TRASHFUTURE - The Road to Apedom feat. This Machine Kills

Episode Date: January 11, 2022

Jathan and Ed from TMK (@machinekillspod) return to help us figure out exactly what “Web 3” is, and what people actually mean when they say “Web 3.” What we find when we look under the hood is a virtual series of colonia dignidads all layered on top of one another promising that only when we have interpreted Hayek correctly, will we find utopia. If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture If you’re in the UK and want to help Afghan refugees and internally displaced people, consider donating to Afghanaid: https://www.afghanaid.org.uk/ *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to this free episode of the T1, not avoiding it again. We're back in 2022 and it is the free one. There were a few where I managed to bulldoze in to introducing the guests before you were able to do that. You were just like, it's the episode you don't pay for. It's that one. Yeah. It's that one.

The non-charged one. Look, before I introduce our wonderful guests, I just want to say happy 6th of January. Congratulations to everyone involved on both sides. I think we've got this nice lectern that we have in the studio. You all did a great job, again, on both sides. And I think everyone who perished that day should get a state funeral. Yeah, they should dig them up and do a state funeral now. Absolutely.

But here, of course, helping us celebrate in the usual style, which is, of course, to talk about the theory of the high-tech economy. Look, it's how America's celebrated January 6th for ages. It is, of course, this machine kills is J. Thinsodowski and Adam Gweso Jr. Guys, how's it going? Hello. Yeah. I mean, I am American, but I live in Australia, so I'm the only one on my neighborhood celebrating

January 6th. I'm setting off fireworks. Roasting a turkey. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, look. Everybody's dressing all under armor in honor of the occasion. Yeah. I smashed a few cans of monster on my way here. Oh, yeah. I punched a cop, you know? Oh, yeah.

Yeah, but that's just a Saturday for me. In Australia, you're allowed to do that. That's right. It's encouraged. Australia has a, it has like a pink panther rule where it's to keep them sharp. Yeah. It's the cop's job to not allow themselves to be punched. Yeah.

No, it's welcome to you both and welcome to you, the listener. So we've got a lot on today. It's Riley Hussain and Milo from the TF side. And you know, there's just a lot of stuff that's been going on in the technology industry. You guys heard that the web is finally upgrading to 3.0? Pretty exciting. Oh, yeah. I'm excited for that.

Yeah. That's cool. Yeah. One web for each gender. And of course, the main thing about it is that it's meaningfully different and not just as you have said to me in DMs, Jathan, the same old sour wine of neoliberalism in new cryptocurrency shaped bottles. Totally not that.

I'm kind of disappointed. Jathan doesn't share my enthusiasm for what it promises to be, the transformation. Web 3.0 promises, number one, stacks on deck, number two, Patronon ice, number three, gas up the jet for you tonight, baby, you can have whatever you like. Yeah. This is the real TI's hit song, whatever you like. Oh, OK. Yeah.

No, this is the real schism that's going to tear apart this machine kills is, you know, my downer attitude towards Web 3.0 and Ed's, you know, rightfully booster attitude towards Web 3. I'm going to build a mansion in the metaverse on on the crypto island and charge everybody tether to get in and get rich. It's going to and then find a lot. That's all I'm going to say to the left. I hate knowing what any of that means.

Well, I love knowing what all of that means. Well, if you want to know what all of that means, or at least most of it, then keep listening. But would you like to suffer? Would you like to join us in hell? Keep listening, but I wanted to talk a little bit about I have like a five minute British politics thing I wanted to talk about first just because, OK, so for context, everyone especially are sort of Australian and American sort of friends and co-workers. If you there's been this set of regional pilots going on in the UK, a country that has a very,

very regressive and punitive drugs policy to effectively not even decriminalize just to stop prosecuting young people, especially young black people. But that's not said, but that's sort of what the implication is for carrying small amounts of cannabis, which like a huge percentage of the population are prosecuted for doing. And most of them just railroaded into the criminal justice system. The trouble is, there's all these kids in London are shooting up cannabis and getting on smacked up and then they're addicted and then they go around killing people. That's right. Just to get that next hit of indica.

That's right. Yeah. A weed connoisseur who's so into weed, he's willing to kill for like the perfect strain. That's right. I call it in the couch. What's up? That's right. Jonesing for that hit of Dutch cheese. So basically, right? That's that's what's happened.

And Sadiq Khan in the sort of labor sensible mayor of London in a rare, I think quite quite correct and humane move has said, we're going to imitate this policy. We're going to take this policy that's been trial elsewhere and we're going to trial it locally in a couple of London boroughs where we're just going to say, we're going to say to the police, you're now directed to stop prosecuting in these conditions, like stop bringing charges. And immediately Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer, we're both saying no. Keir Starmer first.

Crucially. Keir Starmer before anyone else chief Keir Starmer left out to say, we do not believe in changing the British drug laws. We think they are fit for purpose. We think drugs lead to violence and all this at the response of someone in his party doing something a very, very small pilot program extremely watered down for a policy which it leads towards a policy that's decriminalizing cannabis. That's popular with the majority of the electorate.

And also is the only policy that fucking works, you idiot. What I loved about this though, is it led to something I would like to call the political satanalia where the slaves were emperors and the emperors were slaves. Because on this one magical day of the year, the Prime Minister welcomed what Keir Starmer had said. An inversion. The tables were turned. And I'm calling him to go further. I would call him to go further.

That's the thing, right? He says, it increases power of criminal gangs and drugs are associated with crime. Making drugs illegal increases the power of criminal gangs. Next question. Fucking idiot. That's obvious. You could teach a child this. Yeah.

If you make something illegal, it puts it in the hands of criminals. This is almost like fucking like first principle shit. See, I think I kind of agree with him in the sense that like, if you kind of legalize, I know this isn't legalization. Like this is just kind of like a facetious thing. But you know, anyone who's been to Vancouver sort of knows what weed culture is like. It's filled with like fucking nerds. And he's just protecting the integrity of weed culture.

I'll keep it cool. That's your argument. Yeah. In Britain, we smoke weed that smells of piss and looks like shit. And it should stay that way. He can't wants to gentrify weed. That's right. Exactly.

I don't want any of this like fucking indica cuss shit. I want the weed that I get from a chicken box in like a weird KFC in Camden. But it tastes of Greece and it's fine. But like, look, this is, it just goes to show, right? A couple of days ago, he made his first speech of the year where he said, I don't think politics is a branch of the entertainment industry. I think it's the serious business. You know what he did, right?

That's right. Look, I don't want any of you are getting too excited during my speech. So what I've done is I've dressed up in a big gray sack now. But right. But if I think that if you want to take seriously this and the other thing, right, is basically, I think drug decriminalization is the most you could possibly expect at this point from a kind of center left party. If only because it's politically very popular.

It's basically got no cost. It gives like it is kind of and it's been done other way and other places by other center left political organizations. It's no risk and it's the thing they can do that would just take the boot a little bit off the people on whom the boot is pressing down on some of the hardest that where they can affect the hardness of the boot. It's one of these rare policies where it actually saves money. It solves a lot of the problems and it harms no one.

Yes, there's no, there is no constituency other than people who are annoyed by in an imaginary way in their own head. There's no person that actually affects negatively at all. And the only thing I want to add before getting into what we're here to actually talk about, right, is that this I think this goes to show especially, right? We talk about the British media being an extension of the state. And what is and the fact that like these policies that are popular and easy and proven elsewhere are politically impossible here.

