Are we a Psyop to left-wash crypto?
For this episode I interviewed Danny O'Brien (@mala) , current senior fellow at the Filecoin Foundation and special advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Danny worked with the EFF for a very long time and has a podcast called How to Fix the Internet. During the interview we talked about his experience of the early internet and what it was like to see it develop without significant influence from the left, his pub hangouts with cypherpunks before it ended, and the import...
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Transcript
And now is the time to start recording, but before I, you know, I peek, And then it's just all kind of like the the footnotes, the boring historical footnotes.
Cool. So I have right now with me, Danny O'Brien. And, you know, for those who maybe don't know you or did not witness maybe the the small, dramas on Twitter.
Our introductory drama. Yeah. For for those of you who don't know me, I was, the person who, Evgeny Morozov, who runs the blockchain syllabus and the syllabus to really great serve services crypto syllabus. That's right. And, also coined the term solutionism, a great techno utopian critic. I met the blockchain socialist on Twitter around about the same time as Evgeny was denouncing me. Actually, did you like, you commenting about him ended up with him denouncing me for revealing private conversations.
I I tweeted something that did not mention him, but I did it did use the word that he used in, like, a recent the recent essay where he said left washing. Which is left washing. Left washing. So this is the idea that, It wasn't just to be clear, it wasn't, like, specifically directed at him, but he took it very personally very quickly. Right. Right. So, yeah. This is the idea that, like,
people of the left who are involved in crypto stuff are kinda is the implication that you're kind of being paid to do it or,
like, kind of just being used as cover? I mean, I get a lot of different type of criticisms of, like I mean, it's usually just like, I don't know, a random account, which is, like, probably someone who's just extremely online and has, you know, these particular parasocial relationships with maybe other left wing celebrities who feel a certain way. And so, their mind has already been made up about this particular thing, and so they, you know of course, the first thing to to accuse someone else of being on the left is a CIA psyop or something like that. So Right. That was, like, kind of the thing that I was talking about. And then the but I did use the word left washing with the which, Yeah. This this is I should I should segue neatly into the introduction of who I am because so far people would just know that I am a CIA psy op, I guess. So
I've I've I've kicked around for a very long time. I've been a digital rights activist and a journalist writing about, I guess, technological culture for since the mid nineties. I did a one man show about the Internet and the West End in in, like, 1994. But then but that's not what I'm known for. I I mainly known, I guess, because I went to the Electronic Frontier Foundation for close on ten years on and off. And, actually, I mean, the weird thing for me is that when you and we probably wanna talk about this. I actually kind of attenuated my personal brand, as it were in the last ten years, because I I I find it, like you say, it's really hard to, like, aunties who you are online with kind of the values that you represent or whatever. And at EFF, the organization itself has a pretty strong voice, and I was doing a quite a bit of work kind of maintaining that voice and doing a lot of the strategic thinking. And so it was always kind of a distraction to actually be anyone outside of that. So I've been relatively silent, but and here's the hook. I guess last year, I moved from EFF to the Filecoin Foundation and the Filecoin Foundation for the decentralized web. So that is a in the current atmosphere, that is a big shift. And I tentatively I was like, okay. Let's you know, I need to talk about this on Twitter. I'll start, you know, with a little light critique of the critiques of with web three or whatever. And within, like, six hours of my first hot take on crypto, I'd had Evgeny denounce me for being a crypto soldier. Charlie Stross, the science fiction author, saying that I had bent the neck to, I guess, big crypto. And I think Jamie Zawinski, cofounder of Mozilla, creator of the first Netscape browser, popular nightclub owner, also joined in the denunciations. And so I was like, I guess this is this is the, the world we live in now, our polarized crypto versus everyone else, world. But but I'm kinda used to it. You know? Even when the the funny thing with EFF is that, you know, there are a lot of people who are kind of arraigned against the organization and or had strong feelings about things that we would do. And I I got accused of being a CIA agent. I accused of being, like, the new Karl Rove.
You've it kinda comes with the the territory. The EFF is the electronic,
Frontier Foundation. Right. So, to introduce that too, EFF has been around since 1989. It was founded by John Perry Barlow, who some people might know from the declaration of independence of cyberspace, Mitch Kapoor invented Lotus one two three, and John Gilmore, who was one of the, original, cypherpunks, still is. He's he's he's around. You bump into him in San Francisco. And, it I think it it it's sort of this the easy pitch is that it was it it was the kinda ACLU of the Internet back when the ACLU wasn't doing Internet things. And it would do public impact litigation. But I think more broadly, it's always been seen as kind of the, ideological kind of think tanky kind of organized lobbying kind of organization for what you might think of as, like, digital rights writ large. So protecting encryption, stopping online censorship, sued the NSA over kind of revealed and sued the NSA over the mass surveillance programs, and also built technology too. So it it kind of works. It it it has a bunch of lawyers. So if you get into trouble and you're a hacker, like, you should contact EFF on speed dial. Has a bunch of activists, so do a lot of, grassroots stuff about right now, the earn it act, and, and also technologists. So if you're a tool techie, the fact that you can get free certificates, HTTPS certificates to turn on encryption for a for a website is, a project that, EFF sort of works on and builds with a bunch of other other groups. So It's sort of like a a think and do tank. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Right. Yeah. Think and act. Yeah. And, and sue. Okay.
And so then I'm curious, like, because yeah. Going to something like Filecoin Foundation is to to some people, to, like, maybe, like, the Web three enthusiast eye, it's sort of like, oh, you're you're moving to Web three. You're, like, joining the the revolution.
