Welcome on another episode of Democracy Innovator Podcast and our guest of today is Samuel Vans Lowe.
So welcome Samuel and thank
Thank you very much, Alessandro.
It's great to be here.
And as a first question, I know that you are very, I think you are very interested by decentralization.
Clearly.
And I saw on your website that as the first phrase, you have, what is governance and how does it affect the ways we interact with technology and one another?
And so I know that it is not an easy question, but like, what is governance for you?
Yeah, I love that this is the starting point for our conversation.
Thanks again for having me on.
um And I think here's what I'm going to start with governance, which was the start of that question, the start of that whole paragraph, which is uh my my knowledge and interaction
with governance as a concept is relatively new, like the last, say, five or six years.
And um when it was described to me first, right, like how we organize stuff, it sounded incredibly boring, like, be honest, sounded.
really, really dull.
And it turns out that often the very boring sounding things are the most sexy things.
I did not know, but now I know.
And so when I think about governance, I think specifically about who owns, runs, controls, specifically controls for us at the DRC, any particular type of technology, but in
general, how we organize society and the ways in which we organize society.
And I think for a lot of us, don't think too much about governance.
Democracy is a turn up every few years and cast a ballot.
That's kind of the extent of the action part of it.
um And in terms of governance, even the family unit, or at schools, or within churches, or in terms of local government and one's engagement with it, those concerns tend to be
theoretical at best and completely ignored at worst.
And one of the things that's happened because so many people ignore governance is that those who don't have seized a hell of a lot of power.
And for us at the DRC, we're mainly focused on emerging technologies.
And that can include the internet, which is hardly emerging now, but like they can include Web 2, but it's also Web 3, blockchain, uh obviously the newer uh wave of AI innovation.
And the governance of that tends to be extraordinarily centralized and for the financial benefit of very few people.
And so uh that's where our interest in governance is, is who controls these technologies that affect us all, uh who benefits from them, mainly financially.
And if we're not happy about that, and I'm not, how do we create better systems for owning and governing uh massive corporations for one, but also governing our everyday lives?
And this question is even harder than the one I asked you.
I mean, how do we do it?
I mean, the one thing I want to say about governance for me at least is there is no answer.
There's no right answer, right?
Governance is a constantly emerging interaction between peoples.
So there is no like stasis that you reach where you go, thank God we governed.
And then you just like all stop and it works, right?
Like governance is a constant set of compromises, negotiations.
It fluctuates between jurisdictions.
groups of people, types of organization, types of legal structure.
uh It's an ongoing battle forever.
uh So it's okay if you don't get it straight away, right?
Because you're not supposed to.
That's not the point.
It's all just about uh maintaining an ongoing dialogue with who's in control and why.
And so I think like that at least already takes a lot of the weight off and the heat off people who are like, but how do we fix it?
You know, we don't.
We work on it.
We engage with it.
We're not looking for the final fix to this whole thing.
Yeah.
And I'm thinking how, as you said also in your website, that governance is unsexy.
Yeah.
And I'm thinking how, like when you ask people what you would like to do here or there, they all have ideas.
So in some way, they like to, let's say, say their idea.
So govern.
Yeah.
about their neighborhood, or like I said, the house, where to put the television.
I'm sure that every person in the family knows the right place where to put the television.
But then, how can it happen in a way that is not, let's say, just one person that decides.
And I want to say having an opinion is the first step in governance, right?
Like it is all of its governance, all of it, from ideation to execution, all of that is governance, right?
And one of the interesting things about that is like, how does ideation happen?
Where does ideation, like where does that opinion come from?
And I think when it comes to the web, we, and throughout human history, but particularly now when we live in these ecosystems, online ecosystems,
The why we ask certain questions and why we don't ask certain questions is as important a part of governance as follow through.
Because there are lot of questions that we are incentivized not to ask and there are lot of follow throughs that we're incentivized not to follow through on.
And I can imagine that also the question that we don't ask because we are not incentivized to ask or they incentivize, like incentivize in a negative way.
I think that those could be also interesting contributions.
um But because we give...
um
Yeah, we not just...
