Tech Won't Save Us - Blockchain Won’t Save the Global South w/ Olivier Jutel

Episode Date: August 26, 2021

Paris Marx is joined by Olivier Jutel to discuss blockchain’s pivot to humanitarianism, the questionable people behind the technology, and how their projects in the Pacific have benefited capitalist and imperial power.Olivier Jutel is a lecturer at the University of Otago. Follow Olivier on Twitter at @OJutel.🚨 T-shirts are now available!Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.Also mentioned in this episode:Paris’ first book “Road to Nowhere” comes out in July 2022.Olivier wrote a paper about blockchain imperialism in the Pacific and it was covered by Motherboard.BCCI was an international bank established in 1972 that was shut down in 1991 for hiding money laundering and other financial crimes.Hernando De Soto is a Latin American economist who advised Peruvian dictator Alberto Fujimori and advocates neoliberal policies like land title programs. He now pushes for it to be done through blockchains, and wrote an op-ed with Phil Gramm.Brock Pierce is a co-founder of Tether and tried to turn Puerto Rico into a crypto paradise.Hillary Clinton described the freedom to connect doctrine. Geoffrey Bond sold Vanuatu citizenship and was connected to Sebastian Greenwood, who was part of the OneCoin Ponzi scheme.Binance is under investigation, if not pushed out of, multiple countries.Fiji is facing major opposition to land reform plans.Books mentioned: David Gerard’s “Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain” and “Libra Shrugged,” Fred Turner’s “From Counterculture to Cyberculture,” Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s “Empire,” Herbert Schiller’s “Communication and Cultural Domination,” Armand Mattelart’s “The Invention of Communication,” Lilli Irani’s “Chasing Innovation,” and Teresia Teaiwa in “Anglo-American Imperialism and the Pacific.”Support the show

Blockchain is part of this push to sort of rationalize, marketize, and bring the world's assets, as DeSoto would put it, into a single computer platform. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Olivier Jutel. Olivier is a lecturer at the University of Otago, and his research recently has been focusing on blockchain projects and the narratives around them that have been deployed in the Pacific, usually on Pacific island states that have been promoted as a means of providing aid or some form of humanitarian effort to these countries. And if you've been paying any attention to blockchain and crypto discourses, you know, in the recent months and years, you'll

probably notice that there's been more and more focus on kind of humanitarian and human rights implementations of these technologies to try to give them a different kind of image as they have started to receive more criticism and more open criticism of the kind of things that they are actually doing and enabling, like money laundering, environmental harm, things like that. And kind of unsurprisingly, what Olivier finds in his research is that rather than promoting really positive things in these societies where these kind of ostensibly human rights oriented implementations of blockchain are being made, rather they are reinforcing existing power structures,

whether that is of capitalist dynamics and wealthy kind of capitalist power players, or existing kind of state power in the sense of the imperial pressures that have been long been placed on the Pacific and parts of the global South by countries like the United States. So I think this is an important conversation and an important corrective to some of these narratives that we have been hearing recently. And if you haven't encountered them, I'm sure that you will hear them soon. I'll note that Olivier mentions a lot of names of different people who you might not be familiar with. And he usually gives a bit of information on who those people are. But what I'll try to do in the show notes is to list some of those people and to provide links where you

can find more information about them if you are interested in doing so. And before we get into this week's episode, I also have something else to announce or to let you know about. And that is that Verso Books released its spring catalog on Wednesday. And so I can officially say that my first book will be coming out through Verso in July of 2022. It's called Road to Nowhere, Silicon Valley and the Future of Mobility and it kind of digs into the history of transportation to help to illustrate the problems with the visions for the future of transportation that have been put forward by Silicon Valley in recent years you know things like ride hailing services like autonomous vehicles micro mobility services and even electric cars and obviously that's not something

that's just been pushed by Silicon Valley. But Silicon Valley has played an important role through especially Elon Musk and Tesla. And naturally, the goal of the book is to not only question and criticize these ideas for the future of transportation, but to try to set up a way of thinking about the future of transportation that would enable a more egalitarian and I guess a fairer future of transportation that we should be working toward and wanting to achieve. Now, it's still too early to go and pre-order the book or anything like that, but I will put a link in the show notes to the tweet that I sent out about it where you can find out more information about the book if you are interested in doing so.

And obviously when pre-ordering is available, I'll let you know about that. But obviously, I am really excited. And even though the book is still, you know, quite a ways away, it's July of next year, I'm really looking forward to all of you being able to read it if you're interested in that. And obviously, I'll provide more information as we get closer to the release date. So with that said, Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network, a group of left-wing podcasts that are made in Canada. And you can find out more about that at harbingermedianetwork.com. If you like this conversation, make sure to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts and share it on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would enjoy it.

And this episode, like every episode of Tech Won't Save Us, is provided free to everybody because listeners support the work that it takes for me to put them together, to research them, to do the interviews, and all of that. So if you feel like you learned from the show, if you enjoy these conversations, consider joining supporters like Martin from Stockholm in Sweden and Michael from California by going to patreon.com slash techwon'tsaveus and becoming a supporter. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Olivier, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Listen, it's an honor and a pleasure to be here. I really appreciate it.

