 
good morning everyone very happy to be
here in London and to share some
thoughts about democracy and just
talking backstage I was confessing that
I feel more pessimistic than ever but
anyway I'll try to bring here some some
ideas of what we have been looking at in
the field of democracy democracy earth
is a nonprofit organization we're a
foundation we build open-source software
using peer-to-peer protocols to deploy
censorship resistant democracies over
the Internet
I come from Argentina Argentina is a
country that is consistently going from
crisis to crisis has a very weak
institutional it's a very weak very weak
institutional model it's a very weak
democracy but still a place where people
are very much politicized and in the
streets trying to bring ideas that help
improve society and one of the things
about democracy that I've learned
throughout the past five years running
democracy earth is that ultimately what
we want these systems that are built for
deep conflicts I promise that I won't
mentioned the word breaks it just gonna
get that out of the presentation but
they're you know one of the reasons
organizations or communities when they
decide to go out and make a decision
with a vote is usually the mechanism of
last resort most organizations and most
constituency's would rather make
decisions through consensus or through
common sense but when there's a
contentious event or there's something
that is challenging a community that's
when usually people go out for a boat
and boats can be this means that
democracies get implemented in context
were these are contexts of deep
conflicts these are contexts where there
is there's a very high stakes decision
to be made and usually what
this means inner view is that the higher
the risk the higher the need for
legitimacy in the decision-making
process and legitimacy is a critical
component we want to make a democracy
that works is a democracy were the
losing side also can agree with with the
result rather than splitting a society
apart or breaking a society apart so
this also brings another problem that
when we when we try to implement
solutions in context are facing a deep
conflict this means that some parts of
that constituency will try to hijack the
system will try to attack the
decision-making system so throughout the
last five years in democracy earth we
try to find real context democracies are
not surveys they are not polls we want
to find organizations that are facing a
deep conflict that are willing to
surrender their decision-making process
to an innovative way of doing democracy
either through digital form or through
much more interesting rules and just
first-past-the-post voting and
throughout these past five years I'm
gonna share with you some of this pilot
some of these experiences of that we
have worked with in the past in every
single implementation we made we have
been attacked in one way or another and
we have discovered one vulnerability or
one weakness of the system we were
trying to implement so my my personal
story with with this ideas begins in
2012 back in Buenos Aires Argentina were
with a group of friends and colleagues
we started a political party called
partido della red or the net party in
english and the whole ideology of this
party was very simple and it can be
summarized in a tweet we would put
candidates for Congress that are
committed to voting Congress always
according to what people tell them
online how to vote that's the entire
ideology of the party so we run actually
for elections in in 2013 in 2013 we run
for our first election
an independent party and it was an
incredible experience because for me it
was my first time as an activist my
first time working for a set of
political ideas discovering a lot of
young people that were willing to start
thinking about democracy under in in a
new way using the the language of the
digital generation and the experience of
campaigning of going out in the streets
of talking to everyone about the
possibility of improving democracy this
way it's a it's one of the most
fascinating experiences I've been
through in my life one of the funniest
things we did during that campaign is
that we we always talked about putting a
Trojan legislature in Congress that does
not look like a real legislature because
in reality he will be simply a puppet of
the people being used on that we'll be
voting over the internet so we literally
built four meter tall Trojan horse that
we paraded through the streets of Buenos
Aires you can see a picture of it of
that horse there and we always say that
we made we make campaigning with a work
of art not marketing but but art so it
was incredible you know going through
the streets with Buenos Aires with a
massive Trojan horse telling you know at
the the citizens of my city that we were
gonna hack the Congress we needed three
percent of the votes to get the Conneaut
elected we only got 1.2 but it was
enough to get something started and we
started putting more emphasis and more
focus on the software in even though we
didn't get the candidate elected in in
2014 we were able to make the first
implementation of her software with the
city Congress of when Osiris where and
16 political parties contributed our
bill each party and 13,000 citizens
voted online to decide which bill would
be treated in the floor of the Congress
with the official support from the
Congress this was our first pilot making
digital democracy our first assumption
was if we make it open source and it's a
software anyone can old it and
contribute to and it's definitely it was
a good first step to to this problem
but very soon we found out when we made
this implementation that the Workers
Party they suddenly flooded the system
with six thousand fake identities or you
know significantly more identities than
the other part is competing in this
process which made us you know when we
look at the IPS and and we made that try
to analyze a little bit of the data we
realize you know open source is not
enough if the Workers Party can come or
any party can come and try to subvert
the system with fake identities then we
need to put you know is it we need to
put more emphasis on and try to
understand better the problem of how we
give boater rights over these platforms
but nonetheless it was a great
experience actually well we have to
accept the result that the Workers Party
but it was actually a very good bill
about giving bench about the pensions of
the elder in in the city of Buenos Aires
not that bill got treated in the floor
they the Workers Party wanted to push
that into the floor of the Congress it
didn't get approved by the Congress
later it was a pity but it was a first
pilot the first experience to to to do
democracy in a digital way in Latin
America in in South America in my
country now there's a lot I can tell you
also about the dark side of this
engaging politics in a country like
argentina was also one of the most
terrifying experiences in my life
we had Secret Service agents
infiltrating party meetings trying to
sabotage these meetings to scare people
away from engaging with a new party like
ours I I had meetings with some
politicians and when I go back to my car
I find find the wheels of my car slashed
I got asked to bribe a federal judge in
order to run for the next election in
2015 which of course I did not do and I
actually wrote a long article describing
the details of how this happened but
it's it's really scary when you you know
there's a lot of hypotheses of how
corrupt and how violent the political
system is in Latin America it's even
