Ethereum’s Impact on Society Overview by Rhys Lindmark (Devcon4)

let's begin this is me my name is Rhys I work for the digital currency initiative at the MIT Media Lab and I helped helped curate the systems in society track here at Def Con this year and that's my twitter handle so as I said these are the five talks that we're going to be chatting about today and we will yeah a way that I like to think about them is that the top three and I'll discuss a bit the top three are about how things are affecting kind of personal like kind of at the micro personal level while the bottom two thinking about international law and thinking about nation state governments are thinking about kind of macro institutional macro societal so that's what we're gonna be chatting about today and I just want to remind everybody that how like where this falls in the the there's this big bucket of like how technology impacts society that's kind of a difficult thing to understand and hasn't it doesn't have that much texture on it you could be like what is philosophy you want a society how does it impact so I just wanna be clear about what we're discussing today and where it fits in so if you saw the thing that I gave at the opening keynote the a general idea here is that we have oh yeah so we have Biddle in the middle which is the tech side of things where we're building things the wide Biddle piece is asking yourself why are you building these things what is your mindset what are your goals what are your values that happens kind of before you actually start building and we've had discussions there's a values breakout this morning there have been discussions about goals and how to think about high impact before and then but we're gonna be chatting out today is actually sets in the other tracks we're trying about today is the impact side the impact dole which is kind of dumb but thinking about when we actually make the tech how does it impact society okay so that's how you should kind of buck it in your mind as example this when vitalik when he tweeted the stuff I guess December of last year this he was thinking about this impactful thing thinking about like you know the second one here how many unbanked people have we banked that's an impact question right that's not a that is not a values question necessarily so in terms of impact and again in a quick reminder here for everybody that this is in a this is an ax loop there's a reinforcing loop here where after you have impact on the world then you re-evaluate and go back to Y pedal and then Reda terminus is kind of sad I've had emoji issues recently the in between that supposed to be a beautiful systems emoji that says tech impact society society impacts tech and as I said this in the the kind of the intro as well it this is a question of why should we care about these things there was after I gave my thing during the opening kind of keynote area there was someone said hey it's important to care about these things but or else just trying to like build deep level infrastructure actually get like actual like many daily active users you don't have right now but we should begin to care about how our tech will impact society because we're building pretty powerful technology here and when that technology goes out into the world it will have big impact so we can see this with the web 2.0 world with stuff like the Arab Spring and that's to here square where the technology enabled to some extent some of the protests that happened there and then something like surveillance capitalism were the incentives in the affordances of web 2.0 technology gave birth to the rise of surveillance and addiction capitalism so for a easy example of this happening already within the Bitcoin in aetherium world the blockchain world this is the classic energy consumption graph where proof-of-work is a very expensive is very energy intensive thing and so you can see right now the theorem uses about twenty terawatt hours per year of electricity which is in between Iceland and Azerbaijan so this is an example where you just put some incentives out into the world and in the world kind of congregates around them in before long you're spending lots of electricity keeping the consensus of a global blockchain state so this is why we should care is because it will impact society we think about it as I said I think it's very helpful both as we try to understand it in terms of the the talks that were gonna listen to today but also just in general thinking about wind tech impact society especially the impact side thinking about this from a kind of a macro systemic or macro institutional perspective but also from a micro personal perspective so here's what I mean by each of those so from a macro systemic perspective institutional coevolution and what I mean by that is if you think about the institutions that existed before the information revolution we had stuff like markets and we had things like religion and States and firms and these were things that and they are on this axis of how good they are coordinating people and how good they are at motivating people so there's something called the goose kosis Ronald Coase his theory of the firm says hey why do firms exist why isn't everything a market well it's because firms are really good at coordinating people together in the transaction cost within the firm or less so these are the kind of institutions that existed pre information revolution but those were not always true so has