Why the Left Should Care about Value Accounting feat. Dr. Sarah Grace Manski
This week I spoke with Dr. Sarah Grace Manski, she has a PhD in Global Studies from UC Santa Barbara and is now a professor at George Mason University. On one side she’s done quite a bit of work for unions and written for Jacobin and on the other side she’s the founder of the International Society of Blockchain Scholars, Research fellow at the P2P foundation, and collaborator for RadicalxChange and Holochain. During the interview we focus on her most recent publication in Frontiers in Block...
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Hello there. You're listening to the Blockchain Security podcast, and I have another special guest today. I'm with doctor Sarah Grace Manske. She's, has a PhD in global studies from UC Santa Barbara and is now an adjunct professor at George Mason. On one side, she's done quite a bit of work for unions. She's written for Jacobin. And on the other side, she's also the founder of the International Society of Blockchain Scholars, research fellow at the p two p foundation, and collaborator for RadicalxChange and Holochain. So hi, doctor Manske. How are you doing? I'm great. How are you? Good. So for this interview, I really wanted to focus mainly on your paper your paper called distributed ledger technologies, value accounting and the self sovereign identity. So it was published this year, so it's pretty it's pretty new. And I thought it was really good, and it is the first time I think I've ever seen someone use Marxist Capital as a reference in academic paper about blockchain. Usually, it's you know, they refer to Hayek and all the other libertarian sort of, you know, people, academics, or whatever you wanna call them. And so I thought it was really interesting, your paper, in the, how you were sort of positioning blockchain rather than as like a, you know, libertarian sort of dream for people, and instead something more oriented towards, the commons and something more towards maybe what would be like a socialistic type of vision. So I thought to start off, it might be good, because to define a couple of different, a couple of different, things you talk about. So you describe valuation as a social process and accounting, which is not neutral from the dominant economic ideology, as a social practice. So I was wondering if you could expand a bit on what you mean by these terms and why these two things may be important to people on the left.
Well, what we value really determines how we structure society. And so what is very important is to examine our values and not think that they just are natural and consistent and have always been this way. Right? So valuation is a social process, and what we value is determined, in large part by our economic, political, and social institutions and our technologies. Right? And my work looks a lot at the what I is called the socio technical imaginary. Basically, it's the vision of the ideal, maybe utopian, not in a negative sense, but in a positive way, where we wanna go. So when I look at technologies and technologists, I ask them, what is your what is your vision of the world that you would want to build towards both, you know, in five years and I you know, twenty years? And often, they don't have a very robust vision of where they're trying to go. And so what they end up doing is reproducing with all their multitude of design choices, the current structural inequalities that exist in society right now. So the world that they're building towards is the world we already live in, but slightly different because they have no vision of where they're trying to go. So we end up going in the same direction we're going in. Blockchain technologies are interesting in that, Bitcoin, the first blockchain, does exactly what the creator wanted to do. So he had a vision of circumventing large banking institutions and states from being involved in, you know, monetary transactions, and he made design choices and imbued the technology with agency that would, make sure his vision came to pass, and it has in large part. Right? Bitcoin does those things very well. What happened is people started to think and put their own value on this technology and say, well, I would like to see a world where, data is free and where people are able to communicate and govern themselves in a different way. And they're trying to make blockchain technology do that. Right? And it wasn't really designed to do that. So when I you have to separate Bitcoin at the blockchain and then distributed ledgers more generally, where people are who have a different socio technical imaginary, a different vision of the world they wanna live in, they're building distributed ledger technologies and making design choices that will have more equitable, more democratic, more socialist future, come about through the use of that technology.