It's because the British media has performed a kind of cup and ball track, a kind of three car bounty, where what happens is the sensible majoritarian view is switched out for a basically hard, a very hard punitive view. And I think this links into the fact that the state's mission for the last 40 years has been to sort of wind itself out of existence to say, look, the business of social reproduction in terms of carrots is no longer happening. We're not doing social housing. We're not doing the NHS because capital can just get workers elsewhere.

It doesn't need to preserve these workers, really. And so what it needs for social reproduction is the police and the army is the sticks. It needs the punitive organs that is the solving capital's collective action problem, which is what the state exists to do. How else would we be nice for British time? And so what has happened essentially is that the British media has, again, working as an organ of the state, which is, again, this thing for capital, has essentially made it so that the only viable way forward is to love the police and BAE systems.

It is saying the only things you can do is use and valorize the state as the instrument of discipline and punishment because the state as the giver of carrots as opposed to sticks is now gone. And I think you can really see it in this drugs policy, which is, no, it doesn't matter. Discipline must be increased. And this is a majoritarian. This is the only sensible opinion to have in a democracy, even though it's wildly unpopular. And I think this is just a perfect case study of that phenomenon.

Yeah. Well, I want to jump in real quick and say that Starmer doesn't realize he's lying because he's playing a part when he says that politics is not a branch of the entertainment industry. I mean, that's all it is, is it's peer theater. He is an actor on stage playing a part as are other politicians. And when they claim it's about the serious business of getting things done, I mean, their actions speak to the contrary every single fucking time. They don't get anything done. But that's kind of the point. I think you're exactly right here, Riley,

that this is the state winding itself out of existence, but doing so in this way that policies and positions that are already in place remain ossified. They become fossilized. So they don't go away. The state just stops doing stuff. And what already exists just continues forever. And then people like Starmer are there to be the ring leaders of this circus, kind of distracting you, dancing on stage, saying foolish things, gaffing to keep you entertained while nothing else actually happens.

That's kind of the whole point. Well, the difference between someone like Keir Starmer and Donald Trump is that they're both equally theatrical. It's just that Donald Trump's in like a fun play, you know, like a comedy with lots of pratfalls. And then like Keir Starmer's in like an Ibsen play at the National Theatre, like he's playing it dead straight. They're both actors. It's just Donald Trump actually has some entertainment value. I think like in the case of the Labour Party, it's also this kind of perennial problem,

that they have themselves created where it's very much like, they're kind of fixated on these imaginary voters that we've like discussed on the show before, like these kind of voters that only exist inside their head and are like constantly mad at them. And one of those things was obviously just like, you know, respecting the police, right? Or, you know, the idea that like in these mythical voters, they really love the police, even though I'm not convinced any British person actually likes the police. They like the idea of it, like some of them, they like, I think like people in the suburbs like the kind of idea of like a policeman keeping out like,

you know, weed smoking teenagers off their like, you know, front lawns and stuff. But like they don't really exist in practice, but because like, again, Labour is so sort of stimmed by like focus groups and focus groups of focus groups. They've kind of got it in their head that like even this very obvious and sensible policy, but like they had been advocating like the Labour Party has sort of like been kind of advocating it for a while, like now suddenly it sort of becomes untenable. And I think a lot of that comes down to this like, just fear that they have that like any kind of policy they propose is going to be hated by these mythical voices who by the way, like,

just hate everything that they do. Like the way that it's set up is like, we can't propose anything because we'll like alienate these sort of like, you know, these kind of fictive working classes. And it just so happens to be married into this kind of much broader political consensus of like, the state can't do anything and you shouldn't expect it to do anything. It does remind me if we jump across the pond, you know, New York Senator Chuck Schumer, who's this the Senate Majority Leader guy friend of the show, but he has talked explicitly about this imaginary family. He's written a book about them called the Baileys. And it's like, that's who he does policy for is literally this family that exists only in his head, who he imagines as his

ideal constituent. And like, that's just an absurdist version of it. I think, you know, who's saying you're exactly right here that Starmer that all of these politicians are doing is they have an imaginary constituent in their head who doesn't actually exist. And that's who they're doing policy for. And I think there's a trans I'll do a segue here for you Riley, but I think there's a nice segue here from the kind of politics of entertainment or politics as entertainment to technology as entertainment as well, where this is truly both in the realms of politics and technology. It's all fucking pure marketing. It's for all pure spectacle. Nothing gets done, right? Whether you call it innovation or you call it policy, nothing is actually getting done except for

hucksters and grifters selling you something, right? Marketing you something, dancing on stage and convincing you that it's progress. Like, that's all it is in both spheres, technology or politics. You know, your island baffles me sometimes, but I think it shares the same the same core tenet that the United States does about belief that punishment is fundamentally good on some level or that some of the specifically some of the Tories and other politicians may believe are unified in a belief that punishing people or being punitive on people is good and helps turn them into good characters in addition to other lovely ideas they might have about skull measurements and sizes. So also part of me is not surprised because in mirrors a lot of the debates also

that happen here over drug legalization. I mean, even the fact that like drug legalization in of itself isn't something you can even really discuss the barriers decriminalization because of all because of the nice interplay of like, you know, lingering still lingering phonology and also commitment to punitive measures that lingers here and is also present there. So I don't know, it feels it feels like hearing a more more polite articulation of some of the some of the arguments here. Yeah, that is actually something that's quite fascinating that like America is actually in general further down the road towards drug legalization than we are in the UK, because in general, America is both like a moderately more reactionary and also more of an ice chewing

Protestant ass country than Britain is like, it's weird because in Britain, like drugs are almost like effectively decriminalized for a lot of people. Like, it's weird that like, it's not saying they often choose to prosecute unless it's a black teenager with a bit of weed. But at the same time, the idea of actually decriminalizing it is like completely politically unthinkable. Well, couldn't possibly do that. However, I want to talk about startups. So the startup and by the way, just I'll tell you now, the answer is not this group of people here around this table. The startup is called Brain Trust. Okay, Ed, what do you think Brain Trust is? You know, if I had to guess what Brain Trust is, I would think that it's like a

consulting group for foreign policy, like if I you know, just off the name consulting group for foreign policy, or a nice smokers club for VCs, you know, that's what that's the power that the name gets a little velour jackets on like a paneled wall of a lower jacket where it displays your ape. Oh, yeah, that would be nice. Now, a jacket, Jason, you know what it is, because we've talked about it extensively, because I was trying to figure it out. So I'm going to skip you, Hussain, Brain Trust, what do you think? Okay, what if you could put your brain on the blockchain? It is to do with the blockchain. Of course it is. I mean, kind of a give. I mean, kind of a give, because I know it has to like segue into like this episode. So what if you

could put your brain onto the blockchain and also turn it into some kind of asset? I hate to tell you this, but am I right? Am I correct? I mean, here's the thing. I know what you mean, which is like personality uploading, but if you were to interpret what you said broadly, you would kind of be in the right ballpark. Is it like holding yourself accountable for your Duolingo scores using the blockchain? That would be fun and more useful than what it does. What if you could decentralize your brain? I would love to do that.

I want an NFT of the Duolingo owl. Smoking weed and making the pussy. It's four million dollars. M&M bought it. Oh, fuck, it already exists. We've set it out. One last thing. What if your brain was a kind of Dow structure where other people could decide what you were thinking? Brain Trust is a Dow. So distributed autonomous organization. So again, they're saying you keep being right by accident a little bit.