Sorry.
What I want to say is that the fact that some questions are not asked, then it can cause a lot of loss in what could be a sort of collective intelligence process.
Absolutely, absolutely in a plurality process, the best, not as there, there are all sorts of ways of doing good governance and it depends on situations.
So I don't want to claim one as the best for all situations, but the ability to have differing opinions and have those opinions voiced is what makes democracy at least as a
governance structure work.
And if you have a whole bunch of voices, we're quite used to the idea of silencing voices.
But at the moment,
uh As well as that being a problem, we do have the problem of various opinions uh not only not seeing the light, but not even being thought of because they're so far outside of, as
you say, what we're incentivized for.
We're de-incentivized to think about various solutions as being practical or even of interest.
um One of the histories that I have not got into, but you will know far more than me, which is very exciting, is the kind of uh federalist makeup of Italy, like
a couple of few hundred years ago, and the number of different governance systems that Italy's city-states had, um and how different they could be, one from the other, how proud
the various city-states were of their governance structures.
Governance was pretty sexy.
The whole history you will know better than I do, but we don't have that anymore.
We don't have governance models that we stand behind or represent or feel excited about in constant friction with one another.
um
That kind of sense of plurality and of interaction just simply doesn't exist in our modern world in the same way.
And uh I think we're poorer for it because we simply don't have some perspectives and points of view that we should probably have in order to have a fully functioning society.
Yeah, something that I'm thinking about in the medieval age.
The towns, they had an interesting thing, at least was interesting to me, that they were basically inviting someone external from the town, govern the town.
And then after two months, they had a sort of process.
to see if the town was governed in a correct way.
and um there is a famous historian professor in Italy, he was comparing those ways of governing.
uh
with the one that we have now, now we look for like stability.
So like we have like a government that has to last for five years.
Well, it was like very short and with a sort of feedback loop also.
Yeah, well, this is something that people like Audrey Tang talk about all the time.
Your listeners probably know Audrey by now.
uh But uh one of the reasons why uh we all love DAOs as a concept, if not an execution, is, and Audrey says this all the time, you can iterate on voting mechanisms all the time.
Like the feedback you get from a four-year cycle is every four years you get feedback on the feedback loop.
It's not remotely useful for data collection.
Whereas in a DAO, you have votes happening all the time, and if you have thousands of DAOs voting all the time, you can collate that data.
You can get a way better idea of what works in terms of democratic governance and in which systems what works.
Like if you have a bicameral system, for instance, like what works there across a whole bunch of different use cases.
Yeah, the four-year system gives you so little uh data with which to figure out if the system's working at all or not.
Yeah, that two month idea is kind of interesting.
I don't know if I have fun in it, but you'd get way more feedback, way more quickly about what works, what doesn't, what makes a citizen really happy, what doesn't, etc.
And how do you imagine like the, let's say the future of governance also considering DAOs, if DAOs can be adopted, I don't know, like can institution also become DAOs?
like, yeah, I wonder if there, if, how do you see it?
Like that institution, the institution that we have now.
decide to also appear on the web tree.
So as a sort of...
Or it will be a sort of parallel process.
There are normal institutions, DAOs, and at a certain point, institutions become so old that DAOs become the new institutions.
Right.
Yeah, mean, one of the things I would like to kind of um go into a little bit, this is me personally speaking, and I do not represent necessarily my organization when I say this,
nor do I necessarily represent a broader view, I'm not entirely sure.
But I find DAO is extraordinarily interesting because of what they suggest is possible, not necessarily what is possible.
And I just want to clarify that a bit.
DAO, think the types of
experimentation that DAOs enable is something that is possible without, say, blockchain technology.
I think it's the new, exciting iteration of governance in practice that caught people's attention specifically because of the technology, but has helped revivify various types of
democratic practices, get people interested in various types of democratic practices.
But they face uh many of the problems that legacy organizations from
state governments to co-ops have, right?
And one is low voter turnout, for instance, right?
Like Dow turnout is, I think on average around 7 % on votes.
