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In this episode, I consider the inter-state struggle over 5G, the rollout of which will create a new global surveillance surface. Who will control this massive new opportunity to surveil the world's data? If China gets its way, it will be Huawei, run by ex-Chinese-military officer Ren Zhengfei. And if the precedent of the world pharmaceutical market - almost completely controlled by China - is anything to go by, there may not be much anyone can do to stop them.
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First part of a two-part interview in which Tim Tayshun (AKA Tim Curry) of
BlockchainBTM discusses taking on OneCoin, the massive crypto Ponzi scheme responsible for bilking investors out of $4.6bn dollars.
We discuss: how OneCoin was supposed to work vs. the dismal reality, its colourful cast of leaders and the lengths they went to in order to establish OneCoin as a valuable investment, and the risk OneCoin posed to the growth of Bitcoin itself.
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This is the second and final part of our interview with Enric Duran of the Faircoin / Faircoop project.
We
We also take a long excursion into Enric's backstory as the 'Robin Hood' of the
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This is part one of a two-part series with Enric Duran, leader of the Faircoin project and founder of Fair Coop. Faircoin is a fascinating experiment in cryptocurrency: a LETS-style community currency which also functions as an exchange-traded token. With it, Duran's Fair Co-op wants to power an international co-operative movement based on ideas and principles emerging from the Catalan Integral Co-operative: peer-to-peer organization, and horizontal governance by consensus.
We discuss how the Fair Co-Op project co-opted (!) the original Fair Coin for its own use; trust and reciprocity in small communities and how crypto can extend this into the wider world; and just how to think about the 'ecological cost' of Bitcoin as a means to create a truly trustless global exchange network.
Enric Duran raised around four hundred thousand Euros in 2008 by creating multiple overdrafts with fake solvency, and then invested this money into building the cooperative movement in Spain in 2008, leading to the creation of the Catalonia Integral Cooperative movement in 2010. Since 2014, Duran’s focus has been on working with FairCoop to generate the alternative ecological and post-capitalist ecosystem that FairCoin is based on.
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This episode picks up where we left off in the discussion with @rabble, one of the co-founders of Twitter and Indymedia. Starting with the idea of Silicon Valley as a new empire, restructuring the world's institutions through software, we consider the ideology of this empire, and how it differs from that of the previous order of transnational capitalism.
Have what Evan calls Silicon Valley's 'social libertarian' values survived the terrific enlargement of the second-wave web services like Uber, Facebook and Airbnb into global superpowers?
Finally we discuss @Rabble's work developing Scuttlebutt as a future platform for decentralised community, content distribution and monetisation. Are we moving away from the cycles of centralisation we've seen with platforms like Google and Facebook and towards a cycle of decentralisation?
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This is part one of a two-part interview with @Rabble (Evan Henshaw Plath) -- activist technologist, co-founder of Indymedia, and one of the originators of Twitter. We discuss the origins of Twitter in the protest organisation tool TxtMob; Evan's work developing Indymedia and the early days of tech's interaction with activism; how social media is continuing to mutate politics, for better and worse; how the sorting algorithms developed by Big Social are becoming indelibly embedded in our world -- and finally Evan introduces the subject of part two: Silicon Valley's hidden mission to restructure the world's institutions via software.
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Loomio has already come up a few times on this show. It's an open-source civic platform designed to help people make decisions collaboratively, and it's been used by everyone from Pirate Parties to City Councils.
In this episode I met up with with Loomio's Rich Bartlett to discuss the relationship of software to social change -- how platforms like Facebook and Slack embed coded ideas about how people should relate to and interact with each other, and how Loomio is trying to design for new modes of interaction and consensus springing up in and around the social movements.
We discuss how a truly
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'Watch as Silicon Valley replaces everything with robots... Authorities release a geolocation app to real-time snitch on immigrants and political dissent... Government services fail.... Upheaval, polarization, politics as bankrupt as the financial markets–yet under crisis lies possibility.'
These words are cut from the pages of Inhabit.Global, a pamphlet-platform-programme outlining what its members call an 'operation in a cyberwar'. Collectively and anonymously produced by a network of actors across North America, Inhabit.global presents a call to arms for a new autonomous, decentralized movement.
This interview introduces two Inhabit members to discuss the sharp end of decentralized autonomy as the network seeks to become a force for global change in the style of Anonymous, Lulzsec and other '4th generation warfare' non-state actors.
Starting from the principle that 'only the tech industry is allowed to change the world', the Inhabit.global network proposes repurposing the technologies around us to produce real social change. We discuss: what happens when AI replaces the middle class (lawyers, programmers, doctors); the politics of cryptocurrency and money as a protocol; and whether we still have the power to produce real change.
Who controls your online accounts and identities? For most of us, the answer will be some combination of Big Social -- companies like Google and Facebook -- as well as a host of smaller platforms and services, all of them parceling up and selling our information for profit.
But after a series of high-profile hacks, trusting social media corporations to store and safeguard our personal information looks an increasingly bad idea. And many are understandably wary about letting platforms look after their cryptocurrency investments. Custody of our digital assets, it seems, is shaping up to be a key issue for network citizens.
Enter Dark Crystal, a project based around Scuttlebutt (interviewed in a previous episode) and recipient of a recent grant from Ethereum Foundation. Dark Crystal enables users to store private keys -- from Bitcoin to email encryption and beyond -- with
In this episode, we meet Peg and Kieran from Dark Crystal to discuss the implications of the project: what happens when custody of our most precious digital resources can be taken away from banks and megacorps and entrusted to friends, family
Embedded in an increasing number of the devices and objects surrounding us, computers are turning the everyday world into a radically programmable attack surface. This is the subject of computer security & cryptography legend Bruce Schneier's latest book, Click Here To Kill Everybody. In this episode we meet up with Bruce to explore how the profusion of insecure devices, capable of being put to a variety of unpredictable purposes, is radically shifting the balance of power. Via cyberattacks, smaller states get the ability to content with the great powers -- and an entirely new class of 'non-state actors' are being granted the power to disrupt nations.
Phenomena like the Mirai Botnet, Bruce argues, are just the beginning: we discuss a host of potential attacks on life and property, from car and thermostat hacking to ransomware against hospitals -- and how 'surveillance capitalism' is one of the most important vectors behind this worrying new paradigm.
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