And then to like you said, like, earlier of, like, a lot of the critics, like, oh, you're going over to, you know, the the evil side in some way. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think you have to put this into a sort of time scale of stuff. Right? Because I think that a lot of the backlash you're seeing in, like, the last year or so is actually I think one of the things that makes it particularly, strong is because a lot of those people were people who maybe at the beginning, you know, from '20 they they would have been an early adopter of, like, Bitcoin or at least interested in it and understood the the concepts. So I think that that, and I mean, like I said, John Gilmore was one of the AFS founders. I mean, as you can probably tell, I'm British. I came over to San Francisco around about 2000. And, I mean, I had been tracking this stuff since I was, you know, the mid eighties, when I was a kid, like, just a teenager getting these, like, weird fanzines from from America. Like, no Internet. Like, no real cross fertilization. Like, the only thing you would get would be, like, TV shows, and no TV shows was covering this stuff. So we get these weird zines about strong encryption. And so I knew a little bit about the cypherpunks movement. So as a journalist as I was then, I would like to start hanging around with that gang. And it was past kind of peak cypherpunk in 2000, but it was still going on. And a lot of the people I met there and became friends with, ended up being a lot of the key figures in what, for me, is like the reanimation of that movement in the twenty twenty tens. So both EFF and me personally have been around, like, before Bitcoin was Bitcoin. So you've got to see a lot of those threads come back. And threads that, honestly, I think a lot of us assumed were just been proved to be, unimplementable. Like at the point when Bitcoin, the Satoshi paper came out, a huge number of people had taken their eye off that particular ball because we just gone. We tried, Didn't work out. You know, the Internet is now kind of Facebook and Google and is very different from that original vision.
I guess it was a a dead end. And then it all came back to life again. Is that because of, like, maybe the experience of watching, like, David Chaum and his I could I forgot what it was. Big Gold or, eCash Cash and DigiCash?
I should so it's DigiCash. And so there was, like I mean, you can imagine how ridiculously early this was. I mean, even the, the PayPal mafia, like, the original idea of PayPal was much more kind of like. So the kind of ideological framing was there. Like, people really wanted to do this thing.
Do you think that's why, like, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk have been sort of, like,
into into crypto. I mean, that yeah. And, like, you know, we should get into this a little bit. Right? Because, like, one of the things that I think is sort of, you know, when when Evgeny is sort of saying, that that which we haven't gone into all the drama about that, but maybe we can thread it as a theme. I know he listens to the podcast, so he's waiting for us to mention him again. The, you know, part of the theme here is, like, does does the kinda ideology and does the the the mental model of cryptocurrencies and blockchain and stuff like that, is it permanently tied to a kind of right wing vision? And, so so yeah. You know, Thiel and and Elon Musk and that lot, you know, were I mean, they were I'm I doubt that they went to the siphon pump meeting because it was kinda, like, grungy. Right? It wasn't people making money. It was people kinda you know, to it's it's like when you join the socialist workers party is in your all set in a pub somewhere. I this is a very British analogy. But, like, you know, when you're sitting there after having given out the pamphlets and you're all sitting there, like, you know, grimly smoking your roll up cigarettes. Right? Like, I think that's the way to think of, like, the cypherpunks meetings as much as anything else. Right? These are not Very informal. Money. They're just informal and kinda like people talking kind of intently and a little bit crazily about ideas. Anyway but it's still in the media. Right? It's still, you know, it's you would I mean, I heard about it in The UK. So there was an there was a chain of interest. And, like, the only reason I would hear about it was, like, half interested in politics and as, like, you know, a teenager, like, understood public key encrypt or half understood public key cryptography enough to know that there was something significant here. And in that setting, with that limited set of media, like, who you gonna turn to? Right? Like, you sit there and you read something, and you go, holy shit. This is just what I was thinking. I was, like, totally thinking this with my you know, you might be able to build, like, a secure, totally stateless environment. Right? So these things are in the air, then you meet people who have that at least in common with you, and then you get very excited because you kinda met your your your people. And then you discover that some of the people that you've met have extremely crazy ideas. And then and then as it grows, like, that kind of forks and and grows. That's that's that's what I'm curious to hear about. Like,
did you, at least in the time that you were with these people, with the cypherpunks in their, you know, in their pubs, hanging out and drinking, you know, a pint of beer, I guess, Did you get the impression that it was like a, I guess, right wing libertarian dominated space?
