What Does It Mean to Be a Radical?

Transcript

cool guys very shortly I'm going to bring up your next speaker uh he's actually got a new book out called blockchain radicals uh he will be just outside after his speech uh signing copies and selling books as well so you're welcome to go and have a chat with them afterwards or if you want to ask questions uh sort of at the end of a speech uh do join the uh the chat room you can ask questions in there uh that's an option as well uh ladies and gentlemen on what does it mean to be a radical please welcome Joshua Dila is it working

no nice have 20 seconds um no five is it working okay now we're good uh hi everyone my name is Joshua Davila um and I recently wrote a book uh titled

blockchain radicals how capitalism ruined crypto and how to fix it uh I wrote the book over the past uh couple of years and it's coming out this August 8th you can pre-order it through my publisher at repeater books.com you can also find it on Amazon and everywhere else but for this talk I just wanted to talk about bit uh about the book and sort of the overarching structure of it um but to start off in case you don't know me uh you may know me online as the blockchain Socialist that's sort of like my uh my logo that I use everywhere I've been working in blockchain for a little over 5 years I started my blog SL podcast uh of that name called uh of the blockchain Socialist about three years ago I co I co-founded a project called bread chain Cooperative which is a

Federation of different projects that are values aligned on the more Progressive side we have the crypto Commons Association uh pack Dow which is based in New York City and labor Dow I'm filming a documentary in crypto and uh recently on my podcast been focusing a lot on uh the network State and sort of our critiques of it and producing alternatives to uh balaji's very wild idea um but so let's talk about the overarching structure of my book to understand it uh let's first um understand what I call or what is is called the critique of representational thinking so this was an idea or framework proposed by the post-marxist philosopher uh Jil DZ who's a french guy

in like the uh 70s and 80s um but in his work uh difference in repetition uh he kind of proposed that often times people try to understand new things by imprinting examples of the old and to sort of understand why this type of thinking can be problematic I like to use the example of the drum machine the drum machine was invented way back when as something that you could purchase um in order to play music with your bud with your buddies but maybe your drummer wasn't able to come by so you bought the machine you put the buttons in and then you press play it plays the beats and you can strum your guitar along with the drum

machine um and this was the purpose of its invention the sort of repres the framework of the uh drum machine in this type of way is that the drum machine was a representation of a drummer right so the drummer is the ideal form in the platonic sense of like what is uh the best way to kind of make drumming music um and the drum machine was just a lesser version of it it was just a representation but what actually happened in history is that people took the drum machine and they turned up the dial and they Ed it in ways in which the drummer could never actually play music themselves so the drum machine went past its representational model or you can

also think that the representational model that it was sort of thought about under wasn't correct in the first place it was always wrong so thinking in a representational way can be very problematic and very limiting for how we actually use the things that we use um we may want to use and so duus calls representational thinking it describes it as thinking like a tree or arboreal thinking in which the ideal form is at the the trunk and everything else comes out as a representation it's branches of the ideal form um and this is a very problematic way of thinking instead um he's very obsessed with potatoes so he likes to say that we should be thinking romatic we should be thinking in ways

that has no clear Center in which it is where the center is sort of um idealized in a particular way um mushrooms also have a romatic structure through their mycelial networks which is why I've worn my mushroom shirt today um but so I'm saying this because my argument is that representational thinking is endemic in crypto it's all over the place the white paper for Bitcoin itself was peer-to-peer cash um and then afterwards the kind of representational model metaphor that people like to use to understand it was thinking about it as digital gold um you know when we think about smart contracts which is also itself a representational model

sometimes we think code is law like everywhere you look whenever ever you know nothing about crypto you try to learn about it like you come across things that are using sort of traditional structures or functions that exist already and trying to imprint that into what is crypto in order to understand it or to get people to understand it um but this is uh this is not necessarily a bad thing sometimes it's good to use metaphor to help people understand things but we have to understand that it's side effects and who are the people that are actually making these representations and these metaphors in to understand this new thing that we call crypto um and so if we take just the example of Bitcoin being digital gold there already existed like a pretty um nonsignificant amount

of people who are really into the idea of gold as being like the ultimate form of money this highly commoditized form of money is like the best because there's a limited amount and because like you know people use Gold forever or whatever uh it was a very conservative ideology very libertarian conservative um and therefore a lot of conservative Libertarians became very enticed by the idea of of Bitcoin and were willing to give their money to people in order to uh to have that sort of ideology like so that they can live it um you also see this in like uh in crypto you know decentralized autonomous Corporation was the original name of adal but that then that later changed because of adic