It might be a little bit higher, I'm not entirely sure, but it's like, let's say 10 % as a friendly low.
And so a lot of the problems that voting systems have had in the past are had now.
Now, I wanna come back to your question, which is what does this look like when it integrates into
legacy systems.
And one of the things I don't want is for people to think that suddenly legacy systems work or work better or more responsive.
Because if you have low turnout, right, if the same problems that plague legacy systems plague DAOs, then the outcomes can't be different.
And so I think there has to be a longer discussion about incentives as well.
mean, the other thing that like DAOs and Web3 is relatively famous for is like tokenizing incentives.
And it's a system I don't particularly like, personally.
Once again, I do not speak for my organization here.
I find quantitative and I find metrics-based assessment of reputation and trustworthiness difficult, personally.
And so I know this is a roundabout answer to your question, but I don't think we've necessarily solved for the problems that we would have to solve to make...
um We could 100 % and it has been done...
attach it out to a legacy governmental organization and have them operate in tandem.
Can be done, has been done.
I don't know if it's yet solved many of the problems that we faced in the democratic space outside of Web3 or blockchain, for instance.
Does that make sense?
Was that too long?
Was that too straight?
uh
It makes sense.
I mean, that there are the same problems also in legacy organization or in the Web3 organization.
And so it's a sort of cultural problem.
And because many times I ask myself why people do not participate in the political life.
And then it is the same also in, let's say, maybe inside DAOs.
And then I wonder, em because actually people are participating in other things.
I know that you're also a musician.
And so I'm thinking, uh have you ever had any thoughts related to maybe, I don't know, people...
uh politics, and maybe it's unsexy?
governance is not sexy, but music in some ways is sexy.
Like people want to go to a concert, they want to dance, they want to chat about life and whatever.
Maybe they also chat about politics.
So they are actually participating in something, this concert.
And I wonder if you have any thoughts about how...
because that is a place where people are participating.
So I wonder how to bring participation to them instead of asking people to use another platform or to install a wall.
You're speaking my language, Alessandro.
So I'm going to give you a...
If my last answer was roundabout, this one's going to be even weirder, but I think it's also going to make sense.
So I think it was Alexander de Tocqueville who said, if you want to practice democracy at large scales, you have to practice it at small scales.
And I really appreciate that idea that democracy isn't just something that happens on the state level at millions of people.
It has to be practiced in everyday life and it has to be practiced relatively often.
And what that looks like can be discussed, but it can't be ignored, I don't think.
And then I want to combine it with something that Nathan Schneider said to me once.
He works in cooperatives a lot.
He works on a lot of things, but he's co-op guy.
And he says, look at board of directors on big corporations and look at how much they get paid.
His point is, governance is expensive.
If you want, good governance costs a lot of money.
And a lot of the time we hope that people give up their time and energies for free.
Not even like, and you'll make your world a better place.
Just turn up, get shouted down, lose, and please do that for free, by the way.
And so I think there is a disconnect between why we think people should turn up and why people do turn up.
Back to dancing, music, clubs, let's go, art.
So I've been thinking about this problem very specifically, right?
Like, how do we turn something?
that people really don't want to do, it seems, right?
Like the percentages are just so low, into something that they've practiced doing somewhere else, have become used to, understand and engage with almost automatically.
And I thought art was a great place to start, right?
If you can get people engaged in democratic art making, then you can get them used to, like we're used to authoritarian systems.
Teacher comes in, we sit down, they say stuff for an hour, we get up, we leave.
We practice that.
our entire childhoods and teenage years.
We don't practice democracy like that, right?
If we practiced that multiple hours per day in every single class we went to, we'd be really frigging good at democracy by the time we left high school.
But we leave high school and then someone's like, by the way, politics or something, vote for whoever your dad votes for or whatever.
And you're like, oh, OK, I guess that's it.
I guess we've learned how to do democracy.
It doesn't work.
It's one of the weirdest.
failures of a system that I can imagine, genuinely.
people engage with art, people love art, people want art.
Now, the extent to which they want to make art is hard to say, but you can imagine all sorts of art that is uh participatory, democratically created.