worse than what I imagined and it was
the only period in my life that I
actually faced
to panic attacks and you know it made me
really question the if it actually made
any sense to go and try to change the
system from within because when I see
the politicians and the people that
become successful in that game I wonder
if I really want to become one of them
so that really pushed me in the
direction of thinking you know if you
try to change the system from within
it's much more likely that you will end
up being changed by the system first so
in 2015 we got very lucky and we got an
incredible opportunity that Silicon
Valley accelerator called Y Combinator
and they looked at what we did in when
Osiris and they invited us to California
to start thinking about democracy from a
more global perspective and because it's
YC it's a great organization that has a
lot of the best software engineers in
the world helping you out we started
putting more focus on building
technology and and we went from a
philosophy of trying to change the
system from within the Trojan philosophy
to a philosophy of
let's build a new model that makes the
existing model obsolete about Minster
fueler like this dome here which is the
architecture of Buckminster Fuller
philosophy so in 2015 we started
democracy earth as an organization a
nonprofit organization with this first
check from Wasi trying to understand how
to build technology for democracy and
because I'm from Argentina and and I
come from a country that has the worst
currency in the world after Venezuela
probably we I always been very much
interested in the world of crypto and
the use of Bitcoin and the blockchain
based technology to create systems that
can be censorship resistant so with
democracy years the first years we
started looking for context where we can
implement a shadow referendums that can
help these movements have a powerful
voice one of the most interesting
implementations we did was actually in
in Hong Kong with the umbrella movement
and they were doing a voting system over
telegram and because the year before
they had been hacked by Chinese hackers
they wanted to find a way to store votes
on the Bitcoin blockchain so we started
building a system that was able to store
using a Bitcoin transaction technically
speaking you include the root of a
Merkel tree which is a tree that has
multiple information that are connected
to that bit of strings related and in
the tree we would store up to 10,000
volts compress in the root of the Merkel
tree which is less than 80 bytes and in
Bitcoin you can include up to 80 bytes
of information in a transaction so with
just a few cents of a Bitcoin
transaction we could include up to
10,000 volts on the Bitcoin blockchain
and we would use that as a way to make
sure that no one is tampering with the
servers where the balls are stored in
this selection made for the Hong Kong
umbrella movement anyway we still got
hacked they hacked the Chinese hackers
tampered with with tile with telegram
and the communication with telegram but
you know it was one of our first
explorations on how we can use the
blockchain of how we can use technology
like Bitcoin for other than just
financial purposes and start using it
for political purposes we also did a
liquid democracy implementation which
was a very exciting idea back then for
Colombia Colombia was having the peace
referendum in 2016
so we've decided to allow Colombian
expats Colombians that were not allowed
to vote in their home country because
they were living abroad to vote on this
piece referendum in a shallow election
just like we did in Hong Kong which was
also a shallow election a shallow
referendum to devote not only over the
peace agreement as a whole but on each
article on each aspect of the peace
agreement we try the idea of liquid
democracy what we found out is that when
the the stakes are very high
people are very opinionated and very
rarely are willing to delegate their
vote so we have less than 3% of
delegations happening liquid democracy
has other issues which you know if you
have multiple delegations it can also
lead to a monopoly or a duopoly and you
will end up
having Republicans and Democrats like we
see in the in the traditional political
world most most times but it was an
interesting experience on the less
because we were able to find the deal
breaker of the peace referendum
Colombians pretty much agreed on every
aspect of the peace agreement but but if
you look at the official election
actually the 51% of the people in
Colombia voted for no to that peace
agreement and while we found out in our
own implementation was that the
deal-breaker
the one issue where every Colombian was
in this agreement with a peace
referendum with a peace agreement was
giving political rights to the FARC
giving political rights to the Marxist
guerrilla which imply giving them 15
million dollars every years a budget and
by the factor five seats in the Senate
without even going to elections so it
was a it was an interesting way of
trying to look deeper into the reasons
of why actually the no one and in the
official election then in 2017 for the
for the party dollar read we had an
internal decision to make to decide
whether the party would be allowed to
make alliances with other parties or not
in the upcoming election of the year
2017 and my personal position was I was
completely against the party making
alliances but of course the other side
of the party was willing to make an
alliance because they had something
cooked up so we went for a boat and it
was one of the most interesting boats
because again it was a very high-stakes
decision and what we found there even
though we had a clear registry of who
were able to vote we had the party had
1,200 octal eight members the persons
that were controlling the database they
had their own bias in that election and
because they had their own bias they
were accelerating certain people to get
the right to vote and delaying other
people to get the right to vote and that
single point of failure led to tumbling
the outcome of the election by
controlling the timing and when you open
the access to to a voter through through
in in the span of that time so that made
us realize again how relevant it is to
the way of decentralizing the consensus
that gives rights to voters to vote in
the digital spectrum in the in the
digital world in 2018 we had for the
first time
congressman actually willing to vote
according to the people how the people
would tell them will tell him to vote
online and this was a very relevant
build it was I would argue the most
relevant bill being ever discussed in at
least since I have a memory in the
Congress of when Osiris which was a bill
about legalizing abortion obviously a
very sensitive topic something that
mobilised all of Argentine society and
is still being mobilized because of this
and one congressman decided that he
would vote according to the people's
will online using our software so the
interesting thing here was that he
14,000 people voted in this case it
wasn't much but you know he tried to
keep a tight control over the end he did
a fairly good job on that aspect but he
had the even though the general vote
gave 50 to 53 percent were willing to
vote for yes to legalize abortion his
constituency which is a province in
Argentina tucumán decided 82 to 70 to 80
percent to not vote according to to to
to vote for no on the legalization of
abortion and he as a congressman he
decided to vote according to his
province crit criteria rather than the
general criteria I think that he