anybody in this room read the sovereign individual nice we got so this is essentially from that book where it said hey when we had these institutions they can leverage a couple different things and one of them that they can leverage is the information in the myths right and so at the beginning of the when the printing press came out at that time the church essentially had a monopoly on the written word and on the Word of God but as you can see from this graph on the Left boom the printing press came out and then there are so many more printed books and that's crazy and that essentially took this defensible monopoly that the church had around information and myths and broke that monopoly and said you don't have us anymore and in the Crick I'd love this stat from in the early 1500 from 15 18 15 25 Luther's works accounted for no less than a third of all German language books sold that's just like an example of your release this into the wild it changes the way that information flows in the myths that people can create with that information just create a competition essentially among there's an example of institutional coevolution where there's competition among Catholic and Protestant religions as a result of the technology the printing press so we can kind of use a similar mindset but instead to think about post information revolution so if you saw the first one in here there were about four things and now we have I've added three so now after the information revolution after we have these digital computers and networked computers the interwebs we have things like networks these are like Airbnb Facebook uber things of that variety that connect people at these big massive platform these aggregators we have things like block chains which we're gonna talk about some extent today which are new ways to coordinate and motivate people and then we also have things like memes and this is kind of a weird one but this you can think of something like I think I say this in this next graph yeah something like me to is a great interesting example of a meme this is a this shows the power of the mean this is a history within the United States of America of reasons why people in Congress resigned over time and you can see in the back in the day in the 1900s there's some things that happened and then like in World War two a bunch of them went to left for military service you go further to the right for the to the right changes in pension laws whatever but the far right there me too me too as a meme was something that was able to was created a bunch of congressional resignations so as we see stuff like me - or black lives matter or make America great again those kinds of memes are powerful and institutions that people can coordinate and motivate around and with something like Biddle as another example so this is what we mean by institutional coevolution it's these institutions code following with each other and as we listen to some of the talks today think about the new ways that blockchain enables information especially capital to move around and how that enables new institutions there's a funny example of this just with what we've seen today um this is an example of these these new Internet enabled businesses Co evolving from an institutional level this is just a tweet from this person who I don't know but he says so how long until GoFundMe is our nation's leading healthcare provider and that's kind of funny kind of sad but the reason why he says is because in 2017 GoFundMe hosted more than 250,000 medical campaigns which raised over 650 million dollars combined so what traditionally was an institution the nation state providing a public good something like health care now something like GoFundMe one of these Internet enabled platforms are these internet in the able businesses now is is providing that public good so it's kind of a competition or coevolution among who's gonna provide the public good another example this is something like this lady who says hey a ten dollar override is a lot a lot cheaper than three thousand dollars for an ambulance and this is because of the study that she's referencing here where they showed that when uber came into a city the amount of people that took boobers for ambulance visits went way up because hey something like these new platforms can compete with something like the traditional nation state government way to provide a public good of like an ambulance Jonathan Zittrain who's a great person from the Berkman Kline Center at Harvard which studies how internet it's an Internet Society Center at Harvard he he captures this well this is at Davos and says what if public infrastructure was funded by the crowd would that be so crazy and cool like or some would call it taxes these are all just ways to think about how these institutions these new internet-enabled institutions are Co evolving with existing with existing kind of pre-internet institutions as an example of this you can think like which institution has more power and so on the left side are all the institutions and different types of institutions on the right side there's a bunch of different metrics which are they're not correlated with each other they're not the shared metric unfortunately but like suddenly Christianity the religion has 2.4 billion people that is an institution something like Facebook is a network has 2.2 billion monthly active users that more or less holdin Christianity something like China the nation state has 1.