So I think I think one of the and, like, again, like, not to dunk on Evgeny, but, like, I think that there is a model where this is sort of and actually, this isn't what I I don't wanna miss misrepresent what Evgeny thinks. But, like, I think you can fall into this sort of conspiracy theory model of, like, you know, Peter Thiel is the puppeteer or whatever. And I think that that actually and and and so this is the link with Ebony. So my actual point that I was making before I got denounced was that Ebony had tweeted something along the lines of, like, this is why I don't think the left should really get involved in crypto. And I think to poorly reiterate his argument is it was kind of like there's nothing there. Right? It's all scam, or it's just there are more useful ways of achieving, a leftist or a socialist, like, model. And I kind of went in and went, you know, like, I can totally understand that. Right? Because it's not it doesn't the the meshing is not immediate. Right? Like, you have to do a lot of thinking about how this might fit into a traditional socialist model of political change. But even if that's the case, I think that the, there's a huge amount of ideological shift that you can do and learning that you can do just by being in that space at the beginning. And it's always the beginning. Like, this is the other lesson from a million decades. Right? Is that, like, I, in 2001, was sitting there going, well, I guess I miss the great cypherpunk, like, renaissance. I'm just, like, here in the drag ends. You know? And I mean, lit literally. Right? Like, I was turning up to these things and people are going, it was good two years ago, but now, like, people just don't like, these are just and, and so it's always this moment of of expansion and development and sophistication. And I think that if you don't get involved, whatever your political stripe, like, in the early nineties and I think one of the reasons why the Internet kinda turned out a little bit libertarian for, you know, decades, really, was because of the initial conditions. And it wasn't that, like, the Internet was well, maybe it was particularly appealing to that political viewpoint. Right? But it was also weirdly empty of leftist discourse. And as soon as I said this, like, people came in going, well, I was there. You know? What about me? And, you know, absolutely true. Incredible amounts of, like, interesting, leftist conversations and analysis. Right? But not the same level of kind of, like, mainstream adoption and engagement with its consequences. So, the so, I mean, just to kind of give you a feel. Right? Like, there was a a strong theme, and I'm not, like, judging anyone in this in the space at all. Right? I'm not even. My my politics my own personal politics kinda oscillate wildly. But, one thing that you would definitely say, I think, is that the more, syndicalist or anarchist sort of side of the socialist project, right, was was there on the Internet much more early. Right? And, you know, the tail end of that was Occupy, but the beginning of that was, like, in the media, A lot of, like, the, WTO protests were online, you know, Zapatistas. Right? That was the kind of milieu of people who quickly joined the Internet and saw, saw an advantage here. The green movement as well. Actually, a huge chunk of the early political UK Internet was driven by the Green Party. And, part of that is, like, opportunistic. Right? Part of that is, like, well, we don't have avenues that we have in standard political discourse. Right? Like, we're not winning elections, so let's try this out. But a lot of it was down to, I think, mainstream left thought, not really having a good box to put the Internet and technology into to to begin with. Right? And so because of that, there wasn't a great deal of engagement. And because of that, there wasn't really a huge level of like, the theory didn't change to take into account the Internet. I'm a I'm a great believer in technology as a as a so technology is the thing that that turns up that's new. Right? The new machinery, social, digital, whatever. And I feel using technology changes your political outlook frequently. Right? It gives you a capability that you didn't have before. And not only do you say, okay. Here's my politics. This capability will allow me to spread my politics or implement my politics. But it also makes you go, actually, I now think that to give an example, you know, we might be able to self organize without a central cadre or, you know, we might be able to achieve political change, outside the state. And it's very natural for a technology that sort of, at first glance, like, fits your ideology, like the, you know, the the just to plug an example. Like, the free speech opportunities of the Internet meant that a lot of people who were super into the Internet were also super into free speech. And then their model of free speech changed, by using the Internet. Well, there just weren't a there weren't as many people as I wanted from a leftist milieu engaging with the Internet at that stage and having their model of change and how how their theory, like, be affected by that. Anyway, my point here is is that it's really important for me, I feel for leftists to engage with this and use the technology so that, you can better you you you can better use it as a way to achieve things, but also because I think it will change how you think about things. Yeah. I I think that that sort of summarizes,
my thoughts as well. Like, technology facilitates also new social relations. So, like, I I'm not, I hate that I have to repeat it because I feel like people think that I am, but I'm not like a techno determinist, of course. But neither am I, like, a social determinist. Like, I don't think that we can just, like, believe our way into socialism or, like, just, like, we just need to, socialize in a particular way, and that will create political change without any consideration of technology at all. I mean, it's like, if if you are considering if you need want if you're worried about the material conditions, that's just, like, inherently what you have to think about.
Well, I think one of the things that that probably the Internet, but possibly a lot of, like, technological advances. Right? If you are attracted to technology, you get drawn into it. I think one of the big dividing lines that that causes politically is, Jonathan Smucker, who is this really interesting kind of, activist strategist. I think he ended up sort of advising on on on the the the Bernie campaign, but he's he's he's he's he's done a lot of thinking about this. And he he I think he a lot of his outlook came from after Occupy, kind of trying to regroup the left and go, okay. Like, we didn't achieve a set of goals in occupy. How do we go about achieving our goals in that that kind of period? And he sort of puts the he he he makes this this division between, prefigurative prefigurative politics and, policy politics. Right? And the idea of policy politics is your traditional I mean, not necessarily within just exclusively within the democratic system, but you're trying to achieve change by changing what the state or what government and what people do. Right? Pre prefigured politics is sort of where you you you you are the change that you want to see in the world. Right? Like, you go, okay. If we're gonna do