actually voted how he wanted to vote
personally and he just adapted his
subjective point of view to to how he
interpreted the data so again this it
was interesting for us to see what was
this idea of having a congressman voting
always according to people's will online
and seeing it in reality at a very high
stakes are very important bill and
seeing these congressman's you know
adapt his subject
tivity to eventually vote how he wanted
to vote so and you know these are all
lessons that you know we are looking you
know in order to understand how complex
democracy can actually be in 2018 we
started focusing working with crypto
networks with decentralized networks a
great pilot that we did was with block
stack which is a blockchain that tries
to allow developers to build
decentralized applications using their
protocol block stack every month gives
$100,000 as a subsidy to developers to
fund their efforts and through six
months period we use our software to
allow token holders block stock
investors to decide how to distribute
this subsidy this monthly subsidy of
$100,000 to developers this was basic
participatory budgeting you know people
were voting with our tokens how to
allocate a budget and what we found they
here even though it worked for the most
part we did find collusion we find Sun
Li investors that would take all of
their tokens and put these tokens into a
new coming application that might not be
the best application for the platform
but it's something that serves the
interest of those investors so we didn't
find for the most part decisions that
were putting the common good first we
find of it which is a rational choice
decisions that were putting the selfish
interest of the voters first so that's
what's one of the weak points of of how
participatory budgeting works but in a
more hopeful note in 2019 and I'm
arriving to our present we did this
our last pilot was in for the state of
Colorado in the United States and we
implemented a new idea that is quadratic
voting quadratic voting is one of the
ideas present on this book written by
Len while the book is called radical
markets and is this idea of the
tradition of radicalism that is
implementing liberal
and leave it all ideas to everything not
just to to markets but to political
rights to property to to a lot of
aspects that are not usually put under
the lens of liberal ideas quadratic
voting is a very interesting idea
because you let every voter gets a same
set of credits or tokens and you can
vote on issues but the more votes you
put on a given issue it will cost you
exponentially so if you put 3 votes on
an issue that you care about it will
cost you to 19
if you put four votes it will cost you
16 tokens so the more you scream you
even though you can scream as loud as
you want but you won't be heard as loud
as you want and this is a kind of voting
that prevents zealotry you can you know
you can definitely put all of your
tokens to defend an idea but you know
that that strength in that voice won't
won't be won that economic impact will
be mitigated by the effect of using this
exponential quadratic cost and it's
specific a property that happens with a
square root source our powers of two so
the interesting thing about quadratic
voting and one of the properties of this
system that I like the most is that the
winning idea will also be the idea that
will satisfy the largest amount of
individual voters so it will be an idea
that has a high degree of legitimacy and
when we look at the data usually in
quadratic votes people don't go to the
extremes and you will find most of the
boats trying to find consensus at the
center of things
so usually quadratic boats have a more
bell-like distribution of the data
rather than polar polarizing data were
you know people either strongly agree or
strongly disagree on something so it's a
very promising new way of tallying boats
and you know the reason we have
first-past-the-post voting and the 51%
rule is really an idea that comes from
the French Revolution and and this
political economist Condorcet came out
with this concept and this concept
legitimized through our boats and
political experience the last 200 years
but there's no reason why we shouldn't
be questioning how Italian how we
compute boats we definitely the purpose
of democracy is trying to find some
common good in the experience we did
with Colorado we we work with the
Democratic caucus of the lower house of
Colorado it's 41 legislators it was the
legislators that were voting so it was a
very curated environment in terms of
identifying the voters that they decided
over a hundred and seven bills that were
gonna be using a budget of a total of
150 million dollars of the of the
Colorado House and the interesting thing
is that of the 107 bills only five did
not get a single boat and the
distribution of votes was very lineal
very very organic were the first winning
vote we need the mode the bill that got
most votes was a bill that that was
called titled equal pay for equal work
which makes a lot of sense since this
was a test made with the cap island made
with the Democratic caucus of Colorado
so one of the things that we have been
trying to do is we we know the world of
politics because we have started a
political party and we have been engaged
with political movements and we know the
world of technology we have seen the
rise of blockchain based networks and
the crypto currency and what that can
mean in terms of giving power back to
the people so what we find that is an
important mission for us coming from
democracies is to build this bridge
between Krypton politics and how we can
make politics much more accountable in
the way blockchains bring more
transparency and how we can make crypto
start facing challenges there are more
than just sophisticated financial tools
and start facing some of the issues that
our societies are facing we have seen in
the last five years an emergence of
movements and groups across the whole
world
that are looking into the world of
digital democracy and implementing new
ideas
in the in the field of politics there is
really very inspiring we have found
organizations like the party revolution
democratic and Chile which was born out
of the student movement there that made
it to the Congress the dissident s
movement in Venezuela this is an
incredible organization that is using
digital technology to help the
dissidents organize beyond the radar of
the government and cryptographic sex
tremely relevant for them in a context
like Venezuela the radical exchange
movement led by Glenn while the author
of the idea of quadratic boating so we
have we have you know addressed some
hope that we are seeing a new wave of
political movements and organizations
that are willing to innovate in this
field but it's a challenge it's a
political challenge to engage our
politicians and our political class with
these new ideas coming from democracy
earth we we have an open source project
called sovereign which is a web
application that serves as an interface
with web 3 and blockchain based networks
that allows for the governance and
implementing different voting schemes
with using decentralized technology
using any kind of ERC 20 token or even
your CSUN 21 tokens and use those tools
for the governance of communities we're
actually working now with decentraland
which is an interesting project that is
trying to do virtual reality using
crypto and using a USC non-functional
tokens on the helium blockchain to
represent property to represent land and
the governance of will to our virtual
