Democracy as a Design Space (Interview with Nathan Schneider)
Nathan Schneider (@ntnsndr) is a professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder and the editor of “Proof of Stake: The Making of Ethereum and the Philosophy of Blockchains,” a collection of essays by Vitalik Buterin that will be published this September. He is also one of the most prominent thinkers on cooperativism and the creator of the term Exit to Community. He has to be one of my favorite thinkers involved in the crypto space as you may have noticed that I've mentioned...
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Transcript
Well, hello everyone. You are listening to the Blockchain Socials podcast, and I have probably, I think, one of the most, like, inspiring writers for me in blockchain world. I reference his work a lot, and I haven't had him on the podcast until now.
So I'm very excited to have, Nathan Schneider on. So hi, Nathan. How are you? Good. It's so good to be here. I'm an avid listener. It's really good to, you know, to participate.
Yeah. Which I'm, like, super honored that, you find that you even even listen to the podcast. But in case people don't know you, you know, you're, like, one of the, I guess one of the more prominent, thinkers and writers and academics about cooperativism. And you were a journalist during the Occupy Wall Street movement. And you've been, you know, I guess more recently been really interested in cryptocurrency or have been involved also as well in its development in in in certain ways. So I was wondering if you can start off just to, like, recount a bit the way that you first started looking into cryptocurrency, how how you came across it. So I know it's it's a fairly interesting story, and it was part of the the early history of Ethereum from what I understand.
Yeah. For me, it was, while I was on a book tour for my book about Occupy Wall Street. It's called Thank You Anarchy. And I was doing a stop in San Francisco where I was doing an event with, Rebecca Solnit. And, the afternoon before the event, an old friend, said he wanted to meet up, wanted to share something that he was working on and exploring. And and, so we met in this strange kind of, like, Veterans for Peace pop up cafe in San Francisco, and, and he started telling me about this white paper that just come out. And he'd become he he this is one of these people who's always, like, you know, a few light years ahead of everybody else, and, in terms of both time and distance and and everything and and, for better or worse. And and, started describing the Ethereum white paper that he'd start started getting involved in. His name is Joel Dietz. He's he was a early MetaMask developer, for instance. And, and, you know, at that time, it what he was describing and then what I eventually read in the white paper myself was, an answer to a question that I had been really wrestling with, which was, in the 2001, uprisings around the world, of which Occupy was just one, just a kind of US manifestation, there had been all this powerful democratic experimentation in the streets, in these occupied spaces. And I had gone through that year feeling, wow, there is an incredible craving for deepening democracy among young people today. This was ten years ago. It's just so much deep experimentation. And once those occupations were gone, I was wondering where will that experiment experimentation go? Where will that energy go? And, I had been beginning my work in cooperatives. I saw some of those people from those protests going into the cooperative movement, and that ended up becoming a major, major focus of mine. But when I read about this and heard about this technology, it seemed like, oh, this could also be a space of that kind of experimentation. It it doesn't have to be. It's got all those dystopian possibilities in it too. It could also be the, you know, the tool of the of the Antichrist or whatever you wanna I wanna call it. But but, wow, you could also build, you know, your your, new democratic possibilities in code here and not have to wait for governments or or other kinds of institutions to catch up. This is clear, like, in 2014
for you?
So January 2014. So this was the white paper had just come out, was just starting to circulate. A few weeks later. Vitalik announced it at at, Bitcoin Miami, you know, with that listing the possibilities and then also, like, the mic drop at the end of or Skynet, you know, or the the dystopian robot consciousness that tries to exterminate the human race in the Terminator movies. So that ambivalence for me has been, like, always present in this. You know? And then as a reporter, I tried to cover the early development of Ethereum. The editors at the magazines that I was writing for at the time kind of, you know, establishment New York magazines, like, could not care less. They did not wanna take this seriously. So I just kind of kept, you know, kept following it on my own.
To me, it seems, like, pretty clear that the your experience in covering Occupy Wall Street was influential in, like, taking this weird thing called crypto or Ethereum or whatever it was, like, somewhat seriously. And I was wondering if you could maybe, like, lay out where those influences lie. Because it seems to me and, you know, correct me if I'm wrong. But it it seems that, like, if you've done or attempted at trying to do something like decentralized organizing in the past, then you come across, like, all of these same issues, usually around, like, I mean, staying resilient and, like, the with with with threats, like, staying on topic, staying like, being able to stay cohesive and, like, resilient, adaptable over time. And I guess a decentralized infrastructure like a blockchain is something that sounds appealing when you've, like, when you've seen, like, seen those failures happen.
In in very specific ways. So, you know, this is something that I've been wrestling with in the years since 2011, and and many others have been. I I think the the best analysis of it is is in Zeynep Tufekci's book, Twitter and Tear Gas. But it is the question of why is it that these massive uprisings, these massive outpourings of democratic aspiration with, you know, all the latest social media technologies and decentralized organizing and so forth produced close to nothing. And in many cases, actually produced, you know, brutal civil wars, brutal conflicts, and worse authoritarian, outcomes, than than we started with. And and that is you know, I think Occupy accomplished a lot in terms of network building and vision casting and so forth. You know, I stand by a lot of that, but I, you know, I think we have to be honest about how social movements are not doing their jobs, right now. And and and what Tufekci points to is this difference between signal and capacity. Social media enables movements that have this tremendous signal. They can spread their message. They can go viral all they want. But, you know, do they have the political capacity to back that up? You know? And you saw this so clearly in Egypt where, like, the young liberals, you know, techie kind of middle class people, like, in many respects became the face of Tahrir Square, though it had many, many more, faces in it, including, for instance, the Muslim Brotherhood that decided to get involved. And when Mubarak was deposed and an election was called, who won? Not the Liberals, but the Muslim Brotherhood because they had capacity. They had been building political power for decades, under really adverse conditions. And, so what is interesting to me too about what the blockchain introduced is it wasn't just an attempt to create viral a viral moment on a platform designed for advertising, but it was an ability to hold and govern assets, resources, potentially capacity. So that that seemed to me like a really pivotal potential turning point there. Yeah.