you're an anarchist. Right? So you, if we want an anarchist society, the best thing we can do is to build a small version or element of that, in our current lives, right, and organize, in that way. And, therefore, we kinda set the example, and then it spreads that way. And I think it's fair to say that Jonathan is, down on that. Right? Like, is I mean, he that's kind of his critique of occupy. It's like, you kinda try to do that. You have consensus meetings in, intent encampments, and that did not spark the revolution that you wanted. It's we should actually organize to use the existing systems to achieve change. And, of course, you know, both of those things, preferably simultaneously, are kind of important. But I think the thing with technology, particularly user empowering technology, technology gives you additional powers, leans people towards that prefigurative model. Right? And you definitely see that in Web three and crypto. Right? The feeling that you get is like, holy shit. I can, like, build a way, as you say, of socially organizing right here, right now, and that will spread or at least it'll give me a chance to, like, live out my values. And I think I I think any technology get that that empowers you in a new way, you know, from literacy onwards, like, gives you gives you that that feeling. Is it is it, is it too heady a feeling? Right? Are there, like, you know, countervailing economic and social pressures that doom that to failure? I I I, you know, I mean, I'm my heart is always in the prefigurative side. I think one of the things going into, like, the crypto and web three world is like, oh, you are fully in prefigurative mode. Maybe you need to think a little bit more about, like, you know, what happens when this fails or, like, how to And and how policy affects the the whole. Yeah. Absolutely. That's right. I mean, especially right now, recently, it's having a huge impact. Yeah. And and, you know, not just in that kind of, okay. We have to organize to stop dumb bills going through, which, you know, has been, again, drawing on my my time at the EFF. That's kind of what the the EFF if if people know about it, that's what they do. And, I mean, to to give, like, a pointed example. Right? So if you imagine, like, the libertarian y kind of, like, it's not just libertarian, but kinda like the the the standard two thousands techno techno optimism. Right? I think one of the things about that was that it was very of its time and very fertile. It came up with a lot of, like, akin ideas, again, with with cypherpunks. I think from 2008 onwards, it was pretty clear to me that, that was seeding away and that it was actually the online left and the left in general who were coming up with who were in their period of most kind of, like, fertile expression, like, you know, in the we're engaging with the world as it was then. What examples, like, come to mind for you during that time? I mean, just, you know, I I just the two thousand and eight financial crash. Right? Like, you know, there was a whole community, like, you know, there's a reason why people see that as the twilight of kind of the neoliberal point of view because that was something that was both kinda unpredicted and inexplicable and unjustifiable even in it's, even in the kind of social contract that the the the neoliberal model had. It it seems
like interesting slash kind of depressing maybe for me is that, it was only until we had this monumentous economic crash where, like, the Internet was taken a little bit more seriously, I guess, from a left wing political point of view. Well, I mean, you know, there's always, like, a generational
change, but, like, I also think that, like, I mean, there was a lot in the I mean, I so my my my parents met at a communist party dance. Right? And I I grew up, like, I wasn't quite a red diaper baby, but but I I, you know, I definitely was raised in a in a a leftist tradition. And, like, being a teenager in the late eighties was a really hard time to be on the left because, like, neoliberals in, like, 2008, like, none of, like, the obvious apparatus that you were using to judge the world was working. Right? There was, like, the rise of the Thatcher Reagan kind of working class coalition. You had the collapse of the Soviet Union. You had, like, the boom of the nineties that was pursuing all of these things. So it was very like, your theoretical base and your practical base were very, hard to, like, kick start. And, again, like, if you were cobbling together, like, a new way of viewing things that was tied to the Internet, you had a lot of like, it had a lot of explanatory power. Right? Like, you you know, pretty much anything that you said about the the the if you had said the Internet was going to do well, which very few people said, right, you had some cache of prediction. Like, you were like, oh, you're a genius. Right? Like, because you said that. And it would be complete unrelated to the actual reasons the Internet grew. You just you you were just the cool people. Right? 2008, I think that the the the weight and the impetus and the fertility came to the left again. The, I think there's this great thing by Brad DeLong, who I think might describe himself as a neoliberal economist, right, or at least, you know, a Clinton a Clinton economist, where he sort of goes, the baton is now passed. Right? Like, we had our go. Like, we kinda fucked up. Like, there were definitely things we got wrong. And, like, now it's the it's the left's opportunity to shine because their analysis actually fits the way the world is now. From somebody kind of dealing with Internet issues, right, my my primary thought in that space was, it's gonna be a nightmare if the left gets the Internet wrong. Right? And, you know, that's entirely possible. Right? Like, you you you know, in this moment of fertility, like, nobody that thing people can believe crazy fucking shit. Right? And, like, if you if you if you aren't, like if if before your theory hits the ground, right, like, you you may make mistakes and it would be very bad to back out of those mistakes. The one that that I think the bullet that I was most worried about and the left successfully dodged, but it was a close thing. And, actually, the left dodged it, and it hit sex workers bluntly, was was Chester Foster. Right? Like, so Chester Foster was the first really concerted attempt to, weaken section two thirty, the, thing that that gives liability protection to big tech companies. And, there is a very cohesive argument that you can make that if you are trying to tackle big tech's control over, over the Internet and also tackle monopolies and antitrust and also kind of, beat back, a kind of economic surety or economic influence that those tech companies have, removing their liability protections against what the shit people say on them, is a would be a way of doing that. Actually, though, if you, like, spend a lot of time thinking about, for instance, decentralized networks. Right? Like, if you have a mesh network, say, or, right, you have a network that people are passing content around or even just having a discussion forum. Right? If you think of intermediaries as nodes in a network, which is what a decentralized Internet, how it should work, that means everybody is liable for everybody else. Right? It's an incredibly
Everybody sued everyone.