Dude, there are not too many spaces for a kind of like cut the deep sea cable type community to like come together around. So it's great to network Paris. Thank you, my man. Absolutely. I'm super excited to chat with you. And you know, a lot of your work recently has focused on blockchain, and in particular, these kind of recent framings that they have been trying to make around humanitarianism, human rights, things like that. And so, you know, obviously, I think it's important that we unpack those things and see what's actually going on there. But I wanted to start really basic, you know, there will be people who are listening to the episode who might not be very familiar with cryptocurrencies, blockchains, the difference between the two. So if I can start, what is

blockchain? And what is its relationship to cryptocurrency? Are they the same thing? Are they different? How should we understand that? So I really think that the fantasy of Bitcoin proof of work blockchains are so fundamental to understanding everything that comes after that. When we start talking about blockchain humanitarian projects, blockchain governance projects, it all starts with the sort of like, you know with the hard kernel here of the Bitcoin blockchain and what it does. We can argue about how well it does it, but it essentially offers the ability to track and trace every transaction and distribute that information across an entire network of people participating in the Bitcoin

economy. And the people that are distributing and verifying that information, Bitcoin miners, are economically incentivized to sort of, they're playing a bit of a sort of lottery. They're not really like doing math, but they'll tell you that it's like doing math but they're doing a lottery that essentially encrypts and strengthens that sort of you know distribution of of information and it's exponentially more difficult to to run that encryption that's why we see um you know these servers in uh and, you know, graphics cards are so scarce because that's the sort of like mining process. And it's again, it's very interesting. The sort of the metaphors of Bitcoin and blockchain are very sort of like frontier libertarian

gold bug stuff. And economically, it is a sort of libertarian, cypherpunk sort of space. Like that's the animating ideology. That's why it was so essential to things like Silk Road and the dark web and, you know, all manner of money laundering and scumbaggery under the sun. And for a time I was like, is Bitcoin and crypto, is that like the new BCCI? Is this like the new dark money, sort of like spooky nexus of like finance and intelligence? Maybe, I don't know. But look,

the idea then that this system could then be extracted into every other domain of human governance is completely insane. I mean, one, it has the fantasy that the sort of very positivist notion that every transaction of discrete coins could somehow represent what life looks like. And so what is it trying to do? It would make life like a set of sort of nano transactions and again, complete libertarian, anarcho-capitalist type imagining of our social world. And it's this sort of like inexhaustible sort of metaphor because they think that this process of distributing and decentralizing data is sort of like the core good and the core promise of what the internet could and should be. That's why people say that blockchain is going to be web 3.0. Basically,

every individual will become like a Bitcoin wallet, right? That will be your identity. You'll be a Deleuzian individual, and you will have complete, what they like to say, disintermediation from the state and from any other sort of governing structure. And yeah, just to bring it back, right, the blockchain metaphor, right, that sort of encryption process and building upon previous blocks of data and then not being able to sort of reverse making data, quote, immutable. That's the central metaphor of blockchain. And again, it's sort of like tracing a sort of golden thread of like human civilization built upon encrypted blocks of data. So there's some very obvious sort of like sketchy right wing cypherpunk

politics that infuses this whole space. And as I hope to sort of demonstrate, you can't really separate the sort of high-minded humanitarian solutionist blockchainers from this undergirding crypto economy. It's just baked in. I think that's a really good description of what it is. And I think in particular, you know, your attachment of those ideas to the politics that kind of inspired them and that have been built around them. And, you know, I think one of the important things about your work is you identify how there has been this attempt, at least in some circles, to kind of shift the framing of blockchains and cryptocurrencies away from, you know, that libertarian politics that you're talking about there, toward a more kind of focus on humanitarianism and human rights. So can you describe why that shift has

occurred and what the kind of goal of getting people to see it through this different lens is? Great question. David Gerrard in his book, Attack of the 50-Foot Blockchain, or maybe it was the Libra book. And Dave Gerrard is like an absolute giant of the no-coin community. And so we're all indebted to his great work. I think he identified the kind of blockchain as quote, banking the unbanked. That's the sort of big phrase that comes out of the sort of development space. He identifies that that's starting to kick around in 2013. And I feel like 2013, I feel like I first heard about like Bitcoin in like 2011, 2012. So it's starting to kind of percolate on the scene a little bit. And the reality is, is the Bitcoin blockchain is awash in all manner of disgusting, deplorable

sort of dark web behaviors. And I'm pretty sure that the BSV blockchain actually has like child pornography, like encoded on the block. I mean, like, this is just a diabolical space of, again, cyber libertarian speculation. And if you want to sort of get around the sort of material realities of intense consumption of energy, and you know, the reality of how it serves in the world of money laundering, and the fact that it's creating a whole new financial oligarchy, I don't know, maybe more rapacious than the system it was supposed to replace, then what are you going to do? You're going to say you're helping bank the world unbanked. That's basically what this is.