Then there's, like, this very easy there's a very easy jump, I think, from that to, like, I guess, cooperatives where there is a lot of the I mean, they're both organizations, like, whether it's a political one or not. Cooperatives need to know how to organize in a decentralized fashion, and it's a little bit of a safer type of area to play in than it is if you are like a political organization trying to overthrow, the Egyptian president or whatever. So I imagine, like, is that how, you know, you started making these connections as well?
Well, the the cooperative movement, I think, is is interesting in part because of its role in so many resistance movements. I mean, going back to you know, you can think of, like I mean, it goes way back for many, many centuries, but, you know, Gandhi would talk about, like, the constructive program, which was basically, like, village level cooperatives as being 90% of his strategy, 10% was just that resistance stuff. You know, even the early, like, English cooperative movement in the nineteenth century was really an outgrowth of the chartist movement, which was an effort to win, the vote for working class people. It was really a kind of a demonstration project for that political program. The, civil rights movement in The US full of cooperative. So so, you know, the the idea of building democratic economies and pairing that with resist social movement resistance, you know, is very old. And, and many of the most, like, boring cooperatives that we have in The United States, Land O'Lakes and so forth, were born of actually very militant, like, in that case, the populist movement resistance among among farmers, who, you know, who were being, you know, powerfully exploited by urban banks and railroads and and and so forth. And so, the the connection with social movements, you know, I think is really important and, and and it was always a part of my interest in it. But, it also just became a kind of practical interest as I started working with, starting around 2014, started working with starter, startup founders who I was covering versus a journalist and just, like, seeing them trying to build cooperative models in the tech economy today and just seeing, like, this incredible barriers they're up against. And and and so so quickly, you know, the cooperative idea goes from being you know, it's both a political project, but it's in many ways just a very practical day to day. How do we get this stuff to work in a system that is not designed for it in so many respects? And, you know, how do what what kinds of what do we even mean by work? You know, how do we make it so that people can build viable livelihoods, you know, with democracy.
Right. Yeah. I I yeah. I I didn't mean to imply that that cooperatives aren't necessarily political, but that, like, it's on the surface, your, I don't know, average apolitical person will not would not perceive it as necessarily being a a political thing, which is also one of its strengths, I think, and is something that is, Yandi, like, paired with a political movement that sort of provides the what did you call earlier? Just capacity, for, like because your message can be propagated, but if you don't have the capacity to sort of, like, make material, movements or whatever you wanna call it, then, you know, your memes can only go so far. Yeah. And I I remember once a conversation when I was reporting on,
cooperation Jackson and related things in Mississippi. I was talking with a a civil rights elder and, you know, asked him, you know, were there cooperatives around, you know, while you're doing that work in the sixties? And he said, are are you kidding? Like, who do you think was registering to vote? You know, it was the cooperative owners. The people who because they were part they were part of cooperative farms or or had relationships with with black cooperatives that they were had the independence to be able to take a risk like that. And, and then I started asking more kind of mentors who were civil rights elders, and everyone had a story, you know, or multiple stories. And so it's so often just an untold, you know, part of, of that movement where so so often we see the resistance. We see the the confrontation, the conflict. We don't see the underlying power that enables that conflict to be built and sustained.
Yeah. I think that's to me, that's super related to I mean, just in general, people sort of focus on the the spectacle first and foremost out of everything else. And this is the case with especially with with cryptocurrency as well. I mean, the you see you see the spectacle. You see, like, changing prices just like you'd only see, like, the image of, you know, whatever sort of scene that's set up for, like, a civil rights movement. Not trying to compare cryptocurrency to civil rights movement at all, but, like, the there's some, similarities there. Yeah. And and also it's it's,
I mean, it's such a multifaceted thing. And I, you know, I often have to kind of remind myself, you know, I've been in this stuff for a while, but I have really self selected, you know, opted into certain kinds of communities and spaces there. You know, when, you know, for friends who are journalists or or, you know, scholars who are looking at this stuff, from a different perspective and experience, they're often focusing on a lot of the kind of speculative and and, you know, currency focused components of this stuff. And my first response is, oh, but don't you understand that's not all of it? Like, there's this other, there are these, like, you know, there are these more prosocial things going on, but then I have to remind myself, you know, I'm really looking at just a tiny subset. You know, it is such a it's such a vast thing. And, you know, I've been trying to temper my my hope for some of the some of what's going on here and some of what, you know, initially got me interested with this recognition that, wow, you know, we're up against a lot if we're trying to develop these kind of prosocial, prohuman, outcomes as opposed to, you know, this you know, what is kind of a beast of of speculation and and, potential kind of world destroying power.
Yeah. Indeed. I mean, it's I think from from my perspective, at least, it seems that at least when when you're critical, like, it's it's a it's a criticism from the inside, which I feel like is, in my opinion, a bit more, influential or a bit more, like, it would reach the more important ears, the people who are, like, sort of, like, building the the stuff rather than, like, I think what I see a lot of, I don't know, whatever left wing academic that that makes their criticism from the outside. It seems to me that those are the type of criticisms that will not sort of penetrate into the people that are that are building it, but maybe those aren't there. That's not their audience.
