Listen on SoundCloud or Spotify
- Introduction
- Illinois Ends Cash Bail
- Interview with Molly White
- Panel with Molly and Cooper
- Interview with Cooper Quintin
- Pirates at the Bitcoin Conference
- Libertarians Unmasked
- Anarcolonizers
- Smash MAGA! Civil War
- Hacker and the Fraud
- Conclusions: Ending the Grift Economy
Introductions
Jeremy:
Well well! Welcome to another show! Twin Trouble!
Jason:
Your source for 100% verified takes on the entropy of US empire and “culture”.
I am Jason… and I am Jeremy. And we are….Twin Trouble!
Jeremy:
It’s clear we living in an era of decline, of collapse, of stochastic terror and rising fascism. Worse yet, this is also the era of grifts. And today, we’re pulling no punches, we’re calling out the frauds.
Jason:
Wikipedia describes “crypto-fascism” as “the secret support for, or admiration of, fascism or trends very closely related to the ideology. The term is used to imply that an individual or group keeps this support or admiration hidden”. It’s a rebranding tactic: like calling themselves freedom fighters, they use dog whistles to larger audiences in order to redpill normies towards fascism.
Jeremy:
We’re calling out that fake ass “Anarchapulco” scene, the crypto conspiracist colonizers at the heart of the HBO docuseries “The Anarchists”, and their followup cringefest, “Anarchovid”.
Jason:
We’ll also be talking about the Libertarian Party – kind of this toxic dumping ground ideology underpinning this fraudulent freedom movement. We’ll be looking at its increasing fascistification with the Mises Caucus takeover earlier this year.
Jeremy:
Finally, we’ll be looking at the king grift of them all: the scam that is crypto. Bitcoin, Defi. Web3. It’s been major Ls for Ponzi schemes these days. There’s been hundreds of collapses, but this month saw the biggest so far – FTX, their CEO Sam Bankman-Fried was just arrested. The crypto capitalism house of cards is all falling apart. Hundreds of billions of dollars gone, everybody lost all their money, and more cascading collapses are coming.
Jason:
We’ve got a great guest to help sort all this out. Molly White, who runs Web3 is Going Just Great, joining us for a deep dive into this toxic scene to dissect the dumpster fires and failed promises, and what this all means for the so-called future of the web.
Jeremy:
We’ve got another guest as well, Cooper Quintin, with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. An old school hacker, good friends of ours, gonna be talking about circumventing government surveillance, and just talk in general about some of the hacktivist happenings around the world.
Jason:
We’re bringing both of them on for commentary on the contours of the crisis we’re living in, and what role and responsibility ethical technologists should be playing.
Jason:
It’s a hell of a timeline. What happened to the promise of a liberatory techno utopia? Billionaire tech tycoons got us trapped up in their financial matrix, selling us crude parodies of our own ideals as we endlessly mine for virtual fake gold in their metaverses. No future but total ecological destruction. The cyberpunk dream turned out to be a dystopian nightmare.
Welcome to … Crypto Fascist Hell.
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In remembrance of our dear friend and comrade Marco Quiroz, we dedicate this podcast to his life. Marco Apocalypto was a well-loved anarchist punk from Chicago via Mexico. He sang in the legendary hardcore punk band Tras de Nada, old schoolers who influenced the next generations of punks. We’re honoring him by featuring his music in this podcast along with his bandmate’s current project Kebranto. Punks not Dead, up the motherfucking punks.
Illinois Ends Cash Bail
Jason:
Before we get to the interviews, a quick celebration of what’s coming up here in our home state.
So Illinois is leading the way with the passage of the Safe-T Act, including the Pretrial Fairness Act. It’s a historic bill advocated by a network coalition of abolitionist orgs. In addition to plenty of important criminal justice reforms, which have already begun to be implemented, the abolition of cash bail is set to go into effect on January 1st. We’re stoked to see people freed from hellholes like Cook County Jail, who finally no longer have to be assumed guilty til proven innocent, no longer have to sit in jail waiting for trial just because they can’t afford the bail.
Illinois has suffered not only from mass incarceration but from the mass disinformation campaign that sought to maintain the prison systems. Pro-police ‘news’ fills the TV stations and mainstream media each night to convince people or present the appearance for the need for the police. So-called ‘reporting’ on crime is almost always one-sided verbatim takes from the mouths of cops. But a new wave of copaganda arose specifically to beat back the Pretrial Fairness Act, most egregiously with these “pink slime” publications – made up papers, literal fake news, tens of thousands of copies were sent to doorstops all over Illinois filled with far-right algorithmic content, mugshots, falsities and fascist panic. Many people who received this shit did not realize it was merely the result of a 42 million dollar midterm donation to “People Who Play By The Rules”, a Florida-based PAC.
Jeremy:
They tried to weaponize racism and transphobia, calling this the “Purge”, saying that police can no longer detain people, spreading all these lies just to keep in place this racist and classist prison system. These Republicans, Darren Bailey, Tom Devore, Dan Proft, Paul Vallas, even Blagoyevich, all these clowns were out there making fools of themselves and it failed for them spectacularly in the midterms, here in Illinois and nationwide, as voters rejected the tough-on-crime election sloganeering.
The simple fact of the matter is that the PFA is eliminating one of the most blatant injustices embedded in the prison system – that whether somebody has the financial ability to pay the cash bail or not, that will no longer be a determining factor whether someone is imprisoned pending their trial. Cause right now you got people just languishing for months, years even, not because you been convicted of a crime, cause it’s pretrial. Not because they been denied bail because of flight risk or perceived danger to the public, but just because poor folks can’t afford the bail. The system collects all this money, the rich people walk, while everyone else got to sit and suffer, well that ain’t right, and it’s gotta stop.
Jason:
So we’re excited that Illinois is leading the way to finally end this discriminatory practice. This is one law we can actually get behind! As the Safe-T Act and PFA goes live on January 1st, we’ll be covering the rollout in future podcasts.
Interview with Molly White
Jason:
Today we have another special guest, Molly White. She’s a knowledgeable and prolific critic of crypto. A self-described anti crypto voice, her site “Web3 is Going Just Great” details the grift that is the whole scene which is routinely plagued by scams and collapse. Molly thanks for coming on the show today.
Molly:
Thanks for having me.
Jason:
How are you doing?
Molly:
I’m doing well, how are you?
Jeremy:
We’re here, we’re great, we’re having a great view of the dumpster fire. Thanks for joining us. A hell of a timeline, that web3, your coverage of this has been top notch. Much respects to your work. We do want to ask you all about FTX and all the stuff that happened this past month, but, people ask you all the time. You know we’re not crypto people, we’re not generally in that scene. But we do have some, me and my brother, we went to the Bitcoin conference, that was kind of funny. We had to see for ourselves. You know, I went to prison and did a lot of time, but when I was out, Bitcoin was kind of just Silk Road era, $10 a coin type of thing, right. It is kind of like this cool underground feel, right? And you know a lot has happened since I’ve been gone. And I just kind of try to keep an open mind about it cause people ask me all the time. We’re not investors, or have any speculations in crypto or stuff like that. But me and my brother, we did go to the Bitcoin conference, I also went to NFT NYC. And as we had to see for ourselves, and it was nauseating, pretty toxic.
Jason:
Have you by yourself, felt any type of way, having rubbed shoulders with some of these crypto, like the sleaziness or something?
Molly:
Yeah, there’s kind of this constant feeling that they’re trying to sell you something. It’s hard to have a straightforward conversation with people sometimes that are really deep in it, because it becomes just so ideological and so sales-pitchy so quickly. So it is a really weird scene especially when you end up talking to some of the people who are really in it, not just dabblers, but have really devoted themselves to it, it can be a really weird experience.
Jeremy:
Yeah the True Believers, they got like that glazed look in their eyes, trying to sell you something, right? Now, as techies, right – you’re a fantastic coder, you’re an actual techie. One of my experiences going to this thing, this whole consultant-speak, all these acronyms, they try to keep their knowledge in their in-cult type of language. And I know tech! and I hear these red flags going off, and I’m just like, you’re full of shit, just stop it man, you’re full of shit, you don’t even know what you’re talking about. This whole fraud, it’s kind of the big theme this episode. We were going to ask you what your opinions generally, what the crossover has been with the tech industry and the crypto industry: culturally, politically – we’re gonna get into all that.
Jason:
Do you want to talk about maybe a brief summary of FTX and maybe how this compares and contrasts to traditional financial schemes and collapses?
Molly:
Yeah, so FTX is a huge crypto exchange, I think the second-largest crypto exchange up until recently. And there is this guy, Sam Bankman-Fried, who had founded it, he also ran a quantitative trading firm called Alameda Research. And recently FTX completely collapsed. There is sort of a run on the exchange where a bunch of people tried to all withdraw their crypto because of concerns about the solvency of the exchange. And it turned out that there was basically this enormous hole in their balance sheet of billions of dollars. They’ve been unable to continue processing withdrawals, they’ve filed for bankruptcy, and Sam Bankman-Fried has been replaced as CEO by someone who’s going to now try to unwind the chaos that was FTX. It was basically this big fall from grace from a cryptocurrency exchange that was considered generally to be one of the more aboveboard crypto exchanges. You know it was an offshore exchange that had a much more limited US offering, but it did have major mainstream appeal. They have superbowl ads, they bought a stadium in Miami – the FTX Stadium. So people really knew about it and thought it was like this legit thing but it turned out it was a whole bunch of, what is beginning to look a lot like fraud behind the scenes.
Jeremy:
Yeah. Remember those fortune cookies, the FTX fortune cookies? That was ridiculous.
Molly:
That was such a cheap bottom of the barrel thing. Your family is trying to enjoy some nice takeout, and your kid opens the fortune cookie, and it’s like “buy crypto, you 12 year old!”
Jason:
I do remember that!