And there's a certain amount of of because Bitcoin doesn't actually do what it's supposed to be, i.e. a money system. It's not a money system. Money is really complex. And these, again, cypherpunk enthusiasts don't really have the sort of chops for like thinking about history, economy, you know, the humanities, all these things that, again, it's a very sort of positivist data reduction view of the world. So, all right, that, again, it's a very sort of positivist data reduction view of the world. So, all right, they're not really confronting the fact that this project's a bit of a failure. It's a crazy sort of speculative bubble. But let's sort of see if we can sort of transfer this paradigm, this undergirding structure of the blockchain into

other more humanitarian stuff. That's the kind of pivot, if you will. And my main thing that I've observed is people in the blockchain space try to de-emphasize crypto, not critique it, because they're essentially bankrolled by the same people and have the same vision of the social. But they sort of want to make you think like, oh, cryptocurrency is a thing. Maybe it's the future. Maybe it isn't. But blockchain, that's really where the action is. So it's completely dishonest. Or maybe it's just myopic. I mean, I don't know, like back to the sort of like this new class of tech solutionists, they're so poorly read and uninterested in like the world and the kind of stuff that we do in humanities programs, universities, sorry to plug,

but like, it could be myopia, or it could be a lot more nefarious. I don't know. I'll entertain both theories. Yeah, but you know, I think what you're saying there, whether it comes to the cypherpunks, or you know, the people who are explicitly interested in blockchains, cryptocurrencies, things like that is this ignorance of the history and the ignorance of the things that have happened in the past. And I would say even like the power relations that exist in society today as they operate, there seems to be like just a desire to kind of ignore how that works, or at least in their framings of the technologies to act as though it can get around these problems that we've found in so many other cases when we try to take on these like

established hierarchies or nodes of power like the idea that you're going to implement this blockchain and all of a sudden you're going to like take down the state and like you know the major financial institutions it just seems really naive so there are a lot of really sus characters operating in the humanitarian space, like Hernando de Soto, or Tim Draper, or Brock Pierce, or any of these people. But the main thing they'll say is, solutions. This is about solutions. And it's almost like to be a left-wing Marxist, historical materialist, blah, blah, blah, is to like be rooted to the horrible past. That's sort of like part of the problem.

Actually, it reminds me of a great anecdote that's in Fred Turner's book where like Ken Kesey and for your listeners, you may not know Ken Kesey was the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which got him lots of royalties. That's that Jack Nicholson film. And he spent the 60s just like doing acid tests, like driving around in that, you know, it's like the Muppets bus, the electric mayhem, but they were like doing LSD all over the place. And Ken Kesey's like at Berkeley and there's like an anti-war protest and they're, you know, they're left-wingers, they're left wingers, they're anti-war, they're anti-imperialist. They're having all these sort of like political

kind of ideologies to bear on this question. And Ken Kesey's like berating them for like, you're, you know, you're power freaks, you're structure freaks, you're of the past. So this kind of like hostility to, you know, an ideological, politically informed notion of what the problems are, therefore what the solutions might be, is anathema to the whole sort of like tech counterculture. And, you know, that's in Fred Turner's book that these kinds of unplugging, go off the grid, do LSD, experiment with technology, that sort of informs their, again, just sort of ignorance to all this stuff. And then your Tim Drapers and your Hernando de Soto's and all these kinds of ghouls can just sort of like invoke that powerful optimism to sort of just skirt all this sort of like,

well, what are you doing in this space? And I'm really tired of Americans and their optimism. It's one of the most, or good intentions, like, okay, like that's an out. We got to look really hard at people and their good intentions, in my opinion. Absolutely. You know, I think that's a good example. And you brought up Hernando de Soto, and that's actually something that stood out to me when I was reading one of your articles. Just for the listeners, he was an advisor to Peru's far-right dictatorship under Alberto Fujimori and was a supporter of Keiko Fujimori, who just lost the recent Peruvian election to Pedro Castillo. And so I found it really interesting to see that connection when that has obviously been in a lot

of people's minds, I guess, lately. The Friedrich von Hayek of Latin America, as he was called. I'm pretty sure he's a Chicago boy. So when we again, when we invoke terms like banking the unbanked in the 90s, he was the guy along with Muhammad Yunus in the sort of like NGO sphere talking about development, but like an expressly sort of neoliberal development model of the problem with the developing world is people don't have access to finance, i.e. microloans, subprime mortgages for the world's poor, and they don't have property rights. It's just terra nullis, basically. Bring everything in the world into the kind of governance structure of the market. And that's where Hernando de Soto's interests in blockchain

lie. I kind of described, what would the Bitcoinification of all social life look like? Well, it's as Hernando de Soto, who penned an op-ed with Phil Graham. I don't know if you remember Phil Graham. He's the US Senator who repealed or led the repeal of Glass-Steagall. And Glass-Steagall is that little bit that separates the wall between publicly insured holdings and investment banking, et cetera, et cetera. But whatever. Again, neoliberal ghouls. And they penned an op-ed together in the Wall Street Journal, how blockchain can end global poverty. And it was again, like we have satellite technology that will register every square inch of the world, and then we can put it on the blockchain and then everything will be tradable and we can beat back the Marxist equalization of poverty, I think was his final

rhetorical flourish. And this is a guy that is in important institutional settings in sort of humanitarian projects and work. And there's more stuff I could go on about him and Richard Branson and blah, blah, blah. But again, you don't have to. Once you get past the cheerful optimism, this is what's kicking around. And any sort of aid organization or if you want to be taken seriously by saying this technology offers something, I don't know, different. I mean, I'm not a complete technophobe. Then you have to confront all this. And I don't mean explicitly Hernando de Soto, but like that link between what Bitcoin imagines of the social world and how this, you know, by welding on a little bit of a humanitarian face, you're just, you know, getting us closer towards that pretty bleak vision.

