel art fair and then someone steals a 100 bananas and a 100 rolls of duct tape, no one says, oh, it's a $100,000,000 heist. Right? That when people when when when you steal like, my uncle runs a small business in Canada, and he was just subjected to, a an executive account takeover where someone impersonated him to his bank and got a quarter million dollars. It's an actual quarter million dollars. Yeah. You know, like, I understand that banks are doing fractional reserve and whatever and a quarter million dollars. It's it's not it's not like, the bank didn't actually lose a quarter million dollars. A quarter million dollar bills didn't waltz out of the bank. But there is liquidity to those bank balances that is not present in a shitcoin.

The stock market in general is pretty liquid, compared to compared to Chitcoins.

Well, sure. And, you know, like and there are other factors involved. Right? So, like, one of the things that makes Tesla valuable is that it entered the S and P 500. And now that that it's in the S and P 500, all the asset managers have to maintain a portfolio of it because that is what the the index funds are. Right? Their their shares in all of them. And so, you know, there's people who kinda front ran that. Right? They they anticipated the entry into the S and P 500 of the of the stock, then they bought the stock. The act of buying the stock drove up the stock price. That was a self fulfilling prophecy. But, again, that is a fundamentally different thing from saying I sold one coin for a dollar. I have a million more. Therefore, I have a million dollars. It's it's like, there it is it is its own form of dysfunction. It does not represent value into in the real economy. The financial economy is not the real economy. We should fight their the financial economy and fight the language of financialism. But we can still make gradations between the absurdity of claims about financial assets that are different. Like, it is very different for the the people who manage my four zero one k to send me a statement telling me how much the index funds that I put my retirement savings are worth and Bernie Madoff to send me that statement. Right? That they are really different propositions, and we can distinguish between them in a coherent way without conceding that a four zero one k is a is a good way to plan for not starving to death when you get old. Right. I yeah. I mean

But I'm curious on yeah. If you could explain a bit, like, what seizing the means of production to you, so I would like to explain to explain it, and then I'd also like to talk about whether or not dowser are the kind of thing that I'm thinking of. Sure. Yeah. Because I I I have I am skeptical of that proposition, but I'm willing to be educated on it. So the the, the there's something amazing about computers. Right? I I am a technology exceptionalist in this sense that that the Turing complete Von Neumann machine that is the only computer we know how to make that can run every program we know how to write is a remarkable new thing in the world. We have had lots of general purpose things that tend to be simple like wheels. We've had lots of special purpose things that tend to be complicated like, you know, nuclear power plants. But we have not had general purpose complicated things before. And the primitives that arise out of the general purpose computer like cryptography and the ability to make secrets that are, at least to a first approximation, perfect, general purpose end to end networks where to a first approximation, any two parties can communicate using any protocol without any third party being inter able to intermediate them. And, you know, more recently and I think more complicatedly, something I'm less sanguine about, the, rise of, of, trusted computing in, environments that allow you to make remote attestations so that mutually untrusted parties can make reliable statements to one another about their computer's operating environment. I think all of those things in combination are like new things on the Earth and that we can do some amazing things with them. So, you know, you you talked earlier about the right wing origins or the libertarian origins of of cryptocurrency. And, you know, the Internet has far more right wing origins than mere cryptocurrency. It was invented by, like, US defense contractors as part of the project of, you know, building a nuclear tipped US empire, that spanned the globe and subjugated, all non American populations to American hegemony. Right? Like, it's it's hard to be more right wing than that. Right? And but I can articulate a way that we can use those primitives that arose out of that project in the project of human liberation from that kind of hegemony. Right? So we can lower the coordination and communications cost, the discovery cost among partisans for a better world that we can then, you know, mobilize and coordinate with one another. Right? I I've written a bunch of novels about this. We don't have to get into detail, but it's it's not hard to imagine how our liberatory revolutionary movement could use this technology. And, of course, there have been examples of this. You know, Stafford Beer teaming up with Salvador Allende to build CyberSon is an example of a kind of utopian questing after a, a a better digital future. But I've I've yet to have someone explain to me how, DAOs do that necessarily. Like, I I I'm I it it feels like so now sorry. I'm getting ahead of myself. I'm getting into the why I don't think why I don't like DAOs or why I think DAOs are are not a good way to own the means of production. But in terms of seizing the means of computation, seizing the means of computation is asserting the right to reconfigure the digital computers that you use and or own so that they serve your interest and the interest of the people you are in community with as opposed to the interest of the people you are adverse to. And, we have a combination of technology and law that stands in the way of that. Primarily, there's this thicket of laws like anti circumvention rules like section twelve one of the DMCA that bans breaking DRM and makes it a five year felony, to promulgate tools that bypass DRM. You have software patents. You have exotic contract theories like tortious interference that make terms of service have the force of law. You have cybersecurity laws like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act that have also been used to turn terms of service into legally binding documents with criminal sanctions for violating them. And seizing the means of computation is in part a technological project. It's saying we should modify our general purpose computers so that they serve us and not others. Right? That the problem with Facebook is not that your friends are there, it's that you don't get to decide how it works and you and your friends don't get to decide how it works. And so the answer isn't let's build something that's not Facebook. The answer is let's change Facebook so that we can carve off a piece of it that we control that operates according to our norms and wishes. It's the difference between saying if you don't like it, leave and saying if you don't like it, grab it and fix it. Make it better. That that hacker ethic of, this this doesn't work for me, so I'm gonna modify it so it will work for me. And then I'm gonna package up my mods as a script, and I'm gonna share it with anyone who wants to use it so that they can use it too. And so seizing the means of computation right now, I think step one is reform the laws that block interoperability, that block user configuration of the things in their lives or toolsmith configuration on behalf of users to improve the things in their lives. Step two are are more ambitious projects. It's what we build, what we actually do once we can modify those things. But we can't get to step two until we have step one. Right? We have to seize the means, and then we have to direct the means. In terms of DAOs, you know, I I understand that there is a kind of a notional way to build a DAO in which the governance tokens are illiquid and therefore not speculative. But the the template of DAOs, you know, generally, and the way that I've seen DAOs, including DAOs that are organized around providing public goods, is that the governance tokens are are tradable assets and that the reason to acquire a governance token is to speculate with it in part, or the reason the governance tokens are valuable and fund this is that you can speculate with it. And if your means of production are is owned in part by speculators, that is the literal opposite of you owning the means of production. Like, the whole point of seizing the means of production is to eliminate speculators from the governance of the means of production. It's to organize production around the people who who make it and the people who use the goods that are produced and cutting speculators out.