Yeah. It's not. And I I think it's two different questions. Right? The I think it's the it's the question of why or or not why. Sorry. Whether or how. Right? The the question of whether is what I see a lot of people I otherwise might find political alignment with asking. Should we have this crypto thing? And a lot of them have been coming to it just in the last few years, and they're like, oh my gosh. There's this thing that's happening. You know? Should we do it or not? Like, should it exist or not? And, I guess maybe it's because I've been in it longer, and I've seen the cycles, and I've seen it grow, like, so much more than I ever expected even. That's true. And I've asked that question of weather a lot and seen its irrelevance to what has actually occurred. And so I just don't think it's a question of weather. I think it's happening. And so I'm much more interested in the question of how. And, and so I think that's the difference. There's also, I think, this, like, this kind of socialist fantasy that, oh, we can just get the state to make this go away for us. And I just I think I have you know, I'm I'm a bit more anarchist in my leanings. I and I'm also a product of, like, the twenty first century in which I have I have very little hope in this in the state as a source of enlightened, you know, policy and decision making. I you know? So so I'm just so even that question of, like, are we gonna ban it, you know, just does not feel like a live question to me. And and, you know, what we need to be asking is, what do we mean by it? What are the what are the tendencies we wanna be driving here? What are the parts of this that we want, and what are the parts of this that we want to want to have less of? What do we wanna encourage?
Yeah. I have but we can go on, like, a whole other tangent on what I think about that. But, yeah. I mean I mean, also just in the just in the current state right now, at least in The US, I mean, yeah, it's hard to have faith that that there will be any sort of, like, sensible, like, I don't know, good way of banning cryptocurrency, I guess, without sort of, like, an intense amount of surveillance being, being used. But I guess to really how I I mean, what's clear that, like, you're showing how you're doing that is through, like, this this thing with I mean, very recently now, you were editing, Vitalik Buterin's book, which is coming out in September, I think, called Proof of Stake. So, like, I'm I'm curious how how that process was like and, like, how do you let's ignore the question of whether and assume you're correct that this is going to happen, you know, and we can use the book maybe as, like, partially an example of, like, how we navigate this space.
Yeah. No. It's it's been, an idea that I've bounced around, a lot over the years, just because, you know, those of us who've been kind of mixed up in this world have all been many of us, at least in in the kind of Ethereum universe, reading these blog posts, these essays that that Vitalik has been writing over the years. And, you know, there's this kind of shared sense of, like, well, he's not right about everything, but it's always fun when he comes out with something. You know? Like, he's just this you know, he's not just a founder. He's this kind of literary figure. And, actually, he started in crypto. You know, his first act was asking somebody to pay him to write. You know? So he was kind of always a writer in this. And and I guess I it always felt to me like, wow. I, you know, I just wish the people who were seeing, like, you know, the Schillers, the kind of, like, celebrity Schillers who show up on Super Bowl commercials or whatever, like, also knew that there's this really interesting conversation happening about, like, the future of the universe, among people building this stuff. And they're crazy sometimes, but they're really interesting sometimes. And so I I kept kind of, you know, bouncing this, you know, around. My my wife works in book publishing. We talked about this a lot over the years. And and I always you know, I I've known Vitalik since 2014, but I'd never wanted to, you know, push him on on anything like this. But then in the last year or so, you know, we had an exchange, and and I just floated the question. Like, have you thought about assembling your writing into a book? I think it would be really, you know, useful to introduce people out who haven't been following in real time, you know, to help them catch up to some of these conversations. And he expressed he, you know, he wanted to do it. So we've been working together on on, assembling this, and, you know, it's a selection that's focused on kind of less technical, more kind of big idea essays he's been doing, you know, really a small subset. And and it's got some notes and a glossary and things that will just help guide, guide a reader through. And, again, it's just it's an attempt to shed light on some of the aspects of what's been going on that I think, most of the world has not been seeing. And and part of, like, our frustration, I think, among those of us who are kind of, like, trying to bring, you know, a constructively critical approach to crypto is that, like, there's a disconnect in what people are seeing. Like, a lot of our friends, like, who are who are just critics are not seeing the live dynamic conversations. And, and it's, you know, it's being published by, you know, a a leftist publisher, Seven Stories Press, which, you know, would which is, it's in you know, they publish Angela Davis and things like this. And, you know, I think this is a stretch for them because Vitalik is in no way a traditional leftist, but he is an interesting thinker. And the, you know, the publisher, Dan Simon, recognized that recognized that, you know, this is someone who's just a really interesting, you know, mind and someone that, you know, we should all be able to learn from.
So did you have to, like, get the publisher to read a couple of his essays first to convince them that, you know, it's not, like, the way that maybe you think about it based on, I don't know, articles you read in Jacobin or whatever?
Yeah. Yeah. And and, you know, to be honest, it's it's provoked some interesting controversy in the in the company and and among people who you know, it's it's a it is a a challenge for anybody who is who understands themselves in a kind of classical, you know, or or even, like, contemporary kind of Jacqueline style leftist mold. He is not a Jacqueline style leftist. But, you know, I think he the way he asks questions and approaches the challenge, you know, he is radical, and he is also learning and developing. And to me, that's been the most exciting part of the process is, like, seeing that development, unfold. And it doesn't necessarily mean it's, like, a clear political position, but it's, it reflects, I think, a wider maturing of the of the space he's in. And, you know, the sense this development from the sense of, like, you know, oh, we are reinventing everything, and we can you know, we have nothing to learn from anything that went before to, and everything can be fixed with economics and so forth to now we're talking about, like, what can we learn from cooperatives and other forms of collective organization, and we need soulbound tokens, and we need personhood, and we need, you know, to counteract plutocracy and and these sorts of things. So, you know, his evolution is in some respects reflective of a much broader one underway.
Yeah. Absolutely. I I I have definitely noticed, sort of I mean, in general, the crypto space the crypto space, but, with Vitalik in particular, just how how he writes and how he reasons things. And I think what I do appreciate with him is that he is open about, like, I I have read some pieces where he or, like, at least some tweets or something where, like, you know, he says, like, I used to think this and now I think this or, like, that's, you know, he's open about his evolution that he's not, so he's not he's very he's, like, almost like an anti not I wanna say anti Satoshi, but, like, the way that people perceive, like, in the Bitcoin maximalist community that's, you know, what Satoshi said this on this one forum post is, sort of, like, the word of God type of thing. It's a much more adaptable sort of approach.
