My friend and researcher of the politics of tech platforms, Gianmarco Cristofari recently had an extended in my apartment and so we thought it'd be a great opportunity to interview each other. He interviewed me here for the Institute for Network Cultures to talk about my book and the left's relationship with crypto. We spoke about how platforms are markets within markets, his book The Politics of Platformization, and the socialist history of cybernetics. While he stayed at my place he also read my book and gave some thoughts on the relations and differences between platforms and protocols in ..read more

For this episode I spoke to James Brennan (@jt_bren) who has been finishing up his Masters at the University of Colorado focused on crypto. As part of his research he took a dep dive into the infamous group behind the Miladys NFT collection, Remilia Corp. During the discussion we spoke about esoteric political ideologies professed by Remilia and those associated with it, their financialized tactics for earning revenue, and all of the controversies surrounding the project. We also asked ourselves the very uncomfortable question of whether their tactics are something the left could learn from ..read more

I spoke to Oisín Kyne, co-founder and CTO of Obol Network,  an ecosystem for trust minimized Ethereum staking that enables people to create, test, run and coordinate distributed validators. Distributed Validator Technology (DVT) enables the duties of an Ethereum validator to be performed across a cluster of nodes in order to improve resilience as compared to running a validator on a single node. During the discussion we spoke about how DVT works, its implications for community funding, and  how it supports the decentralization of Ethereum. DVT is one of the most exciting technologie ..read more

I spoke to Kat (katalunia.eth) who is behind a project called ETH Evacuations which is taking donations to pay for families to get out of Gaza through the Rafah crossing. Kat is a product manager and startup builder, most recently Head of Product at Zora and travelled to Gaza in June 2023 to be a mentor in product management for the community at Gaza Sky Geeks. She is accepting ether and other tokens on the Ethereum mainnet, Optimism, or Base so that she can get the money directly to those who are on the ground. I myself donated already to the cause which you can find social proof for here ..read more

I spoke to Mustafa Al-Bassam, co-founder and CEO of Celestia, a modular blockchain network that makes for others to securely launch their own blockchain. Mustafa was also a member of the black hat hacking group LulzSec under the name T-Flow known for hacking the CIA website, newspapaers owned by Rupert Murdoch, and other corporate and state organizations in 2011. During the discussion we spoke about his experience of being in the hacker group, his transition to interest in blockchains, and Celestia. If you want to learn more about the history of hacktivism, Anonymous, and LulzSec, then I can ..read more

If you've been surfing the tech sphere lately, you may have come across the term e/acc or effective accelerationism as if it was something new. But like most of these tech elite driven ideologies, it's largely a mutation of more naive and sometimes sinister trends. For this episode I spoke to Adam Jones, host of Acid Horizon and Zer0 Books and Repeater Media and author of Anti-Oculus. Anti-Oculus is a psychedelic trip through the eyes of power, exploring avenues of escaping systems of control in our cyberpunk reality. During the interview, Adam helps explain the core of accelerationist theory ..read more

The audiobook for my book Blockchain Radicals is officially out! This is a sample you can listen to if you want to know if it seems like something you'd want to pick up. You can find your audiobook copy in all of the major audiobook platforms including Audible, Libro.fm and audiobooks,com. You can still find all the other places to find the physical book online here. Support the show ICYMI I've written a book about, no surprise, blockchains through a left political framework! The title is Blockchain Radicals: How Capitalism Ruined Crypto and How to Fix It and is being published through R ..read more

Tokens have increasingly more popular beyond just in the crypto world *gang gang mmm ice cream so good*. Tokens are not new, but how they have been  used and their proliferation have exploded with the rise of digital platforms. I spoke to Rachel O'Dwyer,  writer and a lecturer in Digital Cultures in the National College of Art and Design in Dublin and author of Tokens: The Future of Money in the Age of the Platform. I gave a recommendation of the book because I think it pairs well with my own book! During the interview we spoke about the history of tokens well before the internet ..read more

You can find the video version of the interview here where I've cut the interview with some film I took while at TDF. In this episode I spoke to Sam Delesque (@samueldelesque), founder of Traditional Dream Factory (TDF), a regenerative village based in Abela, Portugal that is blending crypto with permaculture and community. TDF is the first village part of OASA, a Swiss non-profit to help regenerative villages turn into community land trusts. During the interview we discussed we talked about Sam's vision for TDF and OASA as DAOs, our time there during ReFi Week, and how they are regenerating ..read more

In this episode of OTNS, we spoke to Ali Breland, a journalist at Mother Jones who has written on crypto and politics, about his recent publication about the links between Praxis and far right figures. We spoke about his experience of going to a Praxis sponsored party in NYC, his interviews with ex-employees about the fascist sympathies of the founder Dryden Brown, and how they try to seduce " cool kids" to join them. We also try applying for a citizenship! Check out a previous episode to learn more about our framework for out network state alternative,  coordi-nations. JOIN THE BLOCKCH ..read more