It's hard to imagine, right, like a club dance floor without dancers on it.
I mean, we've actually all walked into that club and then walked out because there was nobody there, right?
In some ways, that's already a form of participatory art.
We've got dancers, and that might be you.
You've already got performers in there.
You might even be dancing for someone.
He's cute, she's cute, they're cute.
my goodness.
All right.
You're part of something.
You're already part of some participatory artistic community.
And what would it look like to formalize that?
One of the reasons democracy can function is because we formalize it.
We know when a vote is.
We know what the vote's on.
We know what happens once a vote has been passed.
um
And you could do this not even necessarily through blockchain, but technologically to a certain extent.
I imagine, and I'm just throwing this out as a really quick example, on a dance floor, when everybody puts their hands up, there's like a laser reader at a certain height that
checks how many hands are in the air.
And that does something with, I don't know, a smoke machine or like the lights or volume level on the thing.
The DJ gets feedback at that point and there's like a feedback loop.
uh That is...
Participatory art.
Is it democracy yet?
but it's like participatory.
Another thing you can imagine, this answer is going to take a while, Sandro, so sorry about that.
Another thing you can imagine is like at the moment when I create a piece of music, I think of something as the lone genius, Like genius is always solo.
It's never like a whole bunch of geniuses came up with something.
It's always like someone alone in their attic, probably poor.
And they come up with something real clever, show the world.
But like changing that format, what if a whole bunch of people came together, say 20, 50, 100 people, and instead of sitting down at a piano where I play, say, a C and someone else
plays a G and you hear the notes G and C, I played a C, they played a G, and you heard the note E, right, which is the note between them.
Now that note E doesn't exist when I play the G and it doesn't exist when they play the C, but when we both play, you end up with that note.
Now you can imagine a whole bunch of people at digital keyboards
playing a whole bunch of different notes, and then you have an average.
And once again, that average would not exist without the community, like the entire community, giving that input.
And that can be up to, you know, an infinite number of people giving input.
um But uh that would be a form of actual communal and democratic music making, for instance.
You would always end up with a note in the middle.
Like the more people you've got, the more it would move toward the mean.
So it would sound really dull, right?
But you could make it happen.
um And anyway, I could go on about various different ways of making this happen for a while.
It's something I've been thinking about a lot.
um It turns out very few people are interested because I've talked to quite a few people about this.
I've applied for grants based on uh these types of concepts.
I've raised them with musicians.
I've written with technologists.
I've raised them with academics.
And absolutely nobody is interested.
it's not that people so Medigov, for instance,
Medigov has a really interesting experiment going on right now in terms of more collaborative slash democratically created art.
And we'll see what happens with that.
think the idea is that there are three people I think got chosen to be a team and they build an architecture, an idea around a collaborative piece of art that will be available
for the public to work on.
So when I say nobody's interested, there are a few people interested.
uh Primavera de Philippi is also well known for making
Art that is interactive and obviously there are all sorts of NFT experiments where you can interact and create art.
Almost none of them are democratic though, like they're collaborative, but they're not democratic in the way that we think of governance, say, being a democratic decision-making
process, right?
Like an outcome that is not the specific outcome that everybody wanted, but is the collective response to a problem or whatever uh the decision-making process was.
em It's really hard to gain traction.
We live sadly in a time that is deeply uninterested in democracy in general.
m And it's very hard to gain traction on an idea that on the right has lost impetus anyway, because um authoritarianism is in.
And on the left has lost trust.
And so I feel as if we live in a bad time for thinking about em
truly democratic governance models.
live in a great time for talking about governance.
But engagement is really hard to come by right now, I find.
And I would love it if your listeners right now are shouting at whatever they're listening on and be like, no, that's not true.
We're doing it.
We're making it happen.
Like share it with the world.
However you do that, write me an email, whatever it is.
Because my world has very, few examples of that type of work happening.
Anyway.
That's my long and winding answer to the question, how do you bring people in engagement?
I've been finding it hard, but there are some ideas and if anybody wants to run with them, feel free.