Yeah, you know, I think that DeSoto provides a pretty good, you know, example of how this kind of push for like a blockchain, humanitarianism or aid programs seems to be an extension of this larger kind of neoliberal project. And you brought up the connections to these aid organizations. Obviously, DeSoto is involved with them, but there's been growing connections between blockchain enthusiasts and these various aid organizations as well. So how has that affected the work of those organizations? Oh, man. Thinking about imperial power today and how it reverberates in and through relations between states, relations between foreign capital, domestic capital, but also the development sector, the NGO sector, what Michael Hart and Tony Negri called in their book, the ethical agents of empire. And that's, listen, that's where we're at. It's a very kind of sticky wicket, to use a New Zealand phrase. That's why it's hard to sort of denounce

what is sort of like an imperial or extractive sort of power when you're in the NGO space, because you're connected to this broader sort of force of empire. There are tech firms making deals with developing world governments in the Pacific. There are NGOs that are sort of trotting this out. There is the U.S. State Department that is hosting big sort of conferences, bringing together civil society people in the developing world, NGOs, certain business concerns. And it's yeah, it's very hard to unpack. But there's some there's some key players that that cut across a lot of these projects. Just to bring it back to Hernando de Soto, he's a board member of the Global Blockchain Business Council, and they're well represented in a prominent Oxfam project in Vanuatu, which put a pin on that, come back to that one. But also they were participating

in a US State Department blockchain tech camp in Fiji at the University of the South Pacific, my former university, back in 2018. And again, the Global Blockchain Business Council brags on its website of being created on Richard Branson's Necker Island and then launched at Davos. And then I go back and look at the Forbes magazine article about this launch, this creation on Necker Island. It was like, it's an eclectic bunch of financiers, ex-generals, ex-CIA, Chinese business people. And like, I mean, I'm just like, my eyes are, you know, this is like a five alarm fire, basically. And again, it's never very hard. You just start scraping the surface and you see lots

of creepy stuff like that. I want to get to the specific projects. But before we talk about those, like when I was reading how you described what these aid organizations, you know, like Oxfam were doing, I was thinking of some previous interviews I did with Shannon Mattern and Dan Green, where they were discussing how the power of tech paired with the kind of austerity of the neoliberal period produced an environment where city governments, but also public institutions like libraries and schools were transformed because they needed to change their practices to conform to what tech capital wanted so that they could get money from them and attract them, like in the case of cities, to attract them to their city. But in the case of libraries and schools, to get the donations, like the philanthropy, et cetera, et cetera. And so that completely changed the way that they approached what they felt that their mandate was. And so I felt that when I was reading about what you were talking about, that it seemed like the same sort of process was happening with the

aid organizations where they know that the money is coming from these people who have really deep pockets in tech. So they shift the way that they approach problems and the solutions to problems to reflect what these wealthy people want to see so that they can get the legitimacy and the funding from those people as well. Do you think that lines up? It's not a one for one comparison, but sort of like neoliberal public private partnerships, PPPs. And it's weird describing PPPs in the international space because sometimes NGOs are acting like the state, which is of course part, part of the results of neoliberal imperialism, is that, again, the NGOs exist in the space where a state would have been

if not for structural adjustment and the dictates of Western capital. And I think I want to talk about the U.S. State Department. Herb Schiller is a great historian of the political economy of communication. And he wrote about in the Cold War era, the State Department policy, sort of soft power mixed with sort of economic interests, obviously, of the freedom of information doctrine, which was one, a kind of ideological story about whatever American liberal democracy in the Cold War period, but also it was about a growing telecommunication sector that was US-led. So freedom of information becomes the rubric under which State Department and economic policy is planned in the interest of kind of American capital. Connect Doctrine. And she describes this as, you know, the internet, this wonderful new thing that

allows us to speak with one voice, one globe, etc, etc. It's really interesting. If you go back to the work of Armand Matlar, talking about the telegraph, like, this is kind of religious, kind of secular theology of technology that just cuts through american sort of history and empire and in fact for for the american empire the frontier has always been like a technological frontier as well so anyway 2010 clinton freedom to connect you have like um you know this is the high this is the nadir of sort of like Twitter, Facebook, Arab Spring sort of rhetoric. You have like sort of court philosopher, Douglas Rushkoff, you know, he's just a TED Talk think fluencer, writing for the State Department about Facebook and,

and, you know, connection and all this sort of great stuff. And this is the, you know, this is the really interesting thing is that like we, this is platform imperialism, i.e. this is creating the infrastructure upon which the new world is created in and lived through. And it has obviously very important implications. Like in Africa, we know about free basics, but similar things happening in Fiji and the Pacific, where basically 80% of the population or something has mobile device capacity phones. And for very small charge, you can experience the internet for the first time, but it's on a Facebook server. It's subsidized data that allows you to experience, you know, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, and Facebook. It's sort of like, it's again, so, you know, Facebook is people's first experiences of the internet as such, right? So it's not hard to kind of understand

how important this is for sort of, you know, American capital, but also sort of American sort of soft power and ideology. And this then kind of informs in the NGO space, a kind of solutionist mantra, like, so solutionism, that sort of happy-go-lucky, cheerful optimism of what if we just solve problems? What if we could just use technology to solve problems? So part of Clinton's rollout of Freedom to Connect was this other project that the State Department hosts at various embassies and countries around the world called Tech Camp. And Tech Camp is a kind of bringing together of sort of like hackathons, workshops, civil society leaders to, the quote is something like, to solve the world's pressing challenges through technology,

right? And so what you're doing there is you are inculcating like a Silicon Valley style ethos and hackathons and Lily Irani and Mirka Madnau have talked about this. It's an entry point for the development sector to come be part of the solutionist class, to groom civil society types that are going to be kind of attached to your project, that kind of give you sort of legitimacy and clout. And, you know, I've struggled to try to find a way to write about this, but like, there is an incredible sort of spectacle of technology that has a tremendous sort of hold of, you know, people that want their societies to progress, to technologically leapfrog, you know. I've seen this in my own sort of experience teaching at the