Jeremy:
That shit was ridiculous. Like, how low can you go, how the mighty have fallen! So, is this a unique thing, though, FTX? Cause you’ve covered hundreds and hundreds of these collapses. They keep on wanting to look at this like how could this have gone wrong, but this is kind of like the model, the standard-bearer.
Molly:
Yeah, I think the uniqueness really is just the scale of it. This is by far one of the largest collapses that we’ve seen to date. But I do think it is really typical, and now that FTX has collapsed, people in the crypto industry are really trying to paint FTX as this total outlier: it’s just this one guy, he was scamming everybody, but it’s not crypto. It’s not the real technology, it was just this guy running this centralized exchange. But I think it actually is completely representative of crypto: this happens all the time, just at smaller scales. And with crypto, it’s pretty easy to do a lot of fraud behind the scenes, and then it only becomes apparent when the whole ship begins to sink. I would be really surprised if there aren’t other crypto firms out there that are doing just as shady stuff as FTX was and we just don’t know about it at this point. I think it’s actually completely normal in the crypto industry for things to be happening like they were happening at FTX. People have started to ask the question now like “how did we not see this coming, there all these red flags” You know FTX had this really close relationship with Alameda, the trading firm. Realistically there should not be such a conflict of interest where those are being operated by the same person. So people are like, how did we not see this coming, and If you talk to people in the crypto industry who are being honest with you at least, they’ll say that “of course we didn’t see this coming because all the crypto exchanges have red flags like that!” Yeah, that’s a problem, that shows that this is actually quite illustrative of the crypto industry, and it’s not an outlier, because a lot of firms are doing really weird stuff.
Jeremy:
This is a house of cards right, the whole token value thing, everybody gotta have a token.
And now that this dumpster fire went up there all looking for something external to themselves, like it’s not like a predictable outcome of the design. Or Bitcoin maximalists will like, oh it’s shitcoins, or it’s some conspiracy theory.
Molly:
Yeah, it’s wild to see all the different things people are saying to try to distance themselves from it. The Bitcoiners are saying, well this wouldn’t have happened with Bitcoin. Some of the people in the Ethereum ecosystem are saying oh it’s all because it was centralized, and these decentralized projects wouldn’t have this problem. Everyone started pointing at something to say that this is just totally out of the blue, couldn’t have seen this coming, and it doesn’t reflect on the crypto industry as a whole, which I think is completely self-serving and not true.
Jeremy:
Just another fraud, just another grift, just like the rest of them. One thing that was unique about this FTX thing was in the aftermath, it seemed like that there was a lot of conspiracy theories surrounding SBF’s donations to the Democratic party, whether he was helping co-author like regulations over about Bitcoin, and all these theories like oh they’re funneling money through the Ukraine to fund Democratic midterms, and all these ridiculous notions. Know anything about that?
Molly:
Yeah, I mean people get really conspiratorial about this stuff, especially when it starts to touch American politics, which obviously FTX was really involved in. But, people were coming up with all these theories about how he was laundering money for the Democrats to send to Ukraine, that didn’t even really make any sense, like why would that even happen, why would Democrats even do that? And then it came out later, he said that he actually donated basically an equal amount to Republicans through basically dark donations that he didn’t disclose, and so I think that sort of falls apart. To be fair, there’s no easy way to verify that he’s not just lying about that, and I think at this point we need to take everything he says with a grain of salt. I think the more obvious explanation here is that he just did a lot of fraud, and that the donations were part of him trying to buy influence, to some extent.
Jeremy:
He did admit in some leaked text messages that oh this whole Effective Altruism thing was just a front. And we get a lot of this from these billionaires who wrap some of the evil things they do within the language of “oh, I’m also a philanthropist”. Stuff like Jeff Bezos say Oh I’m gonna give all my money to the causes before I’m dead, well you know what you fucking rich assholes made billions during the pandemic. Now this SBF guy, just because you been to these different causes and stuff like that, that doesn’t absolve you from some of the other terrible things, and these business decisions you are making that are also ruining all these people’s lives.
Molly:
You seem to have this sort of utilitarian view on things, like even if he was making money at the expense of other people, it was all worth it in the end because he was somehow the better donator, he was the better philanthropist. So It was fine if you took your money because he could do better things with it then you could, which is such a cynical and sociopathic way of thinking.
Jeremy:
Yeah. I mean generally though, crypto, overall, there’s been a lot of support for Republicans as well. There’s articles in the early days of the rise of Bitcoin, specifically funding white supremacy. A lot of alt-right and nazis made bank early on, like Nick Fuentes, and weev, and all them clowns.
Molly:
Still do!
Jeremy:
FTX, his right hand man also gave millions to top Republicans and so forth. Peter Thiel of course is a huge supporter of right wing fascist movements, GOP politicians.
Molly:
Recently crypto – well not recently, but in more recent years, crypto has become more of a mainstream political talking point in the US where there are now Senators and congresspeople adopting crypto as a part of their political platform. And by and large those are the Republicans that are doing it. There’s a handful of Democrats too who have hopped on the train, but there’s a lot of Republicans, who are saying things at least, that are very pro-Bitcoin, pro-crypto, if not actually legislating and campaigning for it. It’s definitely a major part of the political sphere as well. And I think it does jibe pretty well with some of the right-wing talking points about, “you don’t need to tax us, we want to be free to do whatever we want with our money, no government intervention at all”, those types of things. They do jibe to some extent with the crypto ethos, although some of them are a little more authoritarian.
Jeremy:
Yeah, it’s kind of ironic right because this Bitcoin kind of freedom movement they’re talking about is generally about like oh they don’t want to tax us or regulate us. Or even some anti-vax stuff, and other right-wing talking points. But like you said the authoritarian stuff too. Like Peter Thiel, I keep going back to Peter Thiel.
Molly:
Yeah!
Jeremy:
But going back to the role of crypto in politics in the fallout of the SBF stuff, obviously people are going to say regulation is really on the way, now it’s coming. You got all these congress people talking about this shit. But then again, aren’t there already existing regulations and laws, insider trading and Ponzi schemes, securities fraud, monopolies. Companies have always just been taking advantage.
Molly:
I feel like people, when crypto is involved, they forget that it’s illegal to steal money from people. They think that if there isn’t a really specific crypto-focused piece of legislation, then everything goes. You can do whatever you want, you can run a Ponzi-scheme, you can just steal people’s money. No, you still can’t just steal money from people, that is still illegal. And so the fact that those laws haven’t been heavily enforced is pretty weird. There’s also existing laws around securities regulations that have not really been enforced because there’s been so much push back, I guess, against labeling a lot of these tokens, which are quite clearly securities, as securities. These tokens, for example ones that are associated with the exchanges like FTT that was associated with FTX, are not just securities, I mean they behave in basically every way like security, and so there could have been regulatory actions around those under the existing securities regime. But there wasn’t, there wasn’t any action there. I think the claims that we need regulation, we need regulatory clarity it’s like, we have that! We just need enforcement and investigations that are not happening today.
Jeremy:
That’s a good point, because it’s a common criticism of the fact that these big banks are too big to jail. The United States hasn’t really gone after any of these corporate criminals, they just get away with it. And of course the law Is such a way that they got front groups and dark money like you had mentioned earlier. And even the times that they do, very rarely do you see any of them go to jail. Let’s be clear, the whole prison system is not meant to be locking up congresspeople and corporate executives.
Molly:
And that’s what’s been happening in the crypto industry, too. We’ll see these fines against crypto companies that are just pennies to them, there’s no substantial fines being levied. There’s obviously no criminal charges coming down, and so it just becomes a cost of doing business, where if you’re fined by the SEC then you pay the fine and you keep on going. It doesn’t actually stop anywhere from doing anything, It doesn’t keep anyone from being scammed, it’s completely ineffective.
Jeremy:
Right. And let it not be said of all this talk of crime and fraud and stuff, the largest form of crime, property crime specifically, that’s going on in the United States. It’s not shoplifting, it’s not turnstile jumping. It’s wage theft, right? It’s companies just criminally underpaying working people to the tune of billions of dollars. And they’re just getting away with it. But at the same time, the criminal system is set up in a way that… like how people are often talking about SBF like how is he still out, how is he still free… well, the system punishes others more harshly than others.
Molly:
Right
Jeremy:
Like look at the Kalief Browder case for example. Kalief Browder spent three years pretrial in Rikers Island for stealing a backpack, because he couldn’t afford bail. But all these rich fucks just get away with this shit. They got appeals bonds and all that. Looking at Trump just getting away with crimes in front of the whole world, and you think about all the people in prison. So when I hear people like “oh, socialism! oh, taxes!” They’re just trying to defend like a company’s right to run sweatshops, man. I always thought that the regulation was never really going to be a serious way of keeping any of these companies and this crypto stuff in check in the first place, because they’re in cahoots! Way I see it, anyways.
Molly:
Right. And if you just look at the amount of money going into crypto lobbying, it kind of explains why there hasn’t been much in the way of legislation or regulatory action. The crypto industry is very well funded and they can pay lawyers to basically either stall these legal proceedings practically indefinitely, or get them out with a slap on the wrist. That’s why we see people like Bankman-Fried, people who have these millions if not billions of dollars, just paying their way out of things pretty much. Getting a pretty light slap-on-the-wrist compared to other forms of crime. Which is I think somewhat typical of banking and these large industries that are very lucrative and have very close ties to the government and regulatory agencies. But it’s clearly not working well for the actual average people who were being told that this is a system that’s good for them, that this is a way to make money; they’re getting completely screwed over because people are able to really do whatever they want with very little consequence.
Jeremy:
Yeah that’s a great point, reminds me of a quote of yours that I heard at a talk you were giving, someone was talking about “oh well it’s a new industry, and just billions come and go, and you need a break a few plates right: and you said “those plates are people”, right this isn’t just some abstract stuff, a lot of people lost everything.