It's it's a it's a fundamental difference, and it's a fundamental, political question. Right? Do we and it it comes down to do we trust ourselves? Do we trust human beings? Do we want to build a framework for trusting human beings, or do we want to build a framework against trusting human beings? And it goes back to, you know, old debates about, you know, where I was talking about the populous earlier, you know, those early agricultural cooperatives. You know, their core issue was about money, was about, you know, the gold standard. And the the the bankers in New York were trying to protect this gold standard that that, you know, that worked for them. And, and the farmers out in the in the in the West wanted more flexible money supply. They wanted, they wanted a political money supply. They wanted public banks. They wanted, the ability to say, okay. We have a social goal. Let's build the economy around that rather than we have a fixed, like, fake constraint that we're gonna build, and nobody can ever change it because that helps protect wealth in certain ways. And it, you know, it that's a it's a it it's not an easy question. There are there are, you know, arguments on all different kinds of sides, but I think it does come down to, you know, to a fundamental issue of, do you, are we going to trust ourselves with politics? And, you know, even looking at, like, the grip the kind of defining moment of Ethereum around the DAO hack was an example of that. Like, do we care enough about the future of this thing to actually intervene as human beings and say, no. We're gonna change something about this. And, you know, the consequences were complex and and interesting about that change, but, essentially, you know, the community decided we are going to make a radical change in order to protect our shared project rather than we're going to value, you know, the the constraints of code above all else. And, you know, as a result of that, I think it kind of set that that culture a bit more toward that that possibility of politics even when coming from a very kind of libertarian orientation in many respects.
Yeah. I kind of think I mean, I I feel that the the DAO hack was probably, like, the best thing that could have happened for Ethereum in in in in my view and that it sort of shook out a lot of the well, I mean, one, the more, let's say, conservative people who are generally just more right wing and conservative sort of left Ethereum because of the choice, because they did not adhere to this code is law, like, type of, thinking. But there is still it was sort of, like, the very right wing libertarians versus the slightly nuanced libertarians a bit. And That's right. With the slightly nuanced libertarians, like, now there's a whole lot of space to to talk to to where I don't know if you've in your experience in dealing with a lot of these types of people, like, have you seen sort of kind of what a couple of other people that I've talked to think that they're saying kind of like a almost like a libertarian to I wouldn't say socialist, but, like, cooperativist or collectivist minded. Like, almost like there's a pipeline now with especially with all these other types of movements that are happening within, like, a particular niche that is particular in Ethereum with, like, with Refi, Regen, Solarpunk, a lot of people around Gitcoin, like, you know, the people who generally listen to you, I think.
Yeah. That well, you know, in in the meta governance project, which is a kind of research and experimentation network that I'm part of, we we did a a survey, a kind of political survey where we, you know, tried to map the politics of the really, it was of the Ethereum world. And the, and we we really tried to identify what are kind of different positions people are holding. And, you know, a lot of them are not really directly mappable to, you know, previous political positions. And, you know, I I appreciate that. You know, I'm, for instance, a Roman Catholic. Like, you know, I I have like, my politics do not map cleanly onto any political party. And so I appreciate, you know, the this way in which the, the the politics of a, you know, of of this emerging space and technology don't easily map onto, preexisting stuff. And that to me is something that we need to study, embrace, explore, play in. You know, recognizing at the same time that a lot of the old questions that come up in, in all kinds of, in all kinds of contexts are not, you know, are are are still at play and that it it, you know, it does you know, we still do wanna read Marx and other kinds of earlier figures of political economy. They do have something to say, to this moment. But at the same time, there is a kind of autonomy of this of the space, the kinds of questions that technology raises. You know, like, the question around the DAO hack, like, I don't know if you could map that onto a previous question of political economy. It sort of connects to those old populist debates about metalism and and, you know, and and and gold standards and things like that. But it's also different in certain respects because the technology raises new questions. And that to me is is part of what is most exciting about this is that it does create, you know, the capacity for, you know, these these new affiliations, the, you know, the the regens and the and the solarpunks and so forth, that are building their their identity in relationship to particular technological options and and and nonoptions. But at the same time, you know, I, you know, I'm trying to kind of walk a line in on the one hand, really appreciating the energy and the and and the newness that they bring, that sense of, oh, we can we can really do this, you know, that kind of spirit of of possibility that a new technology and community affords while also recognizing, like, you know, we also did try this over and over and over for decades, and we were stopped by corporate and, you know, consolidated and fascist power. And those things are still present among us, and let's, like, recognize how hard this is gonna be and make sure we're prepared for that.
Hi, everyone. If you're enjoying this episode so far, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, share with a friend, and join the Crypto Leftist communities on Discord or Reddit, which you can find links to in the show notes. If you're enjoying the interview or find the content I make important, you can pitch into my efforts starting at $3 a month on patreon.com/theboxingsocialist to help me out and join the newest patrons like Alejandro, Garrett, Rohit, and Pat, which really helps since making this stuff isn't free in money or time. As a patron, you'll get a shout out on an episode like I just did and access the bonus content like q and a episodes. You can submit and vote on questions you'd like me to answer, and I'll give my thoughts in roughly twenty minutes. Of course, I'll still be making free content like this interview to help spread the message that that blockchain does not need to be used to further entrench capitalist exploitation if we put our efforts into it. So if that message resonates with you, I hope you'll consider helping out. So what I think maybe partially interests me about crypto is that it it asks interesting questions that are not normally asked because of its new affordances in particular ways. And I think especially in regards to, like, resistance to authoritative institutional power, whatever you want to call it, that I think on the left you sort of have like a it's almost like we need to we just needed to organize stronger or we just needed to, like, you know, have a bigger union and that and then that would have, like, fixed it. It tends to come down to sort of, like, to to be very abstract. Like, if I try to listen to an argument or, like, a debate against, I don't know, an anarchist and a communist against, you know, which which organizing theory is going to be better, they tend it tends to be very just too abstract. And I think at least within the crypto space, it's more let's say, it it just forces you to come to different questions and looking at it in a slightly different way that I think are useful in some ways, in some ways not.