land it's an interesting challenge to
looking into and where we can implement
some of these new ideas where there's
real economic interest between the land
owners of this built or reality world
but when we look at the problem of
governance and trying to project you
know what's what's at stake looking into
the future and what are one of the some
of the biggest challenges certainly the
rise of deep learning or or machine
learning techniques that are able to
empower the capacity of misinformation
in society
is you know the very meme of fake news
is really a very concerning aspect of
democracy one of the challenges of
democracy is not simply scaling the
ability to vote but really it's about
scaling the ability to understand what
is being voted and if we have techniques
that can spread a lot of misinformation
in society then ability to understand
what is being voted can be hijacked all
of these phases that you see here
none of these humans actually exist
these are all computer-generated phases
that are you know this is this is a
comes from a paper that was released in
December last year that uses a technique
called gun or generative adversarial
networks which are competing neural
networks where there's a discriminator
and a generator and they're able to
combine different features and they can
generate fake pictures dip fakes like
this ones but they also can generate
fake voices they can emulate voices of
other people so in a world that is
deeply driven by the conversations that
we see in the media this kind of
misinformation can be a very risky thing
if we start projecting what computers
can do looking into the future so how
are we gonna deal with deep fakes this
definitely keeps me awake at night
another aspect is specific to the world
of lock chain 99.999% of launching
projects are fundamentally plutocratic
most of the projects because blocking
lacks a formal identity the it's it's
not Facebook you don't have a
formalization of human identities in the
world of blockchain this means that most
of the governance of projects out there
they are really there are really systems
where people vote with their money or or
work with their tokens or work with her
with her with their assets and what we
find in some of these boats is that
usually there was an interesting case
recently with a network called Aragon
were at the very last minute a whale
boat or that holds a large amount of
tokens decided the outcome of the
election for everyone else people were
voting with their tokens over eight
ten different issues and at the very
last minute this whale with $400,000
worth of tokens bought the election by
simply looking at how everyone else was
voting and at the last minute allocating
tokens in a way that would benefit the
interest of this individual voter and
this is the problem with voting with
your money the its it there's a reason
why shareholders of a company ultimately
decide to have a CEO that unde Ella gate
all of these are decisions to a CEO
that's a much more efficient way of
making decisions when when the interests
are aligned to the interests of capital
so we don't have a way right now of
understanding how we can formalize human
identity over decentralized networks or
how we can give people identity we are
without creating all over again a big
brother or a Facebook or a Google how
can we give human rights over the
Internet in a way that is not captured
by a single Orwellian entity and this is
one of the key challenges that we're
trying to address coming from democracy
earth and from our research so today
we're putting some emphasis on
researching how we can implement
solutions that allow for unchained
quadratic voting we find that this can
be an interesting mechanism for the
world of law chains were the one of the
main political actions that happens in
blockchain networks is the ability to
fork we're a minority that disagrees
with how the protocol behaves or how the
protocol works come fork and build their
own version of the protocol and have a
community split in two and and break
some of the cohesive and the consensus
around a given idea in the world of
crypto so in order to keep communities
together we need to find mechanisms that
allow for more legitimacy in the
decision-making process where it
satisfies the largest amount of
individual voters so we're looking to
unchain quadratic voting but what we
want to use sunchang quadratic voting
for first is to create a system that
allows us to validate human participants
over decentralized networks
to use quadratic voting in in systems
where we can curate the curators
ultimately democracy is really about
answering this question who watches the
Watchmen and in order to find a system
that can give human rights that can give
voter rights over decentralized networks
we are working on this pilot
implementation to understand if
quadratic voting can help us create
registries of identities on the
blockchain that that can start giving
this this can help people acknowledge
where the humans are in these networks
now understanding where the humans are
in a world of AI of machine learning is
not easy so there's a field in
computation that is can be very
interesting for this problem that is the
field of Turing tests the Turing test
very well known test is a test to tell
humans from robots apart and in the last
decade it has been used mostly by Google
and all of the Silicon Valley companies
to help to tell humans from robots apart
but with every exercise that we complete
doing a Turing test or a reCAPTCHA or
one of those tests we usually are making
a test that helps improve their AI that
helps train the REA eye so how can we do
Turing tests that cannot be captured by
AI what does a during resistant proof
actually mean so in the world of AI
there's a scope of problems there are AI
heart and these are problems that are
not about pattern recognition anything
that is about pattern recognition you
just you can put a neural network there
and brute force and start recognizing
the patterns on the information so this
this needs to be problems are abstract
this needs to be problems that are about
more about reading between the lines or
joining the dots than just simply
looking at an image and recognizing a
pattern and because this needs to be
problems our abstract means that these
problems cannot be generated by an
algorithm if something is generated by
an algorithm it can also be exploited by
an algorithm so this this needs to be
problems that are human
so this is a very incipient field we had
only found one University in Russia that
is actually researching this that is
about trying to understand how we can
create mechanisms of verification where
no computers are involved and if
computers wanted to be involved they
can't do anything about it
a potential format is the use of video
you can look on Google if you if you if
you type in Google blockchain that you
will find an article about myself and
how I did the birth certificate of my
daughter that is basically a video where
I'm doing a video I'm showing my
daughter my wife in the hospital hating
me for doing this and the what I have
done is I hunch the video with I
generate a code that only matches to the
contents of that video file and I
include that hash in a Bitcoin
transaction so at any given point in the
future I can demonstrate that the
content of that video are legitimate it
has not been corrupted because it
matches this hash that lives on the
Bitcoin blockchain and that that video
was shot in that moment in time and the
interesting thing about video is that
it's still a format that is easy for