Molly:
Right. That’s one thing that really frustrates me but honestly about the tech industry in general is there’s this theory of “move fast and break things”, I think it was Zuckerberg who says that a lot. And it’s like, okay if we’re talking about move fast and break things in the sense of like occasionally you write a bug in your software and it takes your server offline, like fine. But if breaking things means like absolutely ruining people or, just like at some of the huge impacts of the tech industry has had on society, causing complete civil unrest in terms of social media companies or this widespread surveillance. Move fast break things doesn’t really hold up there, when we’re talking about completely wiping out someone’s life savings, they can’t pay their medical bills, can’t pay for their kids tuition, whatever it might be. You have to remember that things can be very different dependending on the actual industry. So it was Charles Hoskinson who said that “in order for the crypto industry to move forward, we’ve got to break a few plates”. He separates himself from the fact that those are actual people who are putting money off and can’t afford to lose in the crypto industry. I mean Charles Hoskinson runs a huge blockchain project, he has millions of dollars. He sort of laughs during that same talk about how you act like “oh yeah the crypto collapse affected me too, I lost two million dollars”, and like… most people don’t have two million dollars that they can just lose! My heart is not breaking for you, Charles Hoskinson, because some of your enormous wealth was evaporated.
Jeremy:
Yeah, That’s pretty fucked up though, and like you said it just highlights the fact that people are very much affected differently. In regular capitalism but in this whole crypto casino capitalism, too. The rich can afford to take these ridiculous losses. And the scale! To me is so unfathomable because I ain’t no millionaire. It’s just so much, like millions, billions and… In Charles’s case, right, the fact that he lost millions. I kind of want to ask you the inverse of this question, isn’t it when it’s these rich assholes getting their wallets hacked, or their apes stolen, all my apes gone. It’s a little funny! Like, it’s a little poetic justice, right? You’re punching up, is there some argument for that? Really I’m actually advocating for a specific tactic here. Looking at this whale crypto thing… to me they’re just a bunch of walking marks, and I say, well maybe you’re just contributing to the overall negativity of the ecosystem as a whole, but I say, if you ain’t got shit, man go fucking hack these whales’ wallets, take that shit, maybe dust everybody’s accounts that they’ve wronged. On some Robin Hood stuff, you know.
Molly:
Yeah. The one thing about running my project where I keep track of scams and hacks and things like that is that… Some of it is very funny! And the ones that I laugh at are usually the millionaires who did something so dumb or ended up falling for the utmost obvious scam.
Because they’re not the ones who can’t put food on the table at the end of the day, right? If someone loses a million dollars that they spent on an ape JPEG, chances are they’re having no trouble paying their rent. But some of them, it’s hard to laugh. They’re really upsetting, because it is people who spent, you know, their last one hundred bucks because they were told that this is their way out of poverty. Those I don’t laugh at, because it’s really upsetting to see people get basically taken for a ride and then end up in pretty dire circumstances in some cases.
Going back to your point about millionaires being marks, I think that’s one thing I don’t think people realize in the crypto ecosystem is when anyone can see your wallet, and can see that you have two million dollars worth of some cryptocurrency, you become such a huge target. We’ve seen that with the Bored Apes as well: the Bored Ape ecosystem has been targeted probably more than any other NFT project for these weird phishing scams, these things around “click this link and we’ll animated your ape for you”, so now your jpeg will dance around or whatever. And a ton of people fell for it. It’s because Bored Apes, that go for hundreds of thousands of dollars… people want to steal those! It’s kind of like you’re just walking around with a huge wad of cash in your hands. People don’t realize the risk that they’re opening themselves up to when they do these things.
Jeremy:
I actually wanted to pick your brain about some of the specifics on some of the methods that people be hacking, and the security in the blockchain, but maybe that’s a different conversation. I encourage people to check out these Solidity contracts and stuff like that, cause I’m reading sometimes how weaknesses just sitting there for years just waiting for someone to exploit. Just utterly drain an entire market in a matter of minutes. And anybody can do it.
Molly:
Yeah it’s the biggest bug bounty out there. Hey you hack that thing and you get the entire contents of the crypto wallet that belongs to the project. It’s so obvious why there’s so much hacking happening in this space because you can make incredible amounts of money at it, and it’s generally not prosecuted. There isn’t much in the way of resources. Projects have been really hacked profusely, and it’s very lucrative for some of these hackers.
Jeremy:
Kind of going along with the criminalized darknet type of thing, I want to ask about use cases and stuff like that. I know you get asked about this shit all the time, but one thing, is it still a useful tool for criminalized people, like sex workers, or even drug markets stuff like that. Maybe a lot of these mainstream crypto people keep trying to put that off to the side, even though it kind of paved the way for all their casino shit. But what is the state of the darknet scene right now, if you know anything. Or you don’t have to answer that question.
Molly:
There still is use for it in the criminal side of things. It’s still used for ransomware pretty heavily, it’s used for various darknet markets. But I think that increasingly criminals are moving away from things like Bitcoin and towards other forms of cryptocurrency because the tracing has become pretty sophisticated at this point. Back in the early 2010s when people were buying weed off of the Silk Road, chances are there wasn’t going to be some internet detective at the FBI knocking at your front door because you could obfuscate who you were pretty easily with Bitcoin, especially if you were buying Bitcoins from some person you met rather than – there weren’t the Coinbases where you had to upload your driver’s license photo so you could connect your real life bank account and buy Bitcoins. It was very private back then. These days, people really have to work to keep their identities private much more than they used to with these centralized exchanges and these on-ramps. And there are these huge tools, and an entire industry now, of companies that create tracing tools that they then sell to the government, and to various other agencies, so that they can track down people who are sending Bitcoin around. It is more difficult these days to commit crimes, I think, or to purchase substances or whatever you might be doing with cryptocurrencies. You have to be really thoughtful of it. And I actually think we’re starting to see people who were involved in crimes, back in the early 2010s or whatever, now being discovered because those tools have evolved over time, and the crime they committed that maybe they got away with a while ago has now been uncovered because Chainalysis and the FBI has resources.
Jeremy:
That’s really scary, actually. And you know, fuck those dudes working at the FBI or these private cybersecurity firms going to go back like 10 years and trying to trace these motherfuckers. That’s some shit, and I know a piece of shit like that, by the way, Chris Tarbell who busted both me and Ross Ulbricht, he’s now a crypto cybersecurity dude, trying to get in on that grift. So fuck all these fake ass technologists working to deanonymize people.
Molly:
But I think it’s really actually something that’s very much underappreciated, people aren’t paying enough attention to that. Because Bitcoin or whatever crypto has has this public ledger that never goes away. If you do something with Bitcoin today and you get away with it, that doesn’t necessarily mean that in five years, ten years, the technology won’t have evolved to the point that people can actually trace it. And those records are probably still going to be there. It’s the same thing when people start talking about putting data on the blockchain for various reasons. People start talking about storing various forms of private data, even like medical records and scary shit like that, with web3. “No no no, we’ll just encrypt it, and nobody will be able to figure out what it actually says”, and it’s like, okay so now you’re putting out this encrypted blob of data, and then just sort of hoping that that encryption is good forever? In most industries you add layers of security around really sensitive data, so you would encrypt it but you’d also store it in a private data store and you would put all these controls behind it. And in the crypto industry they’re like, just put it out there, just put it on this public ledger, and then who knows if those encryption algorithms turn out to be flawed – which has happened, just look at the history of computer science, there have been encryption algorithms that have been broken. Then you are just counting on people not caring enough to go and look at your medical records. It’s a really scary sort of permanent decision that people don’t always realize the implications of.
Jeremy:
Yeah, I don’t know why they would at the same time talk about the promise of anonymity but at the same time, let’s just put everything out there in a public dump. And like you sakd, what if they got quantum computing, they crack that shit years later. And to me, that was like, one of the biggest disappointments, the biggest lie of this whole crypto Bitcoin dream that they’re trying to sell us. The promise of anonymity, like what a joke. And also the promise of decentralization Which are two things that are very important to anarchists, autonomous movements. One of the reasons why maybe in the early days people were interested in it. And I was, and I thought that’s kind of cool in the early days, right? But when you put the magnifying glass and you see how their ideologies and underlying technologies, didn’t live up to the dream.
Molly:
I agree with you. When I first heard of Bitcoin, it was the early 2010s, and I remember hearing about it like this is how we’re going to be able to fund whistleblowers, at that point WikiLeaks was being funded with Bitcoin because all of the credit card agencies had stopped processing payments for them. And I was like this is the way that we’re going to make it so that even if there’s a regime trying to crack down on someone, people can still support them or whatever. I was like, that makes some sense, I kind of get why people might want to send money outside of the controls of Visa or whatever. But that’s largely not what crypto is today. There’s still people on the fringes who talk about that kind of stuff, and there’s a lot of people who try to co-opt those types of talking points in order to talk up their particular crypto scheme, whatever it is, even though often it ends up being an empty talking point. But those sort of early ideological points have been overshadowed by the amount of venture capital, the amount of retail capital going into the space. People get these dollar signs in their eyes, and sort of forget about a lot of the ideological points. And people are generally unwilling to actually consider a lot of the ideological points. With a lot of these topics: decentralization, anonymity, sending money outside the bounds of the government… you really do have to engage with those really carefully and think about it like, what are the risks when we’re doing this? How are we putting our users at risk; how are people going to lose privacy for example. People just sort of look at it like “oh, decentralization, sounds great” but don’t think about the potential downsides or tradeoffs that they’re making. It’s just a weird… the space has evolved in a really weird unsettling way.
Jeremy:
There’s plenty of examples of every time some of these venture capitalists create a crypto project they’re trying to sell you the ideas of decentralization, but they don’t even make any half ass attempt at even technologically implementing decentralization. What they’re doing is making central APIs or something, or they’re making these exchanges that are basically just banks anyway, so all this talk about the bankless, well you’re not really any different. And one example after another just keeps undermining the entire – for example, MetaMask banning sending money back and forth from Venezuela, or OpenSea kicking Iranian artists off their platform, it’s like, this is a central platform! It’s just a charade, a big fraud, right? No decentralized nothing!
