Byzantine Dreams: Recent Episodes

View Details

In this special ✨LIVE ✨episode, we bring you 3 on-stage convos we had earlier this year with 3 humans who’ve helped define what it means to practice activism through crypto.

Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn is the creator of Zcash, the first privacy coin. He’s an outspoken advocate on privacy and surveillance, and has been working on free, open source cryptocurrency and privacy-preserving tech since the 1980s.

Emily Yang (Pplpleasr) is the multidisciplinary artist at the core of PleasrDAO. She made headlines in 2021 when PleasrDAO formed to buy her Uniswap NFT for >$500k—the first time ever a DAO or collective had made a such a large art purchase—and for her work with groups like Stop Asian Hate.

Nadya Tolokno is a Russian-born artist + activist, best known as the co-founder of artist collective Pussy Riot. She was sentenced to two years in prison for their 2012 performance ‘Punk Prayer’ and has made waves since by starting UkraineDAO, which raised >$20 million in a matter of days.

Start times

• 2:45 mins → Zooko
• 21:20 mins→ Emily
• 37:30 mins → Nadya

Links from our chat with Zooko

• An amazing episode of Radiolab that talks about the Zcash ‘Ceremony’
• Zooko’s Triangle on wikipedia
• ‘Crypto’ by Steven Levy (a wonderful history of renegade 1970s cryptographers and the early cypherpunks)
• ‘1984’ by George Owell 🤦‍♂️😬

Links from our chat with Emily

• Emily’s dope homepage
• PleasrDAO + a blog post with the whole backstory 💜
• Her hallmark Uniswap NFT
• Her work w/FORTUNE

Links from our chat with Nadya

• The New York Times on Nadya + UkraineDAO
• For more on Pussy Riot’s backstory, check out the preview of the documentary Punk Prayer and The Guardian’s full writeup
• UnicornDAO - a collector’s DAO for women (story @ Blockworks)
• A friendly Linktree to her work and orgs
• Join #PUSSYRIOT on Discord

🤓 For the full, unabridged audio + video from our convos, check out these YouTube links:

• Michael's talk with Zooko

• Carolyn's talk with Emily

• Michael's talk with Nadya

For more on the vibe at ETHDenver, check out this piece from The Defiant.

🌤⛈

View Details

Daniel Schmachtenberger is a renowned theorist, systems thinker, and polymath. In this episode, he speaks with us about the existential threats facing humanity, our society's ability to make sense of the world, exponential technology, and steps we can take towards a more beautiful civilization.

About Daniel

Daniel Schmachtenberger is a founding member of The Consilience Project, aimed at improving public sensemaking and dialogue.

The throughline of his interests has to do with ways of improving the health and development of individuals and society, with a virtuous relationship between the two as a goal.

Towards these ends, he’s had particular interest in the topics of catastrophic and existential risk, civilization and institutional decay and collapse as well as progress, collective action problems, social organization theories, and the relevant domains in philosophy and science.

Motivated by the belief that advancing collective intelligence and capacity is foundational to the integrity of any civilization, and necessary to address the unique risks we currently face given the intersection of globalization and exponential technology, he has spoken publicly on many of these topics, hoping to popularize and deepen important conversations and engage more people in working towards their solutions. Many of these can be found at http://civilizationemerging.com/media/

Links from our show

• The Consilience Project
• Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond
• Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter
• Daniels' blog
• His New Economics Series

View Details

Named one of the “world’s ten most influential intellectuals” by MIT Technology Review, Douglas Ruskhoff is a media theorist, author, and documentarian studying human autonomy in the digital age. He’s the author of over 20 books, including Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, Media Virus, and most recently Team Human.

In this episode, we ask him to unpack why he thinks we as a society ‘blew it’ with digital tech - its psychedelic, subversive beginnings giving way, as he sees it, to one pyramid scheme stacked on top of another.

What does this mean for crypto?

If money is a medium, how can we subject it to the type of media critiques that made Rushkoff famous early in his career?

And what does he think of this weird COVID moment, where many of us sit at home in a womb of technological convenience?

