gave a very casual talk this week at a month-long retreat i’ve been at in the adirondack mountains :-) my friend wes and i hosted a “crypto double feature” where i talked about distributed coops and they covered rsa cryptography.

have been thinking a lot about how crypto and blockchain tech can be used for community building and organizing, specifically for facilitating the distribution of wealth, supporting creative and activist communities, and redefining the way we govern social systems and resource sharing.

particular topics of interest include: distributed coops (discos), universal basic income in blockchain networks (who watches the watchmen?), commons-based peer production (cbpp), and cities and governance.

here are the slides below:

a very huge thank you to my friend kadallah for introducing me to discos (distributed cooperative organizations) and for all their deep insights and inspirations and our many conversations on distributed communities and worker-coops for artists and activists!

special shoutouts as well to friends ryan, bert, wes, ember, and joe for being sounding boards throughout this month as i talk endlessly on this topic :-)

on a more technical note — i’ve been reading more recently on zero knowledge proofs and zksnarks/zkstarks. thank you to ember for their casual talk + discussion on zkp’s (my notes here)!