Sure. That's right.

But the question is I I think the thing that it that, where I would disagree here is that with both proof of work and proof of stake and proof of storage, they're all grounded in the idea that, we're not going to trust each other. We're going to nominate a system that will run the computation for us, that will use some form of mathematics to make that work. And all three of those, that system requires that, or or creates a regime in which people who are more wealthy have more control over the network. There's a fourth one which is the the mobile coin style, you trusted computing. And as I mentioned earlier, trusted computing is a thing I find really troubling, but but but although also exciting and interesting. But but the the there is a counter solidaristic foundation in the idea of this. And there's also, a degree to which it is nonsense or at least incoherent because even if your computing substrate is something that you trust and and it's been built on math and you found a way to make it egalitarian so that there's not, loci of control that are oligarchic or that can be organized around cartels so that it it really is one person, one vote or a consensus driven organization and so on. Eventually, if you are going to do a thing in the world that isn't just money, that isn't money going to other you know, money being transferred from one wallet to another or money like tokens being transferred from one wallet to another, you're gonna have to nominate a human being to go and do a thing. Right? If you're if you're you know, SpiceDao has to eventually send someone to Sotheby's to bid on a book. Absolutely. Right? I I don't think Yeah. Go go ahead. The thing that I wonder about, the thing that no one's been able to explain to me is what is the environment in which you don't trust someone to run your server, but you do trust them to take all the money that you use the distributed server to organize and not run away with it. Right? Who who is the person who can be trusted with all of your money but not with your server?

what is the difference between a DAO that doesn't have a token and, you know, get standing up like, getting a a Raspberry Pi scale server that can run the message board for you and your friends and installing liquid liquid democracy on it?

I get that, but I just am I I keep waiting for the application in which it is better to build something on chain than it is to build elsewhere. I had a conversation with a friend of mine who's into this stuff and does a lot of community stuff with it, and he argued that, oh, there's a lot of tooling. Like, you can just sort of download some stuff so it's easier to set up. I mean but that's a bit circular. Yes. Right? No. I agree I I agree with that. But I think the the key argument for me is about resilience.

I hear that. And, you know, I'm conscious of the fact that we're running out of time. I got another meeting about to start. But, you know, I I by way of closing, I'll say that I just I don't have your confidence that the blockchain will endure, that it's an enduring thing. And I I also, I I think that, there are lots of deliberative tools that are reliable and robust, that don't require that, it be hitched to this and that don't require interoperability with a project to dismantle the regulation of the finance sector. Like, we have like, back to the back to the earlier discussions we had about these excluded middles, like, it is on the it is absolutely true that the finance sector is badly regulated and oligarchic, but it is likewise Right. Right? And that and that the answer to the bad regulation is good regulation. I don't want an unregulated finance sector. I am like I'll I'll stake that now. Right? Like, I'm a 100% against an unregulated finance sector. Right. I guess I would yeah. I mean, ideally, there would be maybe no finance sector in our socialist utopia. But I'll go along with that too or at least boring. Like, if if the finance sector returned to what it was, which is, like, it's what the fail sons of American Brahmins were sent to do because they weren't very bright. And they did it from, like, ten to three every day and then went and played golf. And they allocated, you know, sort of 15 to 25% of the capital that was allocated in our society was allocated by these these fail sons. I mean, that's worse than just getting rid of them and, you know, I don't know, sending those people north for reeducation or something. But but it it's still, like, it still would be infinitely preferable to what we have now. I would go back to the finance sector of the nineteen fifties in a heartbeat. Yeah. It's it's it's the the the lesser of two worst options.

I I hear you. I mean, I I I really do have to go, but I'll say that I think good regulation is possible, and we know it's possible because the roof hasn't fallen on in on you. And the reason your roof isn't isn't like, the reason you're not sitting in a pile of rubble is someone figured out what the structural members that go over your ceiling, should be, and they did so in an evidence based way even though there is upsides for many people in the chain between the person who broke ground on your foundation and and you sitting in the building that you're sitting in now who would have benefited from, more lax regulation. That we don't have to be nihilists. Right? We we can we can create and agree on ways to do stuff that are good. We absolutely can.