I feel the idea of like getting other people to think like to think for you is a very sort of like thinking free idea. No one makes me think. If it was to be a Web 3 idea, they would have to think for you, but they wouldn't know what they were thinking. They would just be sort of applying computational power in their brain. That's pretty much how these guys operate. We exist to spread economic opportunity more equitably around the world.

Now, any organization that says it exists to spread economic opportunity more equitably around the world, what you can really interpret from that is wage arbitrage. Yeah, it's like remote slavery, right? They've got like a warehouse full of people in the Philippines who are like doing a job that's in like Manhattan or something. Yeah, that's pretty, that's closer to what it really is. Anyone want to sort of drive the final nail through the coffin? Okay, there's a token.

Yes, there's a token. There's always a token, but the token, the name has to be like brain, something stupid like brain coin. It's stupider than that. Oh no. Dome coin. Dome coin, is that it? Yeah, she got that dumb coin.

Smart coin, IQ coin. The coin is brain trust, but with no vowels. It's like a throwback to 2011. Oh, nice. Brain coin would have been very fun, but instead of the IQ coin, but instead of the C, it's the Q of IQ. So it's like I coin. Exactly, you should work for brain trust because it's better than what they're doing.

Now, so brain trust mission is to build the world's most impactful talent network, one that is user owned, aligns incentives and redistributes value to both talent, meaning freelancers and organizations, meaning Apple and Deloitte and so on. Those guys need some power redistributed to them, I think. Well, here's the thing, right? Oh, there's not another thing. Well, there is indeed another thing. So brain trust is a blockchain.

So it's a DAO based on a blockchain that's governed by smart contracts. So just like an NFT is on a website like OpenSea, but the engine of who owns it or owns the NFT is a smart contract. So you as a freelancer, you have a profile with brain trust, but there is no organization called brain trust. You just linked to this distributed autonomous organization. You just trust the brain. Yeah.

And then if you're one of higher freelancers, you do the same thing. You can connect to it, but there's no central organization. There's no one who owns it really. Now, of course, we five here all know that's a sleight of hand, right? But that's sort of, that's the basics. It is a, it's like monster.com or jobs.com or indeed or whatever, right? It's a job board. Monster.com where you got to look for monsters.

Monsters of JavaScript. Yeah, Geralt of Rivia logging on to monster.com. Ironically to look for a job, but in a different sense. And so when they talk about redistributing value to talents and organizations, they're like, well, hey, check it out. The big platforms, they're like landlords, right? They're sitting on all of this information. And what we're going to do is unite the interests of capital and labor

by kicking out the landlords. They're George. It always comes back down to George-ism always. Why, why is there never a Maoist startup, right? Why do they always have to be fucking George-ist? I'm just imagining like a room full of people where the dude's like, so they're landlords, right? And everyone's like, yeah, they're fucking landlords and we hate landlords, right?

Yeah. So okay, we're going to, we're going to kick them out and be the new landlords. Just kissing and booing. A Maoist startup called Furnace with no vowels. It's a decentralized iron smelting organization where they put a pig iron furnace in everyone's backyard. So I think we're pretty comfortable like what this thing does, right? It's a job's board on the blockchain, on a blockchain.

It runs on a version of Ethereum, but not Ethereum itself, obviously, because that would be too expensive. And it's all for like high value jobs. Like if you're a front-end engineer and you want to work for three months for $150,000, this is where you post that job. So here is their mission. The way we work is broken. In fact, it's been broken for a long time now.

We'd hoped the gig economy would usher in a new era of autonomy and abundance. Oh, I see. They're stupid. What's up? Okay, right. What's up? Yeah. Tell me you're stupid without saying you're stupid. I really thought that, you know,

piecework, if you put it on a phone would have a different result. I thought if you add the phone to the piecework, then that makes you rich, as opposed to every other time anyone else has done piecework, which makes them poorer. What's amazing is that like a half of these companies, it feels like they're reverse engineering, a black mirror episode, like they've seen it and they're like, yeah, what if that was your phone? Actually, maybe that could be a good startup. But they said the economics didn't pan out.

They fucking did. They absolutely did for the people that designed them. We democratized access to servants and I cannot understand why people are angry about this. A few wealthy people, the white paper goes on because, by the way, these companies now don't have websites anymore. They have white papers because they're not companies. Yeah. Or they have tokenomics documents, right?

They're not because they're not companies. They're nonprofit organizations that own the branding of a blockchain that quote unquote, no one owns. Again, we'll get into how that's a falsehood. A few wealthy people became even wealthier and the average worker is still scrambling to make a living. Crazy. You know what, a deepening and intensifying of the employer-employer

really, yeah, because it's not like Indeed or Uber. It's not that expression of that individual company. It's the relationship. They're like, what if we change the way the relationship came to be? The traditional work until you retire contract between employer and employee is being disrupted by short-term rapidly changing engagements. Work history is moving from subjective records to immutable ones with ratings and verifiable expertise.

Awesome. Yeah, I record my toilet break on the blockchain. Please do it. I wanted my future employers to know. I want it to be written in like fucking tombstone so that future generations will know about when I took a shit on company time. Also, the idea that moving from subjective records to immutable ones, the implication being that the immutable records on the blockchain are objective,

not subjective, but motherfucker, where did that record come from? Did it come from you the same way as the other one did? Like, it's the same record. Yeah, it's like, I think the imaginary behind why these things are disruptive or genuinely transformative is that someone say, well, the problem is, is that if you work at Acme Incorporated, that HR, someone malicious person, could go and change your record, we're going to stop that scourge of that thing happening as opposed to the fact that they can record whatever they want anyway.

In this case, even if there's no central organization called BrainTrust recording it, they still control what information gets pulled in. They still code what information gets displayed. And yeah, you can vote on that kind of thing with governance tokens, which we'll get to in a second. But boy, is that broken for other reasons that we'll also talk about. It reminds me when I was growing up in elementary school, like they would threaten us as kids to be like, you know,

this is going on your permanent record, right? Like, like you're late for class that's going on your permanent record, right? The implication being- Riley does this all the time. Gonna be late for podcast. The implication being that one, there is a permanent record that exists and follows you through life. And two, that like future opportunities when you're an adult will depend on,

you know, your elementary school permanent record. And like, you know, Milo was saying, you know, they hear a bad idea or a bad thing and they're like, oh, that's good. Let's do it. Let's actually do it. Like that's what they're trying to do here. They're trying to make the permanent record into reality. It's amazing how libertarians are always just like, okay, we hate the state.

We hate taxes. We hate being forced and forced to have our money extracted at every venture. So what if we reorganize society so that all of that is just how we all live every single day and there's no office where you have to check in and do that, right? Everyone watched, everybody installed money from everybody all day, every day. Wouldn't that be great? It's okay because it's a corporation, not a state. Like we read that book by David Friedman, Milton Friedman's son.

We said we're not real Luddites because we don't know what Luddism is. On TMK, we read this book called Machinery of Freedom, which is like a field guide or hand manual for anarcho-capitalism by Milton Friedman's son, David Friedman. It really is just like creating the state but calling it corporations and saying this is okay, actually. But in this case, it's not even corporations. It's a nonprofit foundation and then everything is in the code, which is different somehow because institutions are bad and code is not an institution.

