Crypto for Activism by Micah White & Amir Taaki (Devcon5)

hello everyone we're about to get started so if you are coming to this session you should come join us now people are filtering in great all right hello my name is Michael white and this is a mere talkie and we are doing a session on crypto for activism I want to explain first the the format that we're gonna do is gonna be little more interactive than some of the sessions that you've had so far so I'm gonna give a 10-minute brief introduction to some ideas about activism and crypto then Amir and I are gonna have a onstage discussion for about 20 minutes and then we're gonna have questions from the audience and so while we're talking you know think of your question and then line up at this mic and we'll we'll just kind of go into a free-flowing discussion I also have copies of my book for free at the end of my talk just go grab them over there they're in a stack there's about 20 copies so first-come first-serve okay are we ready great ok so my name is Michael white briefly I just want to tell you my kind of story to situate myself in my context I am a lifelong activist I started doing active as when I was 13 years old and I did lots of things I went to Palestine to direct action nonviolent I basically tried to just every year I did a new kind of campaign eventually I worked my way into a magazine called Adbusters and in 2011 during the kind of peak of the Arab Spring we put out a call for something called Occupy Wall Street and very quickly the the call was picked up by activists in New York City who started to self-organize and they they went ahead and created basically the movement so I'm one of two people who came up with the original idea for Occupy Wall Street we picked the name the date and that kind of stuff and then there's about 200 people in New York City who actually organized for the very first day of the movement but I've also been kind of lurking in the crypto scene for a long time because you know occupy around the time that we were coming with the idea for Occupy Wall Street Bitcoin was very new I was paying attention to Bitcoin I was an early kind of adopter of Bitcoin I got my first five Bitcoin for free from the Bitcoin faucet and so I've been in the scene for a while I remember when counterparty versus aetherium I remember the first etherium announcement and that kind of stuff and so it was just kind of recently they started to come out of the crypto closet as a word and to talk about cryptography cryptocurrencies and activism and recently when I was invited to give this talk I actually went ahead and like learned solidity so I have a basic understanding of solidity to give more like depth to this conversation alright so let's get into it so one of the things that I think is very tantalizing question is that we know that Satoshi embedded a reference to the financial crisis in in the source code for Bitcoin so in so some one question I've been thinking about is in some ways is Bitcoin a better form of protest than Occupy Wall Street which of those things is was a more effective response to the financial crisis Bitcoin or Occupy Wall Street and as we kind of think about in that our minds I want to point to some of the ways that activists can think about how to use blockchain for activism so if you're an activist and you want to use blockchain what are some of the models or ways of thinking about how to do activism on the blockchain so that's we're gonna get into that now so there's basically four models that I want to think about if they are new economic logics new funding mechanisms new social contracts or governance and adversarial smart contracts so let's go through those one by one so new economic logics I think we've seen a lot of these right so so it's very easy in solidity to create programmable money that violates core concepts of capitalist economy so you can have for example deflationary tokens extremely easy to burn a certain percentage of tokens upon transfer you can have like sortition tokens where you know people are rewarded randomly based on the health of the economy so this is like shuffle shuffle monster came out recently or you can have like redistributed tokens you can have tokens that implement like a Tobin tax or a financial tax which is something that has been talked about at the left for like 30 or 40 years but only with I think the emergence of aetherium is actually possible to encode so there's there's some there's some problems though with economic logics the first is that activists are not writing smart contracts to a blank slate right if theory em still dot it's a theorem is still the base currency even if you just look at like the gas cost you still have to pay in aetherium so there's still you're still in you're still basically in here and economic logic from aetherium that itself might be unfair it's it's hard to enact progress the second thing is it's hard to enact progressive politic progressive policies that rely on knowing who is rich and who is poor right we know this is a problem so obviously you can split if you're a wealthy aetherium holder you can split your wallet into many different wallets to appear like many different poor people to benefit unfairly from a progressive system and this is that this is the problem of identity that's very that a lot people are talking about how to solve so it's very easy to appear poor in in aetherium and only the rich can really prove that they're rich but anyone can like pretend to be poor this makes a lot of the kind of leftist policies very difficult to implement the third the third problem is that the most popular economic logics have turned out to be basically Ponzi schemes right so this has left a lot of people in the community very jaded about the idea of creating you know like redistributed currencies so I created a very simple redistribute of currency called sparkle and one of the first reactions was this is like proof