University of the South Pacific, and you have sort of American consultants coming in telling you about online education, and we've got to become an online university, and you can just fire staff and run MOOCs. And they just come in, they leave the country with suitcases full of money, and all you've got is a bunch of 60-year-old senior administrators of the university in a developing world country where they don't understand that the ICT infrastructure is from the 1990s on the brink of collapse. But they'll tell you, oh, you know what these consultants told us? They told us we're the digital natives. It's just so many levels of obscuring where power, capital and imperial relations intersect. But again, it sort of

seeds the sort of social space with all that sort of really cheap and vulgar optimism. It's a real bummer, man. I wanted to start to shift us toward some of these actual projects that are going on in the Pacific. But to set that up, you talked about how the Pacific in particular is of interest to these blockchain enthusiasts, but other folks who have these kind of techno-solutionist ideas. So why does the Pacific, in their minds, hold this promise? Well, I got to shout out here the late, great Pacific Studies scholar, Teresia Tiawa, who has got a Routledge Collection, Anglo-American Imperialism and the Pacific is the fantasy of mobility and kind of dreamy island escape is one that is, it's a kind of naval imperialism. It's also an imperialism of literally the tourism infrastructure of the Pacific was created by like Vietnam War era R&R. Like it's literally kind of connected to that sort of military history.

It's also, you know, very explicitly connected to, you know, the Marshall Islands and Bikini Atoll and technological experimentation, which is what blockchain is doing right now currently in the Pacific. And I mean, much as the nuclear bomb blast was the technological experimentation that allowed America to dominate in the field of whether it's electronics or

military infrastructure, whatever it is. And then there's this weird psycho sublimation, right? We've all seen Dr. Strangelove. These generals want the end of the world. They also horny as hell. And it's explicitly in the sort of way we talk about bombshell babes and bikinis. Like that's I know that's like too on the nose and Freudian, but my God, it's there. There is something about that, plus a sort of Robinson Crusoe desire to be, you know, a kind of libertarian that lands on an island and just sort of like uh weaves a blockchain out of like coconut fibers or something like there is a notion that it's empty space right that it's a frontier and like peter teal very explicit about this in his um 10 theses on why i'm a libertarian

for the cato institute he's basically saying until we get to outer space the pacific beckons you know we have free floating islands. This is a project he's working on with Milton Freeman's grandson, whether it's Bannon, David Geffen, Epstein. I mean, it's diabolical. He's also responsible for $60 billion worth of toxic assets in the sort of crypto ecosystem that should bring the whole thing down. We'll see. But in 2017, he went to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria and was like, hey, let's do some crypto disaster capitalism. That's not how he described it. He described it as like a burning man.

We're going to decolonize money. We're going to decolonize citizenship. I mean, it was really monstrous. And so I really sort of piqued my interest here. And then shortly after, we're seeing very similar projects and sort of entry into the Pacific space in that sort of time period, 2017, 2018. Vanuatu figures very early in the piece. And this is interesting because Vanuatu later goes on to be one of the emblems of the great successes of humanitarian blockchain. But in 2017, Vanuatu is a tax haven that is perfect for this libertarian fantasy because it's sort of like Western financial escapism. While you sit on the island enjoying life, there's no taxes. You can buy citizenship. And this incredibly sus dude named Jeffrey Bond, who was mobbed up in Bangkok, it looks like, and was connected to Sebastian Greenwood,

who is one of the founders of OneCoin, which is like a billion dollar crypto style Ponzi scheme. Anyway, this guy is actually licensed by the Vanuatu government to sell passports, and he was selling them for bitcoins. He was selling passports for bitcoins. And because this is part of the sort of whole thing is like in anything in tech, you just want to get headlines in Wired magazine. It doesn't matter if your tech can do the thing. But he was getting the sort of the good press in Wired. And then, you know, crypto people, much like they are now salivating about El Salvador, were like, hmm, Vanuatu, they look like they like a progressive, you know, technological advanced, whatever. And then lots of crypto scams were running out of Vanuatu. This one, Bankera,