What if it was a computer? That would be good. Stuff like this makes me think a lot about a thing that Stuart Lee once said in a different context where he described social media as like a star z staffed by gullible volunteers and like so much libertarian shit is basically that. Further context. So they say in the white paper, workers are increasingly abandoning the extractionary model of platforms, meaning that I post a job on like Fiverr or whatever.

Someone else buys that job from me. So they purchased my labor and then the platform takes a huge commission by benefiting from the network effects that it has of having all those people signed up to it. Essentially, essentially being a digital landlord, right? And they're saying what if we eliminated those rents by putting this on the blockchain, which again sort of makes sense on its own terms, but the idea that this is going to abandon the extractionary model of labor is ludicrous. He says, but also listen to this, in the wake of a global pandemic that demonstrated

the remote work as possible in a mass scale and essentially that workers have much more power, workers are unwinding out of traditional employment arrangements and become their own nodes in sprawling freelance networks, a global phenomenon described as the great resignation. And what this really is is like, this is the libertarian answer to increased worker power. It's don't unionize freelance more efficiently using the blockchain. Effectively, this is the libertarian answer to the great resignation. Do not unionize, use the blockchain. The two greatest prisons in capitalism are your mind and a union.

And the sooner you realize it, the sooner that you break out Neo. Yeah, don't join a mind union, join a brain trust. The work revolution coincides with the social revolution spurred by heightened awareness of broader social inequalities. Modern talent networks have long extracted disproportionate value from workers, building their enterprise value by levying high fees on their users. They also refer to the income gap between workers and owners, which they say this will fix. In short, the rich have gotten richer while workers have remained marginalized.

The implication being our blockchain will fix that by basically correcting an information imbalance. Cool. So, I mentioned earlier about the token. There's the bruterist token. There is, because this thing needs to govern itself, right? Because you need this thing needs some people steering it. What happens is the users of brain trust have brain trust tokens, which you can buy.

And then the more tokens you have, the more votes you get on governance. And in a dow, how governance works is it's built into the smart contract that the tokens recognize that you can vote on changes and then the changes are kind of automatically executed. No one needs to go and execute them. And so, that's how it is essentially governed. And you can use brain trust or brain bruterist tokens for lots of different things. You can enhance your job postings with them, or you can enhance your proposals.

You can level up your skills, quote unquote, by using brain trust tokens to like put little experiences on your immutable permanent record. And also, then you can govern the way that the blockchain works. Surprised. Yes. And then here's the interesting thing. Do you know, and again, don't forget, this is not a company. There's no company here.

There's nothing called a corporation. There's no startup. There's a nonprofit foundation that has all the branding and then the blockchain, which has the governance tokens. Isn't it weird that Tiger Global Co2 investments in OMADR technology have spent $100 million buying these tokens for this nonprofit, user-owned foundation that's a cooperative on a blockchain that will never make any money? And that brain trust, this nonprofit, aren't they valued at like $4 billion or something like that?

Weird. I don't know what the market capitalization of their token is off hand. Like, that's how it would be valued is the market cap of the token. Yeah, I think the market cap is over $4 billion from what I've seen. Wow. Why not? Crazy. What the fuck? No, guys, this is not, like you said, it's totally not a corporation.

This is backed by three of the most like bloodthirsty, worthless venture capital funds or capitalist networks you can imagine. Has says nothing about what we're doing here. Yeah, you know, I mean, I mean, this organization that like Tiger Global, one of these organizations where if they put $100 million into an investment, they do that because they want to get back $10 billion, right? Those people, they didn't do that this time. They just bought all these tokens for funsies because they loved the white paper.

When they love democracy, that's why they just wanted to vote a lot because they love the governance system of ancient Athens. They're big on that over at Tiger Global. Wow, Riley thinks that people are incapable of learning and growing. All right. It's sort of, yeah, it's sort of, it's sort of incredible how like it's again, one of the classic situations where like they've sort of diagnosed the problem correctly, i.e. about like, okay, you have this kind of unstable labor market and like,

you know, you have like this abundance of freelancers and lots of these freelancers are kind of like fighting for minimal amounts of work and everything. And this is a problem. This is a structural economic problem. And like, yeah, even kind of, you know, you can make the argument to kind of say, but okay, well, more empowerment for these types of precarious like forces of labor are probably a good thing. But then their kind of solution to that is this sort of like weird tokenized system,

which can very, very easily be exploited and is designed to be exploited because they can't kind of reach the logical conclusion that most people have, which is that maybe getting more money might be a good thing. And like people think that is a better source of empowerment. But anyway, I don't know. What do I know? How they, how they bring that in is they say, look, a normal job board will charge you like a percentage of what you take as fees for being on.

And again, like the George's criticism of landlords isn't wrong. It's just, it's wrong that it stops there. And like, yeah, they're right that the platforms are incredibly exploitative and sort of rentieristic. But then because what they do is they've centralized all the information and then they use the fact they've monopolized access to that information and the ability of people to communicate using it. They then just like charge rents on people using it. And they're saying, well, let's kick out the landlords.

Let's kick out the platforms. Let's charge like a 10% fee to the clients only. So not the freelancers in order to like, because they think you do need to like pay to maintain and or even like a Dow, right? Like you have to buy, you have to pay for like, you know, hash, you have to pay for those apes. Yeah, you have to pay, but you do have to pay for things. That's, that's like unrealistic to think you don't. But what I've sort of, what I'm beginning to understand about these web three startups

is that the, the goal is still the same, right? It's just that instead of buying shares in the company, you buy a huge number of the tokens and then hope that the tokens become very in demand. Because then what Tiger Global can do, let's say, let's say Brain Trust takes off, becomes really popular. It becomes a kind of quote unquote user owned monopolist, right? Like, and then all of a sudden, if you want to say, I don't know, post a job and then promote it so that your profile is more visible.

All of a sudden that takes Brain Trust coin and who holds all that Brain Trust coin? Why, why it's our good friends, Tiger Global. They hold all that brain and suddenly people are buying it. Their hundred million dollar investment becomes very, very valuable because what they've essentially done is they have sat and they have made themselves rentiers on the same process. It's almost as though, because they, if they, 10 years ago, Tiger Global would have invested in a job board that said, we're a local social mobile job board that's connecting kick-ass developers with awesome organization, like a web two one, right?

Like one that was more of a central organization. They're just doing the same thing. They're just calling it something else, effectively. And so this is like, It's almost as though there's a theme developing on this property. People doing something that has existed for a very long time, but calling it something else. It's almost as though a lot of those robots are just a guy. I think one of the things that's like when Riley, when you and I were talking about Brain

Trust and the DMs and like trying to like do some analysis and be like, what is going on here? Like how are they making money? Like how is this actually happening? I think part of the difficulty of sussing out a lot of this, a lot of these web three things is that there's equal parts, grifters and useful idiots. And it's really difficult sometimes to discern who is a grifter, right? Who is like knowingly doing something that has baked into exploitation and extraction and like knows that they are running a grift versus who is a useful idiot?

