= Influential podcast for the progressive crypto commons community, maintained by Joshua Dávila – aka The Blockchain Socialist.

URL = https://theblockchainsocialist.com/

Contextual Quote

""Ethereum’s smart-contract architecture has attracted a huge wave of would-be economic engineers, focused not on Bitcoin-style individual sovereignty, but new incentive structures they hope can foster a more balanced and healthy society. Two key examples include Glen Weyl’s "Radical Markets" theories, and the nascent “regenerative economics” discourse spearheaded by Gitcoin founder Kevin Owocki and others. It was in that context that a new Twitter account declaring itself “The Blockchain Socialist” appeared on my radar two or three years ago. An accompanying podcast welcomed truly transformative figures like artists Rhea Myers, Ethereum cofounder Amir Taaki and Sci-hub’s Alexandra Elbakyan, who saw the utility of crypto to their widely varied activist projects. The Blockchain Socialist became a nexus for discussions of American economic imperialism and the left-wing case for privacy in particular, two pillars that have helped define positions outside of crypto’s largely libertarian mainstream."

- By David Z. Morris [1]

Podcast Directory

Akseli Virtanen on Designing Post-Capitalism with the Economic Space Agency: "If you’re a leftist interested in the blockchain space, it’s absolutely imperative that you keep up with the work of ECSA."

Michel Bauwens on Commons Based Peer Production on the Blockchain

[2]

Jonathan Beller on How To Finance the Post-Capitalist Revolution

Series: Overthrowing the Network State
- Primavera De Filippi on the Critique of the Network State Concept of Balaji Srivanasan
- Glen Weyl on Overthrowing the Network State

Publications

Book: Blockchain Radicals. Joshua Dávila. Repeater Books, August 2023

URL = https://theblockchainsocialist.com/blockchain-radicals-book-announcement/

Interview

* Gianmarco Cristofari: How did you get into the crypto world?

Joshua Dávila: I was broke when I got out of college and I needed a way to make some money. I had recently graduated with a degree in neuroscience and was playing around with the idea of trading stocks in biotech. My thinking was that if I knew neuroscience well enough I could probably play the stock market. In these pharmaceutical companies, as soon as a drug is approved, there’s a huge spike and increase in the price of the stock. I now think it was a very silly and naive idea, and I was really bad at it. While playing around I came across cryptocurrencies. I had heard of it in the context of Bitcoin and as being mainly used for buying drugs online (which I never really needed to do myself). But then I came across Ethereum. It had fairly recently been released at that point and it introduced smart contracts, which were very interesting to me.

At the same time, I was also going through a process of political radicalization. I was always on the left, but I became much more interested in radical politics, in reading political theory and in the meaning behind it. When I was living in New York I also got into a communist organization. I was seeing all these connections with what was going on in that space of crypto with left politics, but I also realized that there wasn’t really anybody kind of making those connections. Then eventually I got a job in Belgium, doing work with blockchain, but after a couple of years I became frustrated that there still wasn’t anyone out there talking about crypto from a left-wing point of view. Based on my experience of being in the crypto space, a lot of the left-wing analysis was not very good. So, I made the unfortunate decision one weekend to buy a website’s URL and just start blogging and posting online and then it’s grown since then. It’s become more of a podcast as well.

* GC: Reading your book, I liked how you report the impressive growth of blockchain applications. You mention three foundational metaphors of the crypto world: money, finance, and economic coordination. Why have you chosen these metaphors? Do you think that they are useful?

In the book I borrow the critique of representational thinking from Gilles Deleuze, which is basically saying that oftentimes we take models of the old and impose it on the new as a way to try and understand it. I think that is what happens in crypto constantly. People are creating metaphors to explain what this thing is, but also as a way to sell it. What I’ve seen is that the dominant metaphor has changed over time. It used to be really dominated with this idea of being a new monetary system. That was core to the creation of Bitcoin, its philosophy, its ideology and what’s baked into the code itself, as outlined in the white paper named “Peer to peer: digital system for peer-to-peer cash”.

But the advent of smart contracts and Ethereum really opened up a new space for what we can do with this technology. The narrative and the metaphor really changed; people started becoming more interested in complex financial products. More recently, people have thought about it in a more abstract sense that goes beyond the monetary or financial layer to become a medium or a substrate to help people coordinate over distance and time using the decentralized infrastructure that blockchains provide and smart contracts to automate a lot of interactions that people would have."

(https://networkcultures.org/moneylab/2024/04/10/you-shall-speculate-we-shall-coordinate/)

More information

Articles

Ian Wright on the Blockchain as the Material Foundation for Algorithmic Socialism: "about the potential application of blockchain-like technologies to building socialist institutions."

* [[Socialism and the Blockchain[[. By Steve Huckle and Martin White. Future Internet 2016, 8(4), 49 : "...blockchain technologies are not just a Libertarian tool, they also enhance Socialist forms of governance. "