Everyone sues everyone. There's a huge chilling effect. You basically can't, like, share or interconnect without, like, spreading the virus of this liability. And, and also, it means that the actual ultimate liability doesn't lie with individuals. Right? It kinda hides. Like, so the people who pay the price aren't the Nazis. It's the people who host the Nazis, which sounds fine unless you, for instance, get a bunch of Nazis going, okay. We're gonna take down this particular community by going entry as tactics, taking it over, and then it gets then, like, they get targeted. Anyway, like, there's a lot of deep thought that's gone into this this whole thing. And, like, we spent a long time both EOF and more generally in the digital rights community trying to create a legal environment which would protect decentralized systems. So anyway, so you have this big fork in the road. Do you save the Internet by weakening section two thirty and this liability protections, or do you prefiguratively protect, better decentralized Internet that might be that was in the past and will be in the future by maintaining this this legal model? And the thing that happened was the first attempt to tackle that was this thing called Chester Foster. And Chester Foster was, supported by the left and the right because it targeted sex trafficking. And it basically said, if you have sex trafficking on your website, you can be sued for that, and you will have liability for that in The US. And there were lots of arguments on the left that why this should pass, and, ultimately, it did pass. The thing that everybody who's left politics or any politics have been informed by their knowledge of how the Internet works with like, okay, what's gonna happen here is that Craigslist, all of these sites, Facebook, all these sites are just gonna shut off any discussion of the the might even have, like, a hint of sex trafficking. Right? And that will mean sex work, discussions of sex work. And it had this catastrophic effect because suddenly, sex workers can't couldn't discuss what was happening to them. They couldn't, operate independently of, of of of pimps, bluntly. It sent people back onto the streets. It it it it was it was a nightmare. Right? And it still is. But I guess, you know, and it's always the minorities who who who bear the brunt of the lessons that wider political movements learn is that at least that that point the left recognized, I think, mostly that this was this was not the route to take to, to dismantle or tackle the kind of dominant economic control of these big corporations.
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Well because that can mean a lot of different things when you say decentralized Internet. I feel like I know. I know. And it's sort of such a sort of, like, a victim, and I never define it, and I feel bad defining it, or feel bad not defining it. But in many ways, like, unpacking the whole thing would take, like, you know sometimes you just have to again, in, like, making making points, you sometimes have to not unpack things. Right? You have to just go. It's like I think that that there's so much complexity to the term open when we talk about the open Internet or we talk about, you know, open source even. And, there's a great article which I will send you, and you can we can throw it in the the podcast notes or whatever, which is, like, someone doing this analysis and going, did anyone actually define this? We have, like, a whole movement about open data, and no one defined it. And, like, as someone who was in that that process of advocating for that is like, no. And we we deliberately didn't. Like, that was it was a phrase that that lots of people could project their own ideals into, and that's actually okay sometimes. Right? Sometimes you're feeling your way through this and, like, you know, it's a it's a loose definition.
Is it is that is that because of the, like, technical things that you would have to explain to, like, properly
define that term? No. It's because the possibilities of this movement, this general direction, are are yet unexplored. Like, one of the hardest things that you have to do. So when I first joined, like, I think my first day at EFF was in 2005. And one of the first meetings I went into was this this project called GNU Radio. And GNU Radio is software was software continues to be software defined radio. Right? Basically, before software defined radio, a radio could do, like, one thing. Right? Like and you would physically wire, like, the whole thing up. So you could and you would wire it in one way, and you would plug things in, and it would be a television. You wire it another way, it would be a shortwave radio. You would wire it another way, and it would be, like, you know, a mobile phone. And so we have defined radio with this opportunity and continues to be of creating tools that were much more generic than that. And there were a bunch of lawyers sitting with the technologists that built this thing, going through what this would mean in fifteen years' time. Right? And, like, you have to think at that kind of time scale partly because that's how long it takes to, like, prepare and move a lawsuit through the courts. Like, the suits about the post nine eleven mass surveillance of the NSA is still going through the courts. Right? But partly, it's because you're trying to represent legally represent and sort of politically represent something that has not happened yet, like a potential opportunity. And, like, people in the crypto community, you're gonna be well aware of this where people are going, what are you defending? Right? There's like nothing is happening. You're going, no. But but, like, there is this whole thing that I can almost see and is so hard to describe, but I've used the technology. So I have, like, this fundamental feeling about it that we we have to that that is going to happen and we have to get right. So in that, sometimes you have to use terms that are the gesture to that, right, rather than be able to go, oh, yeah. In the future, we'll be on, like, you know, special buggies or whatever. So, decentralization is a little like that. I feel that it's less like that for anyone who's grown up with the Internet because what we're really doing is redecentralizing. Right? We're re we're returning back to something that we already had an existence proof of.
Do you agree then with, like, this narrative? Because, like, I mean, I'm personally, like, unsure of how true it is, but, like, for the most part, like, Web three hype men a little bit, to be honest. Of, like, Web one was, like, our decentralized Internet. Web two was centralization of big tech. And then Web three is sort of like this re decentralization through crypto. I think that's
ahistorical. Okay. I mean, I think that that, I think the problem is is that you can't really divide those those lines. I mean, and there's a lot of, there's like a whole mishmash of currents that were going on at the same time and were going in different directions. I mean, I think my model and in those public interest essays, I'm kinda touching on it, although I kinda left EFF in the middle of them, is I see the Internet as, like, a fairly classic kinda enclosure of the commons kind of process, right, in which you have this public commons and then people kind of ex increasingly extract from it, or propertize it. And and, you know, when web two critics are saying this about web three, that's what they're worried about. Right? They're worried about resewing a kind of carving up of, a tokenization of things that what is the small remains of a a commons. Now I don't see it through that that framing, and the reason why is because while that is the story of one of the processes that happened with the Internet, the other earlier story is we created a commons. Right? Like, somehow, the the in this very, air quotes, decentralized way, we were able to fashion something that was not controlled certainly to to the extent, and with very novel sort of ideas of ownership and participation. Right? And I think that is kind of fascinating. Right? The ability to create a public good in an uncoordinated emergent way. And then we we can overstate it, and I don't wanna sound too, like, I'm flashing back to my, you know, nineties days right here. But, a lot of that had to do with, like is it accidental? I think it's, like, just an existence proof. Right? Like, there was just, like, a particular alignment of incentives that made that work. And once you see that happen and then, actually, the other thing, see it happen again and again with something like like the thing, you know, having been embedded, I worked at Wired as well. Right? I worked at Wired and EFF. I was certainly embedded with techno utopians during this whole period. And the thing you have to, like, understand is that that, also a lot of skepticism, like, even in that kinda heart of, like, Silicon Valley ideology. And, like, lots of people like, if you look at the early version issues of Wired, which is, like, techno libertarianism is at its peak, none of those people, thought the web was gonna take off. Right? They just thought, obviously, like, you know, academic bollocks. Like, just there's no mention of the web in the early
What was the magazine about in the beginning then?