We recorded this episode the day after Christmas, before entering what feels like an endgame in American domestic politics. It seems fitting then, that we conclude with a dive into the stakes for mutual aid, mutual respect, and of course, Qanon.

🌚 🌘 🌗 🌗 🌖 🌞

🌞 🌖 🌗 🌗 🌘 🌚

Rushkoff's homepage

Team Human HQ

On Dr. Mark Filippi

• Somaspace
• Dr. Mark's interview with Douglas Rushkoff on Team Human

Tim May - 'The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto'

Eric Hughes - 'A Cypherpunk's Manifesto'

Chapter 10 from 'Mastering Bitcoin' (on Bitcoin mining and issuance)

A sample of Rushkoff's recent essays -

• ‘We Blew It.’ Douglas Rushkoff’s Take on the Future of the Web
• Survival of the Richest The wealthy are plotting to leave us behind
• The Privileged Have Entered Their Escape Pods
• How Centuries of Black Strength Created a Blueprint for Economic Recovery

View Details

Sarah Friend is a badass infrastructure developer, digital artist, activist, and community crypto pioneer who works on Circles UBI and lives in Berlin.

Below are the many links we promised at the end of this show ✌️.

++

For more info on Circles, look no further than https://joincircles.net/ or https://circles.garden/

Projects we mentioned during our chat: 

--> CultureStake - https://gitcoin.co/grants/544/culturestake (built in partnership with https://www.furtherfield.org/)

--> Hervisions - https://www.hervisions.world/

--> Our Networks Conference (which Sarah co-helms)- https://ournetworks.ca/ 

--> ClickMine - https://clickmine.click/ 

--> Her awesome webring project - https://possible.social/join 

--> Xyrden (eco-friendly, open source propaganda meme page) - https://instagram.com/xyrden?igshid=11h9cmvtpvsj0

And here is Sarahs' base of operations online: https://isthisa.com/

If you liked this convo, definitely check out her excellent talk 'Decentralization & its Discontents' from earlier this year - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zx-O4W9TbHg 

PS:

--> For more detail on the Xdai sidechain, check out https://www.xdaichain.com/

--> And last up, here's the website for Duniter, lords of the impenetrable strong set in Toulouse 🤷‍♀️ - https://duniter.org/en/

View Details

Even if you don’t know Bitcoin Sign Guy by name, you’ve probably seen Christian’s grinning face on repeat in the crypto meme-sphere.

In July 2017, Christian Langalis attended a congressional hearing where Janet Yellen, Chair of the Federal Reserve, was giving testimony. CSPAN’s caption read: "Breaking news: Yellen: I'm strongly opposed to audit the fed." Christian jostled for a spot in the audience and then, when he had a straight shot at the camera, brandished a legal pad into the camera lens with the words ‘Buy Bitcoin’ scrawled across it.

Today Christian works for Tlon as the Bitcoin ambassador to the Urbit project. In this episode he dives into Urbit’s mission to create a clean slate computing network and OS from the ground up, designed to empower the individual and offer an exit from the parasitic state of social media and cloud computing today.

This episode takes us on a fascinating journey through the Bison Sphere: touching on cognitive malware, casino jails, dopamine vending machines, mimetic language, and Christian’s vision of the future primitive, colored by his classical tastes and background in studio art.

---- Show Notes ----

Christian on twitter https://twitter.com/BitcoinUr

Tlon https://tlon.io/

Urbit https://urbit.org/

Sign up here for an Urbit planet you can host yourself: https://urbit.typeform.com/to/zQ9QOV3Z#source=200 (If you want a raw planet, you can DM Christian on twitter.)

Nick Land - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiaWsgtJrNI&feature=youtu.be

Bitcoin Sign incident - https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/12/someone-held-up-a-buy-bitcoin-sign-during-yellens-testimony-to-congress.html

Bitcoin free banking - http://www.philosophicaleconomics.com/2014/10/btc/

Whitey on the moon - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4

View Details

🦄 Amber Baldet is Cofounder + CEO of Clovyr and Board Member of the Zcash Foundation. We take a tour of the crisis in Belarus, surveillance capitalism, hijacking the cloud, and Amber’s sweet gaming rig.