Who is so blinded by the ideology and the propaganda and the buzzwords that they are also doing something that has exploitation and extraction baked into it, but they don't realize that's what they're doing. And it can be like actually really impossible sometimes to discern between those two groups of people. Yeah, absolutely. One of the things we talked about about this is that it does kind of uncover one of the places that those two people come together, which is that they all have the same Hayekian fantasy that the market is itself this big distributed computer that can assign a quote unquote fair

value to everything. So they say in the white paper, one of the key benefits of the Brain Trust network is its ability to provide efficient price discovery for all services. In a decentralized network, users are able to track in real time the market value of assets in this case, labor. Consider sort of the digital asset exchanges like Uniswap, where the supply and demand of listed digital assets are easily observed by the public. And so a fair market price is indisputably produced by price discovery activities on these networks. Again, never minding what we know about the pricing of digital assets just being the same two guys selling the same picture of an ape spreading its butthole back and forth

like 30 times for millions of dollars each, thereby setting the value, right? It's called the economy, Riley. I don't see why you're being so down on it. We've got a recession to get out of. And here's the other thing, right? I think the key question with understanding Brain Trust is what does Tiger Global get out of it, right? Either they get an investment where they hold a coin that suddenly becomes super necessary to get if you want a job anywhere, and then Tiger Global can say, it's $100 if you want to post a job. Here you go. Have a fucking Brain Trust coin, you asshole. Or maybe what happens is there's a big hype cycle, and then Tiger Global being the first investor is basically bailed out of its investment by a

bunch of retail investors who hope that someone else will bail them out of their investment, and so on forever, Riley. I think you're suggesting that at the top there's this one investor, right? And then below him there's a slightly wider shelf of investors, and then below them there's an even wider shelf of investors, and every shelf of investors relies on a wider shelf of investors below it. Now, hear me out on this. If you were to take this on a whiteboard and then you were to draw lines around it, gunshot. I know you have a classics education, and what you describe sounds a lot like Plato's Republic, democracy. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, it's democracy. That was what I was about to say before I was rudely

shot dead. Yeah, so it's, look, the thing is, right, you could say that about any tech IPO, because their Facebook's never going to pay a fucking dividend, or Metta's never going to pay a fucking dividend, right? Because these things are things you buy because you hope the value is going to go up, and the value goes up when someone else pays more for it from you. And like, the problem is that is stupid and unsustainable. Like, don't forget me wrong. All of it is the whole thing, including stocks that pay dividends, stupid and unsustainable for reasons laid out by Marx. But this is sort of making it much faster and dumber, and you don't have to sort of, you call that contradictions inherent to capitalism. I'll show you some contradictions,

motherfucker. This is new kind of money. Yeah. Oh, American can paying three cents a share. I invented my own money, and I sold it to someone else for different money. What about a four million dollar apes that destroys the Amazon rainforest? Are you hearing me, Marx? You're a child. You know nothing. Yeah. Right. And so there's all sorts of other talk of like, oh, we're going to democratize this and that. But like, if you're attracting the same VCs who want the same thing, what you've done is you have branded what's always happening as something that is somehow better. And you know what? I mean, the thing is, right? Maybe like, yeah, it is good to have to have like a user owned talent network. It's probably the best way to govern that realistically is probably a decentralized

autonomous organization. However, to have the problem is, is that because it is fundamentally the same as everything else, they're going to have a highly financialized way of interacting with it that's going to be bought by venture capital funds. And so it's no different. Yep. Great talk, guys. Should we wind this up? No, it reminds me of maybe a segue, but like, I can't remember who said it, but they were like, you know, is it any coincidence, you know, that the three that the art is the reason why web three has a three in it because there are three investment firms that are pushing it, right? You have a 16 Z. And then you have, I think Tiger Global, I don't remember the third one, right? And you know, it's like, that's how it always is.

It's with Tiger Global also has been involved involved in one of my favorite investments that they've done is in like SPACs or in like the pre-pershing square models. Remember SPACs, right? Right. See, it's so quiet now. Back in Poghorn. Oh, sorry. It's a normal company that's listed on the, on the grandpa exchange. Yeah. How is that a monkey? What I love also, there's like, there, they also saw an opportunity that they're like, look, we're just helping companies who want to get public, but can't possibly get public,

go public. But then if you just look at the model, what's really happening is they are just foisting a bag of unicorn shit onto every single investor who comes after them because they got in the door and you get free stocks when you go in the door. And similarly here, yeah, you get free tokens. Most of these, most of these business models, most of these Dow models, the way they're set up also is like, you pour in a lot of money and then you also are now in a position to just get free tokens for literally, for no reason other than existing, right? You get free tokens for staking them as like liquidity and really complex financial speculative instruments. So even if they ate shit in their investment, they'd be able to be involved in really complex

financial tricks and scams to make up some of that money and get it back. Maybe do a liquidity exchange for some AVACs if you want, right? And then play with degenerate tokens on other exchanges that are unregulated. You know, they, you know, you could do anything with it. You just have to put enough money or skin into the game and for them, it's nothing. Right. Yeah. It's, it's almost though you get, you're big enough, you just win by being there. Yeah. You just literally just throw money or buy lottery tickets if you're like Masayoshi-san, you know, you can do any. Oh yeah. That was a cool one. I respected that. That was great. SoftBank will be investing in the lottery. Perfect. Why not? Somebody's got to win.

Might be me. There's a lot more to talk about about DAOs in general and how they like have switched out a form of company script for doing actual labor as well. Right. But I think that's for another time. I want to talk like, I want to pull back, right? Because we've, this group of us together, we've talked about like, when we, when we come together, we tend to talk about different big picture things in like the field of technology and trying to think of what we've talked about the metaverse, for example, we tried to like figure out what was making Netflix tick. And I think it's, I want to want to do is pull back again to web three in general. This thing that I think gets talked about a lot, but not well understood. And I think it's easy to think

web three is just pictures of apes. And you're sort of not entirely wrong, but also not entirely right. Yeah, but some lions as well. I remember those. I wonder if they're still worth tons of money. Yeah. There's the lions. There's the like silhouettes of women, that one lady shapes with Alan Vardridge. Yeah. So what, what, I mean, if I wanted to think about web three on its own terms, I've sort of, I've got a sort of potted definition from the web three foundation. But Ed and Jathan, what do you, if you guys wanted to define web, I mean, Ed, you've given yours already, which is, is pushed by three VCs. Jathan, what do you think? What is, what is web three? How do you understand it? Yeah. I mean, and I think this gets at a, at a bigger point that you're also

driving at here as well, Riley, which is that like, you know, the, the so-called like paradigmatic disruptions in the internet, right? Like, like it's called web three because it's following or supposedly following directly from web 2.0, which itself followed from the web or web one, right? Like, like it's, it's setting up for itself this like phase model of history where, you know, the internet develops, you know, the internet, whatever that is, right? Develops in this like linear stage progression from one thing to the next to the next. And, and each one is, you know, not, not, not even, you know, people don't even talk about as like building from each other, but again, as disruptions, right? As, as like a paradigmatic rupture in what the internet means.