So kind of like cyber stuff. Like, like, just like, you know and and, you know, the the networks. Right? But, like, there were proprietary networks that competing with the Internet. So before the Internet before the web really took off, Microsoft had, like, this project, which was I can't remember what it's called. It was named after some fruit or something, which was gonna be the Internet. And, like, there was a thing AOL, of course. There was a org company CompuServe. Rupert Murdoch had his Internet ready to go called Delphi.
Glad it didn't happen.
Right. Right. Right. Exactly. So you can imagine, like, the weirdness of this thing succeeding, which, you know, didn't really I mean, it was kind of government supported, but not really because they just let it go. They just threw it out. There was no kind of, you know, state funding of the Internet's growth beyond the DARPA phase. Right? It was assumption that it would, like, live and die in the free market. And it succeeded against all of these odds, and you kind of assume that that's a sui generis thing. Right? You kind of people go, oh, wow. This is amazing. But, like, then the web came along and people go, well, yeah, but there's no money in it. Like like like, you know, one of the the articles that that that in that that series that I wrote was trying to convey how most people in the entertainment business or the content business were like, you're gonna have to pay us in some way to put content because who's gonna put content up for free? And they almost had this sort of boycott of the early Internet.
I guess they've they've kind of ended up being right being afraid of it to a certain extent.
Oh, well, yeah. But it wasn't a fear to begin with. Like, it was sort of a standoffishness. Right? So what would happen is they would go, well, until we get paid, like, we're not gonna go there. And without, like, Hollywood content, like, your thing is not we're just gonna make these deals with Microsoft and AOL, and that's what we're gonna do because there's money there. And then, boom. I mean, the example I use is the IMDB, which was like a bunch of volunteers. Well, the server was at Cardiff University, and it was I mean, in a way that is unsurprising to us now. Right? It was, like, the same as Wikipedia. It's that everybody just pulled together and built this thing, like, with no central organization or real profit motive. Right? And the Internet filled with this content. Right? Like, this novel content that was just sucked in by this new technological capability that people had. And, also, because it wasn't centrally organized, people could just plug into it. Right? Like, people would just go, okay. I've dialed up to my ISP. But you know what? Like, there are all these people over here, and they want the Internet. So we're gonna, like they can connect, like, so I was in The UK. I was desperate to get onto the Internet in the, I guess, the early nineties. And the way the Internet came to The UK and most European countries was a bunch of people. It was a company called Demon Internet, and they got, like, I think, a thousand people to pay £10 a month. And that was enough to pay for a single leased line across The Atlantic. And then they found somebody to connect to on the other like, some Internet person on the other line, and then everyone connected to that. And so that was the growth pattern of this. And, like, all the innovation was happening at the edges, and, and all the incentives aligned to just make this suddenly the global dominant Internet. And then this as I say, people go, that's never gonna happen again, and then it would keep happening with things like Wikipedia, Linux, all of these things until eventually theory has to catch up to this. Right? You're sitting there going, okay, this should not happen.
Right? And like a bun wait. Go ahead. I was gonna say this this sort of shows the, so many cases where, like, the libertarian theory was wrong
over and over again. Right. Right. So so what would happen is that people would adapt to their theory to match reality. And some people were quicker at adapting because they could see what was going on. Some people would, like, arch so far into theory that, like, you know, they're now in the dustbin of history because, you know, when I I kinda, like, you know, took some of this cool aid, right, where you're like, oh my god. Everything's gonna change. We'll just be you know, this this is the moment of the prefigurative politics where suddenly everything will be run with a wiki or whatever. Right? And, but but there's some matching of velocity. Right? Like, you you have a thing in the world like the financial crisis that needs explaining, and your theory does not explain it. So what do you do? And I think so, interestingly, just to pick on the libertarians a little bit more. Right? Like, one of the things that happened was that there was a big fork in the road for them about intellectual property. So, you know, intellectual property in many ways is like such a strong, like you say, kind of libertarian model. Right? Like, let's extend property rights to, ideas. Ideas. Right? But, it was pretty clear that to kind of follow I think one of the transformative effects the early Internet had was for anybody who went through it was to realize how poor a fit copyright was and copyright law was for this new model. And so you had this fork in the road where and, actually, I would say that this is one of the places where I think, the left I mean, maybe maybe kind of the liberal left, but the left had a head start. Right? Because they had a much better model of what, a copyright and intellectual property regime that that that had a a functional public benefit model, would would look like. And so I think that, actually, if you look back, you know, the IP start of that, which, again, the Electronic Frontier Foundation was super in the lead, like, trying to defend people who were getting, like, sued to hell and back by by Hollywood and that whole phase. I think that that was far more informed by a kind of traditional, liberal academic kind of analysis of IP.