of weak hands you know what I mean this is this is basically a Ponzi scheme which I thought was very interesting I didn't think it was evidence of Ponzi scheme but I but I think that what that's saying is there's a basically a jaded jaded miss about new economic logics still I think they're very promising okay let's go on to the next one the second area of kind of possibility is new funding mechanisms right so we within the activist community there's a growing sense that we need to escape the dominance on risk-averse philanthropic organizations and foundations right that we need to escape the nonprofit industrial complex if you ever heard that phrase within activism and I think the etherion presents some interesting possibilities so two examples we have like our die you guys been following this so it's basically it's like see die but instead of earning the interest you're able to identify a beneficiary of the interest right so you can deposit your your die and then you can withdraw at any time but the beneficiary gets to keep the interest so this is a simple example of how you could have you could basically have people stake large amounts of qalaat of money and then interest is given to a nonprofit that they support the other one of course is really promoted by Vitalik and others is quadratic funding so the point here is that basically we can create new ways of movements funding funding themselves on the blockchain and so my proposal in this category would be something like like movement coins or protest coins coins whose coins whose existence is to fund social movements and and I would love to think about that with you okay moving on to the third thing and then we'll get into our discussion the third category is new new social contracts new forms of governance okay so activists especially within Occupy Wall Street you know we talked about creating a real democracy consensus based assemblies and all these kinds of collective decision-making but when we try to enact it in the real world through our assemblies obviously it collapsed like we weren't even able to make the simplest of decisions but within a theorem there's been a lot of work around these decentralized autonomous organizations we have the yang da Malik da meta cartel Aragon etc here though I think we've we've started to learn that you know just because you have a Dao it doesn't immediately eradicate power imbalances nor does it necessarily mean that decision making is more equally distributed so there's been a lot of questioning about for example not to pick it on anyone but the concentration of decision-making within the maker Stability fee or something like that this is an example of how just because it's just because you enacted doubt doesn't mean you're necessarily creating a more democratic or or Liberatore form of decision-making distribution of power but but here I think there's still tantalizing possibilities and I'm personally really interested in the emergence of kind of sortition based decision making where people within a community are randomly picked in order to make decisions this gets back to into the problem of identity and how do you identify people but there's something called humanity Dao that's trying to verify individuals verify humans so I could imagine a system where you you know tie up with humanity Dao in order to enact sortition based decision making and then the fourth the fourth kind of category that I want to think about before we get into our discussion is is adversarial contracts and this is I think is the most exciting and the most purely and essentially activist way of thinking about currency and so I mean adversarial in two senses first adversarial contracts are ones that are inherently in themselves a form of protest okay so under this category you might think about like privacy coins privacy coins might be conceived of as inherently a form of protest against the existing status quo and the second kind of form of adversarial would be adversarial in the sense that we're learning about in that we're seeing developing like machine learning right so people have developed certain objects that like there's a there's a like a 3d printed turtle that appears to a machine like it's a gun so this is an adversarial this is another concept of adversarial so under this under this you would think about smart contracts that interact with other smart contracts or the basic aetherium virtual machine in ways that produce political consequences unintended political consequences so they're adversarial in that sense I think this is the most promising direction for for activism on the blockchain and there's a lot of kind of thinking that needs to be done about this and I look forward to kind of talking about it but now I want to move into a discussion with Amir taki who has a lot of experience I would say creating adversarial concepts on the blockchain and his himself also an activist so thank you yeah very interesting to be of my Nika here that I was also involved in Occupy from very early days I think what we need to the main issue now inside of cryptocurrency is we seem to be repeating the same mistakes that have been shown to us throughout history in the history of Technology and even in the history of activist movements and we're not learning from those same mistakes we're just repeating them over and over again as a way to segue into that the point three you made about the third form of how you can use the technology had so new forms of social contracts and you said in in occupying they had they wanted to create a new way a new form of governments which in the end didn't really create any real social change it just ended up being like a new way of managing things and you know just because we create a dowel or we create some new structure doesn't eradicate the power imbalances so maybe you can talk a bit about what gave occupy its power and why I didn't transfer to real social change and maybe some of