Molly:
Yeah, it’s really weird and I don’t know why more people don’t object to this, but to hear the Andreessen Horowitzes and other venture capitalists talk about crypto, they’re basically condemning themselves. They’ll say all these things like :we don’t want to have a web that’s controlled by a couple big companies”, and it’s like, who did you invest in? Look at Andreessen Horowitz, they were backing all of these tech monopolies. Andreessen Horowitz has so much control in the tech industry, so it’s like, why are you claiming that you’re trying to take power away from yourselves. No one should be believing that, no one should be looking at them and thinking “oh yeah you know, after they’ve created this tech monopoly horrorshow, they’ve suddenly seen the light and they want to return power to the little guy, return wealth to the little guy. Why wouldn’t you just think that trying to centralize power and hoard as much money they can for themselves, when that’s what they’ve been doing for years, I mean they’re a venture capital firm, that’s what they’re supposed to do. It’s really weird to see people looking at venture capital firms as though they are these visionaries in the crypto industry who espouse all these ideals when they’re just regurgitating talking points that they clearly don’t believe.
Jeremy:
That was kind of our experience at the Bitcoin conference too. It just really looked more like a corporate sideshow. Let’s be clear, the industry bought in, it’s been mainstreamified. Even the handful of people we talked to there that were actually kind of cool and not into that whole thing, and they were like, yeah this isn’t at all, what we thought it was going to be like. This is just some corporate sideshow.
I want to hone in on what you said about the whole hoarding power and wealth thing, and in general, in crypto, how does it compare to the traditional economy in the distribution of wealth and power. I know equality was never really one of the promises of crypto, like they promised us anonymity and decentralization, but it seems that inequality has kinda always just been baked into the whole formula in the first place. I guess my question is, who’s owning all the Bitcoins? How is this pyramid set up? I think I remember something like 2% of all the addresses hold 95% of the Bitcoins, but I don’t know, maybe you could clue us in, who’s got all the Bitcoins?
Molly:
It’s worse than traditional finance. You talk about 1% in the U.S. holding so much of the wealth. But if you look at the distributions of Bitcoin, it’s the 0.01%, It’s worse than the traditional monetary system. And if you look at the way the lot of the cryptocurrencies aside from Bitcoin are designed, they’re designed with the intention of, well not all, but a lot of them have these huge premines where before the general public can go and buy this token, they set aside this huge portion of it either for the founding team or often for the investors in the company. The general public starts at a disadvantage. And we see this same pattern happen again and again with these, where people will hoard these premined coins that the general public didn’t have access to, and when the project opens up for general access and retail investors are all excited and they see this new project and it’s really interesting, they buy up the token. And that’s when people who had this early access dump all their tokens and make a killing at the expense of the retail investors because after they dump their tokens, the price goes back down, and those retail investors are often the ones who bought high and then end up having to sell low or not even being able to sell the tokens at all. So it’s almost like it’s designed to benefit the people who have early access, which is wealthy people, people with influence, people who were connected, and not the little guy, even though a lot of crypto projects have also started to claim they are focused on empowering people who don’t have access to traditional finance, to banking the unbanked, to distributing wealth outside of the hands of these tech founders that they’re demonizing while basically becoming one themselves. So it’s definitely a pretty unequal world, there’s these crypto whales that have obscene amounts of money and then there’s the average person, who’s usually not doing very well.
Jeremy:
You had said like some of these folks who are trying to use crypto as a means to distribute power in an egalitarian way. Also there has been a number of attempts within crypto to kind of carve out a space for marginalized groups: women, people of color, queer folks. I just wonder how that actually fits within the larger sphere, which I don’t know, I kind of see as toxic. It seems like a contradiction or juxtaposition, but I was wondering if you had any opinion on how those actually fared, like have they made any waves in their claims.
Molly:
Yeah I mean I think it’s kind of typical of frauds, where if you’re doing a Ponzi scheme or something like that, traditional money, no crypto involved. One good way to get people to buy into your fraud is to say, “hey, I’m just like you: we have the same circumstances, we’re all queer, we’re all women, whatever: come get in on this, get your friends in on this, tell everyone how great this is, we’re all gonna lift each up together”. People have been using that language for far longer than crypto has been around. But it has been very much become a part of the crypto industry where there are these sort of affinity frauds and predatory schemes that really do target individual communities based on some attribute. We saw a lot of it with NFTs and women, like “hey, we have been excluded from the crypto industry, it’s this total crypto bro space, but come here, we’ll welcome you right in, we’ll show you which NFTs to buy. You can make money too”. Women come in, they buy the NFT and they end up being taken for a ride. It’s sort of a predatory scheme where the goal is to get people to buy in, not to make sure that the outcomes are fair to them. I think that data has begun to back that up, it’s one of those things that’s a little bit hard to measure, but there was some studies around like who has been buying cryptocurrencies, and it showed that Black Americans are among the larger groups that was buying in compared to their white counterparts or to other groups. And there was recently a study published that showed that a lot of the same people who bought into crypto, the Black Americans who bought in, bought when the prices were high and either had to sell or chose to sell after the most recent crypto crash. Sure they were buying crypto, getting into crypto, the crypto companies were all talking this up like look, we’re providing this option, marginalized people are using our products. And then it turns out that likely they were losing a lot of money based on the times at which they purchased and sold. I think people just have to realize that you can’t say across-the-board that we’re welcoming in these marginalized communities and it’s going to be good for them, because if you’re welcoming in marginalized communities to something that is detrimental to them, then that’s not a good thing. You need to be really thoughtful about who you’re targeting and what your goals are. And in crypto, the goal is usually just to make a lot of money.
Jeremy:
Yeah, right. Seems like it’s only real use case is speculation, financial casino type of thing, it’s the negative-sum game – mostly losers, right? Like you said the early adapters made bank and then they try to pass the bag onto someone else when it got bad, and unfortunately look who suffered the most.
I wanted to ask about other implementations of this whole crypto DAO thing that is not specifically speculation or money. There’s a lot of these DAOs, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations. A lot of them are branding themselves as “Social Impact DAO”. UkraineDAO is one of the big ones, there’s a couple environmental justice related ones, I was wondering what your experience is with that. I just kind of think… sorry, got a cat. I think the DAO is a cool idea, right? It sounds cool. I mean I’m an anarchist, and Decentralized Autonomous Organization, wow, is this? I don’t know if you had any opinion – I know every one is different, but if you think of that as somehow different than some of the regular speculation type hyper financialization of the project.
Molly:
Yeah so I had kind of a similar experience to you when I heard about these DAOs and I was oh cool, online self-governing communities, that sounds awesome, as opposed to say social media for example where the rules are set by the tech company or whoever, and there’s these outside moderation teams and the users had very little input on how things are run or how decisions are made, I was like oh that sounds pretty great. But like a lot of things in crypto, the promise sounds good and the actual reality is not living up to the promise. If you look at these DAOs, a lot of them, first of all, are DAOs in name only. They’re not decentralized, they’re not autonomous; they’re just a group of people who like crypto who are coming together and they call themselves a DAO even though they haven’t implemented any actual governance system. That’s strikingly common in the DAO space where it’s like, it’s not a DAO, it’s just a group of people, and there’s still just one person that makes all the decisions. But among the DAOs that do actually have a governance system set up, you have to look at how power is being distributed in those groups. In most cases with these DAOs, people get votes based on how many tokens they hold. So a DAO has a governance token, you obtain some amount of those governance tokens, and then if you have 10 tokens, you get 10 votes, if you have 1 token, you only get 1 vote. This is implemented because there’s a lot of trouble in crypto around something called the Sybil Problem, which if you’re not familiar, is basically: if you did one or one vote per crypto wallet, there’s nothing that would stop me from just making 100 crypto wallets and voting 100 times. Because in crypto, you don’t necessarily know who somebody is, it’s just a wallet address. And there’s really very limited options in terms of preventing people from gaming the system that way: it’s this huge unsolved problem in crypto, and they sort of have to go to this token-based voting system. But when you set up voting based on how many tokens you hold, then it just means the rich people in this DAO get all the votes. And it’s often the founders or a founding team, and you end up with the same, if not worse, centralization of power with DAOs than in even a lot of even traditional systems which might have shareholder voting or something like that. So I think DAOs have adopted, again, the language of flat organizations where everyone gets to vote, and then you actually look how they’re actually being run, and it’s a plutocracy, basically.
Jeremy:
Yeah, wow, this whole voting based on how many tokens you have. Seems like… for one,
I don’t know why you need to have on-chain voting in the first place? Isn’t there other ways of organizing? And like you said too, the financialization of it, the whales have disproportionate power, it seems, like buying of votes, right? Crypto has not gotten around that problem. It would arguably be even worse than traditional organizations with voting power.
Molly:
I’ve done some research in terms of how we could get around that problem, how can we set up alternative voting structures for these DAOs. And you start to see people exploring “self-sovereign identity solutions” where the ideas is like: okay so we want people to be able to prove that they only have one wallet in this DAO but we don’t necessarily want them to have to reveal who they are because everyone should be anonymous. And the systems that people are coming up with to allow for that kind of thing are like Black Mirror dystopian nightmare type of stuff where it’s like… a good example of this is this system called WorldCoin. They claim that they want to provide Universal Basic Income, but it looks kinda like they just want to train a big system to scan people’s eyeballs. And these chrome orbs that come to collect biometric data on people and retinal scans, and the idea is that your retinal scan is unique, and we can hash it, to make sure that you only have one crypto wallet. And it’s like… you’re scanning people’s eyeballs and you’re storing that data in some system that you’re not telling people about. They’re collecting all kinds of other data, it’s horrifying! And there are other systems that people have suggested around web of trust where you verify that your friend is a real person, and they can verify that their friends are real people. Aside from being probably pretty impractical, because in order for that to work, you need every single person to participate. They’re also really kind of weird around how you can challenge that someone’s a real person, or you can attest that someone is not a real person, and boy that sounds like a Dystopian novel that hasn’t been written yet.