Yeah. I I think that's, that's a good summary of how I think some people who may be critical of blockchain who are on the left to be able to to to sort of critically analyze sort of the the situations that Bitcoin actually did exactly what it wanted to do, and it had nothing to do really with changing much of the sort of institutional, at least the major institutional, obstacles within capitalism. Mhmm. It just sort of rearranges it a tiny bit. But so then I think it's really interesting because, in the paper, you talk about a few ongoing projects at the moment, in the crypto space that, take a look at the future of value accounting in a different way and then maybe in a more positive way. So you mentioned things like Medicurrency, Deep Wealth, Holochain, and Commonstack, who Jeff Emmett, I actually one of the first people I interviewed, if you guys wanna check that out. Great. But, what do you think these projects have exactly in common that make you think like, how would you explain, to someone that's skeptical about technology that these projects could potentially create some sort of change or, like, can imagine some sort of change? Like, how how do you see those those specific projects in, like, that space in the blockchain
world? Right. Well, those projects want to transform how we think about value in the sense that value moves beyond profit and exchange value, something, you know, the amount that a particular item can be bought and sold for and moves into, you know, what Marks and others call use value.
Hey, everyone. I hope you're enjoying this interview with doctor Manske so far. If you're an old listener, this is not your first rodeo. Welcome back. And if you are a new listener, maybe because you saw the most recent article in a Mel magazine titled The Socialists Trying to Reclaim Cryptocurrency, and you may have clicked a link or two that got you to this podcast. Welcome. If you are liking this interview, you want to be sure that more content like this can be created that you can donate to my efforts through Patreon. So if you go to patreon.com/theblockchainsocialist, you can donate starting at $3 a month, and it gives you access to a exclusive post, which occasionally I do. So if you do, you can join other patrons like Andrew, Sam, Paul, Matthew, Kendra, and the newest patron, JB. At the moment, I've spent more on this project than I've ever earned from it due to hosting costs, so any amount really helps, and it really means a lot. In the future, I'm hoping to do more complex bits of content, maybe through video, just so I can help spread the message 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. If you can't help out financially, I completely understand. Other things you can do include subscribing to the podcast on whatever platform that you use, including the YouTube channel. So the the Blockchain Socialist YouTube channel, you can also subscribe there if you prefer YouTube. And as well, you can leave a positive rating. So that helps with, like, the SEO, so search engine optimization type of stuff and, like, making sure that more people are able to see the podcast. So you can do that. Or as well, you can be an active member in the crypto leftist subreddit. So r slash cryptoleftists on reddit.com and as well join the crypto leftist discord group. So there'll be links, to those communities if you haven't found them yet in the episode description as well. I have the link to the article that will be for the article that we're talking about in this interview, with doctor Manske. It's really good. If you have the time to read it, I highly recommend it. It was super insightful, and it really gives a really good, sociotechnical framework for understanding blockchain. And he does a really good job. But, yeah, that's it for me. Here's the rest of the interview with doctor Sarah Grace Manske.
Okay. So in the paper, I contrast, capitalist value accounting with commons value accounting. And commons value accounting is different in that it moves beyond exchange value into use value, and it moves beyond, a system that is based on profit to one that's based on, regeneration. So when it comes to human labor, for example, capitalist value accounting looks at the unit labor price and really doesn't care too much about whether the job is fulfilling, whether the job destroys the person's body or mind. You know, the the he the human in our humanity is is missing from that kind of value accounting. Marx calls your, work a reflection of your species being, meaning a reflection of your essential humanity and humanness. In terms of time, capitalist value accounting is makes time the continuous is made discreet in the sense that you have hours and you clock in, and your whole way of living and being as a human is, broken up into chunks that can be commodified. And that's just not how humans probably should live. Right? You know, we shouldn't have a lunch hour, and it's gotta be at from twelve to one, and you have to hurry up and make sure that your need for a break and feeding yourself and everything else fits within this capitalist time frame. Right? Life could be kind of a continuous natural flow of interactions, based on our just natural body processes. Right? When we need to sleep, when we need to eat, we just do that when we need to do it rather than when it's convenient for our employers. Also, institutions under capitalist value accounting, they're embodiments of class hierarchies, meaning, everything