let's begin this is me my name is Rhys I
work for the digital currency initiative
at the MIT Media Lab and I helped helped
curate the systems in society track here
at Def Con this year and that's my
twitter handle so as I said these are
the five talks that we're going to be
chatting about today and we will yeah a
way that I like to think about them is
that the top three and I'll discuss a
bit the top three are about how things
are affecting kind of personal like kind
of at the micro personal level while the
bottom two thinking about international
law and thinking about nation state
governments are thinking about kind of
macro institutional macro societal so
that's what we're gonna be chatting
about today and I just want to remind
everybody that how like where this falls
in the the there's this big bucket of
like how technology impacts society
that's kind of a difficult thing to
understand and hasn't it doesn't have
that much texture on it you could be
like what is philosophy you want a
society how does it impact so I just
wanna be clear about what we're
discussing today and where it fits in so
if you saw the thing that I gave at the
opening keynote the a general idea here
is that we have oh yeah so we have
Biddle in the middle which is the tech
side of things where we're building
things the wide Biddle piece is asking
yourself why are you building these
things what is your mindset what are
your goals what are your values that
happens kind of before you actually
start building and we've had discussions
there's a values breakout this morning
there have been discussions about goals
and how to think about high impact
before and then but we're gonna be
chatting out today is actually sets in
the other tracks we're trying about
today is the impact side the impact dole
which is kind of dumb but thinking about
when we actually make the tech how does
it impact society okay so that's how you
should kind of buck it in your mind as
example this when vitalik when he
tweeted the stuff I guess December of
last year this he was thinking about
this impactful thing thinking about like
you know the second one here how many
unbanked people have we banked that's an
impact question right that's not a
that is not a values question
necessarily so in terms of impact and
again in a quick reminder here for
everybody that this is in a this is an
ax loop there's a reinforcing loop here
where after you have impact on the world
then you re-evaluate and go back to Y
pedal and then Reda terminus is kind of
sad I've had emoji issues recently the
in between that supposed to be a
beautiful systems emoji that says tech
impact society society impacts tech and
as I said this in the the kind of the
intro as well it this is a question of
why should we care about these things
there was after I gave my thing during
the opening kind of keynote area there
was someone said hey it's important to
care about these things but or else just
trying to like build deep level
infrastructure actually get like actual
like many daily active users you don't
have right now but we should begin to
care about how our tech will impact
society because we're building pretty
powerful technology here and when that
technology goes out into the world it
will have big impact so we can see this
with the web 2.0 world with stuff like
the Arab Spring and that's to here
square where the technology enabled to
some extent some of the protests that
happened there and then something like
surveillance capitalism were the
incentives in the affordances of web 2.0
technology gave birth to the rise of
surveillance and addiction capitalism so
for a easy example of this happening
already within the Bitcoin in aetherium
world the blockchain world this is the
classic energy consumption graph where
proof-of-work is a very expensive is
very energy intensive thing and so you
can see right now the theorem uses about
twenty terawatt hours per year of
electricity which is in between Iceland
and Azerbaijan so this is an example
where you just put some incentives out
into the world and in the world kind of
congregates around them in before long
you're spending lots of electricity
keeping the consensus of a global
blockchain state so this is why we
should care is because it will impact
society
we think about it as I said I think it's
very helpful both as we try to
understand it in terms of the the talks
that were gonna listen to today but also
just in general thinking about wind tech
impact society especially the impact
side thinking about this from a kind of
a macro systemic or macro institutional
perspective but also from a micro
personal perspective so here's what I
mean by each of those so from a macro
systemic perspective institutional
coevolution and what I mean by that is
if you think about the institutions that
existed before the information
revolution we had stuff like markets and
we had things like religion and States
and firms and these were things that and
they are on this axis of how good they
are coordinating people and how good
they are at motivating people so there's
something called the goose kosis Ronald
Coase his theory of the firm says hey
why do firms exist why isn't everything
a market well it's because firms are
really good at coordinating people
together in the transaction cost within
the firm or less so these are the kind
of institutions that existed pre
information revolution but those were
not always true so has anybody in this
room read the sovereign individual nice
we got so this is essentially from that
book where it said hey when we had these
institutions they can leverage a couple
different things and one of them that
they can leverage is the information in
the myths right and so at the beginning
of the when the printing press came out
at that time the church essentially had