Jeremy:
That’s been a regular theme in this whole crypto thing, this dystopian nightmare, it seems. Copying your biometrics to some type of public ledger, I can’t see any situation where that would go wrong.
Molly:
What could possibly go wrong!
Jeremy:
Yeah, or scanning your IDs, I thought it was supposed to be – now you want my ID scanned to the blockchain, alright.
Molly:
That’s actually something that Vitalik Buterin has talked about, he’s the guy that’s behind a lot of the Etherum community, he’s like this absolute God among people who like Ethereum. He started talking about these things called “Soulound” tokens, which first off is a terrifying name. But he was coming up with this idea that you can use these soulbound tokens that can’t be transferred to determine if somebody is worth engaging with, basically. He was talking about how right now you can’t necessarily decide if you trust someone enough to give them a loan that isn’t over-collateralized because you have no information about them, there is no incentive for them to not just run off with that money. But you can use these Soulbound tokens that show this sort of picture of their identity to determine some level of trustworthiness without necessarily exposing their identity. So he started talking about this on some podcast, he wrote a whole white paper about it which was like… pretty weird, and gave me some concerns to begin with. And then I saw that he was on the podcast, so I’ll go listen to what he has to say about it. And he started talking about how you could use these Soulbound tokens for negative credentials, basically, because if you’re given one of these tokens, and you can’t get rid of it, then it can be used to prove things about you that even if you don’t necessarily want them proven about you.
And his example was, if you want to try to determine someone’s level of trustworthiness, well we could just put all police records on the blockchain, and you can just basically query someone’s wallet, and see, do they have a police record, and I was like, are you crazy? You want to put all police records on the blockchain in a format that they cannot be challenged or erased. In what universe is that not going to be abused and used to absolutely exclude the most marginalized people from this system that you’re claiming is going to be revolutionary as far as inclusion goes. I think a lot of people just don’t think about these things, it’s people like Vitalik Buterin who have no experience with marginalized communities, or with police abuse, and they just think of these things and is like, boy that sounds great! And they want to move forward with it, and no one tells them no.
Jeremy:
Wow. Yeah that got carceral really quickly. What happened to the whole off the grid, underground economy, right. Now it’s like… we will build a nightmare credit score system that you can’t opt out of. Wow, and this is the main Ethereum guy.
Molly
Turns into these crazy social credit projects like in the blink of an eye.
Jeremy:
Going back to the DAO, why do you need a DAO anyways, why do you need on-chain voting. There’s plenty of other examples of decentralized organization, looking at the anarchist side of things, we got Food Not Bombs, we got antifa, we got Books to Prisoners, Anarchist Black Cross, remember IndyMedia a long time ago, that was decentralized journalist. John Brown Gun Clubs everywhere, Occupy Wallstreet was decentralized. There’s a lot of different implementations of consensus decision making, spokescouncils, diversity of tactics, so why do you need a blockchain? And I wanted to ask you, because Wikipedia been doing this for the longest, right? That’s a great method of content moderation, of self organization, that didn’t need a blockchain, right?
Jeremy:
Honestly I think a part of it is there’s this impulse in the tech industry where people will think of something like a DAO and they’ll go we’re brilliant, no one has ever thought of this before. We’re the first people to ever think about a group where you could all come together and run the group together, and they just don’t look at history. They don’t look at systems outside of their little bubble and so they just don’t know that co-ops or mutual organizations or various other forms of this have existed for centuries. And especially I think when a lot of people in the industry are coming from a very capitalist system: they’ve worked in tech for example for a long time, they don’t have exposure to mutual aid organizations that might be structured in this way. They aren’t aware that these opportunities are available. A lot of it is just naivety where people are just like yeah we’re brilliant, we came up with the first self-governing system, and they don’t realize that, again, this is something that has existed.
But I also think that people in crypto are keen on basically trying to create technological solutions for things that are actually really a societal problem. If you look at any self-governing community, there’s a lot of issues there that come up. People get into fights, there’s disputes about how the community should be run, who should ultimately be able to make a decision if there’s disagreement. There’s a lot of messy human parts to organizations like that that are challenging. It’s tough, especially with large organizations, to make sure that everyone is on the same page, and is working towards the same goals. And so there’s this impulse to say, well, we’ll just fix it with code and so we don’t have to get into those messy arguments. We’ll just set it up with token voting and if you don’t like too bad, it’ll all just be – code is law, basically. It’ll all just be self running systems and you don’t have to get worried about all the messy human stuff. Which is just I think really naive. The messy human stuff is the important part. These organizations require the messy human part to actually function well. And by trying to take that out of the picture, you just sort of ignore the real issues that you need to be engaging with. You end up with these DAOs where people are just like trying to game the system, trying to buy votes, because again the messy human part will find it’s way in, no matter how you set it up, it just sort of appears in different ways. I think there’s just a lot of naivety in crypto around these types of communities.
And there’s a lot of ignorance towards the fact that when you introduce a token that has some monetary value, you also introduce a sort of competing incentive. So that’s something I’ve seen a fair bit with these Social Impact DAOs like you mentioned where the DAO has some goal, whatever might be, saving the rainforest. And people are using their governance tokens to vote on proposals, or whatever, they’re using them as voting tokens in the pursuit of that goal. But because the tokens have a monetary value, because they need to to prevent someone from totally gaming the system, there’s now this competing goal that is not necessarily aligned with the goal of the DAO which is that they want to maximize their value of the token, because then individual members of the DAO could sell off their token for loads of money and that’s really exciting to a lot of people. So now you have these save the rainforest DAOs that are also coming up with these crazy schemes to try to maximize the price of their token. And often those goals are completely disaligned. So you end up with a group that just sort of collapses because it ends up pulling apart in those two different directions.
Jason:
So we’re talking about maybe the future of these crypto and DAO scenes, do you think that there is one, for one, and also do you think that maybe we just need less fully automated luxury capitalists and maybe some more fully automated luxury communists?
Molly:
I don’t have much hope for the future of DAOs in their current form. Seems like the issue of token-based voting is pretty intractable and the lot of the solutions to it which people are working on sound worse. Maybe there’s some magical self-sovereign identity solution out there that is actually wonderful and will solve everything, but I kind of doubt it, it seems like we just end up with these really scary and weird social credit systems or biometric systems.
One thing I think is really important, though, is to separate the impugnment of DAOs and my skepticism of DAOs from my feelings around self-governing communities, because I’m very optimistic about the future of mutual aid organizations that are set up in fairly flat structures or online self-governing communities like Wikipedia. I think those can be enormously powerful, co-ops are another example, they can be enormously powerful and effective. I think it’s just the idea that they somehow need crypto in order to function: that is not true, and I think sometimes kind of arrogant. There’s a lot of people like “we could fix all the problems with WIkipedia if you just put a crypto token in there”, and it’s always people who have no idea how Wikipedia works who suggest that. They just have this idea of crypto like the one big savior for all these organizations.
Long story short, there is not that much potential in DAOs in their current form. But I do hope, maybe naively, maybe it’s unlikely that people who are exposed to communities that are just like working together in the pursuit of a common goal, via this crypto world, start to explore the world of self-organizing communities outside of crypto. Maybe the best case scenario here will be that all these people who got into DAOs because they wanted to speculate on some DAO token actually realize that hey maybe there’s something to this organizational structure that doesn’t just have this one big boss. Maybe we should try this without the token that kept getting gamed. And they’ll start to explore other forms of governance like that.
Jeremy:
Right, because I mean there are a lot of people whom I met that maybe are in it for the right reasons, but they’re just attached to this whole crypto thing that just delegitimizes everything that they’ve been working for. But how do you unplug people from this? Seems like failure after failure after failure, what’s the line for a lot of people, when they say that’s enough? It just seem like we just need to get people out of this ecosystem and into stuff that’s meaningful. And that’s why I really like some of the work that you do. I don’t have much hope and faith for these regulators or these crypto people to just willingly give up power. Someone needs to go out there and study it, like yourself, and point it out. Because every time you do that it’s hopefully driving a wedge in such a way that people are opening their eyes to this whole thing. So my question is how do you unplug people, and also, how bad is it going to get first? What’s rock bottom here?
Molly:
I think you’re completely right that there is potential for some of these people who are involved to realize that OK so crypto maybe isn’t the way to achieve the goals I’ve been chasing. They’re often very reasonable goals, like banking the unbanked, sounds great, that’s something we should be working on, we should be fixing financial access. Maybe those people will realize that OK so crypto is clearly not working well, but what might work well, maybe we can start to work in that direction. I hope that the work I’m doing is helping with that, helping people realize that the system that they have chosen has these enormous flaws that are preventing it from achieving the goals that they ostensibly are chasing after. I’ve heard from some people who’ve seen some of the work that I’ve done and who’ve said “I was all in on crypto and I decided to leave the industry, to sell all my tokens, whatever it is, because of some of the things that you’ve said”. That’s been really satisfying for me: I hope that there are more people out there who are seeing the kinds of work that I’m doing and a lot of other people are doing and really reconsidering their choices as far as engaging with crypto. But ultimately, and cynically, I do think that these crypto crashes also have some of that effect as well, where the price goes down, the people who bought into Bitcoin when it was $50,000 a coin, are now realizing that that was maybe not the right decision for them, they get disillusioned and leave the industry. I think that’s probably more likely why larger numbers of people are leaving. The promises that were made, around this being the secret to generational wealth and to all of these amazing returns. turned out to be false, and so they feel slighted basically, and choose to leave for that reason.