suggesting like hey maybe we shouldn't only be doing corporations you know but the fact that the corporation was the first one I think tells a lot about the ideological framework of the people who came first and what they were trying to to put forth in the world um so this is just like a really common tactic in marketing uh people do it everywhere not just in crypto but like this is how um this can be problematic in certain ways if we don't if we aren't aware of it um and so what I really like this like kind of saying is that the map is not the territory the word is not the thing it describes whenever the map is confused with a territory a semantic disturbance is set up in the organ organism the disturbance continues until the limitation of the map is recognized by Alfred cor Corin corsky um and so

like representation is something that is kind of unavoidable we have to keep in mind uh but I think what's important at the same time from George box is that all models are wrong but some are useful so uh we can use representational models to understand things but some of them are worse than others right um but representation is a necessary thing and in order to kind of reduce complexity in order to understand and wrap our heads around certain things um but a map itself can be very political um I learned yesterday that in India there are certain types of maps that are completely illegal to own um because it goes against the kind of Hindu nationalist uh sentiment of the government there um so the types of

models or the types of maps that we put over the territory that exists has political consequences it means that people are going to understand things in particular ways and they're going to uh go after things in particular ways because that's the map that they're given and that they're trying to follow um and so in my book I go through what I think are sort of the three most common like overarching representational models that are used in crypto so section one is crypto as money section two is crypto as finance and section three is crypto as coordination um so these are like the three most common ways whenever I like try to find explanations of of blockchains or crypto like this is how people kind of explain it majority of

the time but what you can see with this kind of way that it's being explained and being modeled is that what's essentially happening is the uh the representations are being expanded every time right people start off with money and they're like oh wait no we can do more than that and now we have defi so now everything is finan and now we have people saying that um it's all coordination because of dows and things like this um but what's happening is just like the drum machine in the early example crypto is breaking past its representation every time but what's I think hap uh important to understand what's happening underneath is that there is a very complex en larged territory of things that that are possible or that can happen um and the

particular maps that we're sort of drawing on top of it is never going to fully Encompass the territory itself right like the map of Peru is always going to be uh less than the actual existence of Peru right um Peru is more complicated than like the piece of paper in which you use the map but the map itself can sometimes be useful I think in the case here uh what we need to understand is kind of the limitations of the maps that we decide to use or not um and so what I think is interesting to also keep in mind why it's been related especially with a lot of the news that happening lately is sort of this understanding that nothing is forever so that includes the internet so like thinking of things as kind of like a

stable uh entity can sometimes be very problematic I think there is kind of this platonic ideal idealization of things that are static or things that can be static I think that's why a lot of people are attracted to bitcoin and the 21 million cap or whatever um but this tends to be and attract a lot of very very conservative uh ideals and politics um but we've seen you know throughout the past you know decades that the internet has changed quite a lot from what we used to think it was to what it is what has become and what it is now you know we used to have AOL we used to have Myspace now we have like very different types of applications that do very different things and have uh can do more things than they were

able to before and the way that we've been able to understand the internet has has changed quite a bit at the same time you know large corporations have sort of slowly uh sort of coming to the realizations of what ultimately the conclusions of capitalistic business uh kind of does and that now kind of the The Venture Capital money is running out you know the internet has lasted for a long time and has existed as it as has existed because it has been sort of running on an almost like Limitless amount of cash that has come from Venture Capital because there's always this kind of story and narrative and expectation that if you can fund a whatever software based startup then you

can make 100x your you know the the returns you can make are very very high and this is like a model that's used repeatedly over and over and over again in the tech world and this has continued into crypto world to almost an extreme extent and I think this has been like why a lot of people have felt I think um kind of dissatisfied with the current status quo of crypto where uh people are sort of subject to the swings of the market in which case oh I have a job when the price is up and now I'm like not sure if my work is going to continue because the price is down and we're in a bare market and I don't know where to find funding and so I think this can cause like really like um problem atic types of Dynamics between people and

even within themselves um and so one of the things you know I'll give you a little tidbit uh that I think is like worth a worthy goal of kind of pursuing like understanding all these things that we need to build kind of alternatives to the types of infrastructure that we're building right now a VC backed kind of uh startup is not a kind of collectively owned digital infrastructure which is what I think that we ultimately need to be to be building if we want to build something that's truly an alternative to what exists already so if we think back like the maps that we're using right now and that we're overlaying onto the territory of crypto are essentially a recreation of what has already existed and so like now we have the kind of