And so like, you know, for, I think, while I think that's a lot of bullshit, and we'll talk about that, and it's very a, a material and a historical way of understanding these technological and cultural systems, you know, the way that web three is often talked about by the, the, the mavens in favor of it is, you know, they talk about like web one, the analogy is a page, right? It's, it's, you know, you log on and there's just a, there's a web page and you read and, and that's all. And web two is the platform, right? And we all know what that is. And web three is the network, right? So it's like, you know, it's meant to be, you know, replaces the democratization of web 2.0 with the decentralization of web three, right? Where it's, it's no longer

about this like model of liberal democracy and participation that a lot of people talked about, you know, with the platforms of web 2.0, it is a much more like libertarian individualistic idea of, you know, no, no, no, we are not coming together to do some kind of what Tim O'Reilly, who will talk about calls collective intelligence of web 2.0, we are instead becoming the ultimate atomistic ubermensch of our own networks, right? Like we are decentralized in the sense that we are all the individual great men of history. Like that is really the model of the internet that web three is trying to push. Yeah. Well, it's why all of the, everything in web three always has its own special little money, right? Because every single interaction you have with any other thing needs

to be somehow monetized. Yeah, because that's the point of money is that everyone has their own money, because you don't want a money where everyone has the same money, which makes it easy to exchange things with each other. You want everyone to have their own esoteric money, which then has to be complex exchange for the type of money you need to buy the other thing that you're buying. Absolutely. Yeah, that's how an economy works. The whole model of the economy is nobody has money and everybody wants it. The new model of the economy is everybody has money and nobody wants it. I do sort of miss the old school capitalists who, you know, like they were evil and everything, but like they understood that shit had to work. Like the Henry Ford types,

they had a sense of, you know, like the production line. Hilariously, I saw someone on Twitter yesterday trying to argue that like the production line was a particularly evil capitalist invention, because it prevented people from having the skills to make the entire thing. And I'm like, oh yeah, because in the Soviet Union, every worker went to the factory and built an entire car. That is sort of like an orthodox Marxist view, not that the Soviet Union is necessarily doing it, but rather that like the point of the production line is that the worker is no longer able to do anything except in the context of the production line, which he doesn't own. Right. The division of labor is done in such a way where it's dehumanizing and not like,

if you wanted to, you could just build whatever part of the car, I mean, you know, it wouldn't be exactly efficient or productive. But if you wanted to, you could decide, you know, I really am interested in this part of the story factory. That is sort of what we're talking about when we talk about the specific evil of the production line. It's because it sort of instanced that particular rupture of the worker from his labor. That's sort of what we're talking about. But the thing about it is it also happens to be a very effective way of getting something done. So if you had some people in charge of it who weren't evil, that could be like a great way if everyone could share in the benefit. This is what they call dialectics. Yeah, that's a very

effective thing. Correct. Anyway, look, so back to Web 3. So what if we democratize the factory? What if everyone in the factory gone ape? No, no, no, no. You've gone too far. No, we're not at the apes yet. No, I insist on the apes. We're going to have our first schism. That's it. I'm Trotsky and I demand the apes. First comes communism, then comes the ape smile. You've got it mixed up. There's actually a page of the original volume three of capital that talks about when the apes come in. It was just stuck to the other page. Oh, yeah, that's right. So look, let's go with this. I shouldn't have come on the communist manifest. So the Web 3 Foundation, which this is Gavin Wood

writing, who helped develop Ethereum. He wrote, personally, Gavin wouldn't. Sorry. The key principles of Web 3 is users owning their own data, not corporations. Global digital transactions are secure, which means trustless. And online exchanges of information and value are decentralized. So essentially, instead of Facebook sitting on a big bunch of data and then its goal is to obscure the cost of the service it provides you by taking a thing that you don't really notice and then selling it to other people you don't know what selling it to, you quote, own your own data. It's just you own it, for example, on a profusion of different blockchains that don't interoperate with one another and all have different currencies.

It is, again, the Web 3 story is a very tidy one. If you're a doctrinaire Hayekian, and we know every time doctrinaire Hayekians have come together to try to make a society, we know what happens. We sure do. You get a colonia dignidad situation. And so it's the, because the idea, what strikes me about this, right, is the fantasy of this revolution of the internet to be defined entirely by blockchains that, again, like, might happen because a lot of very wealthy and powerful people have an interest in it happening and they can make things happen, right, that that future is one where things don't work very well because of this very, you might say, principled stand that the people in charge of building it

are making in favor of hating institutions because they're institutions, because this is centralized, it's therefore bad. I must be master of all I survey. And that's how you get to your house burning down and trying to negotiate with the firefighter if they'll put it out. Yeah. Yeah. How many apes will they accept to save your house? Put out my burning out. And, you know, so it's how, so the Web 3 supposedly, architecturally, is supposed to look something like this, right? It's these DAOs instead of corporations, it's cryptocurrency instead of money, it's sort of blockchains that generally put these things together because you can, because the rules can just be coded directly in on the

smart contracts on the blockchains themselves, you don't need someone like, for example, approving my application to join Facebook, because what happens, you apply to Facebook, they have some rules internally in Facebook, you fill in your form, the form is checked against those rules, then Facebook gives you a profile and then starts spying on you, right? How a blockchain would work architecturally is the rules are coded into the blockchain, there's no, there's nothing central, there's no, you don't give it to anyone else, you just put it on there and if it fits, it sticks, essentially, right? That's the, that's the sort of basic premise of how you put information onto this thing and how it communicates. Whereas Web 2.0, right, we talk

about platforms, highly permissioned walled committees, where that basically their whole profit is we center everyone together and then by putting them all together, we can make a lot of money by data harvesting or ad targeting or whatever, right? And what I find sort of, and again, in theory, right? And if you're going to be a doctrinaire hierarchy and if you're going to be like one of these sovereign individual types, you could say, yeah, perfect, if everyone has perfect information, right? Because I know everyone else on this blockchain, I know how much it's going to cost for me to post to it, that everyone's going to make perfect decisions and all humans will be completely liberated. But again, Jay, we were talking

about this, that's completely fucking insane. Yeah, I mean, it is very interesting to see, and again, this is what we've talked about, where it's like the old sour wine of neoliberalism poured into new stupid bottles, right? Because it really is like, they continue to try to make high a cap in, right? Quit trying to make high a cap in. And they continue to find like, try to find new technological systems to do so. Like, you know, we were talking about brain trust and reading the white paper, it is pretty striking how, you know, this is what makes me think they are useful idiots, not so much grifters, but useful idiots doing the same thing. But it is quite striking how that white paper is extremely hyper hyacin in like the language it uses in terms

of like price discovery, right, efficient price discovery, and so on. And like, I think a lot of people who are aware of the thought of Friedrich Hayek, and like, you know, his very famous essay, the use of knowledge in society, right, the kind of a neoliberal ideology that formed the basis of like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and the, you know, the Pinochet and Chicago boys, like, but they don't, I don't think a lot of people know that Hayek himself later in life became extremely interested in cybernetics. And like, what we now know of as cognitive computing, and he called the market the greatest information processor mankind has ever built, right? Like, he himself thought of the market as a big computer. And, you know, it's very interesting to see that,

like, this is in a lot of ways Hayek's dream finally being brought to some form of fruition. It's not, you know, the Pinochet coup happens, and they literally put a knife in the screen, in one of the screens of Cyberson saying, this is not what we believe in. But now, you know, fast forward 50 years later or whatever. And the Web3 goons are like, no, this is what we believe in. We believe in the neoliberal Cyberson. But it looks like Dow's, it looks like NFTs, it looks like crypto, like, you know, and, you know, and, and as you said, like, we know what happens in history when a Hayekian policy or society tries to come to fruition. It's brutal. It's authoritarian. It's nasty. It's all the Hobbesian adjectives. And I mean,