Yeah. And and I think it does also come down to a question of, like, do we are the framing devices that, for instance, unions or state power, built around are those one frames that we want to always keep. And, you know, with those two examples, I'm really not sure. I mean, jobs, like, I think jobs are generally, like, an idea that hopefully will not last forever. You know? The idea of, like, fixed employment and subjugation to an employer. And and, you know, unions are an important intervention in that context. I'm, you know, helping to organize the union here on on on my campus. Like, I'm very pro union where there are jobs. But, ultimately, I would love a world in which, like, in which people are less attached to particular employment and are able to meet their needs in other ways and have more free time and all that sort of thing. So I'm not sure I wanna keep the, you know, that frame. And the 1938, you know, legal structure around unions, you know, as someone who's kind of has cooperativist anarchist orientations, like, that deal threw us under the bus. You know? It it set up an arrangement where unions would forever be in conflict with with capital, not the earlier ambition of the Knights of Labor and the and, and the IWW and so forth to actually replace capital with labor, and to and to fundamentally change the arrangement. Same with state power. You know? Like, I just really, I I I think that the scope of significance of the territorial nation state is and should be decreasing. You know, in a in a world where we're more connected across geography, we don't need to to organize so much of our lives around the geographic borders in which we happen to exist. And and and these nation states have become incredibly dangerous institutions, you know, reinforcing these incredibly dangerous borders, you know, wielding violence at incredible scales, to to to hold on to their power. And, you know, I think there is a space for territorial nation states to operate things like roads and physical infrastructure. But I don't think they need to be governing a lot of the things that are actually really important to us, climate change, global networks, you know, moderation on social networks. These are things that we need new jurisdictions for. And that again is the thing that is exciting to me about about crypto is that is it is it is this tool for for creating jurisdictions, for creating shared assets that are governable. And and that is a a big, you know, step from, for instance, Web two, which, you know, ultimately with Web two, and this is something I've explored historically very deeply is is that every time democratic experiments would come up, ultimately, you'd come to this this hard physical problem. Going back to, like, web point one, you know, of, like, the server has to be somewhere, and that somewhere is in a physical jurisdiction under the law of whoever. And whoever owns the facility that holds the server is liable in a fundamental way, and that is going to be a challenge for any kind of democratic governance. Crypto has a different infrastructural dynamic that really challenges, that, you know, that that that, that problem and and opens doors for jurisdictions in ways that, you know, that previous regimes, did not you know, they it could have been done, but it might have been harder.
Right. Yeah. It at some like, what I like to ask, like, when someone says, you know, oh, we but we can do the same thing without a Blockchain. Like, then I think the immediate question you should ask is, okay then why hasn't it been done? And I think, like, you can we we can have a blockchain of just complete paper and pen. But, of course, like, why hasn't that not been done? Because we're not going to do something like that because there are, like, so many hurdles to it and to upkeep it, it would be very difficult. So yeah. Yeah. I think it relates to, trying to think about the the the nuances of of of of, like, what you're proposing.
And I I think that's it's a tough question for us to think through because there is a sense in which, you know, I working on this essay now and this, you know, it's called, like, Web three is the opportunity we've always had or we've had all along. And and that to me is a really important recognition, like, that that these basic questions of political economy, like, could have been solved earlier. Like, we could have created the policy to enable a a cooperative economy, for instance, much more than we did. And and you can look back at that history and see exactly the moments where that path was not taken for very specific reasons of power and and and, you know, and and and greed and and and that sort of stuff. I mean, the the options were there. We've known how to do it. We've demonstrated we can do it. So a lot of the fundamental questions, are, you know, are things that, you know, have been available to us in the past. So, you know, we can own that. But there are things that that these tools, you know, do do introduce particularly the ability to have these kind of co owned by default digital infrastructures. And and that to me is, you know, is a fundamental shift that, you know, again, it doesn't mean that we couldn't have found ways to do this stuff before, but it does mean that this is a new opportunity to reenter that conflict with some new tools and and new weapons and new strategies. And so that to me is the rallying cry is is we need to see ourselves as part of a long tradition, but also see ourselves in a fundamentally new phase of that of that of that struggle. And, you know, I think that's an exciting mix. You know, some people have been criticizing me on that saying, you know, oh, if if you connect this to older stuff, it'll just diffuse all the all the new energy. I don't I don't think that's true because I I work with a lot of people who are doing the new stuff, and they're they very quickly run into problems recognizing that they need to reinvent a lot of old wheels, and they can learn a lot from, you know, from from what's come before.
Yeah. Indeed. Yeah. That that I think yeah. That's partially why I think I try not to shy away from the word or I can't shy away from the word socialist even though a lot of people want to also say similarly, like, don't use those words, you know. Like, they're too politicized, but I think, there's some interesting connections. But so I I do want to get into the article that you recently published with Noema. Is that am I pronouncing that right? Noema?
I I think so. I don't know.
But it was titled How We Can Encode Human Rights in the Blockchain. And so in this article, you're going through sort of similarly how and, you know, correct me if I'm if I'm summarizing it correctly, but, how the many things that sort of crypto libertarians will, sort of say are good things in terms of, like, immutability, in terms of, like, you know, all those different buzzwords around blockchain. While they are largely, they're they're, like, terms I think that are used, like, kind of incorrectly or let's say, they're not portraying a 100% the truth, either because they don't know or because they're sort of, maybe a little bit mischievous. But a lot of those similar types of properties that exist on a spectrum can be used for enforcing human rights. And so one of those things that you talk about in the article is this idea of neutrality, which I think is a really, really a common thing for crypto founders for, like, I mean, people who are advocates of cryptocurrency to say that their protocol, their application, crypto is neutral, without really necessarily going into what it's neutral about. It's just that it's apolitical or something like that. But do you wanna talk about a bit why you think neutrality as a concept is a bit problematic?