the contemporary examples about that happening as well yeah well this whole question about Occupy Wall Street and it's whether or not it resulted in political change whether or not was a failure is one that's really complicated and difficult the book I wrote is called the end of protest and I was one of the kind of the first people to talk about Occupy Wall Street as a constructive failure not a total failure obviously did good things but it it the movement failed to achieve what we wanted which was like you know a revolutionary change in the nature of power we wanted to basically achieve what the Arab Spring had achieved which is like overthrowing Mubarak but we wanted to achieve that around the financial industry we wanted to overthrow the power of money of our democracy which we obviously failed to do I think that like in terms of for the crypto community thinking about decision making and why our movement kind of failed there's a couple things that we did wrong that I think crypto community can like learn from first of all is that we were we were unable to distinguish between who was in and who was not in the movement so anyone could come up and just say like I'm an occupier and be like a totally disruptive presence okay this is this is I think gets back to this question of kind of how do you it's like identity how do you tell whether or not someone is is actually a beneficial part of the movement and it's not and right now I think within the crypto community the main way that they've that has been addressed is to this concept of like well whoever has the most coins they are part of the community and then they get you know 99 percent of the vote and I think that's one way that is one way to solve it yeah because the early adopters accumulated all the coins they get to make the decisions but that in itself is also a solution that's not giving more power so I think it's I think it's an unsolved problem but I think that that there is something about crypto I believe it's a solvable problem and I think that it probably could involve some sort of some of the new concepts that are being involved within the Dow but I think that yeah I think that there is important not to be naive just because you've created something new does not mean that it's inherently going to create positive social change and in some ways I mean we can get into this in some ways I think blockchain and cryptocurrencies are perhaps like the most evil technology ever created yeah right in some ways the in some ways they are the most unequal distribution of wealth I mean think about how unfair it is like I just told you I got five Bitcoin for free in the early days that's that's in its in itself that is extremely unfair it's unfair to have a system where people got aetherium for very very very little bit of money and now can cash out even at $190 they're making they're making massive profits yeah well not only that there's just like a social credit Sesame credit system in China now where if you talk with the wrong person because a man is monitoring everybody's chats on WeChat if you're late for an appointment you get like a so a lower social score I mean you cannot rent an apartment you cannot get a train ticket you know there's insiders inside parts of China now where you cannot go two blocks without having your iris scanned entire systems from monitoring and managing human beings as tours as human resources I see a lot of that rhetoric inside of blockchain going all me and my friend we were in the future we will have a smart contract between each other these are really scary fundamental systems of control I actually saw a blockchain project recently which was about having people's credit scores and debt ratings on a blockchain so the credit card companies it's like it's like your data about your score with money would become like permanent in a permanent global database like even it's if it's decentralized it doesn't mean that people are free or there's no power you know so you talked actually about number one new economic models and you said yeah you mentioned a few things but the interesting point I think is we should start to look at the technology because you said you said oh poor people a rich person who pretend to be a poor person we should we should start to think that these models that we create don't necessarily can be quite oppressive and instead we need to be thinking about the ideas of deriving us and how we make tools individuals empower human beings to shape the world around them what type of human beings were empowering rather than a perfect system the Alec a little space of freedom and equal resources to a bunch of people because I think that our view is a bit totalitarian yeah well I think there's two ideas here so one is this question of like like a lot of people in the activist community kind of pushed back at me for even talking about crypto because they see it as an inherently oppressive technology but I think instead like if you look at the history of Technology obviously it always has like a like a dark side like Paul really talks about there's always an accident associate with technology and I think that like I think that that personally I think that that cryptocurrencies are perhaps one of the most evil technologies created and yet at the same time they hold this this tremendous possibility this whole tremendous revolutionary possibility so at the same time as you have the ability to collect you know yeah we can live and I can I think it's easy for us to imagine a world very soon where like everything about ourselves is encoded on some sort of immutable blockchain that some government out there is like reading and it involves all of our you know this this whole this whole level basically blockchain is a tremendous tool surveillance yes but at the same time I think it I think that it's that activists have still have this window of opportunity like it's still so new I mean it's amazing to