is based on exclusivity and taking public wealth, such as a beautiful park or, clean water and continuously trying to make it private so somebody can, make a profit off of it. Under commons value accounting, institutions would reflect individuals' perceptions of themselves and be commonly and democratically run for the betterment of society. In terms of, the means of production, how how all the things we need are produced and how value is created. Under capitalist value accounting, of course, capital dominates labor. Capitalists hire workers and, extract wealth from the land with little accounting for the, social and environmental, what they call externalities. All of the, all of the waste and destruction is displaced onto society at large. So the wealth is privatized and the risks and destructive aspects of this are socialized. Commons value accounting takes into account natural, ecological limits, thermodynamics, and labor dominates capital. So the whole society and logic of the economy is based on one in which everything is measured by do does this economic activity, cause humans to thrive in the environment to not just be sustained, but, to regenerate and be create wealth, for everybody. And it's it's not a system of extraction. It's one of regeneration. And I'd like to add one thing. You know, this may, to some some people, seem like this is illogical to try to totally transform the system, but I would add that right now we're on a path towards complete social and ecological destruction. So we better do it. It's not, and so that's why I write about these technologists who are putting all of their time and energy and wealth into trying to build, what they consider to be a life raft to the next economic world system.
In your conversations with these, you know, various projects and technologists who, are working on these projects, I mean, you've mentioned already that generally, it seems like they don't have that much of a framework with what they want to be creating. It seems when I read a lot of these type of commons based blockchain projects, while I think it's, like, a huge positive step, and, like, I think it's a great, like, maturing process that absolutely needs to happen, it seems like they don't really it's not very, like, I mean, not in Marxist terms. It's not a very, like, materialist way of looking at how to change the actual underlying system because, I mean, I mean, maybe they don't don't call themselves socialist and maybe unbiased and think they should be looking in that type of way. But, you know, it seems to me that they're trying for something better, but I really wish I could push them to, like, you know, have a good framework of mind or thinking about these type of changes.
Absolutely. I mean, everybody has they they start from where they are. Right? And, it's vitally important that you have a really robust imagination of the world you're building towards. And people who are working in the common space, sometimes technologists come from places of relative privilege, and I would highly encourage them to before they start building a solution or what they might consider to be a solution to go and talk with people who who are not technologists, who are working on the front lines of, you know, poor people's organizations, for instance, and try to get a collaborative space about what should be built and how it should be designed. You know, sovereignty is, you know, who who has the legitimacy and the means to set the rules in a particular space. Right? And so we can't have a commons based democratic socialist world unless everybody is at the table. And a lot of people are not. Right? Capitalism is all about exclusion and expulsion. And so we have to work together to try to get everybody to the table on on building the technologies that will work for the future. And so that's why in my paper, I call for technologists to join the social movements to try to build build more robust, solutions for where we need to go. I would I would say the left always likes default, pick up pick its own faults out, but the truly dangerous people in this space are the ones who think they're doing something to change the world and have no idea what they're going for. And I've spoken with many of the Ethereum developers who are all about changing the world. They have really no idea where they're trying to go. Not all of them, but a lot. And, you know, but what I have said to them is, you know, the AK 47 changed the world. Right? Explosives change the world. You can change the world, but if you have no vision of where you wanna go, whatever your changes are will be extremely dangerous and destructive. And so a lot of the blockchain hype comes out of spaces like that where people think, oh, I'm gonna fix remittances. I'm gonna help refugees. I'm going to you know, I talked to a developer at a blockchain conference who told me that he created a he wanted to give everybody in Africa a cell phone, so he created a system where people only had to stare at an ad on their phone to be able to access the cell phone. I was like, that's horrible what you did. And he was he was, like, hurt because he didn't he didn't really think about any of the ethical implications of forcing somebody's eyeballs to be staring at an ad. Right? He just thought, giving people access to something they need access to. So we need to challenge all of our, challenge all of our assumptions, challenge everything before we move forward. Yeah.