there's nothing in history to show us that what's happening with Web3 will be anything other than that. So, Hussein, what's I want to bring you in on this as well. I was going to say, RAP, Frederick Hayek, you'd have loved the ape. Yeah, I mean, like, yeah, it's like, you know, there's nothing I like disagree with, like, in terms of Jaffin, who like knows much more about this than like I would. But yeah, I mean, one thing I was going to say, like, before was, I mean, even at like a basic level, I sometimes like ask myself, you know, for all the kind of like virtues of like Web3 that the evangelists love to, you know, to like, to valorize, like, they haven't really answered the basic question of like, why is any of this necessary? You know, like, I kind of

get, I kind of get the premise of like, you know, sovereignty over your data and data ownership and stuff like that. But like, it doesn't sort of, to me, like, it doesn't really make a lot of sense when like the way in which like data is conceived of, which is very much like in a very particular, like, extremely commodified way. I think, you know, when you kind of tell someone, yeah, you could own your data, like an ordinary person, like the thing is, okay, well, what, what, what, what, what do I, what do I do with it? Right? Because the way that like Web2 is kind of built, like, you know, um, you know, where like, you have this sort of like platform economy and you have like all these services that require like, you know, umpteen amounts of like, you know, they require

like so much of your data and they require like so many kind of passwords and stuff like, you can definitely make arguments to like Web2, like, isn't, you know, is kind of like hyper-capitalist and like, it's not particularly empowering and that like, you know, it is kind of something that like, no one really enjoys like using, but they've kind of like, we're all sort of coerced into it. But Web3 like doesn't answer any of those problems. It just kind of is kind of like, okay, well, we know that like, you kind of are coerced into using the system. So what we're going to do is like, it's going to take like its worst excesses and force you to kind of engage with it on a much more personalized level. And we'll kind of give you like this kind of, you know, we'll kind

of give you this token of like perceived autonomy that as we've mentioned, you don't really have. And in exchange, you can kind of like give us more of your data very willingly, right? And you can give us more of your information really willingly. And we can sort of use that in like much more, you know, we can use that for like a lot other things. And there's nothing you can do about it because it operates on like different blockchains and different servers. Like every time I try to engage with this, it's just like, why, what is the actual kind of case with this being an emancipatory technology, right? And no one, no one can really seem to answer that. When you've got a hammer, everything looks like a nail, right? The blockchain guys want to solve

everything with the blockchain. But then you get something like this, right? Where it's got like the job board, like if you really wanted a not-for-profit job board, you could set up like a proper like not-for-profit, which legally can't make a profit and constitutionally say, okay, this is how this company is run. It runs this job board. It reinvests X amount of the money it takes into this whatever it pays this many staff this much. Like you could just do that without decentralizing it and have like a not-for-profit job board. Like that's a thing you can add. Right. And this is kind of like the thing about, I mean, like I really should have said it more succinctly, but ultimately, like it comes down to just this idea that like the kind

of user case for web free is being made by tech guys who have caused problems that they now want to solve in like their own very specific ways. And they see it as like not just a nail, but like a specific nail that requires like a specific hammer, which, you know, just often just tends to like benefit them. Right. And I think that's exactly right. And this has been a big problem plaguing us forever is tech guys deciding they're going to solve the problems they caused and getting a lot of oxygen, you know, in an airtime with these claims. Like I remember, you know, 10 years ago, Jaren Lanier wrote that book who owns the future, right? And for those who don't know, right? Jaren Lanier is a pioneer of virtual reality and has been drawing a salary from Microsoft for the

past like 30 years as some like senior research scientist, but also has made a nice little name for himself as one of the early kind of, you know, like Tristan Harris style tech, you know, tech critics from within the tech sector writing these, you know, pop, you know, books about like you are not a gadget and who owns the future. And the big thing, the big solution he posed in this book from 10 years ago was around data ownership. And it was about everybody will should own their own data. And then it's an, and then you create this network of micro transactions where, you know, Facebook or your Facebook pays you fractions of a penny every time it uses your data, you know, Google pays you fractions of a penny everything. You know, so you have this whole

network of micro transactions, which is then meant to be empowering, right? It's meant to be like, well, if data is a commodity, then you should own it and you should be able to sell it and get some money from it. But of course, the problem here is that that's, I mean, technically very dumb, but you know, but it does kind of preempt a lot of the web three stuff, like I think a lot of web three guys would see that and be like, wow, yeah, that is what we should be doing. I was going to say that they are actually doing that. Like, you know, so one of the things that one of their like little pet projects, which they really kind of love talking about conferences, is kind of like the expansion of the, of the creator economy, right? And this idea that like,

you know, so for them, like they diagnose the problem as being that all platforms don't kind of like pay creators enough, but also like not a lot of, you know, we need more people who are like producing content for like said platforms. So the great thing about the creator economy is that it gives you all this like autonomy to create content by like, you know, so where, where not only can you commodify your own data and like, you know, package it and sell it how you want to. But you also have like, you know, because everything about web three is like about micro chatting transactions and every relationship on the internet in web three will be a transactional one, right? Something that we know, like definitely doesn't have any problem,

like social problems, you know, or any or like, or have any political consequences. But real quick, I think one of the big problems with Jaren Lanier's critique is, you know, not only the technological kind of dumbness of it, okay, we just wait long enough and the technology comes around, but it's fundamentally that it misunderstands the political economy of technology by offering a solution to that political economy based on neoliberal economization, right? It's this idea that it's, it's an anti politics, right? It's that there's no politics. There's no society. There's no ethics. All the solutions are always found in economization or the integration of economic rationalities into every single part of life.

So if there's a problem about power over data use and ownership, well, that problem can be solved by doing an economic system of micro transactions, right? Hyper commodification will solve that problem. And it's fundamentally not the solution, right? It really is quite literally saying, the house is on fire. I know what will put it out more fire, right? The infusion of property rights also like as the avenue by which we'll like rationalize and economize new goods and services and intangible assets is also really, it's like every single time there's an enclosure, every single time there's new goods, new services that are previously public or previously unquantified. There's this attempt to try and enclose them and

rationalize them or subject them to market logic under the argument that like, okay, once they do that, it'll be much easier for us to deal with them and to organize them and to be more productive with them and to input them into larger and larger and larger technological processes or whatever else we want to do for complex civilization. But every single fucking time, almost what happens is you do it, you consume or you exhaust a lot of the most productive from the market sense and valuable parts of it, right? And then you plug it into processes that aren't actually novelly innovative, not novelly productive in new ways. They're really just reinforcing or making cheaper pre-existing relationships and norms, right? Like the

The same old apes. Yeah, the same, yeah, like apes, right? Like the apes who do, to do nature, right, to quantify and commodify nature in the name of conservation, right? What's going to end up happening is going to is that they will end up also deciding, as they've already have in some of the proposals, that there's a certain amount of biodiversity that can be lost. And then we can create a really robust system that finds people and punishes them for going beyond that range. Okay, well, isn't the fucking point to preserve as much biodiversity as possible and not like say we're going to consign some of it to the, you know, to the, to the furnaces. And similarly, with like the digital world, right? With the digital world,

it's like, okay, we're going to sacrifice a lot of the things that people value and generally like because they get in the way of like profit or realization of currently illegal or immoral, otherwise, taboo profits, right? That's really why I see most of these web three gig economy, all of these like frontier, innovative, bullshit, digital concepts are really just like, for some reason, you guys don't want us to make more money. So like, we're going to just do, we're going to wage like a long war, a war maneuver to like fucking brainwash you into believing that it's okay to do that. And then do it. And I think crucially, right, it's just like when we talk about other things, right? It's important not to like

almost preemptively have nostalgia for the web two platforms, right? Right? Because that there is mass, we've seen what kind of sort of we talked about much on here. In fact, mass exploitation of, of, of not just, of not just data, but also huge exploitation of labor, especially in the global south. And so on. So in order to maintain this central control over data in a way that people want to keep engaging with, and also again, to kind of compel people to part with their data via privacy policy, rather than compel them to part with it on the basis of a microtransaction, right? You might be enjoying your video on eBalm's world, but there is blood on your hands. So it's not that, it's not that the old system is better.