2 1.4 billion people something like the Bitcoin as a blockchain has a you know large 125 billion dollar market cap and something like black lives matter that meme had 300 million tweets into 2017 these are examples like hmm what who has more power here is difficult to say one final note here is so especially think about this institutional coevolution during the fifth talk today during Santiago series talk at the end one but one before his Catherine from masari's gonna be talking about law and law is another way that these institutions and especially the digital space kind of co-evolved with with meatspace and this is something that was referenced yesterday by Cory Doctorow was this guy Lawrence Lessig who also works at that Berkman clients in Harvard he has this pathetic dot and he says these are essentially the things that can change a given outcome in the world and there are by architecture on the left he means Coates you can actually have code that changes how things occur you can have the market or incentives that change how things happen you can have law that constrains how people kind of operate or you can have norms I'm kind of like the mindset piece and so this is just another yeah so this is another way to think about this is in there's institutional coevolution and there's a question of how does the law respond to things so the tech that we're building is all on the architecture side the coding architecture side and on the market side the new incentive side different than that is the wide Biddle side which are the norms what norms are we trying to create and then also how does the law kind of constrain this so when we talk about the two buckets of impact there's the big bucket of the macro systemic macro institutional bucket and we chat about that here but remember that that bucket which is on the left here we don't actually care about that bucket and what I mean by that is we don't care what happens to in the end we care about people right we don't that a company does not have a company cannot be hurt a company does not have dopamine receptors a company does not have pain or suffering or those kinds of things and so in the end we care about people and people exist in institutions to try to care about them but we should also be deeply thinking about the kind of micro personal side as well so let's make sure we understand that too so on the Micro personal side there couple I like to bucket this in like three main categories the first is power and how new kinds of technology change your relationship with power so as an example of this within the general blockchain ecosystem we talked about the decentralization of all the things and especially the decentralization of power or wealth and this is this great graph from Balaji from the CTO of coinbase that looks at the Gini coefficients over time of various different block chains and here's the one for the four aetherium so the ideal line of decentralization if everybody had the same I said the amount of wealth then that would be correlate with that yellow line but in fact it's much worse we have a very bad Gini coefficient I think the top 100 addresses control I think it's 39 percent or 50 percent of all the etherium so we should think about this as our relationship with power and how something like these new blockchain networks change our relationship with power and wealth is always a good way to think about that another way to think about power is kind of what the what the technology gives us the ability to do in the academic world kind of calls these affordances so when you have the new technology what does it allow you to do what does it afford you to do and there's a great book by Zeynep - Fekete called Twitter and teargas the power and fragility of networked protest and in that she talks about how the internet with its zero marginal cost of transmitting information allowed people to come together around and have a hundred thousand person protest in a much cheaper way than they were before so that's another way to think about powers these affordances can kind of empower people within these systems to do new kinds of things so start thinking about that as we hear from our speakers later today how do these new kinds of blockchain and the abled systems empower us and give and afford us new kinds of power another so if powers one bucket another bucket here is needs and how a given how given technology verse changes our our needs so when I'm talking about needs I'm mostly talking about like Maslow's hierarchy of needs with physiological at the bottom ie your basic needs and something like self-actualization at the top and this is a good funny graph of a funny pyramid of different startups that have that that that go for different levels on Maslow's hierarchy of needs so something like at the bottom here something like Yelp is really good for finding your base level needs of food while something at the very top like Kickstarter is better for like the self-actualization needs of like I'm gonna do this creative project so with that in mind think about how the blockchain ecosystem what kinds of needs from from a personal level blockchain technology allows you to kind of meet what needs does block to UI to meet and then the final piece here is so if there's power and then there's need meeting and there's also identity is the final one here an identity and let me see if I have this No so identity is uh yeah it's pretty is a pretty humm or what I say it is it has lots of there's lots of stuff wrapped into identity and you can see this happening on the web 2.0 world with the internet essentially enabling filter bubbles and things of that variety that deeply change people's identity and get them you get them in these new kinds of identity that they did not have ten years before identity also exists within the crypto world as we well know we are here at an ethereal conference and Layne Reddick gave a great talk on day one about how like I am an etherion so that's like it a part of your identity he's like oh I I am connected to the etherium ecosystem I am defining myself as in the theory in and so you have all these different identities that show up whether it's the doge whether you love the Doge meme and that is now part of your identity so this is the final piece years as we think about these technologies they are they will almost certainly then be connected into your identity as you go forth you