Jeremy:
So this whole cyberpunk future with neon lights and you can pay for McDonald’s with Bitcoins, is it going to be like that, is going to be like some dystopia where we’re forced into some World of Warcraft to mine for gold in some dystopia. Like Ellon Musk and all that, running shit like… part of me wants to be like… burn that shit to the ground. This whole spread Bitcoin all over the world like is just more of the same “capitalism is great, it’ll set people free, all over the world, we need to spread democracy” and it’s just some western financialization thing, and the examples, it has failed, look what it did to El Salvador. To wrap all this up Molly, I want to know what you think the end stage is going to look like. Even right now, kind of just looking at crypto and NFTs, it seems like sort of a crude parody of capitalism, this is what the end of the world is going to look like. How bad is it going to get? Before you answer that question, what are some of the most ridiculous, just bedonk-as-fuck examples of these NFT projects and crypto projects that you’ve seen? Because there’s some pretty off the wall ones. Pringles NFTs, like you can taste the NFT.
Molly:
Right, so I guess to the first question, I think it will depend a lot on the extent to which people have to engage with crypto. I think the one saving grace of crypto to date is that people largely can opt out of it. You don’t have to hold any crypto, there’s no reason for you to actually need to engage with a blockchain on a day-to-day basis. So people can just avoid it. I think the true dystopian nightmare is if people are actually are basically required to engage with it in some way, whether it’s actually required, or you can’t work someplace unless you’re willing to accept your payments in crypto, or you need this NFT to go to this band you want to go see because they only do NFT tickets now. The sort of seeping tendrils of crypto becoming something that you can’t avoid. But I think there’s a lot to worry about as far as that goes. We’ve been seeing crypto becoming more closely tied to the traditional financial system to the point where people are now starting to worry about contagion to traditional finance, which to date has luckily been fairly limited. When FTX fell apart, it didn’t have a huge impact on traditional finance. But they were certainly hoping to be very closely tied to traditional finance. I mean, FTX had bought a bank, a traditional bank! And we’re starting to see more traditional financial institutions engage with crypto. Fidelity, which is like a major retirement plan offer, I used to have a retirement plan with Fidelity and they started advertising crypto to everybody. Some pension plans are starting to put money into crypto. I think that’s the really scary thing, where it’s being really welcomed in, to a world that people can’t really opt-out of.
To go to the more fun question around these crazy crypto projects, people will do the weirdest things with crypto. A huge one is around these crypto paradise projects that people are starting to come up with, where you buy our token and you can come live on our island where we live and breathe crypto all day. I mean you went to the Bitcoin Miami conference and you can probably imagine what it would be like being stuck on an island with some of those people. That just sounds like the worst possible scenario, especially with people, they come up with these plans for it, and all of their plans involve, “oh, this is what the big casinos gonna look like, and this is what the lambos that drive you around the island are gonna look like”, and there’s no thought put into like waste management or like electricity for all these Bitcoin miners that they’re going to try to put on the island. So it’s kind of funny to imagine this Fire Fest of crypto bros that they’re trying to put together.
Jeremy:
Fire Fest is right!
Molly
That’s definitely been a favorite of mine. I also really love crypto projects where they seem to be under the impression that because they’re using cryptocurrency that just like normal rules don’t apply for some reason. The best example of that I think is the Dune project where these guys decided that they wanted to buy the storyboard for the Dune film that was like lost or whatever. And so they raised like an exorbitant amount of money to go buy at auction this Dune storyboard, and their whole plan was like, okay and then once we have this, we can create all of this media based on it. They wanted to make some sort of animated show based on his storyboard. And people had to point out to them that just because you bought a book doesn’t mean that you own the copyright to that book and you don’t own the IP. It’s like they think if you go to a bookstore and you buy a copy of some novel you can just now make a movie about that same novel because you own a physical copy. What world do you live in where that’s how that works? So those are kind of my favorite ones where people just get so wrapped up in that mythology around crypto that they just sort of forget about reality.
Jeremy:
Yeah, the fanaticism. Hey, how about the Frida Kahlo, burning that one up to manifest it in the- yeah, that was ridiculous.
Molly:
Yeah, luckily we still don’t know if that was actually a Frida Kahlo drawing or if it was a counterfeit. My hope is that… the most poetic thing would be that the guy thought he was buying a real Frida Kahlo drawing and he actually got scammed by somebody who sold him a fake drawing. That’s what I’m really hoping happened, but who knows.
Jeremy:
Then there was also that ridiculous monument tribute to Elon Musk that cost like more than half a million dollars.
Molly:
Yeah, that was like $600,000 to make this rocket with Elon on it. I loved that!
Jeremy:
That shit was ridiculous, yo the whole clout hero worship of these rich billionaires, though!
Molly:
And the betrayal when he didn’t accept their gift!
Jeremy:
Oh yeah! Well it’s not the first time Musk, didn’t he piss off a bunch of Dogecoin people when he got everybody hyped up on that, and then his company instead bought Bitcoin, and then sold all their Bitcoin… well, it’s just like all the other charlatans I suppose.
To the extent that Bitcoin and crypto is going to continue to represent or work with the capitalist economy, we for one are looking forward to that economy dying. It’s an old 60s French quote from the Situationists, like this graffiti on the walls: “The economy is wounded, I hope it dies!
So we’re enjoying watching the dumpster fires and your coverage of this. It’s a terrible atrocity, but Molly, thank you for coming on and entertaining us with your immense knowledge of the crypto scene, as disgusting as it is.
Molly:
Thanks for having me.
Jason:
Where can people tune into your work and all that, of course, web3 is going great.
Molly:
Yep, web3isgoinggreat.com is the website. I’m also on Twitter at the moment, who knows how long that will continue, at @molly0xfff, and my website mollywhite.net.
Jeremy:
We’re going to continue his conversation, though, in a second, with Cooper.
Panel with Molly and Cooper
So anyways, we’re back, still have our esteemed guests. We have Cooper Quintin from the EFF, we have Molly White from Web3 is Going Great. This next little conversation, we’re all coders, old school hackers, technologists if you will. And we want to throw some questions out there, get your opinions on the state of the world, hell of a timeline. Are we headed to some fully automated luxury gay space communism, the techno-dream anarchist utopia, or is all this really leading to some dystopian crypto fascist hell. And what role do technologists, and coders – what role do we play in building this utopia or dystopia, and what do we gotta do about it? The main thing I guess is whether technology is neutral, like on it’s own, maybe get any of yall opinions – Cooper, why don’t you go first, just throw it out there.
Cooper:
Yeah, technology is absolutely not neutral. Every decision we make as technologists, whether you’re at Google, whether you’re at Wikipedia, or Apple, or whatever, or EFF, all of these decisions are not neutral. The decision to invest in cryptocurrencies is not neutral. Right now, I’d say we’re pretty solidly headed toward a crypto fascist technological nightmare future. Cyberpunk, but without any of the cool aesthetics. Just the most boring example of cyberpunk you could possibly imagine: instead of cool mega corporations ran by weird ancient dudes, you have Elon Musk just having a mental breakdown in real time and being the most incredibly divorced dude of all time. I am still at my heart a techno-utopian, I still do want that fully automated gay space communism – space anarchism, not communism. I’m not a tankie. But I still do want that in my heart, and I still do believe we can get there. But I think that there was, because of a lot of really naive libertarians in the origin of this movement that thought that capitalism could co-exist with an actual free and open and liberationist internet, were very wrong, and I think that partly because of those people is why we ended up here.
Molly:
Yeah I agree with pretty much everything you just said. It feels like we are hurtling towards the most obscene form of capitalism that can possibly exist. That is very dystopian, and we’re just seeing it in real time, basically, as some of these projects are conceived. But I also remain hopeful if not optimistic about the future and what technology could bring. I think there needs to be an enormous shift in how things are operated today. The system of these huge tech companies that are basically monopolizing the web, and pushing crypto coins on increasingly, is clearly not working very well. To some extent I wonder if crypto is almost going to – not to go full accelerationist here, but it feels like crypto is really almost exposing the most extreme flaws in the capitalist structure that has come to become so dominant. To some extent, I almost wonder if it is going to hasten the collapse. But, who knows, I do dream that even if the whole thing doesn’t fall apart, people start to see the sort of disgusting impact of a lot of this technology, and these billionaires who are really sort of driving the ship. And they start to think about alternative ways of doing things, their own. And when it comes to technologists, I hope they start to think about their own role that they’re playing in it, and their complacency or support of these structures that have become so dominant. I think there is an ethical responsibility for people who are working in tech to really think deeply about what they’re building and why they’re building it, who they’re building it for, who is being disadvantaged by it. I really hope those ethical questions start to become a very prominent part of people’s decision making.
Cooper:
Totally agree. One last thing I’d add, that you made me think of Molly, one of the things I say a lot is, hackers and technologists and cryptographers and people who actually understand this space actually have a lot of power, right? We have a ton of power in society, an outsized amount, frankly, way more than we should. I’ve always been a big fan of Spiderman, even though he’s a cop, but I think we need to remember that with great power comes great responsibility. The things you do really do affect a ton of people and you need to keep that in mind and think of all the effects you’re going to have. Think like, do I want to write code for this robot that’s gonna be used to kill somebody at some point? Do I want my code to kill people, do I want my code to make people richer, or do I want my code to actually materially make people’s lives better who need those improvements in their lives who are having the hardest time. I would argue that every technologist should be going for that third option.
Molly:
Yeah, absolutely.
Jeremy:
I agree with what yall said. It seems we do have a collective responsibility as technologists for the work that we do. You ever go to classes, like infosec classes, and it’s the same thing for people going to law school, too, and you might be sitting there thinking you might be working as a coder, doing some cool things, meaningful projects, contribute… But the person next to you is like, “I want to work for the NSA”. Or the person at law school would be like, “yeah I think I’ll be a prosecutor, I think I’ll go work for the police”.
Cooper:
I want to be a corporate attorney suing people for IP violations. Making sure that Monsanto stays on top.