Yeah. It's it's it's always I mean, this is such a kind of such a familiar pattern in the field of media studies that I'm I've kind of become my adopted academic home. It's something we just see over and over where, purveyors of technology present attempt to present it as as a kind of even playing field and neutral while at the same time using that technology to centralize and and and attract power in ways that are hard to see. And so it's in some ways, it's kind of like a fish in the barrel type argument in that we've just seen it over and over and over. And so when somebody comes up and says, like, I'm neutral, you know, like, you can guarantee that anybody who has been studying, like, the history of media is going to, you know, is going to, have lots and lots of reasons to be to be skeptical. And and an example in this is, if you bring that question of human rights to bear on on on crypto, like, human rights is kind of it's not my favorite framework, by the way. Not something I've ever written about or used. You know, I think it has these dangerous universalizing implications. You know, it's it's a it's a problematic history, and I used it here, you know, in some ways very reluctantly, because I couldn't find a better frame. And, but still, when you think of human rights as this kind of menu, this list of universal rights or whatever, you know, then you ask, okay, which rights are being respected on blockchains and which ones aren't? And then very much you you see clearly, like, oh, this is a set of choices that have been made here. Property, for instance, is, you know, is a the protection of property is a kind of UN universal, you know, the, right. But, other rights such as against discrimination, you know, are, you know, especially if we have a sophisticated understanding of how discrimination works, which is often not explicit, is is in no way present, and, rights that that so you end up recognizing. And the more you kind of look back into the history of the development of blockchains, you see who you know, what kinds of values were behind this is, yes. These are people who saw property rights as more important than virtually any other right. So the idea that you would whoever holds that private key has access to this this power, is, you know, it's not an accident that the thing was designed that way. And, you know, labor rights are not a priority of the kind of cypherpunk movement that, that that developed, you know, Bitcoin. And it was a movement. It wasn't just one person. It was a collection of people, And, and and, and and so you see very clearly particular kind of political philosophies written into into these tools. And so in this essay, I'm asking, you know, what if we were to introduce other kinds of political philosophies into the design of these tools so that we're not just talking about, for instance, you know, usually, if you, like, do a web search for human rights and blockchain, you see, like, okay. Can we, like, use Bitcoin to create, you know, identity credentials for migrants or something like that? You know? Can we use this tool as it is to and apply it to human rights applications? No. I what I'm interested in is can we rethink the design of these protocols themselves in ways that encode a richer, view of of human rights that are more intentional about the kinds of rights that we want to consider and and enable? And and all also with it as an argument that this is gonna hap or the this this there's a lot pointing toward this happening. We're seeing, you know, markets for governance emerging in the layer two ecosystem, on top of Ethereum. We're seeing increasingly other kind of alternative layer ones introducing proto, you know, rights into what they're doing or protections, for instance, environmental protections. And so, so it seems to me like this conversation is is already kind of overdue. And and finally, you know, I was really motivated by this because I've been working on governance from a perspective of, like, people making collective decisions. And there's a lot of that in crypto. Right? And that's where that's what a lot of people mean by governance is, like, token voting. But I you know, in conversations particularly with Rebecca, McKinnon, and some others, Rebecca McKinnon wrote this fabulous article about, you know, what crypto should learn from web two about human rights, which is basically, like, start thinking now. You know? Don't wait for, for the Rohingya massacre. You know? Start thinking now. And, and that to me, you know, is is revealing of this blind spot we've had that we've been focusing on governance as decision making without remembering that ensuring rights is also a critical piece of of of governance and of how we design, you know, self governing systems.
Right. Like, so in the piece, you you describe definitely a a dystopian world, in in the beginning, which if I I don't know if you've ever read the book, but it sounds very similar to the book Demon by Daniel Suarez, which I've I've, read that Vitalik said was one of the influences, for him on DAOs, which is kind of it's a little bit scary. I don't think he meant it in necessarily a scary way, but, the book is not, is not a utopian. It describes sort of, like, this thing called, the demon, which is sort of like this computer program all around the world acting as basically, like, killing people in different ways that this, like, super, smart computer scientist had built. Kinda like it it is a decentralized autonomous system that is, like, killing people because it wants to change the world in his in his image. But, like, yeah. I mean, how do we prevent this type of future, do you think? Like, because in I think one of the issues I see is that in recent memory, it's sort of difficult for people to think of a time when something dystopian didn't become so. It it seems like, you know, every time we think about technology just in the past twenty twenty years ish or more, we're definitely in a more, let's say, pessimistic, swing it feels like. Whereas, I mean, maybe I think people, I think, used to and also a lot of them still do, just conflate the progression of technology with progressive politics. But, yeah, sometimes it it it feels like a a self fulfilling prophecy sometimes. Because then if you're pessimistic about it, you sort of do nothing about it at the same time.