It's that the people fighting for, to replace it with the new system coming in with the new paradigm. It's not a new paradigm of relating to you. It's a new paradigm of doing the same kind of things to you, but with tools that they prefer. Effectively. Yeah. And even thinking of it as paradigms and the way that the marketing terms around web 2.0 or web three is fundamentally wrong. It's as, you know, it's more of an infrastructural layering. That's what it is. It's not a paradigmatic rupture or rapture at all. And if there's one takeaway message from this episode, it should be down with the revisionist dogs who don't do historical materialism of the internet, right? Who, you know, backtrack it into these like phase progressions or these different

distinct stages of the internet. That is wrong. It's a historical and it's a materialist, and it's also so recent in the past that we can, that how could we have this level of like broad generalized and Nisha already about things that like are, that only just came into fruition not that long ago? Like on, on, on the This Machine Kills Patreon, we just wrapped up a book club series that we did on this book by Wendy HK Chun, who's a very well known cultural theorist of kind of cyber cultures and the internet and does a lot of really great work on, on that topic. And she wrote this book in 2005 called Control and Freedom, Power and Paranoia and the Age of Fiber Optics. And like without realizing it, as we were going through this

book discussing it chapter by chapter, which you know, this book is really about the first like 10 years of the post privatization internet and cyber and the origins of cyber culture and the kind of like frontier mindset and, and all of that kind of stuff. And all of the things that she was talking about from the 90s and the early 2000s, all of the critiques and analysis that she was outlining, so much of it fits one to one to everything that was currently happening as we were reading and discussing this book with web three, it really just like highlighted how much we have one forgotten about what the internet and all of this kind of stuff was like even 10 years ago and to like how much of it is all still the same stuff still subjected

to the same analysis and same critiques because you know, it's not so much a paradigmatic disruption but like this mass, you know, Min and Black Neuralizer that tries to get you to forget what had happened so that they can do it all over again. Yeah, people are trying to forget Kony 2012, but I'm fucking Clockwork Orange holding their eyelids open, making them remember. So just before we, can you give just an example of how, of what you mean here, how this is, because we, I think we've talked about sort of how the way this is much of the same, right? The same companies that financed the first wave of startups, now they're financing this wave of, you know, DAOs or whatever, right? But is this true just

it's the same people who are aiming at the same goals just using a different shaped tool or is it even less distinctive than that? I mean, you're going to jump in, Ed? Oh, no, I would just, you know, say, I think it's interesting that in a lot of the speculative bubbles and even when they've burst, the people who made a lot of money in one carry it forward or make it again in another, right? Because you still retain the connections and that's really all you need. If you want to make a lot of money in these fields and so what you end up seeing is like, you know, a firm like A16Z or interesting Horowitz is going to make money both off of the Web 3.0 and also the traditional Web 2.0 platforms, right? Because a lot of the

times what distinguishes a Web 2.0 and a Web 3.0 platform is the statement that the company gives as to why they're investing in this firm as opposed to another, right? Like Uber is a Web 2.0 firm, maybe in that taxonomy, right? But if you were to create an Uber that for some reason was exclusively operating on the blockchain or said it was, even if it wasn't, right? It was taking crypto payments. If it was a way to figure, if you could figure out some weird novel application of it that wasn't particularly useful but shiny, that would be a Web 3.0 application even though the difference really is just like UI payment system and who it's explicitly targeting, right? It's not like a true fundamental difference in those instances when it's the same funder involved.

There's also a general difference in that like, yeah, this is in one way or another, it's supposed to be a different type of firm startup that is either more explicitly based in crypto, more explicitly based in decentralization, whatever that may look like and other firms have room to like, you know, butt in their heads there. But I would think like a lot of the funders and investors are similar to like Web 2.0 because they have the money, you know? Yeah, it's the same people and I'll just jump really quickly jump in the same. It's not only many of the same people and financial interests, it's many of the same like political ideologies and propagandas, right? Around like, you know, the first chapter of Wendy Chun's book is called

Why Cyberspace and it's looking at this like, you know, frontier, you know, electronic frontier, cyberspace mentality of the internet as, you know, the next stage for capitalist imperialism to colonize, right? And that mentality still exists and we still see that same kind of propaganda and the same kind of political ideology rolled out with Web 3. You know, they talk about frontierism, right? I mean, this is also Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and the space race, right? Space is the final frontier. Like, you know, like many, you know, Rosa Luxemburg talked about imperialism. Linnon talked about imperialism as a core part of capitalism, you know, as a core part of the acceleration and over accumulation of capitalism

as a constant search for new frontiers to colonize, to extract, to exploit, to dump the overproduced commodities into those places, right? And this is very much the same kind of political economic dynamics that we see happening with, you know, new technologies, new frontiers, but at the core, it's still the same old stuff for hundreds of years. And I think this is the big thing that's at the core of my political economic analysis of technology is that nothing, you know, there are new things, but nothing is new in this sense of like, we've never seen this before, right? Like, I think that we really do, we can learn a lot by applying just pretty, you know, a fundamental critique of political economy to the world around

and continue to rediscover the same analysis. It's just new technologies hiding old dynamics. Well, there's nothing new under the sun, but what if we checked a different sun? Or what if we invented a sun on the blockchains for there to be new stuff? Man, I have so much more to talk about with you guys. What if on the blockchain you could buy a picture of a sun that was smoking weed and doing the pussy eating gesture? As ever, every time we talk, I end up with like 30 more things I want to get into, such as like the history of web 2.0 and Tim O'Reilly and like technological theory of bubbles, but Coney 2012. Yeah, absolutely. You know, the one, but once again, we have, we have come to our limit of time, but

Ed and Jason, the bell is going on. Bell is going. As ever, it is always a massive pleasure to talk to you guys. And thank you very much for coming on. Thanks for having us. Always, always fun. And this is also why our episodes on this machine kills range from an hour and a half to two hours long because we do not have the time discipline of Riley to be like, oh, okay, there's time. Let's end the conversation. Because you don't have the bell. We need a better system. Yeah, we got to go to the next podcast. You should collect, you could connect your two bells on the basis of a blockchain so that it's immutable. You have an immutable record of when the bell rang. That's important. Actually, it's not just blockchain. It's quantum now. We could do that.

No, I cannot recommend this machine kills enough. If you're listening to this, you should check it out. And additionally, I want to thank you for listening to the free episodes. Consider listening to the paid ones. It's five bucks a month. You get a second episode every week and a free ape. We can't afford that. We can afford that. That's fine. Yeah, but thank you for all. Thank you. Once again, Ed and Jaythom coming on. Check out TMK. Thank you for listening. We'll see you in a few days. Bye, everyone. Bye.