It seems to be like a couple of different obstacles. Like, one is, I mean, in general, people who get into new technologies kind of tend to be a little bit more privileged, than general society. And then two, in order to create, like, a project that is popular or well known, you need to have funding to do it. And a lot of that funding right now is just dominated by venture capitalists, and it's dominated like, they want to see a return on investment. And so, you have all these people who, I think, yeah, for them, the market system, or whatever, has capitalism, has benefited them in some sort of way. And so, they think that they just need to get those parts of capitalism to some, to the poor people, and then it'll benefit them. Right.
Not realizing the entire system is structured so there will always be people outside of it. Then, you know, you can't ever end poverty, racism, sexism, patriarchy under capitalism. It's just it's a part of the system. If you did that, you wouldn't have capitalism anymore. It'd be something else. Right? So absolutely. Absolutely.
I think there there was that story. What was it? Like, a bunch of crypto libertarians wanted to move to Puerto Rico and, like, try to create their own libertarian commune or whatever, which is when you looked at what they wanted to do, it was essentially neocolonialism just with crypto.
I I spoke at that conference. I was Yeah. The lone socialist there. And to be fair, a lot of I mean, there were some bad people there for sure. I talked to bad people, but a lot of people actually really believed in the the idea that this technology could help people. Right? It's but it's, you know, the that belief without really, a critical understanding of why the people of Puerto Rico were suffering is dangerous. Right? Yeah. So, yeah, you had you just really have to be careful when you're designing new technologies, especially really powerful ones. Because, ultimately, if if you do not, from the get go, decide that this is gonna be used to build a better world, it will be used by large corporations and states Yeah. To surveil and suppress people and extract wealth from them.
Yep. Absolutely. So maybe going back to the paper, you mentioned, one thing I really thought was interesting that technology represents complex layers of intentions that embody cultural artifacts into technical systems. So I was wondering what to you what blockchain represents in, you know, using that that type of framework. And, like, is it, like, you know, if it's a bad, you know, type of cultural artifact or something we don't want, let's say, then how do we do we just then need to not use blockchain? Is blockchain useless? Like, or, you know, what how do you see that?
I think that blockchain, you know, the cultural artifacts that are in at least Bitcoin and a lot of these tokens, token blockchains are they represent, for instance, if you look at governance, a lot of these are pay to play. Right? You have to have tokens to be a part of their governance system. So if you don't have any tokens, you don't count. You don't exist. You know, kind of like in The United States, if you're not a citizen, you know, you don't you don't get a say. Or if you don't have the prep or papers, you don't get a say in governance. Right? And so they just are reinforcing existing, systems of who should be who should be allowed to participate and who shouldn't, who's a person who isn't. And so so blockchain does that. I mean, I think what you're getting at also is this concept of material agency. And technologies have material agency, meaning they impact the world and they shape our behavior in it and the possibilities we have in the world. And a lot of people don't think about that, but the classic example is the car. You know, cities are designed around cars and our individual behavior, whether we own a car or not, is massively impacted by this legacy of cars and the fossil fuel industry. You can't, Most people live in areas, where you can't just walk to get groceries or walk to get a cup of coffee or whatever. You have to drive there. You can't. My kids can't walk to school. I have to drive them to school. Everything is built around a car and driving, and the time that that takes, the expense that it takes, the the atomizing of the individual where I don't interact with anybody, I'm just sitting in my own car by myself. You know, all of these things are, impacted by choices that were made a long time ago. And so, every technology, it not only impacts the world at that moment, but it continues to have agency. And so we're constantly not only fixing crumbling infrastructure, but we're also being impacted by it for decades or millennia. And so what we need to do is which is why the imagination is so important is really think about everything we build and all all the people who are gonna have to be impacted by that in the future. Blockchain is no different, and I think that's why the people who are in the common space are building they're starting with the ideas of distributed ledger, namely that you can have, distributed information that with transactions that are validated and encrypted outside of centralized entities. And they're taking that concept and building something radical and that has a lot a deeper vision for a democratic society.