🎮 🕹️ 👾🎮 🕹️ 👾

As promised on-air, here’s more info on …

Belarus' Intenet outage -
https://www.wired.com/story/belarus-internet-outage-election/

Bcrypt’s bingo card -
https://twitter.com/bcrypt/status/1286763370213859328?s=20

Let’s Encrypt -
https://letsencrypt.org/

Clovyr https://clovyr.io/ and their adorb mascot Otto -
https://cstatic.app/img/clovyr/otto-clovyr.svg

ConsenSys snatches up Quorum -
https://consensys.net/blog/press-release/consensys-acquires-quorum-platform-from-jp-morgan/

Satoshi’s original email (which Patrick deleted) -
https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/1/

Shoshana Zuboff’s book “Surveillance Capitalism” -
https://profilebooks.com/the-age-of-surveillance-capitalism.html

View Details

Cryptoeconomics wouldn't be what it is today without Simon de la Rouviere. An artist and early Ethereum developer, he's best known for his role crafting the original ERC-20 token specification, meme markets, and token curated registries.

In this episode, we delve into CHAZ + autonomous zones, South Africa's water crisis and statue controversy, the ERC-20 origin story, how Simon was radicalized by Dogecoin, and the importance of communities, optimism, and proper incentive design - in blockchain networks, 2020, and beyond.

++

Simon's coordinates

🐦 twitter.com/simondlr

🥞 simondlr.substack.com

🖊️ blog.simondlr.com
🐙 github.com/simondlr

++

F/U reading on topics we cover in this episode 🤓

Simon presenting the first ERC20 spec at DevCon1 in 2015 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kE5oGw8oKsY

South Africa's statue controversy - https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-06-12/pulling-down-statues-of-racists-africas-done-it-for-years

The 2017 Cape Town’s drought - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-12/looking-back-on-cape-town-s-drought-and-day-zero

Vitalik’s 'metacoin' proposal - https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/13/scalability-part-3-metacoin-history-multichain/

'Meme markets' (aka curation markets) - https://github.com/simondlr/mememarkets / https://medium.com/@simondlr/introducing-curation-markets-trade-popularity-of-memes-information-with-code-70bf6fed9881

This Artwork is Always on Sale (THAIAOS) - https://thisartworkisalwaysonsale.com / https://github.com/simondlr/thisartworkisalwaysonsale

View Details

Jameson Lopp is a professional cypherpunk, outspoken privacy and self-sovereignty advocate, and CTO of Casa.

In our first episode, we delve into ACAB, the police, offensive and defensive technologies, life extension, cryogenics, Bitcoin, resilience-first systems, and life beyond the State.

Below are the links we promised you during out show ✌️.

++

Casa - https://keys.casa/

Full text of ‘The Sovereign individual’ - https://www.lopp.net/pdf/The%20Sovereign%20Individual.pdf

Jameson’s ‘Reflections Upon a SWATting’ - https://blog.lopp.net/reflections-upon-a-swatting/

For more info on the Black Panthers and the Second Amendment - https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/09/the-secret-history-of-guns/308608/

Jameson’s article ‘What are the Key Properties of Bitcoin’ - https://nakamoto.com/what-are-the-key-properties-of-bitcoin/

‘Crypto-enabled Immortality’ (2018 talk) - https://youtu.be/V73oztTWNno

Alcor Life Extension Foundation - https://alcor.org/

View Details

🌚 🌘 🌗 🌗 🌖 🌞

Byzantine Dreams is a pirate radio blast, bringing you into conversation with the most important thinkers in crypto and high tech.

++

Meet your hosts, Michael and Carolyn.

Carolyn Reckhow - is a social scientist turned crypto startup pioneer; starting in 2015 at ConsenSys, then Casa, and is currently at Thesis.

Michael Haley - is on the leadership team at Casa, where he helms product.