humans to parse and process than for
computers computers and AI really
require a lot of training and there's
some well-known paper called
unreasonable effectiveness of data that
demonstrates that the success of AI
algorithms is not about the algorithm
itself but about the data that you feed
into the algorithm so to train a general
perception of AI is still a long way to
go so video could be an interesting
format to do Turing resistant probes so
we expect in the second half of this
year to be working on some pilots in
relation to test out this this ideas
this models and to explore what what
makes us human what what makes us human
what differentiates us from the machines
what what our capacities of our ability
to think what fingerprints in our
biology what is the stuff that can
really tell the humans from the machines
apart and if we are able to identify
some of that stuff what kind of
protocols we can build in a world were
computers they in
Internet AI become a dominant way of
connecting with each other to finish I
would encourage you to research also the
area of quadratic voting there's a lot
of academic work led by Glenn while we
are now working some prospects working
after the experience within Colorado
we're working with the Parliament of
Canada and there's some opportunities in
California but it's it's a novel idea an
interesting idea to make a voting system
that where the losing side can also
agree with the result because it will
put also white on the legitimacy of the
decision being made not just on the
economic capacity of the decision to
finish I would like to leave you with a
this quote that I really like it's the
very last words of the last article
published by Jamal khashoggi who said
through the creation of an independent
international forum isolated from the
influence of nationalist governments
spreading hate through propaganda
ordinary people in the Arab world would
be able to address the structural
problems of their so that their
societies face democracy is definitely
not going through a good period right
now we're being challenged from all
different directions and but I would
encourage you that do not lose faith and
to keep fighting for something that will
help you know empowers us as members of
our society and to start thinking about
the democracy that can go can start
looking beyond the limits of the
nation-state we have a world to take
care for in this century and we need to
embrace the capacity that the Internet
has to build a system of governance for
the planet as a whole and hopefully and
you know make make the world a better
place
thank you
thank you so much Santi the topic of
democracy and human rights is something
that we have fabric care a lot about
I'm from Crimea so Russia Ukraine you
can imagine no more comments needed
probably max from my team is actually
from Romania so he and his family have
experienced the totalitarian regimes two
kind of the full extent as well
max will moderate our next panel
discussion which will focus on
surveillance capitalism and how we can
use technology to move from from don't
be evil to come be evil when it comes to
governments and corporations and I'll
let max take over and introduce the the
other panelists that we have in here
that's great good to see you man
alrighty great thank you a lot for that
presentation Santi um so the reason for
which I really wanted to moderate this
panel and bring it together is that well
I'm half Luxembourgish I grew up in
Luxembourg which is sort of this sort of
small utopian country in middle of
Europe I'm also half Romanian and my
family grew up through a communist
regime for 40 years and I grew up with
the stories of that regime and when I
mean the communist regime I don't mean
like soda Gummer government I don't
agree with but rather it means sort of
your passports I think getting up
getting taken away it means your best
friends reporting on you when the
communist regime fell my grandfather got
a stack of 800 pages of documents
written by his best friends and
neighbors reporting on him whether he
was eating chicken soup or chicken broth
for lunch and whether he was speaking
French Romanian on the phone and what
his daughter was his daughter was
playing with and when you think about
the fundamental effect of such a
surveillance on on humans you get very
close to the ideas of Bentham and
foo-foo on optical societies where you
realize that actually observance and the
lack of privacy fundamentally changes
how you behave not only now but also in
the future and when you consider to
where we've arrived today in terms of
society you'd consider that we've gotten
a lot further we've moved away from a
lot of these totalitarian regimes and
yet we've got sort of the Chinese credit
scores that we're seeing
we also realized that action in the US
you've got facial recognition at every
single Airport and when you look at the
sort of dominant business model of today
for tech companies it's all about
gathering data from its users monetizing
it in some shape or form and probably
knowing what you might do in the future
better than you do and so coming to this
perspective it isn't it's really
important topic to discuss from my
perspective not only from the AI stage
but also from the webseries stage and so
we have Santi who well by now you know
his background and all the incredible
work he's done in Argentina we also have
you know he's joining us live as an
equally incredible background and I
wanted to give him the microphone to
introduce himself and why this base
matters him sure so I'm Vinny Gupta are
active in cryptography and civil rights
since probably 97 and I was the project
manager for the etherium watch and I
work on digital identities for physical
things
but I've done what work on trying to
figure out what a human rights framework
looks like in an age of digital
technology including one very serious
project for the US Office of the
Secretary of Defense working on a
genocide resistant biometric ID card
standard for use in areas I have large
genocide risk and I kind of come to this
space with a much more radical critique
of the problems that we face and which
I'll try and take you guys through as we
move forwards that's again
so I guess to warm up a bit and get
started you've both been fantastic quick
remand recommender is to me so I wanted
to hear your perspective on what utopian
or dystopian novel you consider to be
the closest to the future that we're
heading to today well I I'm a big fan of
Aldous Huxley and I think we are closer
to brave new world in many ways that was
a very inspiring book for me and another
book that I remember reading a few years
ago that is almost weird in how
prophetic it can be is this essay from
the late 90s called the sovereign
individual which is known to be Peter
Thiel's favorite book and it's a scary
book in the sense that it's it does have
this attempt to imply information theory
to understand capitalism and it comes to
the conclusion of what would you know
what would happen when we have a
cryptography distributed cryptography
allowing us to make transactions that
cannot be surveyed by the government and
that you know to read that from a book
of 96-97 and live in the world we live
in today with the rise of crypto pretty
much becoming the economic phenomenon of
our day it's really interesting because
it helps to bring some perspective about
processes that you know there have there
have been some people thinking about
this stuff for a long time
for me it's a book called shockwave
writer written by John Brunner in 1976