You don't you think that's a lot of the issues is mostly with the yeah. I guess what's happened so far is the token based blockchains in which you have these sort of play to pay to play rules. And I guess you are sort of looking at you're open to whether it's blockchain or it's just distributed. Maybe it will be a different type of distributed ledger. Doesn't really matter, but, you know, there's more it's more about the goals that it wants to achieve, and blockchain may or may not be an obstacle in that.
Yeah. I mean, the the idea that Arthur Brock from Holochain gives this example of why Holochain is not one chain for the whole world. You know, he says if you're gonna take the temperature in a room, it's gonna be different depending on where you put the thermometer. Right? So the entire world is not you could just can't have one chain for the whole world, which, I mean, getting outside of the issues of, like, that as the chain gets longer, transaction times and costs for validating transaction just take forever and continuously grow. Right? So I think that future distributed ledgers that are more commons based will be more local and be based on community needs. And so there can be micro chains or nano chains.
So you also talked about, building the building of a technological commonwealth. I think it's a pretty interesting idea, but I was wondering if you can explain what you mean by this.
Oh, sure. So, you know, I I came up with this term global technological commonwealth to describe how technologists are kind of coming to an agreement that, their shared imaginary is a it's a post capitalist society, you know, where communities that have mutual interests, they cooperate and they construct new institutions and new regenerative economic, relationships. And so the participants who are trying to build this this commonwealth are they share they share some principles, and, you know, I list the principles in the paper. The first is that technological design should incorporate planetary boundaries. The technological design should incorporate planetary boundaries, that anytime you design something, it should not, it should benefit the planet rather than destroy it, which is a a big challenge for technologies. That, technological design should be modeled on natural biological systems, in the sense that they should be redundant and not overly complex so, they can be flexible and useful for multiple communities. They should all technological design should also enable the redefinition of value, which I talk extensively about in the paper, and I give an example of distributed value accounting, which takes into account, for instance, care, care value and reproductive labor, that the unpaid labor of making sure everybody's doing okay and raising children and having healthy relationships, that labor is massive, and it largely falls on the backs of women in the world and is undervalued, under recognized, undercompensated, that technological design should enable radically democratic coordination and governance, and we should be able to now organize and cooperate more efficiently and easier, and distributed ledgers allow for you to trust the software rather than having to personally know individuals and trust them. And that was one of the revolutions in this new technology is the ability to place they call it trustless software, but really you're trusting the software to make sure through reputation systems that the person you're dealing with is not, a bad person and untrustworthy actor. And technological design should allow for the future growth of a cooperative commons as the desirable future. So what we need to do is take everything that has been privatized, including the land, the air, the water, our human labor, or the natural world, and bring it back into the commons and redesign all of our institutions so that we can have human flourishing in a way that's never, you know, existed really, in an industrial system. So it's a big challenge, and I I think the youth are up to the task. I'm I'm I'm happy when I see, you know, groups like extinction rebellion and other I mean, before them, earth first, really stepping up to the plate and saying, you know, we we can't just keep going. There are no liberal policies right now that can both benefit capitalism and the planet. It's just not gonna happen. The green new deal doesn't go far enough. And so, yeah, we'll take a massive global social movement, and technologists are part big part of that. So I have to be optimistic.
So do you mean that I mean, I guess one option is nationalization, but then other options are, I guess, a more nationalization, I don't know if that's technically within, like, is that a a commons approach, or is that different?
Well, this is a debate, and it's not settled. But there is you have to have the appropriate relationship between the global and the local. And, you know, nationalization under our current economic system would just be probably negative outcomes for everyone. It's right now, at least in most of the world, you have corporate capture of the state. And so if the state decides to do nationalization, it's just gonna benefit people who are already elite. That's
Yeah. Okay.