a monopoly on the written word and on
the Word of God but as you can see from
this graph on the Left boom the printing
press came out and then there are so
many more printed books and that's crazy
and that essentially took this
defensible monopoly that the church had
around information and myths and broke
that monopoly and said you don't have us
anymore and in the Crick I'd love this
stat from in the early 1500 from 15 18
15 25 Luther's works accounted for no
less than a third of all German language
books sold that's just like an example
of your release this into the wild it
changes the way that information flows
in the
myths that people can create with that
information just create a competition
essentially among there's an example of
institutional coevolution where there's
competition among Catholic and
Protestant religions as a result of the
technology the printing press so we can
kind of use a similar mindset but
instead to think about post information
revolution so if you saw the first one
in here there were about four things and
now we have I've added three so now
after the information revolution after
we have these digital computers and
networked computers the interwebs we
have things like networks these are like
Airbnb Facebook uber things of that
variety that connect people at these big
massive platform these aggregators we
have things like block chains which
we're gonna talk about some extent today
which are new ways to coordinate and
motivate people and then we also have
things like memes and this is kind of a
weird one but this you can think of
something like I think I say this in
this next graph yeah something like me
to is a great interesting example of a
meme this is a this shows the power of
the mean this is a history within the
United States of America of reasons why
people in Congress resigned over time
and you can see in the back in the day
in the 1900s there's some things that
happened and then like in World War two
a bunch of them went to left for
military service you go further to the
right for the to the right changes in
pension laws whatever but the far right
there me too me too as a meme was
something that was able to was created a
bunch of congressional resignations so
as we see stuff like me - or black lives
matter or make America great again those
kinds of memes are powerful and
institutions that people can coordinate
and motivate around and with something
like Biddle as another example so this
is what we mean by institutional
coevolution it's these institutions code
following with each other and as we
listen to some of the talks today think
about the new ways that blockchain
enables information especially capital
to move around and how that enables new
institutions there's a funny example of
this just with what we've seen today um
this is an example of these
these new Internet enabled businesses Co
evolving from an institutional level
this is just a tweet from this person
who I don't know but he says so how long
until GoFundMe is our nation's leading
healthcare provider and that's kind of
funny kind of sad but the reason why he
says is because in 2017 GoFundMe hosted
more than 250,000 medical campaigns
which raised over 650 million dollars
combined so what traditionally was an
institution the nation state providing a
public good something like health care
now something like GoFundMe one of these
Internet enabled platforms are these
internet in the able businesses now is
is providing that public good so it's
kind of a competition or coevolution
among who's gonna provide the public
good another example this is something
like this lady who says hey a ten dollar
override is a lot a lot cheaper than
three thousand dollars for an ambulance
and this is because of the study that
she's referencing here where they showed
that when uber came into a city the
amount of people that took boobers for
ambulance visits went way up because hey
something like these new platforms can
compete with something like the
traditional nation state government way
to provide a public good of like an
ambulance Jonathan Zittrain who's a
great person from the Berkman Kline
Center at Harvard which studies how
internet it's an Internet Society Center
at Harvard he he captures this well this
is at Davos and says what if public
infrastructure was funded by the crowd
would that be so crazy and cool like or
some would call it taxes these are all
just ways to think about how these
institutions these new internet-enabled
institutions are Co evolving with
existing with existing kind of
pre-internet institutions as an example
of this you can think like which
institution has more power and so on the
left side are all the institutions and
different types of institutions on the
right side there's a bunch of different
metrics which are they're not correlated
with each other they're not the shared
metric unfortunately but like suddenly
Christianity the religion has 2.4
billion people that is an institution
something like Facebook is a network has
2.2 billion monthly active users that
more or less
holdin Christianity something like China
the nation state has 1.2 1.4 billion
people something like the Bitcoin as a
blockchain has a you know large 125
billion dollar market cap and something
like black lives matter that meme had
300 million tweets into 2017 these are
examples like hmm what who has more
power here is difficult to say one final
note here is so especially think about
this institutional coevolution during
the fifth talk today during Santiago
series talk at the end one but one
before his Catherine from masari's gonna
be talking about law and law is another
way that these institutions and
especially the digital space kind of
co-evolved with with meatspace and this
is something that was referenced