Jeremy:
Right. Or if you’re the ones coding these mass surveillance systems, or coding these robot kill dogs and stuff like that. I feel like if you work in a messed-up industry: military contractors, or police or even crypto, really – you should really have to clarify that, you should stipulate that, “oh, just so you know, I work in crypto”, or, “I’m apartheid emerald rich”, you know what I mean? At this point, we’re speeding towards a cliff, to me it seems like we spent a lot of time building this system. Now we need to spend more time breaking it. We need to break this system. Like you said Cooper, a lot of us have disproportionate power. A lot of people who might join the force, they’re at the NSA now, or they’re working at Meta or something, and they look at all that’s going on in the world. They see for example mass layoffs at Meta, Amazon, Twitter. Foxxconn workers in China striking, just going ham against the police. It’s a “whose side are you on” type of moment. When Musk just severs the union contract, all the janitors, kicks them into the streets right before the holidays, it’s like, which side are you on? For those who do find themselves working in this industry, I want to say, you are in a unique position to know where to put the … in the gears. We need more Edward Snowdens, so to speak.
Cooper:
Yeah, exactly. You could do good inside of a large company because you know the horrible things are. You have a view that those of us are outside of that, like me and Molly, don’t have. If you’re in Google, you can be in a position to help a lot of people. But you still fighting against that horrible fucking corporate machinery. Do the good you can, do all the good you can, and leave a … in the works on your way out.
Molly:
I was just going to say, like I think also if you’ve decided to work for a corporation like that, you also have to be really clear about your line, like how far is too far, at what point are you unwilling to be a part of a company like that. For a lot of people, some companies have already crossed that line, and are unwilling to work for them. I think every technologist needs to know what they’re willing to be a part of. One thing, if there is any good that has come out of Elon Musk and his crazy nightmare dictatorship of Twitter, it’s that he’s sort of I think holding a spotlight to some of the practices of these really powerful people who are just abusing employees in these tech companies. My hope is that some of the unionization that we’ve been seeing especially in the past two years or so in the tech industry will continue to move forward, because I think there are opportunities to really highlight the power that collective organizing has against some of these absolute nightmare bosses. If you are working for a company like Google or Twitter at this point, maybe start talking to your coworkers about a union. If you’re still at Twitter, despite Elon’s iron fist, what’s to protect you from being the next in line when he decides you’ve done something wrong, or you aren’t important. It’s time to start protecting yourself.
Cooper:
Absolutely. So, the EFF actually unionized last year, and the management voluntarily accepted our union, and we’re currently in the process of negotiating our contract. It already feels amazing though, right? I love my job at the EFF, and a lot of tech workers would say “well I love my job, it’s really comfortable, what’s the point of unionizing, I could just go to my boss right now, I could have a friendly chat if I need something”. You might not always be able to do that. At some point, your company is going to do something you disagree with. At some point – well, at all points, companies are ultimately a hierarchical structure, at some point you’re going to be told “no, we don’t give a shit about you, you are a cog in the machine, you’re replaceable, and fuck you”. You need to unionize right now, even if you like your job, especially if you like your job, because you got to take that power to keep it that way, to take that power with your coworkers to protect each other. So yeah huge +1 to what Molly said, go unionize your workplace.
Also you’re totally right about Elon Musk, and I think the other good thing about Elon Musk buying Twitter is that he’s shown a spotlight on how fucking stupid billionaires actually are. Just how… they’re not geniuses, they’re not smart. They’re just people who happened to get a shitload of money. They’re just as stupid as the rest of us, a whole hell of a lot more narcissistic than most of us, and hopefully he has done some serious damage to the cult of the billionaire. Those dudes who – you said five hundred million dollars to buy a rocket?
Molly:
It was $600,000.
Cooper:
They spent half a million dollars to dickride Elon Musk, that’s amazing.
Molly:
Almost literally, it is sort of a weird Freudian-shaped monument.
Cooper:
I wonder if they did that before or after he tweeted about CumRocket .
Molly:
That’s a good question.
Cooper:
The world’s only cum-themed cryptocurrency. Probably not.
Molly:
I’m sure not, in fact I can think of two off the top of my head right now.
Cooper:
I hate it all!
Jeremy:
Yeah, so these billionaire assholes, they just walking all over us, right? They need us, but we don’t need them. It almost seems like the collective organization that is so needed right now to defend worker’s rights against these billionaires is almost like the antithesis of the hyper-individualistic “libertarian” crypto capitalist ideology, of winners and losers, whereas what we’re talking about is kind of more of a collective responsibility, a collective organization that rewards people fairly for the work they do instead of just allowing these parasites to profit and dictate to the world like oh I’m just going to buy Twitter and platform all these neo-fascists.
Jason:
What you were saying Cooper about billionaires being completely inept, he’s trying to make a point about free speech, absolutism, but you can see what he’s doing with it, he’s platforming fascists, he’s deplatforming anti-fascists…
Jeremy:
Yeah, they kicked CrimethInc off? Fuck outta here man! He kicked a lot of people off, journalists…
Cooper:
Chad Loder, other antifascists…
Jeremy:
And bringing back all these literal Nazis.
Cooper:
All the QAnons are back.
Jason:
But everyone still just imagines Trump and Musk to be engaging in some 3d chess game where they know the moves that they’re making and you can’t understand why they’re doing them.
Cooper:
I feel like there’s gotta be a corollary to the “never assume malice when stupidity would suffice”, which is also like, “never assume genius when stupidity would suffice”.
Molly:
I think it actually comes back around also to the recent FTX collapse, where like Sam Bankman-Fried was a billionaire, people thought he was a genius. Turns out he had, or he claims, he had no idea what was going on. Maybe he was just doing a lot of fraud, who knows. Clearly he was not doing enough 5-d chess to keep the whole fraud afloat. It’s just another example of these billionaires who claim to be incredible at what they do, these super geniuses, and then it all just falls apart, because it turns out he’s just not that smart.
Jeremy:
Another fraud like the rest of them. So Musk, he’s known for – people think he’s a genius and stuff, but he didn’t actually invent any of these technologies. He founded or he invented the Tesla, but – no he didn’t. He may have been a cofounder with Thiel of PayPal, but there’s other people at SpaceX who are actually making the rockets fly and not him, he’s just the mouthpiece, whatever. Remember when he wanted people to print out all their code? Fuck outta – you don’t even know what your’e talking about.
Molly:
It’s increasingly looking like Elon’s companies, as much as they are successful, to the extent that they are successful, are successful in spite of him, and not because of him. It seems like there are a lot of people spending a lot of time trying to not upset Elon, trying to not let him go pull the plugs on all the Tesla machines because he thinks it’s a good idea.
Cooper:
The rumor that I’ve heard is basically there’s – and it makes sense, because we do this in leftist circles too at a smaller scale. There’s like a team of people, their job is to just be his handlers, and to insulate himself from the actual workings of the company, and making sure that somebody’s doing something that looks cool and technological to him, like you have code flashing by on your screen just so it looks like some weird 90s hacker aesthetic. And he thinks, oh, good things are happening here, I will move on.
Molly:
It’s just like that scene on TV!
Cooper:
Everybody put on your black hoodies, Elon’s coming! Oh yes, this looks great! But yeah, we do this on a smaller scale on the left. It’s just the larger scale, even griftier version of that. If Elon’s good at anything, it’s projecting this image of business, he’s good at being a grifter, he’s an especially good grifter, and that’s all any of these people are. Talented grifters. That’s all Bill Gates was, that’s all Elon Musk is, that’s all Trump is, they’re all just talented grifters. And thats it at the end of the day, the entire economy is just a fucking grift.
Jeremy:
So let’s get into this! Who else sucks in the tech scene? We got all these leaders, let’s throw some names out there. I’ll start one, Glenn Greenwald – certified, right? Matt Taibbi – certified. Who else?
Molly:
Yeah, I was just going to say, it’s weird that there’s this emergence – well I guess it’s not weird, I guess, it’s kind of expected – there’s sort of been this emergence of post-leftist billionaire bootlickers that have sort of emerged. There’s all these people who used to – Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, who used to do pretty good work, and now, they’re just out there railing against the leftists on Twitter, talking about how great Elon Musk is. I was surprised Elon Musk didn’t choose Glenn Greenwald for his Twitter files, he had to go with Matt Taibbi instead, but…there’s this whole list of them that they’ve decided instead of doing actual meaningful journalism, they’re just going to suck up to the billionaires, and it’s like, how do you live with yourself?
Cooper:
I’ve been increasingly wondering if Glenn Greenwald is just always a shitty person who happened to get really lucky by getting the Snowden files, and just didn’t really know what to do with himself after that.
Molly:
That’s actually kind of my feeling about a lot of tech founders, too, especially with Mark Zuckerberg’s recent play with Meta. It’s starting to look like he just got really lucky with FaceBook, and now he’s like OK, I can do it again, I can do it again, and he’s just sort of tilting at the craziest windmills with these brilliant ideas that turn out to just be nothing.
Cooper:
Trash ass World of Warcraft without legs! That’s his multibillion dollar idea! And he stole FaceBook too, right? It’s all just grifts, all the way down. It’s grifters who got lucky. They’re like the dog who caught the truck. What do I do now!
Molly
Yeah. Which I think comes back around to people working at those companies, it’s like, you got to question your loyalty to some of these people. There’s people who are – Elon Musk is the best example – there’s people who are undyingly loyal to Elon Musk, even as he is exposed as a total grifter and a fraud, and it’s like, why is that something you’re willing to accept, why is that the hill you’re willing to die on, when you could be working for something more meaningful, and not just spending all your time trying to shine up the reputation of a guy who does not care about you.
Jeremy:
Alright, alright, so we know who sucks. Kind of flipping it, what are some good projects happening right now, what are some good people who really did stay true to it, never sold out, never gave up. And what should ethical technologists be doing right now?
Cooper:
A hardcore song playing in my head right now, Never sell out! Never gave up!
Jeremy:
I know who never sold out. Chelsea Manning never sold out. That’s one on our side that’s always been consistently principled, so. Doing cool things still, too. So who else?