and shocker rider represents bankrupt
America dominated by gang violence run
by corporations the only thing that's
holding it together as a cohesive
culture is a 3d video phone network that
also serves documents and democracy has
been completely subverted by massive use
of internet driven opinion polling I
also wrote a novel which are considered
to be pretty utopian although what
people call it a dystopia called mother
of hydrogen which to me is the most
optimistic possible perspective that you
could have on our future and you can
find that online for free just download
off my website and I think that sounds
like two books to add to the reading
list and so moving on I guess the title
of this panel is surveillance tap from
surveillance capitalism to totalitarian
regimes but why don't we start off by
discussing how surveillance capitalism
might affect democracy or undermine
democracy as we see it today so I mean
the fundamental problem we have with
democracy is that it doesn't work right
and it doesn't work in the same way that
horse-drawn carriages don't work for
mass transport yeah we haven't updated
the machinery of democracy in about 300
years and this idea that your total
democratic representation over a
lifetime is basically twelve axis on
pieces of paper like there's no way that
you could expect to run a society at
these kind of paces with these kind of
stakes with that kind of representation
for the public um you know there is a
saying that you know if voting changed
anything it would be illegal and I think
that we can generally speaking see that
that is the case except in very very
rare occasions ordinary individuals even
in large groups feel that they have very
little control over the direction of the
planet or the direction of their lives
and what that is because we just don't
have anything resembling modern
machinery to turn the will for people
into effective action that stuff is all
century's out of date we should have
updated the machinery with every new
technology since the printing press it
should have been updated for radio she'd
you unfit for television it should have
been updated for the early into
it should have been updated for mobile
but because we've refused to update the
machinery of democracy the actual
functions of democracy have become more
and more and more outmoded while the
rest of society is accelerated into a
completely different structural form so
I think that this is our first problem
is that the existing systems are
incredibly out at 8 the second problem
is that they're also incredibly
vulnerable to high-tech attack and all
of the stuff that you've seen with for
example creme brulee analytic is the
high tech attack where you take 21st
century techniques and use them to
attack a 17th century immune system and
you wonder whether problems yeah it's I
definitely agree with that sentiment one
of the things that we try to think about
is you know I'm more of the philosophy
these days that I like I mentioned in my
talk that you know we need to build a
new model working with the existing
model also is dealing with an extremely
corrupt game I think there's a new
generation that is definitely the big
divide of our day and age is the digital
divide but it's a really a generational
divide to have the internet generation
and the online generation and the
offline generation so we're in the in
the middle of that transition right now
and projecting the world that were
looking into the future you know we're
gonna be almost an entire species or
entire species we'll be changing the way
we connect in the way we engage with the
world and what I wonder is you know what
what would would it mean to be human in
that world one of the problems of
identity is that if we try to narrow
down an identity into this concept of a
username or a social security number or
a phone number if you if we try to
narrow down or identities as this
one-dimensional piece of information
that's a recipe for an Orwellian entity
to control us so maybe we even need to
rethink what what we are as what our
identities actually are in the political
sense or when to try to think a new kind
of concept a political unit that helps
us organize as a society at a at a large
scale I don't have any clear answers to
this and I just can point to some
research and some some
are emerging in the field but we
definitely need to start thinking
different I think and we are on the web
three stage after all so bring it back
to this topic we now are at the stage
where we have the ability to have such
primitives as censorship resistant
transactions as sovereignly held digital
assets when I talk to to a lot of
friends from from Luxembourg where
people from Italy Europe you get the
point that these blockchain networks can
be very useful for automated systems for
more higher efficiencies for trading
systems whereas when you talk to people
either from back home and in Romania
were also from I'm sure from from South
America actually the the much more
poignant ideas are around this idea of
sovereign and portable money or
sovereign and portable identity and that
that actually can keep you from this of
grasps of potential totalitarian regimes
from coming together so what are some of
the topics or some of the geopolitical
aspects of this web 3 wave that you
think are not being discussed enough and
where are we going with that so
something that one of the interesting
cases of use of Crypt is definitely
remittances where families are able to
send funds back home and one of the most
if we if we look at the statistics of
localbitcoins calm it's interesting to
see for example what's happening in
Venezuela where the rate of transmission
of Bitcoin in this in this network is
growing exponentially and we see more
and more money being used through this
network from probably from remittances
from family sending money back home but
when I talk with julio coco who is this
activist in venezuela he told me
something that really shocked me that
was that he said 60% or more of the
transactions are happening in local
bitcoins calm it's actually money being
stolen by the corrupt officials of the
venezuelan government and the Venezuelan
military and they're just using Bitcoin
as their new Switzerland they cannot
have a Swiss account anymore Switzerland
is no longer thing so you know the
Bitcoin is a technology Bitcoin is a
technology and can be used in any way we
can use a technology but the the stark
reality of it is that we are also seeing
this technology being used in ways that
we probably
would you know wouldn't that there's
probably benefiting the people that we
don't want to have this technology
benefiting - one of the problems of
Bitcoin in Venezuela for example was the
fact that Bitcoin works with this
algorithm called proof-of-work
it means that it uses a lot of energy
and actually the military that the
dictatorship in Venezuela started
looking at the energy footprint in the
electric grid to identify where were
were the Bitcoin miners and they
expropriated all of the Bitcoin mining
facilities and now the largest miner in
Bitcoin in Venezuela is the government
itself no wonder it's the one government
that tried to launch their own
cryptocurrency so it's it is we need to
address this also like you know the
accountability of these technologies
these are technologies are impacting
society the latest rumor that I heard in
blockchain week in New York was that
Venezuela has seven exchanges and
there's the main operators of
localbitcoins calm is a handful of
Chinese brokers that are making dealings