Perhaps, polo chain are trying to take things that are private like the Internet and disintermediate them, distribute them. So if Holochain is successful and taking the Internet away from large corporations, I think that would be one example of where the movement might go. Looking at various sources of value and saying, how can we break that up and make it commonly owned and held by all the users?
Yeah. So maybe this is a good, opportunity because I wanted to ask as well, because without going into too many technical details, right, within DLT world, Yeah. Blockchain, which is considered data centric, and which is centered around data. You can look it up if you don't know exactly what that means. And then you have Holochain, which calls itself agent centric. So I guess this sort of alludes to what you've been saying, how, maybe blockchain is sort of considering it it's sort of looked at as one universal chain, whereas, and that's sort of a data centric approach, rather the agent centric approach is a little bit different. So I was curious what you thought the the definitive differences between these type of approaches when it comes to value accounting.
Right. Well, I mean, agent centric design is is more about local needs and in local individual needs. So, for instance, anybody could try a new grammar, like tweets, likes, five star ratings, create something without needing permission or support from others. Anyone who wanted to communicate with other people could do so. Agent centric means the essentially, the people who are using the system should be the ones who design it. And that's difficult with blockchain because it's just one chain, generally, and so you it's very resistant to change because that's it's just not the way the software is designed. So, you know, having an agent centric system, it's more responsive. And yeah. So I don't know if I answered your question. But You're you're you're a little bit more,
hopeful about the agent centric approach, it seems, than maybe the data centric one. I'm not I mean Depending on the situation, I guess, as well. Look. Technology
is useful for for who the person who creates it. So if you look at ripple, you know, I mean, it works great for large financial institutions. You know, that's never that technology is never really gonna work for building up a cooperative movement, you know. So the people who, like, at Holochain, who really in their heart are trying to build this new world, if their software is successful, and it looks like it will be because they're testing, Holoports right now, and they have, like, 6,000 nodes in the new network, I think that then they will be successful with it, the technology doing what they they want it to do.
Yeah. I I'm pretty curious to see how how it ends up happening. So it does look quite promising. So you mentioned as well in your paper that DLT infrastructure would be able to protect people's autonomy while also conducting joint work and collective action. I think you mentioned it earlier as well. I was curious if you had any particular examples that you would like to use of that. Because I think if you'd if you say that to, you know, someone on the left, someone they have ideas and, like, what that is in their own sense, but what does that mean if you involve some sort of DLT infrastructure? What does that what does that look like?
Well, I mean, an example with the Internet is if a corporation like Facebook is if you're using their platform, they can look at all your photos and read all your messages and know who all your friends are. But if you're using a distributed ledger version of a Facebook like system like Juntu, then you own your data. So, you know, that's they refer to it as self sovereign identity when you, as a individual, have control over your identifying information.
Mhmm. Okay. So it's it's really like it's not so much I mean, maybe it could, but, it's not so much maybe, like, going on strike using DLT, but creating fundamentally different, infrastructure and institutions, that either compete or combat against sort of the now type of corporate centralized structures that at the moment we may be reliant on Sure. Feel like we are.
Yeah. No. We definitely are. But, I mean, we could I think people haven't figured out all the ways we can use this technology. Right? When the Internet first was developed Yeah. People had no idea of all the possible things people would use it for. Right? So once, humanity gets a hold of this, I think we'll be shocked by the creative uses people put it towards. And so maybe they'll be able to use it to go on strike. I don't know. Yeah. So it's, it's I think it's still relatively early in in in the, I guess, evolution of how how this will be used. Mhmm.
No. So in your paper as well, you talk a lot about post capitalism. When you talk about post capitalism or at least when I think of post capitalism, I think like, oh, well, that's socialism. Like, that's that's what it, like, basically is. But maybe, you know, people don't like to say the word socialism because of one reason or another. But is it fair to say that post capitalism should look like some sort of socialism, or else, I mean, the other is, I guess, apocalypse almost?
