The Breakdown - The Revolution Will Be Retweeted: The Breakdown Weekly Recap

Episode Date: June 6, 2020

The Breakdown Weekly Recap looks at the key themes that shaped the week. On this week’s episode, NLW discusses: The modern significance of Tiananmen Square, and why this week’s U.S. protests show why the tools of surveillance need to be applied to states, not citizens. The importance of “narrative violations,” or fighting to see things without falling into popular but often wrong conventional wisdoms  The need to resist attempts from both the left and the right to fit today’s unrest into convenient culture-war frameworks that perpetuate each group’s power.   This week on The Breakdown: Monday | The Power and Peril of the 'Bitcoin Fixes This' Meme  A look at what role, if any, bitcoin has to play in remaking the world that is being protested around the U.S. (and world) this week. Tuesday | Bitcoin, Cellphones and the Citizen Tools of Anti-Authoritarianism, Feat. Alex Gladstein A look at the anti-authoritarian technology stack, including where non-state money like bitcoin fits in. Wednesday | 5 Numbers That Tell the Story of Markets Right Now From the number of U.S. flights from Chinese carriers to S&P 500 growth in the tumultuous year of 1968, these (unexpected) numbers tell the story of today’s markets. Thursday | The Mirage of the Money Printer: Why the Fed Is More PR Than Policy, Feat. Jeffrey P. Snider An argument that the Fed is actually highly ineffectual due to the presence of the eurodollar shadow-banking system. Friday | The Biggest Realignment in the US-China Relationship Since Nixon, Feat. Graham Webster A 101-level primer on the history of the U.S.-China relationship, and why today’s bluster represents a fundamental shift.   

Welcome back to The Breakdown, an everyday analysis breaking down the most important stories in Bitcoin, crypto, and beyond. This episode is sponsored by BitStamp and Cipher Trace. The Breakdown is produced and distributed by CoinDes. And now, here's your host, NLW. Welcome back to The Breakdown. It is Saturday, June 6th, and today we have a little something different, a weekly recap. And where I want to start with this comes from a tweet that I shared on Friday morning, where I said, The Revolution will be retweeted.

I've been thinking about public media exposure and narrative a lot this week, even more than usual. For those of you who know me, I think about narrative a lot. But it was the 31st anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacres. And there was an extra symbolism this year, extra context. First, there was the context of, in the New York Times, Tom Codagh, Cotton, the Republican Senator, published an op-ed that was basically advocating for extreme force when dealing with protesters that was published ultimately on the same day of the 31st anniversary of Tiananmen Square. There was also the question of whether people in Hong Kong would be able

to, as they have for so many years, actually recognize this as China takes more control over Hong Kong. So there's some current events context, but there's also a lot of more sort of big patternicity historical context that I was thinking it in. On Friday, my episode was with Graham Webster, and it was about the history of the U.S.-China relationship. And one of the arguments that he made was that China's turn away from sort of the established global order and towards a more illiberal authoritarian control coincided with the rise of new types of social media in that country. And I think that that was a point that really struck me, this idea that when authoritarian's confronted with new tools which expose their authoritarian actions, they can either go one

of two ways. They can either get more open so as to not be basically caught on camera doing bad things by virtue of not having done the bad things, or they can get even more authoritarian to try to control even more. And it's very clear that in the last decade, China has gone that second direction. BitStamp is the original global cryptocurrency exchange. Since 2011, BitStamp has been the preferred exchange for serious traders and investors. Trusted by over 4 million customers, including top financial institutions. BitStamp is built on professional grade trading technology. Their platform is powered by a NASDAQ matching engine, and their APIs are recognized as the best in the industry.

