The Revolution Will Be Podcasted: Introducing the New State Change
Today the State Change podcast relaunches with a brand new direction and the release of four killer new podcast episodes: “How a WW2 Economist Prefigured the Economics of the Internet”, “Unpacking Digital Identity”, “The Flat Company: When Technology Drives Social Organization”, and “The Rise of the Weaponized AI Propaganda Machine”.
In early 2014, I was deep in the throes of a possibly unhealthy obsession with second-generation public blockchain tech. As a lobster fisherman and arborist rather than economist, developer, or entrepreneur, I had no way of participating in the more traditional streams of activity. So I picked up a microphone and began to record my Skype conversations.
This ultimately became the Beyond Bitcoin podcast. It proved to be a pivotal decision as it offered an excuse to ask anyone in the nascent blockchain community for an hour of their time to explain the more challenging ideas emerging in the field. Unwittingly I had stumbled on the holy grail of content: while a listener may imagine there is a series of questions waiting for each interviewee, in reality, the best episodes start with an idea to be explored or single question to be answered, and simply follow the road wherever it goes. Effective interviewing is about exploration and spontaneous conversation, not dry inquiry.
The same applies to podcast series as a single body of work. One episode should lead to the creation of another — trying to plan a series inevitably leads to missing the most interesting things along the way. It’s easy to catch a plane, but if you drive you become part of the journey and may even find yourself at a destination other than the one you expected. This was the fate of Beyond Bitcoin. In early 2015 the technological promises of 2014 felt unfulfilled and the series reached a conclusion at odds with the public blockchain model that it began exploring.
Listen to the mammoth final episode here.
As history would have it, Ethereum emerged several months later, challenging the uncomfortable conclusion of Beyond Bitcoin. It was time to bring the Rhode M1 out of retirement for the creation of The Ether Review. My first interviewee was Joseph Lubin. 15 episodes later I opened the graffiti covered door to the ConsenSys office in Bushwick, NY, and walked into blockchain Mecca. Surrounded by dozens of amazing projects, I did what I knew best — created another podcast. That was the first round of State Change, an exploration of the projects being developed within ConsenSys. It was an exciting time with new ideas and worldviews literally codified and laid out to discover with each episode.
There would be times in that office, usually a little after midday when, inspired by a controversial tweet or reddit post, a group of us would spontaneously gather to intensely discuss diverse subjects: philosophy, economics, finance, politics, human rights, societal trends, and of course, how ConsenSys’ technology could, or should, respond to changes taking place in domains typically beyond the realm of the software engineer. Discussion would turn to debate and occasionally an experiment would be constructed from developmental technologies. Sometimes these conversations would end “Oh well, in three years we’ll know for sure. . . hey, we should probably be working.”
It seemed like the essence of our technology lay in those two o’clock conversations.
While the ConsenSys mesh has never stopped innovating, the huge number of exploratory projects are addressing a specific set of social and technological problems. We all understand that personal identity, energy and wealth distribution, online propaganda, internet security, the attention economy, funding of the arts, limits on popular access to capital, global coordination, unsustainable resource abuse, regulatory bloat, corruption, and economic persecution, are affecting us today. But in order to understand the technological response we need to better grasp the subjects themselves.
What will the organizational structures of this new age look like? Where can we turn to begin building an updated model of the world? What monsters lie in wait, and what new tools and approaches can we adopt to protect ourselves? We begin by addressing these questions and more. Where these will take us is as unclear as the infinite possible futures that lie ahead.
EP39 — Technologies of Social Organization:
Technology enables new forms of social organisation. That statement is itself a truism, but as we see technological development accelerate, our means of organising ourselves is constantly changing.
Our guests today are Joseph Lubin and Vinay Gupta. Joe is the Founder of ConsenSys and co-founder of Ethereum. He has a background in robotics, software engineering, and wealth management. He also had a short stint as CEO of a Jamaican record label. Vinay Gupta is the inventor of the Hexayurt emergency shelter and was once a member of both ConsenSys and Ethereum. Vinay now runs an investment firm, Hexayurt Capital.
Have we reached an inflection point where old systems exist at odds with reality? Both Joe and Vinay think that might be the case. We discuss the nature of the firm as described by Ronald Coase, intermediation price discovery, the future of organization and the role of burning man in the birth of the internet. We compare the Joe’s and Vinay’s organizations and explore the role of blockchain in decentralized organizations.
EP40 — Rise of the Weaponized AI Propaganda Machine:
The surprising outcome of the last US Presidential election brought attention to the effect fake news and social media manipulation can have on public thought. Today we are going to take a deep look at what exactly took place, while considering possible solutions to the problems we uncover. Berit Anderson and Brett Horvath, Co-founders of Scout.ai, join us to discuss their investigative piece, The Rise of the Weaponized AI Propaganda Machine, while media and marketing guru Amanda Gutterman of ConsenSys, provides an industry perspective.
EP41 — Digital Identity: Not as Complicated as You Think:
Today we compare in-depth the self-sovereign and federated models of identity. Why is our means of proving who we are important? Well, for one thing, relying on an authority which doesn’t have our best interests at heart to manage our identity is one of the many problems exploited by the decentralized propaganda machine described last episode.
Our guests today are Christian Lundkvist, senior technologist at consensys and chief architect and researcher of the uPort self sovereign identity platform, and Steve Wilson, has spent 22 years researching identity, 14 of which has been independent. Steve currently leads the independent research business, Lockstep and is also working with Constellation Research where he studies blockchain technology.
EP42: — Intelligence at the Edges: How a WW2 Economist Prefigured the Economics of the internet
While today decentralization seems like a revelation, one thinker more than any other stands as its chief proponent. In 1945 Friedrich Hayek bucked the post war fashion of command-control thinking and announced the futility of central economic or societal planning. His essay, The Use of Knowledge in Society, is a concise and accurate argument for the organizing principles of the internet, horizontal organisations, and blockchain networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Jeffrey Tucker: CLO of Liberty.me, Director of Digital Development at The Foundation for Economic Education
Stephen Macaskill: President, Blockchain Association of New Zealand, former CEO of Amagi Metals an e-commerce precious metals company.
Kirk Dameron of ConsenSys, Adjunct Professor Regis University, VP of Operations, Altius Space Machines
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