Bankera, this was like a, forgive me, I think it was a Lithuanian bank or Latvian. I get those two confused. Or it's not a bank, but it pretended to be a bank. And they got a bank registration in Vanuatu. It was $150 million pump and dump. And it got so bad that the government, the Reserve Bank of Vanuatu, actually issued a crypto prohibition on the island. Which is like, I applaud. And then some very intense lobbying happened with the government of Malta, which is another sort of island tax haven nation sort of was like, and somehow they cleared the runway for Oxfam. I don't understand the exact choreography of how this all worked out. But yeah, so a lot of stuff, a lot of sort of libertarian

fantasies of like, what if you could just kick back, watch your crypto portfolio accrue value and live in this sort of, you know, island paradise? Absolutely. And, you know, Vanuatu is the first kind of project that I wanted to ask you about. So what was this project? What was Oxfam promising? And how did this actually work out in practice? I got to start by first saying that like Oxfam, their reporting, their kind of self-reporting is really good and laudable, and it helps me in my job of ruthlessly criticizing them. So shout out to them for that. And that is actually something that in the tech space could be a lot more opaque. But yeah, here we go. I mean, I think Vanuatu fits the sort of PPP model that you discussed like really perfectly. Like the start of this project, they launched

something called Ox Labs, again, sort of like modeling themselves on like, I don't know, being like Y Combinator, just that whole sort of Valley startup culture. And that was an opportunity for an Australian developer called Sempo. It's run by a guy named Nick Williams. I've spoke to him. He's a nice guy. And ConsenSys. And ConsenSys is a raft of sort of blockchain startups. It's run by this guy, Joe Lubin, who's sort of like an Ethereum billionaire. He's not as important in the Ethereum space as Vitalik Buterin,

but he's kind of on the sort of like whatever, council of elders of Ethereum. I should have mentioned, Ethereum is the blockchain that allows you to like launch other sort of, it's kind of an open source blockchain. And so Bitcoin is like launch other sort of, it's kind of an open source blockchain. And so Bitcoin is like the OG sort of idea. And then Ethereum is the thing that sort of sees this out into the world. And what that means is that like 90% of the things launched on

Ethereum are like pump and dump scams, ICOs, but whatever. So Oxfam is bringing these sort of private public sort of partnerships together. And the project lead is an affiliate of the Global Blockchain Business Council. And their language in their sort of reporting is like, hey, we're going to take part in the radical distributed ledger technology. And we're going to use this technology that struck back at the heart of financial corruption and all this sort of. So, you know, they're like, you know, they're drinking the Kool-Aid. Now they are addressing a very real issue around cash aid distribution in sort of disaster prone areas, Vanuatu, volcanic, coastal, lots of reasons why this kind of stuff is needed. Now, I have through the sort of like cash aid, sort of like Twitter sphere, I've been informed that this is sort of like they welded on blockchain to the notion of cash aid. Like there's work in cash aid and it's good work and it's important work. But it's often the case that blockchain enthusiasts will work backwards from the premise that this is the universal technology that solves everything. And that's, again, that's why it features so heavenly in the sort of like solutionist development and geospace.

Because it's like, what about a blockchain for X, Y, or Z? And people are having that conversation about everything. What about a blockchain for podcasts? What about a blockchain for stoner cat comedy? The new Mila Kunis, Chris Rock blockchain. I'm getting off track, but there's a blockchain for everything. And what's happened here is they have launched a project which gives recipients of aid a near field communication card, an NFC card, a bus card, if you will, which allows them to get kind of preloaded some stable coin backed aid. And then they go to a shop, they get some milk, they get some dried goods, whatever it is they need, and they clear that transaction via a smartphone.

And all that information then gets fed back to the central Oxfam programmer and blockchain. Now, the reality of many Pacific blockchain projects is connectivity is a huge issue. So there's not actually really a blockchain interface for the user or the vendor that's necessarily live. It's a centralized blockchain. It's a database, right? a private database and one that had a massive sort of bottleneck and a critical sort of breakdown point, which is they really required the central developer to clear everything and oversee this sort of jerry-rigged kind of blockchain workaround with NFCs. It's not the vision of, hey, I'm a blockchain participant with full access to a world of

data with which that might empower me. It's like, no, it's a centralized data set. And we have to sort of create these sort of workarounds because, well, one, people don't really get the blockchain because it's very difficult to understand for just anyone, even academics, you name it. It's an obscurantist paradigm. And so, look, they've done something. They've been transparent with their reporting. They say, look, we've got some efficiencies here. We've been able to do some stuff.

And we're taking our talents to Papua New Guinea and rolling this out elsewhere. And look, is that a harmful project? I'm not going to say that's a harmful project, but is cash aid really the thing that is most central to what this does within the broader blockchain narrative? I'm saying no, because again, they're getting Wired Magazine headlines about COVID pandemic stimulus checks should be distributed through this Oxfam blockchain. And when they are competing for funding streams from the EU for blockchain for social good prizes, they are doing like a Silicon Valley pitch deck, which says

we have the clients, we have the market, we have the know-how. So like, it's not really about like the on the ground work, which again is the cash aid paradigm, which again, it's like so much in tech. They're reinventing the wheel a little bit here. There are things that are more sort of like M-Pesa. It works on how people actually use phones and is practical sort of on the ground. And they sort of gone again, gone about this the other way, which is we were working from the premise backwards of blockchain is the solution. And then again, we've created something that's not really a blockchain, but it allows us to kind of go forward and again, get the headlines, get the funding, and we're off. It's useful to Joe Lubin, again, who's like, he's a crypto whale. I mean, he's a billionaire in this space developing apps to kind of be the killer app for him to be the guy at the helm of these platforms. And it's, again, he can point to these projects as like, look, look, we're doing the thing. So yeah, that's my skepticism towards that project. Actually, no, I'm being too generous because part of working backwards from the notion that this is a blockchain solution is having ignorance of your actual context in which you're operating.