Download the BitStamp app from the App Store or Google Play, or visit bitstamp.net slash pro to learn more and start trading today. That's bitstamp.net slash pro. CipherTrace helps grow the crypto economy by making it trusted by governments and safe for consumers. and investors. How do they do it? By protecting VASPs, banks, and other financial institutions from crypto laundering risks while protecting user privacy. Years of research have created the world's best cryptocurrency intelligence with the best attribution and deepest token coverage. So if your virtual asset business isn't using CypherTrace to manage compliance risks, you should start now. Learn more at cyphertrace.com. A second part of this conversation that I've been thinking about this week was

Alex Gladstein's conversation from Tuesday, where he really talked about what matters is how much the tools of surveillance are tools that are used by the states to surveil their citizens versus tools that are used by citizens to hold states accountable. And it's really hard not to watch what we've seen go on this week and last weekend in the context of the protests and riots that have been engulfing the country to not appreciate how powerful the mobile phone camera has been in this larger conversation about police brutality, police tactics. It is just every single day is a new viral video of police behaving badly, it feels like. And the most recent is a video of Buffalo, New York police officers

pushing down a 75-year-old man who knocks his head, starts bleeding, and then they just walk past them. He is apparently in stable but serious condition. But, I mean, it's literally Someone tweeted, I just saw someone's grandfather get murdered by cops. And it's not the truth exactly, but it feels like that. And if we hadn't had this camera, the initial report said that he tripped and fell. And it just makes you think about all of the things that go unreported because they are unseen. So I think that this idea of whether the tools of surveillance and accountability are just for power or whether they can be used to hold power accountable is going to be one of the most important conversations that we can have in the coming years. I think that it increases the

urgency around questions of political capture potential for the platforms where these videos go viral and where they get distributed. This is obviously a conversation in and of itself that is heating up as Twitter and Trump go after one another and there's this new precedent and idea of fact-checking and there's new push from the government to walk back rules that help platforms stay unaccountable or not being able to be sued for what goes through their platform. So there's all of these questions. At the same time, I think that there is another question which has to do with mechanisms for change, right? Holding authoritarian's or authoritarian actions accountable requires not just seeing those actions, but also having the due process, the mechanisms, just the ability to actually make a change.

And it feels like that might be a part of the conversation that we have next in this country. The biggest thing that I've been thinking about this week is this idea that the revolution will be retweeted and all of the implications for how we design, protect, preserve our kind of communication systems, our citizen-led communication systems. A second theme I've been thinking about and also comes from a tweet that I shared, I don't think that there's ever been a more acute need for or better time for narrative violations. So the idea of a narrative violation, it comes from Jeff Lewis, who was on the show a couple weeks ago. And it's basically something that, or an opinion, a take that flies in the face of conventional wisdom, not just for the sake of looking like a contrarian, but on the basis of prodding deeper into some bit of information that is missing from that conventional wisdom or a way of interpreting that conventional wisdom. And the importance of narrative violations is that they break us out of easy political molds. And I think that easy political molds that are constructed around narratives that give us identity, but also lock us into a set of beliefs, are one of the more destructive forces right now.

If you're in America and you're having a political conversation, when you are on the left or on the right, that means a whole bunch of things about you that are inviolable and expected and unable to be broken from. And that is in and of itself a tool for control. And this isn't just kind of me interpreting this blithely. Ben Hunt and Epsilon theory wrote a piece this week about how narratives are working right now around the protests. And the narrative machine is aggressively trying to politicize that, right? It's trying to put these protests in the context of the culture war with law and order right on the one side and kind of like liberal, whatever left on the left. And I think that that is a tool for control.

And I think that we need to resist letting ourselves be easily boxed in and actually have important conversations about the specific issues that are addressed. I mean, we get into this with China as well. I think that China is another issue, China-U.S. relations is something that I don't want us to see boxed into these easy conventional wisdoms and this sort of left-right dialectic, but where we can have hard conversations about the balance of how to have this economy, this economic force in the world, while not ceding all of our values as it relates to things like human rights. there's a huge number of these questions right now, and I think it's a time for narrative violations. I think it's a time to kind of try to fight past two easy conventional whisms and two easy

lumpings in with previous political divides, because I think that those are just tools for control. Anyways, guys, that is my weekly recap, the things that I've been thinking about for this week. As I said, let me know if you like this format as it is, or if you want back the larger kind of extended episode version, or if you just have another. idea for what would be valuable in a weekly recap. But until next week, I appreciate you listening. Be safe and take care of each other. Peace.