with the Central Bank of Venezuela
allowing to buy believers and then
trading the believers back using Bitcoin
and that they have they are managing
30,000 bitcoins which is almost 240
million dollars there are actually money
from the Venezuelan people stolen by
Maduro and his cronies and these are all
in the Bitcoin blockchain so I used to
be a big con maximalist I love beacon
Bitcoin like was an incredible still is
an incredible piece of technology but I
I would argue that we need to really
raise the bar of what you know what this
technology really tried to think about
the political impact of these
technologies not just the greedy
financial aspect of it yeah I couldn't
agree more
couldn't agree more and I saw talk by
mari mccarthy and herbert snorrison who
went on to find the Icelandic pirate
party in 2013 an event called Oh hm and
they laid out a case that every new
technology in the past 200 years at any
substantial
was heralded by classical anarchists as
being a technology of decentralization
electric motors motorcars you know
diesel generators solar panels every new
technology that comes around
um there's kind of a political fringe
which grabs on to the new technologies
that's right this will finally be the
thing that decentralized his society and
what happens in almost every instance is
that once the technology is well enough
established to have proven its utility
central powers then look at the
technology and I wonder what we could do
with that then and you go from having
something that looks like Bitcoin to
something that looks like sesame credit
in China the social credit rating inside
of about a generation and this is just a
repeating cycle it happens over and over
and over and over again so the problems
that we have here go far deeper than a
relationship with an individual specific
technology
the problem that we have here is that we
have essentially no human rights right
all of that stuff went out the window
after the invention of the nuclear bomb
because there's no framework that you
can imagine for human rights in which
giving your government the right to
annihilate all life that we can prove
exists in the universe is a sensible
policy option the fundamental compact
between human beings and their rulers
was completely annihilated with the
invention of the nuclear bomb and we
haven't managed to replace it ever since
right we're still in a position where we
live in de facto nuclear dictatorships
and until we start talking about policy
options which remove the nuclear
capacity at the heart of the states and
return us to a condition where the
governments don't represent an
existential threat to every single
molecule of life on earth it's very hard
for us to talk about solving the
problems that we have because these
things are sub problems of sub problems
of sub problems of sub problems of sub
problems that are all anchored in place
by the nuclear weapons stockpile and the
attitude to life that created it so when
we start looking at these kind of
solutions you know you have to say okay
how do we use technology to create a
world in which the nuclear weapon is no
longer a critical power of global
stability how do you use technology to
create a world in which people's on
willingness to be fried in their homes
by somebody else's nuclear bomb turns
into long-term work on policy to
eventually get rid of those capabilities
and if we're not thinking at this scale
we're not talking about having the
ability to handle global warming we're
not talking about the ability to handle
nanotechnology and biotechnology right
you're not going to see substantial
realization of things like the
Millennium Development Goals sorry the
sustainable development goals in a world
which is basically held together by
nuclear bombs and so to get into a
position where we've got real leverage
on these kind of issues we have to start
talking about how do we design a path to
a post nuclear world in which human
beings don't drive starvation and for
that you have to start thinking about a
single global political regime you have
to about start talking about one-person
one-vote
for the entire world in a single global
polity because that's the only way that
we can bring down the barriers between
people that we're currently maintaining
with nuclear bombs and this might be a
one century to century project but
that's how long it took to get every
single human being of Voe in the kind of
democracy we have now franchise was won
by category after category after
category of people over centuries moving
from possession where only the elites
could vote where everybody can vote and
we need to repeat that process again but
a global scale and that's not an
unrealistic goal it might take us a long
time but if we don't get explicit that
this is the goal what's gonna happen is
that we will win small victory after a
small victory after a small victory but
we will never touch the problems which
generate these smaller problems and then
the smaller problems will just reman a
fest in different places right you need
an underlying realistic political
radicalism you know you need to say look
it's basically starfleet or bust and if
we're not moving towards those kind of
approaches to a single just global
governance framework everything else
will be a partial solution which gets
overturned by a higher level of
governance it says oK we've had enough
of that
that looks far too much like power going
into the hands of people that aren't
supposed to have it and they'll just
flip over the fair
revolutions one a time as we've seen
happen over and over again in South
America I like it and this is your
responsibility to implement and I guess
moving away a bit from this of a
geopolitical side and coming back to the
capitalism side if we look at where
capitalism today it's largely a set of
businesses are built based off of open
source technology to a large extent
which out of Terius will talk about soon
and monetizing users data so gathering
data from their customers and their
users and using it in ways that were not
expected before and so the quote Jew
Jack in his new book the relevance of
the communist manifesto which Antley
recommended we've moved away from the
capitalist using forest and work labor
to using the general intellect that is
produced by every individual whether it
be our data or content or even our
identities that we own and so where do
you see the business models of tomorrow
moving to we have a route towards more
collective capitalism that can include
some of these technologies to move away
from some of these sort of surveillance
capitalistic states that we have today
it's it's you know thinking about the
business models one thing that I found
really interesting in in the world of
crypto and the you know the one you know
crypto has a broad range of applications
and a broad range of innovations the one
community that I find that it's most
advanced when it comes to discuss
governance and new structures of capital
is aetherium theorem there's a lot of
very exciting innovation of people that
are trying to think new models of
companies and when we try to think about
what a digital company can do what is
intrinsic about the digital world that
can help us create something better that
simply cannot be possibly made in the
world of traditional or legacy
jurisdictions so there's some after the
whole ICO craze that definitely there
was a lot of noise in in that and
there's a lot of scams and you know it
was it led to a huge mushrooming of the
perception of the space as a whole but
with
we need to improve that a lot and and