And the crucial context in which you're operating in Vanuatu is, hey, this is this place where all these scammy sus dudes have been doing scammy sus crypto scams. OK, and the Reserve Bank of Vanuatu in trying to kind of declare sovereignty over the kind of money supply in Vanuatu has made a crypto prohibition. Now, that's part of the problem that Oxfam says in the report is that, we have to rely on incumbent financial institutions. Meaning, yes, you can't go full crypto because the Reserve Bank says, uh-uh. And so their solution to this problem is we should get the vendors in the shops and the participants of the blockchain to use crypto exchanges like Binance. Now, Binance is like neck deep in all other sort of crypto economy scam bullshit. They are the largest holder of Tether, which is, again, it's a complicated thing, but it's just toxic assets. It's just fake crypto,

toxic asset that probably should bring the whole thing crashing down. And the notion that the world's poor in some of the most vulnerable regions in the world should, one, be your test subjects for a blockchain that you're going to upsell to the US government or wherever to the private sector is, one, bad enough, but two, that they should be to upsell to the US government or wherever to the private sector is one, bad enough, but two, that they should be sort of sacrificed on the altar of Binance, fucking Binance. I mean, like the UK, Japan, Canada, they've all issued prohibitions upon Binance. And again, for me, whether that's myopia, whether that's cynical, I don't know, but it's recklessly irresponsible.

You know, what you're talking about there about these companies and these aid organizations, in this case, experimenting on, you know, people who have some of like the least power in the world to push back is something that I was talking to Daksha Yenisuriya Kumaran about not too long ago, and about how that happened specifically in Australia with welfare programs and border technologies and things like that. But we can see that around the world, right? And I think what you're saying there also leads into an important project that I don't know if it's been proposed or rolled out in Fiji around tracking the land. I think you wrote DeSoto is involved in this as well or recommending it where the land would kind of be put on the

blockchain. So then it would be accessed by foreign capital and things like that. So can you talk a bit about that project and how this kind of fits into this as well? Yeah, so there is a land registry project happening in Fiji, being pushed by the Asian Development Bank. Land registration and exchange of titles through the blockchain is like the sort of pinnacle of DeSotoian sort of vision of what this technology represents. There is a blockchain developer in Fiji, smart guy. He believes in the technology, but he's not a fool. I mean, he's like, I think maybe the ADB, they've got a sort of like a criteria of like rolling out blockchain solutions. And they thought, hey, maybe this. And he's like, look, this doesn't really make a lot of sense. And it would make

sense in like a place like, I don't know, Qatar or something. Right. And it's because it's a really aggressive form of datafication of property. Why this is significant is that 90% of lands in Fiji are held in tribal trust and are administered by a government agency called the Itoke Land Trust Board. And the reason why land is held in kind of common title is that there was an attempt by the British, there always is, for like a land commission, right, to sort of like survey and appraise the land. And the locals weren't having that. They understood very explicitly that sort of like technological abstraction and appraisal in that way was like part of how the land would be like taken from them. And so, yeah, that's a very proud legacy. Land is an issue in Fiji. There's no question about that. And rural poverty is a massive issue. But again, because we are operating in a sort of like post-1980 neoliberal structural adjustment development paradigm, the state can't raise capital. The state's been hollowed out of a lot of its sort of like talent. That's a whole other history about civil conflict in Fiji. Suffice to say, in 1987, in Fiji, they had a Prague Spring. The equivalent of 68 Prague Spring happened in 1987 with a labor government, which was a multi-ethnic alliance, which was a first in Fiji's history. And the

military was encouraged. And the U.S. State Department was playing a role saying, yeah, I think they've got Libyan advisors in Fiji. So the same old sort of history, et cetera, et cetera. Now, so there are issues in Fiji around land. It is complicated. But the reality is this is this collective resource that indigenous F of their efforts. And there is massive, well, like nine opposition MPs have been arrested in the last few weeks, currently around the government's attempts to reform the streamlining of leases of indigenous land. And yes, so Asia Development Bank has been working with the Tokay Land Trust Board to do all that. And they've described this as this would, again, appraise every sort constituents, the government ministry, the landholders, and private investors, foreign investors, insurance companies, i.e. what's on the land, mineral wealth, etc., etc., starts to become processed into computational capitalism in and through the blockchain. It's like a backdoor colonization of what in the tech space they would call an information silo, basically.

They're prizing it open and throwing that out sort of global market to sort that all out. And again, indigenous Fijians, they're very self-aware of like whether it's the traditional practices of medicine or like biopiracy is on their radar screen. And it's not always sort of well articulated how foreign capital comes in and robs people of their sort of legacy of kind of colonial resistance. But there is a sense of that, right? And I think that, again, we've seen the latent sort of political unrest that's been happening. Blockchain is part of this push to sort of rationalize, marketize, and bring the world's

assets, as DeSoto would put it, into a single computer platform. In this conversation, we've talked about those kind of ideological underpinnings of blockchain. We talked about the involvement of, you know, the state in this kind of history of technological imperialism, the US State Department in particular. You know, we talked about these specific implementations in the Pacific. And so I wonder, you know, to close, what do you think we should make of this contrast where on one hand, we can see the reality of the implementations of the ideology of this technology, of the involvement of the state and really powerful players, you know, like DeSoto, but so many of the other folks

that you've talked about. And then, on the other hand, where we have this kind of framing of blockchain and of these projects, as though it's something that is liberatory, that is challenging power, that is empowering the global south in particular. What do you think we should make of that contrast? And what is actually happening through these projects? Unfortunately, that sort of humanitarian solutionism is laundering kind of traditional forms of American military financial elite power. I came across something last week that it sort of pains me to say aloud because of how terrifying and awful it is.