think that theorems like what five or six years old it's still so new that there is a possibility that we could that we could turn things but I think like at the same time there's a question about how much Liberatore possibility there is because of the very nature of of the system so I so it's like I don't know I I don't want to just like say that it's impossible but I also think that it is important to kind of have like a like a skeptical view but yeah it's tricky yeah boy whenever I go to any of these speeches where people turn out synthetic derivatives so people couldn't get easier mortgages I'm not concerned me thinking like why aren't we leveraging that to speculate on government bonds and use them to dump them in mass like we literally have amongst us like the capability and power to crash national economies a lot of a lot of the thinking is on really low level like you have the old rich who they raise their kids from generations in in particular ceremonies and and rituals which are like cloning their dynasties to maintain power and you have this nouveau crypto riche who they just want to buy yachts and Lambos you know if we want to be a power like we want to actually be a political power like step it up to a real level we have to really think big and the main issue I'm experiencing now is there are all these crypto companies and they're just focused on their brands their little niche that they're carving out and they're all trying to one-up each other and it's kind of the same thing I experienced in Occupy I went to occupy in the beginning it was amazing many loads of young people from all over come over the country they intuitively feel something is wrong and they came there because they wanted to change something and they arrived there and what did occupy off of them said okay let's have a discussion what we're actually doing and you know that momentum over time kind of dissipated some of them got normal jobs now some of them are into drugs I don't know but that energy kind of just dissipated yeah well I think again I think there's two things here so one is that and I think this is in terms of applicable to the crypto community is one is that the the experience of social protest teaches us that we mustn't be naive about the power of the status well the power of the status quo is so tremendous that like look at look for example look at the fallout of the Arab Spring like who would have thought that overthrowing Mubarak would result in a government even more regressive than then Mubarak the Sisi government is worse then and if you're an activist in Egypt your experience in 2019 is worse than your experience in 2009 so there's this so that relates to the crypto community I think that in some ways when we when we get into a new thing and we're like yes like we're fighting against the status quo we become very naive about the possibility of actually damaging that status quo and the status quo is amazing at co-optation so very soon you find that you're all suddenly being absorbed and this is this is happening in the crypto community through succumbing to the idea that we need to submit to regulation I see that's very much like that we should already already be submitting to regulation and and I get that because people because you know there's a lot of pressure to do so but it's like it's already the death knell I think the second thing that you're bringing up and I think that when we think about well why did occupy happen why do social movements happen is that social movements happen when you create a new form of protest that people suddenly believe is going to create social change right so one of the questions that plagues activists is this question of like why is it that sometimes people rush into the streets and sometimes they don't so like in the American context like there's been gun violence for years why is it suddenly that March for our lives emerges or like Occupy Wall Street people would wonder like in the weeks between months before Occupy Wall Street there was actually protests on Wall Street there's actually a march on Wall Street that went nowhere and then why is it that it took off with Occupy Wall Street it's because we presented a new kind of social protest that people suddenly believes like this is gonna work and then when they stop believing it it's gonna work than they left I think Kryptos in that golden moment or maybe it's already ending we don't know where people are drawn some people are drawn to the community because they think oh this is a new form of if not protest at least changing the world that hasn't been tried before but I think you're right that that there is a there's a window of opportunity that closes and it might be closing now where suddenly people realize start to think no this isn't a space where change is possible instead it's a space where we're trying to replicate existing models like like I love defy I'm all in you know putting stuff into dye and all this kind of stuff - but ultimately what that's doing is replicating in a certain sense the existing models which i think is what as activists we need to push back against and try to imagine new models but it's very difficult to do so yeah well what is the state the state is ideology it's the military and the administration it's a system that use human beings as tours as resources and ideology that we live under now is the ideology of liberalism which is an ideology of nothingness it's an ideology which is a historical which is that we've reached the end of history what I see happening inside of Krypto now is 90% of the projects are gonna fail because they don't they don't know they don't have a vision of the society they're trying to create it's all very vague and wishy-washy and something I read actually is that now Chinese companies are actually edging out Western companies globally because Western companies are just concerned with their own personal profit whereas Chinese companies