I mean, I totally agree with you that it's hard and also that we are not used.
mean, formally we have democracy, but then we are not used to exercise our power.
And I saw it many times also.
And this was something that when I was a teenager, I remember that also in high school, sometimes I have heard from professors like this is not a democracy.
Like when they were talking about
if to open the door or to the windows.
Something like that.
also about this, um during my master, I remember that um I asked to the professor if we could have had, um if he could um do the break at the middle of the lesson.
And there was a
very short rotation.
And then that was in favor of the break.
And then he said, but we are not in a democracy.
so.
Yeah.
It's sham election, my friend.
Yeah, and then I was like, we are not in a democracy.
um I I can agree, like if we think about the ancient democracy representative, right, was more direct and this is not direct.
This is representative.
And so I went to the mayor and I interviewed the mayor, like asking him like, is it true?
Like, can a professor decide if the windows has
as to stay open or closed.
And he said that actually he cannot decide.
Right.
Because there is no power from the state.
If the state is the entity that does the monopoly of violence, it gives the power to professor to evaluate students, not to decide if the windows have
Windows open or closed.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Absolutely.
And I think that's also how like, power, like coming back to one of your initial questions where you talked about what is governance, right?
Like, and why is it unsexy?
But like, why do we need it?
It's knowing those differences.
It's really important to know where power is being exercised and where you are self, where you're in your own panopticon, right?
Like self controlling ourself, like based on fear of power.
but where you're fully within your rights to go open a window and yet you don't know you are and don't think you are, right?
We need to know when the system is working in whatever way it's working.
We need to know when it's not specifically so that number one, we can exercise our rights outside of that hierarchy and number two, so we know if the system is working or not.
If I think that something is happening that is the fault of the man and it has nothing like nothing to do with the man in a formal sense, that's a really good thing to know.
And then
If I think that something is happening that is bad and it turns out that's the one stream of power that we're dealing with and it is the terrible thing, that's really, really
useful to know, right?
So, um yeah, we need to know when we're practicing and when we're not.
We need to know what the boundaries of that control is, kind of at all times in the best and final analysis.
And maybe this could be a question also related to your background, personal, professional, academic, whatever.
And also when you realize that maybe technology can help.
can be helpful for governance purposes and decentralization.
Yeah, here's, I'd see this the other way around a little bit, right?
And the way I see this the other way around is not that technology is, uh it can be helpful, but not that technology is helpful.
It's that technology is the frontier in which there is the most ability and excitement to experiment with other types of governance models.
If you turn up at like, I don't know here, German,
state government and say, we're going to be employing blockchain right now to run this place.
They're going to say, no, you're not.
There's already a system set up and they like it.
Thank you very much.
And there's probably really good reasons why they like it.
I don't think we should tear down all systems just to replace them with whatever we've come up most recently with.
But because these technology shifts and moves so quickly and is in such a state of flux and development, that's where you have enough gaps to experiment.
to create sandboxes, to try out different ideas, to build technological responses to current problems that may or may not work, but are different than the status quo.
And so for me, the excitement's the other way around.
It's not that blockchain technology enables a certain type of governance practice, which it sure does, but more that governance practices can find in blockchain uh a new form of
expression that might lead to a different way
that we can organize at least our digital worlds.
And since our digital worlds are interwoven with and inextricable from our physical worlds, our physical worlds.
Yeah.
I was thinking about a recent interview.
um He's an expert of cryptography and security.
And he's Bruce Schneier.
uh And he said, everything that is using blockchain can be done also without blockchain.
And way better.
Yeah, the one thing that I, okay, so I semi agree.
One of the things that I do think is that there are things that are more self-evident with blockchain than are with other technologies.
There are things that lend, I don't think blockchain is a neutral technology by any stretch of the imagination, but it lends itself um to certain applications better than
some other things do, or more self-evidently than other things do.
As he says, there might be things that do it better, actually, right?
But there are always trade-offs with what you mean by better.
What are we um optimizing for under that better?
so, yeah, but I do think it's really important.
One of the things I want to stress is that blockchain can be really used, or different parts of blockchain application can be really useful case studies for governance.