You know, I don't know that we know what it looks like, to be honest. Occasionally, when I go to protests like Occupy or the very first Occupy, which was the Wisconsin Uprising where I'm from, where the people of the state took over the state capital for months on end. And there was all this mutual aid activity, and everybody's need everybody tried to provide for everybody else's needs. Only in those moments have I actually had a glimpse of what a future world might look like. And so it's very hard for me to say to say what it'll look like, but, I feel like, you know, the reason why I don't call it socialist is because I don't all of the previous societies that call themselves socialist. I don't think it'll look like that. And in part because we have these new technologies that enable different types of governance and representative structures that are definitely more peer to peer, more locally based, and more cooperative. Right? And so so, yeah, I guess I guess I think that that we'll finally all be able to breathe once we get there. But at this moment, I I just don't I don't know. You could see little glimpses in places. Yeah. But
Maybe, like, at least for for how long it lasted, the CHAS, the Capitol Hill autonomous zone in Seattle.
Yeah. Things like that. You know, if you've ever been to a protest, you know, you get the sense of, like, collective effervescence. Like, we all finally have control over our own lives, even if it is for this thirty minutes here. And so, yeah, we need to start building institutions that make things like that more permanent. And a big part of that process is grabbing a hold of value creation, the means of production and making it ours. And it's really interesting now that everybody is at home working at home from a computer. You know, labor is no longer directly under the super supervision and control of capitalism capital either in a building or some other way. And so I'm wondering, will people start to, you know, rethink their their own place in this value creation process? I don't know. I sure hope so because they should realize that they actually only probably need to work two hours a day to get their work done. So why were they sitting in an office for eight? You know, things like that. Right? Yeah. And that, the labor of of essential workers, you know, teachers, everybody else is should be compensated higher than it is. And, the work that moms and dads do at home is essential labor and should be compensated. Right? You can't have moms at home with no childcare because they can't do work for corporations if they don't. So I I I hope that this moment is causing everybody to reimagine their the future for themselves and for the planet. So who knows? Maybe six months from now, we might see something amazing just because of everybody having to go through this experience together.
Yep. I can say, yeah, at least anecdotally, definitely way more of my friends are like, we should be working less days or less hours. You know? Do you think that at the moment, the left in general has much influence in this sort of post capitalist, DAO commons space? And if not, do you think we can? And how would you propose we go about doing it?
I don't think the left has much space influence in the current fintech blockchain, Silicon Valley space, and I don't even think the left should try to go in there necessarily. I think we should organize alternative conferences that bring together both technologists in this space who would be friendly with social movement organizers who are already doing the work on the ground that needs to be done. That's what I would like to see happen.
Yeah. So you think we shouldn't you're more on the side of creating our own sort of spaces rather than trying to influence or, like, trying to fight against what type of conferences, I guess, you went to
Yeah. Puerto Rico. Well, I I I'm always invited to these conferences, you know, and stuff. And there there will be a couple people afterwards who will come up to me and be like, yeah. That's what we should be doing. Right. So there there is, there's interest in those spaces, but really it's, you know, it's the classic conundrum for the left. Like, do we try to get involved in the Democratic Party in The United States, or do we create our own party? Right? And it's kinda like anybody who goes into an existing institution as an individual or a small group does not change it. They get changed. Right? So I feel like we need to create our own space and invite people in, be evangelical in the sense that we should go to these conferences and say, here's our message. Here's what we're doing. You should come with us. But if you're not gonna change most of the people who are there.
Yep. Well, that's, yeah, something hopefully in the future we can, organize and hopefully you can come in. Let's do it. Need to.
I'm there. I'll be there.
Nice. I'll keep you I'll keep you on the list if I can get all these people together. Great. Alright. Well, thanks so much. I don't wanna keep you for much longer since you gotta go. Thank you. If you guys want, you guys well, actually, you should. The paper is called distributed ledger technologies value accounts against self sovereign identity.