have a core of Communist Party cadre who kind of steer all these companies towards a shared strategic objective now the the the point is it's not the oh we need to create a system of management where there's a boss and the boss is telling someone to do it no it's not that it's a the way that humans work together is based off of storytelling storytelling is something fundamental from the very beginning of history's it's actually we actually understand the world better in terms of stories and we do in abstract models you know and mechanisms and and having a story or a narrative which is an explanation of how did we get here why is the world the way it is you know like what is the world that we're trying to create is something that can allow many groups of people to come together to change the world and which if we're trying to create a world which in which create which make people to be free you know like we need we if we don't and I see it a lot of times there's a lot of projects which is I mean you've heard of this paper called the tyranny of structure lessness the same thing happened in Occupy you know you go to a meeting and it's like all different sorts of people there's like a hippie person I don't know a pacifist person this guy and they believe this thing and this thing there's no there's nothing shared between those people it's like how can you build a democracy when you don't share anything together you know you don't you don't even have like a common basis on which you which you're beginning your work you know and that's why authoritarianism emerges you know it doesn't matter what structure you create necessarily the technology is actually really the way I see it is is like a complicated artifice and we used to trick we used to trick the old power you know is really an extension of ourselves and there is a constant competition between different groups with different philosophies vying for power to shape the development of that technology it's a mistake to see technology as this like static thing that just stay there and never change the technology is actually shaped by us by our motives and we have to be clear about that like what is it where and all of this news about Venezuela Syria Cyprus and so on it's fake news like there really isn't any major adoption of crypto we need to be analyzing those markets we need to be breaking them down seeing where there's an opportunity where how we can deploy develop the tools to exploit those opportunities to to grow to actually make something that's useful for people that's why the the narrative is so important and the philosophical level in crypto community the intellectual level is so low and that's why we're so effective there's a lot of speech and focus now on structures and mechanisms sorry on mechanisms and techniques but there's very little joining the dots how do these make a structure or infrastructure you know we can't just think of like small parts yeah yeah but I mean at the same time [Applause] yeah I mean I think you make a lot of good points but I also think at the same time one of the like one of the narratives around crypto that I think is true and is also beautiful and revolutionary is that crypto does allow so one of the I think it one of the base reasons why occupy failed or a lot of social movements run into trouble is this question of sovereignty you know and I think that with Occupy Wall Street we we basically had this kind of magical thinking that if we can set up assemblies in the streets then and and it's a more perfect form of democracy then then naturally sovereignty will flow to us and naturally our governments have to listen to us and naturally the police won't be able to help and I think that one thing that we that turned out to be not true obviously but there is something about crypto that that does have an inherent kind of sovereignty there is it there's for the first time it is possible for like you know people in this room to come together identify a new form of economic logic distribute a token that embodies it and have it like exist without a state having to get involved so I think that like that that is beautiful and does hold a lot of potential but I agree with you that there's this whole other side which is the the creation of what does that look like right and I think it's much easier right now to I think a lot of crypto sink is is you know for better or worse it's focused around this question of well how do we speculate you know I mean how do we create how do we create speculative currencies that make that make money which is a very different question I think then how do we how do we create sovereignty and self sovereignty all these concepts that we hear about in crypto which I think are the most powerful but are kind of hard so hard to actualize in about a minute we're gonna take questions from the audience so if you won't have a question I hope that you will line up here we already have a question good and we're gonna go into into questions in about a minute unless you want to right now because I think questions are a lot more questions okay so everyone just line up and then yeah I you know you know common courtesy ask a question not like a long speech but about a year ago at DEFCON 4 the speech was about political apathy you mentioned that people are not voting and then the we saw a year later the emergence of all the scandal of Canberra general now we have all Kenbridge analytical the documentaries coming up and how they manipulated people from Facebook the the people that are the ignorance that are actually making it happen and vote I would like you to comment about what can the crypto community actually do to make a change socially what are the first steps that you think that are gonna make a difference because we still need to vote whether we like it or not we still have to go to our governments and decide who is gonna be like in power so if you could comment on first of all the