But it is not the be all and end all of governance.
It's not like, and then blockchain ends and governance ends.
All of the things we're talking about
that say manifest in Dao's are things that can manifest in all sorts of other systems, including like hanging out in your vague, like your shared living space with seven people
or whatever.
Like those governance principles can be put in place and are often put in place better within say a seven person living situation than are in any digital space.
I think because also maybe it changes a lot when we say blockchain.
Maybe one person thinks a lot about the technical aspect.
Maybe the other person sees more the social, political aspect.
like personally, I agree with what you said about the technology create like a sort of the cyberspace is a good space where to test.
new kind of governance systems.
And I saw blockchain as something that could potentially decentralize power.
uh But still there is a sort of concentration of power because maybe uh related to the different kind of proof of system, proof of work that if you have a lot of
uh computational power.
You can have more power in the network.
Yeah, proof of work, proof of stake, both of them have their concentrations of power problems.
mean, blockchain in general has its concentration of power problems.
What I love is that it's it's and this isn't talking about crypto in general, right, especially not DeFi.
But the one thing I love about the blockchain community in general, like on the side that thinks about these things and cares about more than pump and dump schemes is they think
about governance and they notice these things and they care.
That's actually quite rare for people to actually notice and care about organizational problems of those type.
um No, absolutely, like re-centralization, centralization problems all over the place.
But how cool is it that we notice that?
How cool is it that we're talking about it as opposed to just going, no, it's the status quo, whatever.
That's already a way better starting point than ah apathy, for instance.
And I saw that...
Maybe I'm wrong, don't know.
um Usually people that are interested in politics are people that came from humanistic studies, political science, also art, also science sometimes.
And while with technology what happened is...
that there was a sort of like blockchain is not neutral, as you said, there is some political thoughts behind blockchain system and behind the centralization.
So I saw that sometimes technical people also maybe without having like uh the culture related to governance and other things can see that the centralization can be bad.
uh
because you can see, I don't know, Cloudflare is down and all the internet is stuck.
Yeah.
I think one of the things that I find interesting about a lot uh of the discussions, and one of the things that I kind of like about the concept, like Glenn Vile and Audrey Tang's
plurality concept, um which you don't have to take in the specific, but I appreciate in the general, certainly, is it's not that centralization is um always bad, right?
And it's not that decentralization is always good.
But it is that we live specifically and particularly in digital systems that are almost always, certainly when it comes to control and power, centralized.
We don't have that many alternatives.
And it'd be wonderful if we had a multiplicity of alternatives that for each use case could offer various different pros and cons.
um And I think one of the other things, and this I think about is
specifically and particularly when it comes to the AI race right now, we're often optimizing for efficiency when we talk about optimizing.
You were talking about better when you were talking to Bruce Schneider and he said, it's always better, right?
Or often is better.
And you go, well, what is this better?
Often people will talk to me and they're thinking of efficiency.
Efficiency is often terrible.
It's really, really bad.
The easiest example, which is a wonderful game,
It's a museum piece game, as in you play it once and then you know you can't play it again.
it's like, you know those railroad games in like in North America where you build a railroad and you have to lay down tracks and you own stations and stuff like that.
It's one of those, but it's for Europe.
And you get points for laying tracks the most efficiently between various different points.
And after a while, if you're at all historically awake, you realize that you're building a rail network to take um
Jews, gays, priests, the disabled and the politically averse uh to Nazi ideology to concentration camps.
You're building the concentration camp rail network and you have been incentivized for efficiency.
And the question is, of course, do you keep playing and win or do you stop playing?
And I think it's obviously a stark example.
It's obviously an example that doesn't in terms of the evils that can be
coming from uh efficiency is obviously not going to be comparable to a whole bunch of different use cases or things that we might be talking about right now.
But for me, it's the perfect example to show you that efficiency is not always good.
And decentralized systems can often be less efficient.
I think that can often be better.
If efficiency isn't always good, then we can start thinking about, well, when is inefficiency a really useful thing to have?
Is it useful when it helps with security?
Is it useful when it helps with more equal ownership and governance?