Yeah. It it is really interesting seeing, like, how just, like, knowing more about, like, the the things that divide other political tendencies is kind of interesting. Like, how Right. Some libertarians are very, very anti intellectual property, which is very it's like weird and interesting that doesn't really fit. Right. And I think, you know, it gives you some
idea of, like, cultural complexity and cultural contingencies. Right? Like, I think it's very easy to view these things. Like, you know, not again, I'm comparing myself to Evgeny. I'm not dumping on Evgeny. But, like, I think that Evgeny as an academic sees these as, like, a battle of ideas. Right? And that people are, well, I I think he uses a phrase, you know, there are idiots all around us. Right? And, like, so there are some people who were like, you know, the ideas, write them, like, lower to use a Gibsonian kind of, like, analogy. Right? Like, you you the ideas are the things that are doing battle, and then there are people who are sort of manipulating that ideascape to achieve their ends. Adam Curtis, I think, is also kind of, in that that kind of mold where I kind of, and, like, this is my background both as a journalist and, you know, ultimately, like, you know, again, my weird history in this is that I started doing stand up comedy about the Internet and doing a gossip newsletter about the Internet is that I sort of see this whole thing as much more drowned in bathos in the in this whole thing. Right? Where, like, the crazy thing about being in San Francisco during this whole period is how many of the ideas that people were mulling over and chewing over were just like, you know, again, like, dumb, weird things that people had come up with in conversations in, you know, dive bars in, you know, Hayashbury. And but but they they they they inflate at the same size as the Internet or some other, like, moment happens. Right? So the seed ideas of the very early ideas of Web three, of Satoshi, all of these things, have a disproportionate influence on the next generation. And the inconsistencies about those or the things that people sort of think about are the things that define the divide those groups. And, you know, of course, like, everybody who studied, like, the history of the left knows that this is, like, this weird combination of the personal and the political. And I wish that there were more stories that took that line, right, of, like, rather than going, here is sinister Peter Thiel or here is, like, you know, the the libertarian cypherpunks with their guns or whatever and looks more at the, the the personalities. It's not like a great man history of the world. It's like an understanding of, like, oh, if this person had had done this at this point or worked with this person or this community had got involved at this early stage. I really honestly, my biggest critique of Web three and all of this coming into it is and I think this is a valid Web two criticism of people who've learned Web two is like, it's not a lack of diversity, but a lack of connecting with people who really, in in in from a theoretical point of view, should stand to benefit the most. Right? The people who I would describe on the periphery of the existing kind of centralized Internet. And, like, it's not us. Right? Like, we actually we're kind of like the perfect target demographic for the centralized Internet. Right? Like, you know, the ads they sell to us are high paying ads. We have more influence in that space, like and we feel helpless. What does it mean to be and, like, I just I'm just gonna refuse to do the roll call of, like, my you know, minorities and, like, marginalized people because I just feel like every time I do that, I'm, like, doing this weird grab bag of, like, oh, yeah. Indigenous. Blah blah blah. Right? But, like, you have to like, the top the rubber has to hit the road. Right? Like, there has to be this point where we have this technology, which it and it really does empower someone who was not previously empowered. And I think some of that is happening with money, the raw power of money, which I also don't think that web two like, one of the privileges of web two is like, oh, we'll all make a Wikipedia together. Right? Because we have endless free time, and we have a well paid tech job. Right? Like and or or we're neat. Right? Like, we're we're we're living off welfare and also on the Internet all the time. Like so the web we have right now is constructed from people's spare time, and that privilege. Right? And one of the beauties, I think, of the Web three, which people don't take into account, is it does make people rich. Right? And, like, sometimes it makes the wrong people rich. Sometimes it makes rich people richer. But sometimes it's utterly transformative to whole communities because they were never gonna get a tech job at Google. Right? Like, that avenue has completely shut off. Right? And that kind of like, people can be transformed and communities can be transformed with access to resources, and that doesn't mean they suddenly become capitalists or they suddenly become rich bastards. Right? Like, there has to be a way that you can distribute resources and capabilities to people without them being the enemy or them being corrupted. But the but but definitely one of the paths to corruption is just to go, I'm making a lot of money, so I'm fine now, which is the path that you see so many Web three people end up taking.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I have I have so many I'm actually really curious to hear about because you were recently at ETHDenver.
Right. How how that went? Because the Well, I got COVID. So that was a little bit down. Yeah. But I heard like everyone It was a bit of a super spreader event. I think that, like, if if I one of the things I took away from East Denver for when I was there was, like, I got caught up in the excitement and the optimism and, like, maybe the rules can be rewritten. And then I got COVID afterwards, and I went, okay. Some rules cannot be rewritten. Like, something you cannot get through with just blind techno optimism. I guess I've learned that lesson once again.
But it was great. Bit Bitcoin doesn't doesn't solve COVID, unfortunately.
Right. Right. This is like or or, you know, just really believing in something does not solve it. You you eventually, the facts hit hit you in the literally in the face. And I mean to to to draw the theme. You know, the thing that made East Denver exciting was lots of people were seeing this technology through the lens of being able to create public goods and group being able to create new commons. And I think that's a fundamental disconnect between people who on the left to get this and people who don't get it is that I think if you don't get it, you see it as a big pile of scams. You see it as, you know, Ponzi schemes. You see it as libertarianism and enclosure writ large. Right? That everything gets monetized. But the flip side of that is that, you know, right from the Satoshi paper, right? As you look at it through another lens and it's the creating of a public good. Right? Like, the whole point of the distributed ledger is you've suddenly created something that's in every every everybody's interest to maintain and therefore kind of exists without, like, the usual propping up that you would without the policy propping up that you would expect. And almost everybody I know who's excited about this on off from a sort of social liberatory kind of view, looks at it as as this thing that enables you to create and maintain public goods, perhaps in a way that is stable and can defend it the sense it's itself against rentiers, against CAPTCHA, against enclosure.