Technologies perhaps to build things that are vastly different than what exists today and so I think it's you know on us the people who are wanting to build these things in order to build them in a way that is structurally very different that doesn't facilitate the types of social relationships that uh we're currently reliant on in the kind of traditional Tech VC World um and so yeah uh the book goes into a lot more detail of course I've gotten I've been pretty lucky to get a lot of really nice words from different people so vitalic um Nick cernich Prim Vera Def filipi and then here's some of the other words in case you're still not convinced from different people um if you go to my website blockchain social.com um you can

also find all these things and more information or you can just go to the repeater books website um but yeah you can scan that QR code if you want to pre-order it or you can try your luck I have a few copies to sell about 18 or 19 copies to sell outside right afterwards um yeah it's called blockchain radicals and then I guess I can take questions um I think I don't know if I can see if there are questions on the screen or if I should ask the audience or like here go fix how to fix it how to fix it uh so I

would say ultimately what I'm saying how to fix it is to uh radically think or rethink the models in which we are applying ourselves on so I think in order to the first thing to do in order to radically rethink that is to First understand what is the status quo like what is the current existing social relationships that we are put under and to if we can understand that first then we can begin to understand like how do we build something that is very different um and so I think uh yeah for the how to fix it for me one of those things is building like that tweet I said I put out building Collective infrastructure so when I say collective in infrastructure I really mean like

collectively owned and one that is not based on um like the way that a lot of kind of token governance uh Protocols are kind of done at the moment where the token is sort of freely available on the free market where you can buy as many tokens as you want and the more that you buy the more power you have I think that's if we like map that against what is the status quo it's essentially the same I like to say that you know the the US dollar is like the governance token of global capitalism um and I think it's like it's privy that we try something else are there any that getting it

rights I mean I think that yes it's not all horrible but there is a lot of horrible which is why I think like I wrote the book especially for people who are very critical um because I think there is a lot to be um disappointed by in crypto so far like I I think it's it's really hard to defend at this point like no everything is going great like you know it it it's really not uh and so there are some projects that I think that are going in a direction I think are very very interesting what I find particularly interesting is that there's a lot of people who are very interested in governance in particular and sort of collective governance over shared

resources so I think one of the things that is important to keep in mind is that it's not necessarily just like did they make the right app like I don't think that like do we what what's the app that's going to like fix it but it's that the the tools and the infrastructure is able to facilitate like particular types of social dynamics and relationships between people people that were very difficult to do before probably uh and that can sort of create more like Collective um Collective sense making and going after Collective Endeavors um so yeah so I mean I think there are a lot of tools that are trying to be they're like very very open like that try to be like as neutral as

possible and try to do these things but uh so I think that that can be a good thing what's important is there for be to more for for there to be more people to where they're using that infrastructure in like more Collective ways rather than in uh more privatized ways if that makes sense sure sure I think I think there are things like like that that are really interesting like the fact that things are open source uh gitcoin open sourcing their stuff is like an interesting thing um I tend to try to be like uh skeptical at first and then like like like prove it to me like I think

that I think that's kind of like the thing that I think a lot of people maybe more people need to have like like have them prove it to you that they're doing something good doesn't mean that you should completely be turned off by it or like not support it but I try to be uh optimistically skeptical I guess um and then I see something here how might we operate with non-representational territories um I'm not sure I understand that question there is a representational thinking there is the territory which is like the existence of the world in which it's kind of uh impossible really to

understand to like completely map out all of existence right the entire territory is never going to be mapped out you always have to map something like even the fact like my eyes like what I see in front of me is just a bunch of neurons in the back of my brain brain firing to give me this illusion that you guys are in front of me um but the uh so like I think what's important is to kind of like keep in mind the types of maps that you are using and the representations that you are using in order to understand the territory so like just to keep in mind that whatever map that you're deciding has political consequences because you cannot possibly have everything included in your map there are things that you have to let go

that you have to put down and that's fine is just that making that choice has political consequences um hope that makes sense uh just don't tell me [Laughter] don't um all right I'm going to I have a box of books and I'll just be right outside here uh either for €20 cash or if you have crypto I can do that as well if you have any bread from the bread chain crowd staking application then uh

you'll get a discount do 17 bread and yeah I think that's [Applause] it