political apathy and then what can we actually in your mind or your mindset from from all the discussions you've been having what can we actually do to help to make a change well all of the modern concepts of the computer like the network socket the file were all invented in the 70s with the development of UNIX computers have not changed in over 50 years but to compute the computer devices that we use they've got faster they've got smaller that haven't changed and fundamentally the technology that we're using is built for consumers for individuals you know like even something basic like sharing a file is still really difficult you know the whole point of civilization is bringing humans together to be able to collaborate on a large scale so we need to think about the technology like how do we build technology how do we build a new paradigm of computing that can be used to support like a new type of society a new type of civilization every revolutionary movement its success is dependent on its ability to shape the development of Technology as you were here in Japan now there's two provinces Koba and Iger which is where the ninja originated from then these provinces were democratic self-governing provinces within feudal Japan and they fought a war against the samurai the ninjas were people that they were able to develop technology from common everyday items that they could use to wage a guerrilla insurgent war against the samurai who were the defenders of privilege and power in Japan which is that which is the which have a very nice legacy about how technology was used - and we're going into a very scary world like we can't be ignorant about technology like the way technology is being used how can we beat Facebook I think okay I think Facebook is is irrelevant like Facebook is is is not an empowering tool but the problem is it's a linux free software all of these movements they're just trying to copy the dominant paradigm they're not developing their own system of thought they've become entrapped in the system that they're trying to fight against same thing with crypto recreating the same system inside of us we need to create a new system and we need to recruit the people into that new system yeah I mean I think that's I think that's excellent I would just add to that though that one of the things that's so difficult one things we learn from social movement creation is that the ideas that are the most powerful and revolutionary are the are not seen and it's very hard to see them so like when I when I when we came up with idea for Occupy Wall Street and when I told people the idea for Occupy Wall Street before it started no one believed me no one told me was a good idea similarly with with aetherium like like we know from the we know that like the the ideas that are the most revolutionary are not seen so it's also it's it's not just coming with new ideas it's also having the capacity to to know that we can't tell what they are necessarily and to go against our kind of knee-jerk thoughts about what they what they should be so next question um so you know I think it's definitely clear that blockchain technology is super empowering and that it gives us a lot more power from inside our homes in front of our laptops then we had before but one of the ways that it really restricts our ability to use you know the technology to do whatever social change we want is that it has Network effects and therefore we have to kind of do it along with other people who may have very different political agendas than we do even you know inside inside the etherium community we're much less politically United for example then inside the Bitcoin community and I think that but you know imagine if you're some community outside of cryptocurrency and you want to you know create use the technology you have to have a certain amount of like network effect but right now people who are outside the crypto community because the crypto was launched basically seated by radical revolutionary cypherpunks and libertarians see you know see the technology itself as being you know associated with that politics and therefore they're not even trying to they're not even trying to form network effects around you know another instance of the protocol that is used for their political goals and so right now you know there's basically no major left-leaning cryptocurrency it just doesn't exist and no major left-leaning movement is interested at all in starting a cryptocurrency even though you know just from a tech point of view doesn't seem obvious why would it be helpful so what do you think you know we do to help people with different political views use this box chain and not have the blockchain revolution be relegated to you know radical right-wing politics yeah that's a good question I mean I think in some ways like the the the sad answer is that you know activist culture is broken right and so like activist culture has certain assumptions about what should and shouldn't be done and when you go outside of those those assumptions you get cancelled and like punished so it's like even from within activist culture like there's a tremendous pushback against for example like during occupy and the years it's kind of breaking down now but there was a reluctance to engage in any form of electoral politics but I think that crypto is also one of those kind of no-go zones it's a no-go zone for activists because they it violates kind of like the the the social concept like rules of activism so I think one way to do you know part of this talk is to like break that down like more activists need to talk about crypto and like to break it down but I think the other thing that I find so inspiring about aetherium Bitcoin these kind of things is that you know when you build a social movement you do need a lot of people you need network effects like when you're creating like the internet you need people to use your services one thing I like about crypto is