Yeah. I think, what the a lot of this public good talk comes from, to me, it seems is like an actual legitimate issue of, like, funding open source projects. Right.
So so these yeah. These are all the failures the failures that that that that we experienced in Web two. Right? Mhmm. Like, there's only one Wikipedia. There should be more than one Wikipedia. Right? Like like, and, yeah. And the the the Linux project and open source projects have this tense relationship with, with big tech. Right? Right. And, you know, honestly, I feel like on the Web three side, I think people under understate how transformative things like Patreon and Kickstarter are. Right? Like, I mean, I always in the same way as people go, oh, you know, what's you know, Blockchain is just like why not use a database? There's a lot of DAO activity where I'm just like, you know, you could have just done a Kickstarter with this, right, or a GoFundMe. But the pernicious problem was the assumption that if you built it, then if the the the incentives are aligned to build something, that that thing would just continue along that path. And the story of the Internet is even if you get everything magically aligned so you can create a digital public good from nothing. Right? From just everybody, you know, just participating the way that they want to and, like, suddenly we built the world's biggest knowledge base. Right? It it it might not persist in that way. Right? That might not continue. And I think the the story of the next ten to twenty years is that division between profligative politics and and policy politics. Right? There's gonna be regulation, and there should be regulation. Right? This isn't a libertarian place where we can't where the state can be somehow ignored under undermine, you know, dissolved overnight. So there's gonna be regulation. And, and then there's this prefigative model, which is like but we can also continue this project. Right? Like, it's all the same projects, not web one two three. It's like it's the same direction. And that direction is how do we understand better how to make things that can spontaneously and emergently arise and build a thing that everybody wants, and how do we carefully craft the incentives so that that can persist and defend itself against attack over time. And, you know, both of those are are tools in the toolkit of building a society that is stable and equitable, and flexible. Right? Like that's the other thing that I think we have to understand is like how can we having built these systems that can continue, how can they change? Yeah. Yeah. And like, again, the biggest criticism people have, and I think it's a I think it's a valid criticism. I've heard counterarguments, but it's sort of the energy usage of Bitcoin, or other proof of work, systems. And for me, that feels like, you know, one of those incentive warnings that's just a little out of whack, and therefore the problem gets bigger and bigger over time. Like, if you look at the Cypherpunks mailing list and the Satoshi paper, I think, I think it's right in say I'm right in saying that in the thread afterwards, people are going, I think, like, Ben Laurie or someone is sitting there going, isn't this gonna use up a fuck off a lot of energy? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's there. Right? It's it's completely set up to where it can go there there is no cap on the amount of energy that can be used for it theoretically. Yeah. And like but the thing is you in order to kind of calculate that, you have to go, well, let's assume that, like, a single Bitcoin will cost, like, $50,000. And, like, how do you have the long term thinking and, like, the not optimism, but the the ability to not just disregard these things. Right? That's that's the fundamental problem here. Right? Is that what I'm trying to avoid is people going, oh, this is stupid. Right? Like, this will never take off. Right? And you have to walk this line between, you know, just to the moon where you just go, oh my god. Like, I totally believe that this is gonna take over everything. Right? And going, well, what if it does? Like, what does that how does that change things? How do how do we learn to live with that, or how do we stop it if you if you think along those lines? And how do we build a better society given that this is now in the world? And you have to do that early because you that's how you learn, and that's how you change your outlook to, update it to to the world that you live in now.
Yeah. That is, a 100% like, what I was trying to do with this project,
that was a said said much better than I I probably could have said it. Well, you know, I mean, it's it's always good to be on a podcast where we're like, we all agree. We need to grab Evgeny. Right? Like, I mean, presumably, he thinks I'm like so we should end the story. So Evgeny, like, the story was is that, like, I was DMing Evgeny after, like, I wrote my thing, and I went, hey, Evgeny. We should go out for a drink. Like, you know, I don't wanna, like, you know, have, like, a big Twitter fight, like, be a problem. And then you followed me seconds later. And Evgeny was going, yeah, let's go out for a drink, blah blah blah. And then he mentioned you. And, and then I was, like, on like, I'd never heard it. I mean, I'd heard of you, but, like, we hadn't, like, met or anything. And I was on DMs with both of you going, oh, this is weird. Like, you're both talking to me. And then I mentioned that Ebony had maybe implied a thing that maybe you didn't exist. And I was kinda like, this is hilarious. Like like, he thinks you don't exist. And like me going, Ebony, I think that they exist. I mean, I don't think I even said that. But but, like, you know, this weird again, this existence proof we're going, pretty sure this guy's for real. I mean, like, you know, we maybe should update our knowledge to and then and then in the thread afterwards, people were going, well, maybe Danny O'Brien is the blockchain socialist. Did you see that bit? I think I think I think I think a couple of people would say that. Less time on Twitter, but, like, unless this is a very artfully put together podcast, I think we've proven that we're different.
You're really good at hiding your british accent.
Right, right, right. Just very good audio kind of like cutting. Yeah. Anyway, I I so I would do two quick two quick plugs because we talk about the public interest stuff a lot and, EFL. I'm still doing a podcast BFF called How to Fix the Internet. Also, I'm I'm I I work at the Falcon Foundation of the decentralized web. If you have projects that you think will make the world a better place, ping me because we are trying to bring all of this together into a cohesive shared whole, and, and I really want to support projects that that that hit the ground running, that really tackle the people who need this need the technology to change most and learning with them about what we should be building.
Cool. Yeah. Thanks a lot for for taking the time. And, thank you. It was great to talk to you.