Yeah. And and you you can also just get so overwhelmed that, you know, you lose the ability to, you know, to challenge any of these things. I mean, one study that I I really, keep coming back to is done years ago at out of Annenberg at, the University of Pennsylvania. And they, you know, they were looking at people's opinions about online surveillance and advertising and stuff like that. And, you know, initially, they find, like, what most of these studies find, which is, like, most people don't care that much and, like, don't aren't too, like, up in arms about it. And then, like, they also what was different was they asked questions about, like, do you feel you can change it? Do you feel like you understand it? Do you feel and and those kinds of questions reveal something really powerful, which is, like, so so many people feel just tremendously disempowered and just feel helpless. You know? So their their kind of acceptance is intertwined with helplessness. And so, you know, it's why I think it's so important to get these conversations going and to build alternatives because those things present the you know, they they challenge the helplessness. They challenge the the sense that, you know, that you can do you that there's no other way. It's one reason why I spend, like, way too much time, like, worrying about, you know, installing Linux operating systems on my computers and, like, using free and open source software and using community based software and and, you know, you know, forcing the students in my lab to use, you know, community developed tools, you know, because I think it's it's really important for me doing this work every day to experience every day a different way, experience that another way is possible than, you know, simply, you know, choosing among the monopolies. And, and just also experiencing the pleasure of, like, the the incredible dynamic, like, design practice among, like, you know, hackers playing with, you know, Linux desktops. Like, I you know, the last thing I scroll through at night often is this website, this subreddit called UNIX porn. It's just, like, people showing their their desktops. Not because, like, I don't know. I'm not I'm not I don't have any of those skills a lot of times. I just love seeing people's creativity, and love seeing that, you know, that yeah. And so so so creating a conversation, for instance, going back to crypto and human rights, opening the door for that kind of creativity to be part of the discussion and to recognize, like, rights and democracy as a design space, not as this, like, depressing thing you have to deal with, you know, that you wanna pass on to your compliance department, and that, you know, is this kind of, like, you know, sad sack leftist, like, you know, you know, but have you considered type of intervention. Instead, you know, what I hope is that we can get to a point where, you know, the the the design of democracy and of of of rights becomes fun, you know, becomes the thing that people are getting excited about. And and the you know, what I see in the and what keeps me coming back to the crypto world is the extent to which I see that happening. You know, like, I've worked with credit unions, for instance, to try to get them to explore new strategies of, like, you know, co governance with their with their members and, like, you know, lateral member to member relationships is, like, my big thing in credit union, like, consulting or whatever my brief career doing that. But, and they're doing, you know, they're interested in very little of that because they're saddled with all these crazy regulations from, you know, the banking industry and so forth. And and, you know, they're stuck with these nineteen thirties, you know, rules that that set them up. Whereas in in crypto, it is a place where, like, people are are really inventing new voting systems and having you know, and, like, having fun with it and seeing how it works and testing it out and failing and trying again. And, and that is, you know, something I think our society profoundly needs. You know, another space of this that I've been looking at alongside crypto is, like, transformative justice organizers, people who are, trying to develop alternatives to policing. And, you know, a lot of the peep you know, it it it kind of shocked the kind of liberal democratic party. Right? But, you know, the reason why this idea of defunding the police became such a salient call among core Black Lives Matter organizers is so because so many of them are embedded in communities and spaces that are actively doing creative work to try to build alternatives to policing, and they've experienced it in their daily lives, so they don't think this is crazy. And so, you know, as as different as, like, you know, Bitcoin universe and, you know, like, Mariame Kaba universe are, to me, they are two incredibly vital spaces of democratic experimentation going on right now. And, you know, and and and and and what they have in common is that sense that democracy as a design space is a place for creativity and for adaptation, not, you know, a fixed thing, you know, that we, you know, simply adopt or don't.
Yeah. Because, I mean, I think in general like, I can kind of sympathize with why some people are, let's say, annoyed with democracy or don't think that democracy maybe even works because their conception of democracy is just, you know, voting every four years or whatever or, for their in in their local elections, which are which obviously don't work to the extent that they could be working. But I think when you're only presented with the one option of, you know, the country that you live in or whatever and it's shit, then you're going to think it's it's all shit.
Yeah. And that's it's a real danger of identify you know, when you have, like, Biden being, like, you know, the democratic nations of the world, you know, coming together. And it's like, okay. Yeah. You know, we do need to have the institutional power and have to, you know, against authoritarianism, but, you know, we also really need to the the, you know, the to use a cliche, you know, the best defense is offense. And and I mean that not in a military sense, but in a sense that the best way to protect the future of democracy is to be constantly reinventing it. And that's something that, you know, you know, for all his, you know, profound faults, you know, for instance, that, people like Thomas Jefferson, you know, understood in certain respects that that that this had to be an ongoing practice and process. Benjamin Franklin, you know, you know, talked about this. And and one thing too that I've been really trying to explore is is the relationship with the past, you know, because our future possibilities are framed by the past. And and, I've been working on this concept of governance archeology of, like, how do we relate to the past to the governance of the past? Recognizing that those people those people who created, like, the US constitution and and and its institutions, they were drawn you know, you look at Jefferson's library, it's full of all these classical texts. They were also, drawing from the indigenous communities that they were in the process of of, trying to eliminate. And they were you know, but they were engaged in an extractive, destructive process that at the same time was learning from those. And I think the, you know, the, you know, the recent, Graber and Wengrow, both the dawn of everything, you know, is a a powerful account of that of that process, and is and is also a powerful account of the uses of the past and in some ways the need for the past. So so, you know, as we enter this world of, like, creating the new democratic institutions on blockchains or wherever, I'm really interested in how do we draw from the past in a way that doesn't reproduce those patterns of exploitation or of kind of wishful thinking that, you know, that that might have applied more to the classical context, to the Greek and Roman examples, that that that they were drawing on. And to recognize that that the the act of creation is always an act of of of remembering, you know, a a passage, a line that I I always come back to is this is from the one of the founders of the Catholic Worker Movement, Peter Moore. And in in his poems, he often had this phrase, a philosophy so old that it looks like new. And that to me is is something I just keep coming back to is, like, where do you find those resonances between things that have a past and have a history and, you know, that that have something behind them, but then also have a newness about them because they are being applied freshly. They're they're taking on new life in a new context.
Yeah. Absolutely. I know you don't have so much, time left, but I really want to ask this question because well, I mean, in short, like, does instilling a system of human rights with teeth on blockchains is, as you said in in the piece, do you think that involves essentially two things on the top of my mind? One is a is identity, like a system of identity. And two, it also means the propagation of blockchains in in our lives. I'm I'm curious if you think that those two are are requirements or, like, you know, how how you how do you feel about those?