yesterday by Cory Doctorow was this guy
Lawrence Lessig who also works at that
Berkman clients in Harvard he has this
pathetic dot and he says these are
essentially the things that can change a
given outcome in the world and there are
by architecture on the left he means
Coates you can actually have code that
changes how things occur you can have
the market or incentives that change how
things happen you can have law that
constrains how people kind of operate or
you can have norms I'm kind of like the
mindset piece and so this is just
another yeah so this is another way to
think about this is in there's
institutional coevolution and there's a
question of how does the law respond to
things so the tech that we're building
is all on the architecture side the
coding architecture side and on the
market side the new incentive side
different than that is the wide Biddle
side which are the norms what norms are
we trying to create and then also how
does the law kind of constrain this so
when we talk about the two buckets of
impact there's the big bucket of the
macro systemic macro institutional
bucket and we chat about that here but
remember that that bucket which is on
the left here we don't actually care
about that bucket and what I mean by
that is we don't care what happens to in
the end we care about people right we
don't that a
company does not have a company cannot
be hurt a company does not have dopamine
receptors a company does not have pain
or suffering or those kinds of things
and so in the end we care about people
and people exist in institutions to try
to care about them but we should also be
deeply thinking about the kind of micro
personal side as well so let's make sure
we understand that too
so on the Micro personal side there
couple I like to bucket this in like
three main categories the first is power
and how new kinds of technology change
your relationship with power so as an
example of this within the general
blockchain ecosystem we talked about the
decentralization of all the things and
especially the decentralization of power
or wealth and this is this great graph
from Balaji from the CTO of coinbase
that looks at the Gini coefficients over
time of various different block chains
and here's the one for the four
aetherium
so the ideal line of decentralization if
everybody had the same I said the amount
of wealth then that would be correlate
with that yellow line but in fact it's
much worse we have a very bad Gini
coefficient I think the top 100
addresses control I think it's 39
percent or 50 percent of all the
etherium so we should think about this
as our relationship with power and how
something like these new blockchain
networks change our relationship with
power and wealth is always a good way to
think about that another way to think
about power is kind of what the what the
technology gives us the ability to do in
the academic world kind of calls these
affordances
so when you have the new technology what
does it allow you to do what does it
afford you to do and there's a great
book by Zeynep - Fekete called Twitter
and teargas the power and fragility of
networked protest and in that she talks
about how the internet with its zero
marginal cost of transmitting
information allowed people to come
together around and have a hundred
thousand person protest in a much
cheaper way than they were before so
that's another way to think about powers
these affordances can kind of empower
people within these systems to do new
kinds of things so start thinking about
that as we
hear from our speakers later today how
do these new kinds of blockchain and the
abled systems empower us and give and
afford us new kinds of power another so
if powers one bucket another bucket here
is needs and how a given how given
technology verse changes our our needs
so when I'm talking about needs I'm
mostly talking about like Maslow's
hierarchy of needs with physiological at
the bottom ie your basic needs and
something like self-actualization at the
top and this is a good funny graph of a
funny pyramid of different startups that
have that that that go for different
levels on Maslow's hierarchy of needs
so something like at the bottom here
something like Yelp is really good for
finding your base level needs of food
while something at the very top like
Kickstarter is better for like the
self-actualization needs of like I'm
gonna do this creative project so with
that in mind think about how the
blockchain ecosystem what kinds of needs
from from a personal level blockchain
technology allows you to kind of meet
what needs does block to UI to meet and
then the final piece here is so if
there's power and then there's need
meeting and there's also identity is the
final one here an identity and let me
see if I have this No
so identity is uh yeah it's pretty is a
pretty humm or what I say it is it has
lots of there's lots of stuff wrapped
into identity and you can see this
happening on the web 2.0 world with the
internet essentially enabling filter
bubbles and things of that variety that
deeply change people's identity and get
them you get them in these new kinds of
identity that they did not have ten
years before identity also exists within
the crypto world as we well know we are
here at an ethereal conference and Layne
Reddick gave a great talk on day one
about how like I am an etherion so
that's like it a part of your identity
he's like oh I I am connected to the
etherium ecosystem I am defining myself
as in the theory in
and so you have all these different
identities that show up whether it's the
doge whether you love the Doge meme and
that is now part of your identity so
this is the final piece years as we
think about these technologies they are
they will almost certainly then be
connected into your identity as you go
forth
you