You will be aware of that goofy Silicon Valley venture capitalist, Tim Draper. He was early on SpaceX, Tesla, big backer in Theranos. He's a big Bitcoin billionaire. And he's just like, he's a goofy energy kind of entrepreneurial evangelist guy. He runs Draper University where they do a pledge every morning that I will be entrepreneurial and pursue the path of freedom and all this kind of, it's really culty, weird stuff. Tim Draper was involved in a blockchain project where he got an MOU with the government of Papua New Guinea to administer an entire region of the country on the blockchain. It would be a tax-free economic zone.

And a Draper University alum, Shane Nanai, was his sort of like front man for this company. And it was really jarring to these images of Draper launching outside of Draper Yu and San Mateo. We are developing a governance project based on blockchain and the Bitcoin that will be the model for all future governments for the next 50 years. Really dark project and techno speculative land grab. And there are lots of Draper alum in the sort of like humanitarian space. Now, Tim Draper, it gives me no pleasure to say what I'm about to say. He is a third generation venture capitalist. OK, his grandfather, William H. Draper, the third launched the first venture capital firm on the West Coast. He was a general. He was also an investment banker who, very Prescott Bush style, handled accounts of prominent German a great believer in the rehabilitation of certain Nazis.

He was definitely a eugenicist. He went on to be the first U.S. ambassador to NATO. Okay. That great sort of like a Nazi rehabilitation program we know is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. In his later years, he would run the Population Action Institute, which was like a kind of population crisis org that he ran along with a DuPont. You know, those people they do believe, really, they put their money where their mouth is with depopulation and fertility rates. And then his son, William H. Draper Jr., skull and bones, Bush campaign chair, did venture, also ran the UNDP. Now that was bone chilling for me, right? The UN Development Agency. So we're seeing a genealogy here from the sort of like dark sort of nexus of military and finance in the 1930s in the US to its current iteration, which is like a goofy guy is like, hey, let's

jump in the pool with our clothes on so that we kind of embrace entrepreneurialism and solutions. Like that's who is sort of in this space. So it's really hard to not be kind of like blackpilled about it all. I think we got to shout it from the hills that blockchain and crypto are part of the most sort of rapacious logic of kind of like speculative finance and speculative kind of ne1980s sort of like washington consensus notion of like yeah there's nothing you know you you saw this in facebook's launch of libra like the notion that the developing world state is just like a problem to be like worked around like every every developing world state is zimbabwe or something so i don don't know. I like that guy, that German guy who went

to Davos and kind of lit a match there. That's where we've got to be at on this issue. And people's sort of entrepreneurial sort of positivity and sort of solutionism is no replacement for sort of good, hard tax, sort of political economic analysis of the power involved here. And that's just really a start. And again, that sounds like a really stodgy sort of Marxist sort of answer is like, the first thing that we must do is like, you know, historical materialist analysis or something. But that's really urgent and pressing. Because I mean, like, you've got Palantir partnering with the World Food Program. And I mean, who knows, maybe it's too late to like rescue that sort of NGO space from just being fully absorbed into, yeah, that kind of convergence of

American military, tech, finance, intelligence, etc. Anyway, sorry, if that's a black pill. No, but I think it's important, right? Like, I love the going back and looking at the histories of these folks. Like, you know, I love doing that with Teal and with Musk and with Bezos and all them as well. And I think what you're describing is important, right? In the sense that there is this big push now, even bigger push than there was a few years ago, to make us believe that cryptocurrencies and blockchain are like the future and are key to all of these different modes of governance and organization and whatnot. And I completely agree with you that I think that needs to be challenged. And obviously,

that's why I'm having people like you on the show. So we can try to push back on that, at least in what little bit we can. But naturally, I really appreciate you taking the time and sharing these perspectives with us. So thanks so much. Thank you. It's my absolute pleasure. And I guess the one last point I'd say that that is against the sort of like cheerful solutionist tech cosmopolitanism, there is an alternative merging, which is goddamn Peter Thiel's blood and soil tech nationalism. So we got to watch out for that one too. I'm somehow low keykey worried that Lina Khan and her fantastic appointment could somehow be channeled into this kind of rubric as well. That's so weird because there is like a

really juvenile, imbecilic internationalism in sort of tech solutionism. And the swing back is, again, is sort of like Peter Thiel, sort of like, to this point, Silicon Valley have only brought you mere trinkets. I stand for Western civilization and what. So we cannot revert to any style of chauvinism. Yeah. Listen, thank you for the soapbox, Paris. I really appreciate it. And yeah, it's been great to chat. Olivier Jutel is a lecturer at the University of Otago in New Zealand, and you can

find a link to his recent article on blockchain imperialism in the Pacific in the show notes. You can follow Olivier on Twitter at OJutel. You can follow me and at Paris Marks, and you can follow the show at Tech Won't Save Us. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network, and you can find out more about that at harbingermedianetwork.com. And if you want to support the work that I put into making this show every week, you can go to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus and become a supporter. Thanks for listening. Thank you.