At what point, what are the balances that we want?
Where do we want to place efficiency in our rank ordering of priorities?
And that takes a much longer conversation around what our priorities for various technologies and various uses of technologies are.
um But I think we have to be having those conversations a lot more often because when it comes to
I think a lot of technologists that I know, and I know a lot of engaged, political, interesting, smart technologists, but most of their training was around how do you solve a
problem quickly and well.
And that's not necessarily when it comes to governance what you want.
It just isn't.
There are no quick ways.
And I think I was reading some of your papers, like there was a paragraph about the danger of government centralized approach to identity in some ways related also to efficiency,
because we all want to not log in on all different platforms.
Yeah, absolutely.
um
I'm sorry.
I mean, we want our lives to be as easy as possible.
We're also incentivized in a world that measures time as money.
We're also incentivized to move quickly, optimize, become more efficient.
um And yeah, we don't want to be doing all these things, nor do states want to be dealing with the hassle uh of uh a decentralized system.
The problem is that the dangers of centralized systems, specifically when it comes to say something like digital ID,
are so well documented, right?
But we'll go with convenience instead of history.
um Time and time again, it seems.
And it's a frustrating...
um It comes back to kind of that education side, right?
Which is when my understanding of my interaction with technology is how convenient is it?
And that's the one and only question I ask.
uh Then we're missing all the important questions.
about using any piece of technology.
Absolutely.
Would you say that you are optimistic or pessimistic in a short time, long time?
as you say, we choose the efficiency instead of history.
Because also history is unsexy.
We have to say this.
yeah, it's sexier than governance, but it's also unsexy.
And it's inconvenient.
I think that's the thing, it's inconvenient.
It's a real, I feel like this is a baby, another side rant thing, but the Oracle of Delphi didn't actually predict the future and throwing bones didn't actually predict the future.
And now we're like, polymarket's gonna definitely predict the future.
And you're like, team.
we haven't done it yet, we're not going to do it now, right?
Like bringing a new technology to bear, getting a different animal's bones, slitting a different animal's stomach open is not going to help us like figure out the future.
And I think we're looking for technological solutions to unsolvable problems.
um Rather than looking at the historical dangers that have been proven and attempting to solve for them.
And I find that deeply, deeply frustrating.
look at his, we refuse to look at history to learn for the things that haven't worked and replicate that.
But we also, while replicating that, refuse to look at the downsides that have also been proved through history.
em And that's a personal frustration and bugbear of mine.
em But yeah, one of the things I'm, in terms of my own personal opinion, I feel, look, here's what we're gonna do as an organization and here's what I'm gonna do as a person.
I'm gonna work hard.
I'm to put in the time.
I'm going to be full of optimism because to live otherwise is perhaps no great life from my own perspective.
I am not a nihilist nor am I interested in it.
um As a rational thinker who is engaged with these issues on a daily basis, I am deeply pessimistic about the chances for the success of many of the...
If you look at, say, even just blockchain, and you look at the whole thing, the amount of money that is generated, the amount of turnover that is generated from scams, North Korean
hackers, pump and dump schemes, Trump meme coins, far outweighs the decentralized ethical folk.
And that's like
That's the promising side of technology.
um So I don't think it's like, it's not even pessimism, which is like a suggestion that we're looking forward and assessing the future.
um We live in a reality right now in which our side has been losing for a very long time.
That's okay.
That's fine.
We got to keep on doing the work.
But this isn't like, I often find I'll be at a conference and someone will say we're at a tipping point or we're at a turning point, right?
It's now or never.
I'm like, no, now or never was like 50 years ago, minimum.
Post-Second World War, probably.
The building of the Internet, probably.
We lost to then.
That's OK.
Let's keep on trying.
Let's see if we can build even spaces, digital spaces, if not the entire infrastructure of um community, decentralization, equitable ownership and governance, and see what those
experiments look like and live in them.
perhaps, even if they're small, even if it's not the main system.
Let's do all that.
It's not even pessimism to say that uh things are not looking good right now.
Things just aren't looking good right now.