now there's some new ideas emerging in
the field of dowse distributed
autonomous organizations that can find
mechanisms of continuous racing there's
this concept of continuous organizations
where the model is you pack the profits
that an entity generates with the the
share issuance mechanism of that ain't
entity so if the entity grows with
profits it also allows for the issuance
of more shares throughout time in an
automated way in a computed way there's
also the concept there's a very
interesting experiment now going on in
in etherium called Moloch Moloch is a
dhow that has 25 members you have to get
both in to become a member and there's a
tribute of 100 eath so you really have
to have some skin in the game 100 is
this around two hundred and fifty
thousand two hundred twenty-five
thousand dollars it will be 250 maybe
one day but an interesting thing about
Moloch Moloch is really four hundred
lines of code it's really simple code
and it has one function which I think
it's a really interesting idea called
the ragequit and if you are dual age
quit at any given time you can exit the
DAO with your funds so this allows for
the majority of the voters in this now
to make sure that they don't
disenfranchise much the minority on the
votes because at any given time a
minority can split and live with their
funds from the organization
so this ragequit function keeps the
cohesive nature of the DAO while
reducing the risk for investors
investors can join and can live at any
given time so these are some of the
properties that thinking about the
concept of creating entities or
companies in a digital way looks much
more interesting than the way we deal
with risk and assets and investments in
the traditional world so what I wonder
is well how can some of these ideas help
not only fund for-profit projects but
also fund political movements fund
all kinds of organizations are trying to
address challenges in society and apply
some of these innovations beyond the
scope of just finance so I think we're
getting exciting tools really powerful
tools to start building an alternative
the challenge now is to make sure that
these tools are easier to use that have
better user experience and that can
reach anyone from any country I come
from Argentina structuring an illegal
company in Argentina is a bureaucratic
nightmare but suddenly giving an equal
chance for anyone anywhere in the world
through the use of the Internet to
structure companies and to engage with
projects in this type of economies
regardless of where you were born I
think that levels up the playing field
for everyone so I'm definitely long on
the internet and these networks
regardless of how these networks are
today exploiting the traditional legacy
politics we have interesting interesting
so the the way that I think about this
is from a kind of econ an economics
angle we now have the ability to get a
new kind of economic efficiency which I
would refer to as economies of our
missions so we've got economies of scale
which gives you industrialization we've
got economies of agility which gives you
the start-up world become a visa
economies of omniscience or where you
basically know everything about a
situation and then you use it to make
optimal decisions in the environment
that we have right now practically the
only way that we're using economies of
emissions is to show people the best
possible advert to show them to get them
to buy something right we know huge
amounts of information about people but
all we're really using that information
for is targeting adverts and all of our
money is winding up inside of companies
whose business model is to target
adverts Facebook and Google and all the
rest but there are vastly larger sums of
money left on the table by this approach
that are actually extracted by a right
you know the markets that we interact
with for our everyday functions are
completely illiquid and completely
irrational right probably everybody in
this room
has had a nightmare experience trying to
find a place to live in London right
whether you're renting it or whether
you're buying it and access to
information is very poor we walk things
like optionality it's incredibly
difficult to get in contact with people
that might be able to help you so if you
take a new job right you really want to
live in a place that has the shortest
possible commute to work if you've got
kids that's now constrained because you
want to balance school and versus your
commute time and all these things are
kind of systems of constraints if we had
access to all of the information about
housing in London you could do things
like take a new job and you know 50
people then approach you just swap
houses with you because they want to be
closer to where you are you want to be
closer to where your workplace is it
might be a four or five person swap or
everybody shuffles around and at the end
of it everybody's got more of what they
wanted for exactly the same amount of
money they're paying that right and the
entirety of society has opportunities
like that just lying around and we've
got all the information but it's in the
wrong structures for us to be able to
exploit the possibility
same thing with allergies right if you
swipe a credit card in a shop and you
have say a peanut allergy you ought to
get an automated block on your card that
says hey you just bought something with
a peanut in it you know you're gonna
have to confirm that transaction before
we'll let it happen right you know the
manufacturer knows what's in the stuff
the shop knows what stuff you've bought
all we need to do is get tell the credit
card company you have an allergy and we
could tie those stories together into a
new kind of function so to me there's a
wastefulness of this are driven internet
economy is it it's totally failed to do
fundamental structural beneficial
transformation and it's left us with a
bunch of advertising crap
rather than fundamentally more efficient
and more enjoyable lives which is what -
right there on the table and then you
look at things like the Chinese Social
Credit System or indeed American credit
ratings right it's essentially the same
system it's just in America it's done by
private companies absolutely true right
credit rating in social credit it's the
same idea those kinds of systems you
know could be operated for the general
welfare right those things could be
those databases could be used
to help people find jobs to help people
get appropriate education there's so
much more value in these systems that
we're not touching because we just don't
have the correct structure or
organization to pull that value out and
I mean to me this is the whole sort of
thesis of what I wanted to see from Bob
Jane as I wanted to see fundamental
economic transformation at this level of
the economies of emissions and the
transfer of the value that was being
extracted from those economies instead
of it being held by private companies
held by either individuals or by
collectives or indeed by municipalities
in even the state so I'm not sure if
such systems fascinate me or scare me if
we're able to use the full extent of
data that is available today I guess we
just have to move away from serve as
Google did from their old motive don't
be evil which they recently discarded
but move away to systems that are
fundamentally built in a way that they
just can't be evil no matter how much
data they have they can't be used
against their users and but on that note
I think we have to wrap it up I'm
getting signals that we've reached the
top of our hour so
you