that you don't have to wait for anybody right like if you go onto compound finance and you look at how people are actually borrowing on compound finance like it's like 600 people it's a very small it's very small because it because it can so what I'm trying to say is that there's something about crypto because of its connection to being a money in itself that it doesn't need to wait for lots of people so I guess I would push back against this idea that we need to get mass adoption in order to have a revolutionary and I would instead say that that the challenge is to to create that revolutionary and activist II use of aetherium and then like just move forward and not wait for anybody and right now I think that's what's lacking so it's like that parts that's lacking rather than adoption but that kind of jives with your feelings about it or I totally agree view activist or left-wing politics is we should dead end but we need to redevelop our thoughts and go beyond or this left-right paradigm yeah if I'm trying to do as much social good as I can louder louder if I'm trying to do as much social good as I can over the course of my lifetime two strategies that come to mind are Bill Gates style like launched a crypto technology that isn't inherently activist and accrue a bunch of wealth and then deploy it later versus spending time most likely with fewer resources building activists tech how would you think about those and other alternatives yeah well I mean you I think my answer would be you have to look at what happens to people who pursue the first path and they it's what so Nelson Mandela says for example where you sit is where you stand which means basically like when you find yourself so so if you find yourself in a position where you have a billion dollars the things that you're going to support and stand for are not gonna be the things that you would have supported when you had no money and that doesn't mean that you're like a bad person or anything but it's it's everything is influenced by by your position so I think that that I think that adopting a philanthropic model within cryptocurrency and relying on wealthy whales to kind of fund this ideal society but that they themselves aren't like building an activist tech is kind of the wrong way to go I think that instead we need we need an act that we need like activist smart contracts that are themselves the interaction with them is the ease the form of protest I think that's what this lacking I mean yeah and that's that's the direction I want to go I want to like I want to create the first smart contract that's banned for purely political reasons and I think it's like you think about that well what would that look like you know what would that be like that's a whole whole Avenue of you know so the the contract itself is protest not oh I'm gonna like you know invent uh you know a new form of die and then get rich and then fund activists thank you for that answer that really has my head spinning but my original question was to your point about stories versus systems and how people find storytelling much more natural what ways have you come across to tell stories that help people engage with the complexity of systems without getting overwhelms there's two books I want people to read one is manifesto for a Democratic civilization by Abdullah öcalan heroes series of five books only two have been translated to English this is the foundation of our philosophy for our organization and the second book is the myth of the Machine by Lewis Mumford who is a philosopher and historian of science and technology and he connect that political philosophy to the technology and so these books form the foundation or base of a of a movement of a technology movement that can that can make a revolutionary change in our system but we have to we have to bring it to the contemporary law point with like contemporary knowledge and examples and we also have to start to build a roadmap and start to think about the technologies that we want to build by what kind of platforms how we going to reinvent an operating system what infrastructure and hardware that we need to create that we can deploy these technologies in in places when opportunities present themselves and we need to force start forming groups around these philosophies yeah and I would just add briefly to that and then we're gonna be sure they have time but I think that generally speaking a social movement is created out of three things you need a new tactic that like people believe will create change you need a contagious kind of mood and then you need something that's outside of any of our control which is the right historical moment right so I think that cryptocurrencies and smart contracts they can be that new tactic and I think that they can also be vector for spreading that kind of mood in a certain sense but there's also this whole question of the right historical moment so what I like about what I like about smart contracts is that they exist and they just kind of wait I mean they're on the blockchain they wait so I can imagine the deployment of an activist smart contract that no one like pays attention to but then all of a sudden something happens in the world and this smart contract becomes the foundation for this whole eruption of a social protest so I guess what I'm trying to say is like there's also this whole element of things that are outside of our control that we need to like tune into so we just ran out of time yeah thank you so much the two books write this down is manifesto for a Democratic civilization by Abdullah öcalan and the myth of the Machine by Lewis Mumford these this this book by or chillin is the best book that I ever read you can't read it like a story book you have to study the text it took about the different historical events and authors anyway yeah I just wanted to end with that yeah and there's three copies of my book over there so thank you very much [Applause] you