But I don't think that matters in terms of what we do next.
think what we do next is...
Just briefly, and this is for listeners may be interesting, I don't know, but I used to be someone who is quite idealistic.
One of the reasons why I'm a musician is you can quite easily choose to do mainly good.
If you make music and you are speaking to someone about something, can really um give a hundred, like your ability to be idealistic in that situation can be at 100 % and you can
get it out there, right?
Songs do it all the time.
You're the best, simply the best, better than all the rest, right?
Like you can put it out there, 100%.
And when you get down to the work, especially of governance, but especially of governance right now, it is
always incremental, it's always a fight, and most of the time you lose.
And a lot of the time we think about moving the needle.
It's not about creating a whole brand new world right now.
It's about making sure that a different world that is better is more and more available, more and more possible.
And if we can move that needle a little bit kind of every day toward that future, then I think it's worth it.
You mentioned a couple of times your uh organization that I haven't asked you questions.
So I'll do it now about the Decent Right Research Center.
So if you want to tell us something.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, I'll be quick about it only because m some of the things that I say are really based on my research and based on this think tank.
And so we're very much aligned with the think tank.
And then some things are like personal opinions that are not necessarily aligned.
The DRC, the Decentralization Research Center, is the place that really got me turned on to governance, got me excited about governance, and where I've been working on governance
in emerging technologies for the last few years.
It is a nonprofit organization.
um that advocates for the decentralized uh ownership and governance of emerging technologies and really focus on blockchain mainly at the moment and specifically around
control.
So it's kind of difficult sometimes to say what is decentralization.
You talked earlier about like proof of stake and decentralization there.
You can have physical decentralization, architectural, governance, technical, etc.
And one of the things we really wanted to do is, and it's really hard for policymakers in a policy context, right?
You turn up and say, we'd like decentralization.
They say, well, what does the law look like that enables that?
And you go, this is more something for something.
It's really difficult.
And so we've come up with some control tests for decentralization so that policymakers and regulators can see where a system is more or less decentralized, create sandboxes for uh
various organizations that are working towards decentralization and attempt to change in ways both big and small uh US regulatory and compliance uh rules to allow more
decentralized blockchain based organizations to flourish as best possible.
And that can be DAOs or whatever else.
And so that's the organization.
We work outside of blockchain as well.
We've worked on data co-ops.
We're doing work on decentralized AI.
um
But we're trying to be a kind of full stack enterprise that goes all the way from research on one end to advocacy on the Hill, particularly in the US on the other side, to try to
make decentralization more of a reality than a current.
Thank you.
And usually the last question is like a message for the people that are working on similar things.
ah But I think that in some way you already ah sent a message, but I don't know if you want to say something else.
love it.
Oh, okay, yeah, I'll say a couple of things because I think they're important.
The first is that I love, uh I think we need wilder thinking.
I think we need bigger thinking.
I think we need weirder thinking.
I think we live in an incredibly restricted age when it comes to thought.
And I think whatever we're working on, whatever you're working on, think one step bigger.
You can always pull it back in the edit, right?
Like you can always come back when you're getting the master's thesis ready and or like the project ready or the art proposal ready or whatever.
You can always pull it back.
But I think the risk is that we're thinking too small rather than that we're thinking too big.
And I tried to do that in my everyday life as well.
And I fail most of the time because it's actually quite a hard thing to do.
But I do if I were to bump into anybody working on stuff like this, what I would want is an idea that was a little too big.
and then to figure out what to do with that rather than another idea that's a little too small.
ah Once again, it's fine if that's where it ends up, Especially if you're working on regulation or legislation, by the time the bill is passed, it's gone through dozens of
hands.
It's gone through dozens of compromises.
ah But that doesn't have to be your first step.
Your first step doesn't have to be self-censorship.
Get big first.
Other people will censor you later.
Or you will edit your work later.
And I'm excited by anybody who does that.
That's what personally excites me about this space and what I want to see going forward a lot more.
I'm very excited about
Thank you.
And I think that failing is also the key of success.
I'm glad to you agree with me this.
Thank you for your time.
This is very fun.