I those are yeah. In some respects, instrumental. I mean, currently, the human rights regime is built around nation states. Right? And and the, you know, the reason that's convenient is because they're, you know, in certain respects, they imagine themselves as universal. They cover the whole world, and they, and so everyone is in some respects under one of their umbrellas. And then two, they have this often, you know, this monopoly on violence, this ability to, to to demand. And and and with that, they have identity systems generally. So they have a lot of this infrastructure. And so to talk about human rights in a in a crypto context, you know, the enforcement examples I tried I I envision in that essay do depend on, like, the relevant institutions being attached to this blockchain. So, like, the threat of removing a nation state from a blockchain is only, is only threatening if that nation state, for instance, is using the blockchain to to collect taxes, right, that it needs. And and, you know, I I so so that kind of adoption is is real. But, I mean, we've seen that we've seen how sticky it can become. I mean, once people start getting, you know, start collecting Bitcoin, suddenly, like, they're super excited about, like, building these huge, like, planet burning, kind of, mining rigs, because now they're invested in that system. And so, and and I think that's not too far off. You know? And I think already we're seeing, you know, I don't think we fully understand it, but in the current financial kind of debacle that seems to be underway, it does seem like crypto is is interwoven with the the rest of the financial system in ways that, you know, we're still just kind of coming to understand and that is probably gonna deepen with time. So the interwovenness could be indirect as well. The, you know, the question of identity, you know, in many cases, yes, is is very relevant to to some of the enforcement cases I look at, not all of them. But at the same time, again, I think that identity question on blockchains is coming up for many, many more reasons. And so, you know, people are finding all sorts of reasons that they need identity and, you know, and and enforcing human rights is just one thing you can do with that. And and, you know, it's the same with with a lot of this other stuff is that people are coming to these technologies for lots and lots of reasons. I just think it's really important that we fit human rights or related concerns into those reasons and into that logic. When we're talking about, for instance, you know, you know, a lot of crypto people lately are getting more confident about regulation in in The US. You know? I wanna make sure that the that what we're doing there is not just about, you know, protecting investors, but is about, you know, protecting all of us from some of the worst abuses those investors can do upon us, and and I'm worried that we're not getting enough of that. That as we're writing rules, whether they're at their level of policy regulation or at the level of of actually writing protocols, we are we are having a full conversation about what we expect of these things if they really do meet the ambition that so many people have stated for them. I mean, the Vitalik is in this. You know, we're talking about him earlier. He's in this for a kind of world transformation. A lot of these people are. And if they're serious, I think we need to, you know, we need to really stress, you know, this is not a toy anymore. You know, this is this is something where we need to, you know, we need to start making sure that these are at least as good and and hopefully much better than, you know, the current institutions for protecting people and ensuring, you know, the possibilities of, you know, human freedom and autonomy.
Right. Yeah. It it's been, to me, very surprising how how quickly that's happened. But just, I think one of the things that you meant that that I think I've heard you mentioned before as an example was I think it was, like, only being able to be legally registered as a DAO if your token distribution, like, met a certain decentralized threshold or something like that. It's like these more, I guess, almost like positive reinforcement type of thing that if if these are your ideals, let's let's hold you to those ideals. And we're you know, decentralized politically means that the your ownership of your token must also be decentralized.
Yeah. And that's that was I'm cribbing there from the Securities and Exchange Commission. Right? That's what they did around this idea of sufficiently decentralized that has you know, in every whenever I talk with founders of token protocols or things like this, you know, I ask, like, did that influence you? And very often the answer is yes. Like, that threat of SEC enforcement actually pushed us to do our our token drop to our community, to do our our exit to community, to, you know, to make sure that we didn't just hold all the tokens. And so I think those nudges can be really, really important. And, again, the question to me is, like, do we really you know, should the SEC be making those nudges? Or, you know, you could also see that kind of nudge being built into Ethereum or a layer two that's built on top of it saying, like, if your DAO does not distribute tokens in this way and we can computationally see it, like, this the protocol's just automatically gonna move things around a little bit, or it's gonna turn you off until you switch things around. So it's a, you know, the these are I'm not saying that that's what we should do right now, but I just think we need to get away from that idea that we can't do those sorts of things because technologically, we can. It's just that ideologically, we've decided to privilege certain rights around censorship resistance and immutability and and, property rights and the so forth, and we are ignoring other things that we could consider really important and that we could inscribe into these tools.
Right. Yeah. You should yeah. I think it would be interesting to have maybe, like, I don't know, to make it like like a actually decentralized chain or something, like, as a layer two in which, you know, by being on that chain, it means that you are actually decentralized because you fit a particular Yeah. You know, set of rules or or or what have you. And you could see self interested reasons for adopting that. Like, if a bunch of DeFi projects are trying to avoid,
you know, SEC regulatory scrutiny, being on that chain could be a way of certifying that they are above ground, that they are, you know, that they're they're playing by that rule. I similarly, I think, you know, we're gonna see much more demand for, you know, the I think this Terra crash, you know, already we've seen people talking about, oh, maybe we should have, like, you know, deposit insurance, you know, for crypto. And it's and, you know, and we're seeing other kinds of consumer calls for consumer protection. And so the question is, okay. Are we gonna externalize that to territorial governments, or are we gonna build those things in so that maybe transactions can be reversed, under certain circumstances, in a systemic way rather than, like, an ad hoc, you know, DAO hack way? Can you know, what kinds of as we build in those financial protections, I think, are coming just based on this last experience. What other kinds of protections do we wanna introduce so that, for instance, the killer drones, the, you know, the contracts running the killer drones, can't run on your on your Blockchain.
Right. Well, thanks so much for for coming on and sharing your knowledge with us. Maybe just to finish it off, if you want to share with people where they can keep up with you and your work.
Yeah. I just keep a running list of articles and even drafts of articles and things like that on, nathanschneider.info. And and, also, my lab is called the media enterprise design lab at University of Colorado Boulder. So, you can join our newsletter. But, thank you. I I'll I'll see you in the in the, on Discord.