Molly:
I was just going to say, I am personally a huge fan of DDoSecrets. I feel like they are picking up where WikiLeaks kind of fell apart, and they’re managing to do some really important work while also being really careful about doing it in an ethical way. So that’s my big – they sort of give me hope for the future of technology.
Jeremy:
Hell yeah they do! Big shoutout to DDoSecrets, by the way.
Cooper:
They’re awesome as hell. They’re so cool, doing such great work. Shoutout to an org that I’m actually working with right now called Open Archive, that’s building an app in technology to let people videotape people – who says videotype anymore, I just displayed how old I am.
Molly:
With their camcorder!
Cooper:
With their 8MM film! So it lets people record human rights violations or protests and archive those securely to any number of different backups, like the Internet Archive. I’m on the board of the organization, I think they’re doing great work. They’re working with people in Ukraine, all over the place, to try to get footage of human rights abuses and things like that securely archived and out of the country so journalists can report on this stuff. I think that’s another tech group that is doing cool work.
Molly:
I don’t even want to know how many people have approached them and told them they should be using a blockchain. I keep hearing one of the use cases that keeps coming up that we need to record human rights abuses to the blockchain, and it’s like, Jesus Christ!
Cooper:
I have no comment about that. Also, Lucy Parsons Labs in Chicago is doing some really amazing stuff. Back in the day, they built a database of all of the employees of the Chicago PD and their employee photos by FOIAing the database schema of the Chicago PD HR database, and FOIAing a SQL query based on that database schema to get all their photos and all their names. So, huge shout out to them, they’re still doing really cool work
Jeremy:
Hell yeah, but did you say FOIA the SQL query? Cause I got thinking, why don’t you throw some apostrophes or some DROP TABLES in there!
Molly:
Weaponized FOIA requests!
Cooper:
Unfortunately, that’s easy to trace back, you know? But if they ran the code on their own computer, is that – I’m not a lawyer, but would that be a CFAA violation? You ran the code yourself, man, I just told you to run it.
Jeremy:
I think there’s an XKCD comic like that.
Cooper:
I feel like SBF’s lawyers could get you off on a technicality on this one.
Jeremy:
Also, just to point out real quick, DDoSecrets has been banned from Twitter for a couple years now. For all this talk of “free speech absolutism” and stuff like that, Elon Musk still maintaining the ban, that’s just some bullshit.
Molly:
And Matt Taibbi is lying about history when he said that the Hunter Biden laptop story was the first URL to ever be blacklisted from Twitter that wasn’t child pornography or whatever. No, DDoSecrets was that. They’ve been banned, the URL – go try to DM someone DDoSecrets.com and see what happens.
Jeremy:
There was another URL too, recently – Z-Library, I tried to send it to somebody on Instagram, and that shit banned me from sending the URL, I’m like, what the hell?
Molly:
Yeah. It doesn’t even tell you why, it just says, try again! You can just hit that button over and over again.
Jeremy:
Actually that Z-Library thing reminds me of one thing. For all this talk of crypto and web3 and stuff like that. Well first off, what is wrong with Tor? I mean, Tor, and darkwebs, onion servers, they’re doing pretty good, you can still maintain and deploy that stuff. It’s truly – well, if implemented correctly anyways – still anonymous and decentralized?
Cooper:
Yeah, the web3 thing is so frustrating to me because we already have so much cool decentralized web stuff, like Tor, IPFS, Mastodon, the whole fediverse. All these really neat things. Everybody was for a minute, No! NFTs! But this has NFTs! Molly, you’re actually in a better position to see this, but I feel like maybe some of the fervor around web3 has died down and especially with Mastadon taking off, seems like people are like right, we don’t need all this bullshit blockchain to have a decentralized internet.
Molly:
Right, so I think two things there. One, I think it was very revealing that when Twitter started to go up in flames, nobody made off for the blockchain-based social networks, you know?. Everyone was like, let’s go to Mastadon, or to tumblr, or to these weird new things that have just been spun up that have no track record. And nobody was like let’s go over to… I don’t even remember the names of the blockchain social networks, because they’re just so irrelevant at this point.
Cooper:
The only people on them are blockchain bros, and nobody wants to talk to them besides other blockchain bros.
Molly:
Yeah, and it’s just like crypto spam. Because it turns out when you have no moderation, that means you can’t remove spam, either!
Jeremy:
So much spam, though! Like wow, have you ever seen all these DMs on Twitter, it’s just endless!
Cooper:
I’m getting a lot more crypto spam on Twitter these days.
Molly:
It’s practically unusable at this point. But the other thing I was going to say on the whole decentralization thing is one thing that really does worry me a out web3 is that they have picked up on those terms around decentralization, censorship resistance, some of these really important goals, to the point that I worry that they’ve tried to almost make themselves synonymous with those things, as though the decentralized web and web3 are one and the same, and that any decentralized web service needs to use a blockchain for some reason. I think it’s really critical that we remember and we continue to point out that you can decentralize without a blockchain. You don’t need a cryptocurrency. There are no shortage of examples of decentralized projects that have nothing to do with crypto. And these are probably worth our time, we should be supporting projects like this that are actually making a difference and performing an interesting service, and not just trying to get you to buy into their token.
Cooper:
In fact, you usually want to decentralize without a blockchain. Adding a blockchain is almost always strictly worse for your anonymity and decentralization goals. This is what pisses me off, blockchain is a really useful algorithm for one tiny niche specific problem that almost nobody ever needs to solve. People just want to apply this magical blockchain sauce on everything where it’s not needed. What about taxis, but with blockchain? What about Tor, but we have a blockchain for some fucking reason? No! No! You don’t need that algorithm, it’s just an algorithm, it’s not cool, like stop fucking using it!
Molly:
I think the problem is that it’s actually very useful for two things. One is the actual technological purpose that it was meant for, which like you said is very limited. It’s also catnip for venture capitalists. You just dangle a blockchain in front of Mark Andreessen and he just sharts, he just gets a money cannon and points it at you.
Jeremy:
Money cannon, that’s hilarious.
Cooper:
It’s useful for the grift.
Jeremy:
It’s almost like some of the worst things about the internet that we had already addressed decades ago – the exclusivity, the DRM – I feel open source and free software movement has kind of figured that out. But now it’s like, let’s use these technologies to go backwards. BitTorrent set the internet free but now let’s go encode who owns what JPG. It is actually a betrayal of the dream.
Molly:
There’s so many NFT projects that are literally just new DRM. There was one I saw recently, I think Mark Cuban was doing something around textbooks as NFTs, so now the publishers can also take a cut of any resales. Oh, great! That’s what we’ve always needed in the textbook industry is more extraction.
Jeremy:
It’s like… multi-level marketing Ponzi schemes, what industries have we not infected with this yet?
Molly:
Where can we be taking more money from our customers?
Cooper
That’s the essential function of capitalism, right, if you have to grow infinitely, you always have to – it’s this extractivist mindset, you always have to be extracting more wealth, always have to be finding new ways to extract the last cent from people. We gotta kill it, or it’s gonna kill us.
Jeremy:
Yes. It’s gotta go!
Cooper:
Back to our old school hacker conversation, Jeremy and Jason… it’s been really disappointing going to hacker conferences lately, seeing how much the military industrial complex and the financial industry and all the worst people you know have all wormed their way in and really become a core part of “the hacker community”. I really don’t think there’s a hacker community anymore. There’s a hacker industry, and there are a ton of grifters and terrible fucking people who have attached themselves to it. I really would love to – you gave this really fiery speech at Defcon 18 I think? Where you were trying to rile hackers up to do direct action and shit. I think we need more of that. We need more pushing back against this fucking military industrial complex and this cyber warfare industrial complex bullshit within the hacker space, and more hackers saying no, fuck this, we are not for these guys, we do not work with these motherfuckers, let’s actively push back against this.
Jeremy:
Hell yeah! You’re right!
Cooper:
That’s my call to action.
Jeremy:
It’s time to call out the sellouts and the frauds. Sick of this shit, doing this shit, calling themselves technologists, but they’re working for the military, the NSA, all these billion dollar crypto businesses that bankrupted everybody. No, it’s time to call them out. It’s time to draw a line in the sand. That’s why I brought you two on this, because both of yall are very much invested in this, and you’re coming at it from a place of ethics, not this hyper financialization individualization. Your critical analysis and coverage in these issues is really giving a clarifying light to what hackers and technologists and coders, people into it for the right reasons, what we should be doing. And ultimately, I do think it’s not a dystopian message, we can build a better world, but we might have to burn the old one world first. We might have to make some room.
Molly:
Yeah, absolutely. Sometimes you have to make tough decisions when you’re working for something you really care about, more people need to be thinking really hard about what they’re deciding to do these days.
Cooper:
“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters”. But actually, now is the time of grifters.
Jeremy:
Well thanks for coming on, both of yall. Any last shoutouts, any last thoughts, goodbyes?
Cooper:
Thanks to yall for doing this and keeping it real.
Molly:
Thanks for having me, for having this conversation, it was great. My last shoutout would be: unionize your workplace!
Cooper:
Hell yeah. Hackers of the world unite!
Interview with Cooper Quintin
Jeremy:
We’re back with our guest, Cooper Quintin, He’s a public-interest technologist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Cooper, we go way back, we’re old school hackers. It’s so great to have you on. How you been!
Cooper:
Yeah, I’m good. It’s so great to be here, and yeah, we’ve known each other since way back in the day. I was working on Hackbloc, you were working on Hack This Site, Hack This Zine. We started working on Hack This Zine together. Hackbloc had an ad on Hack This Site. 2005!
Jeremy:
The good old days. 2005. the Bush years, anti-war protests, V for Vendetta came out. A more innocent time compared to the timeline we’re in right now, right?
Cooper:
Yeah, we didn’t know how good we had it.
Jeremy:
But now look how far we’ve come. Some of us have not given up the fight, some of us have not sold out. You yourself, now that you’re with the EFF, man you’re doing good work. The EFF of course has been a leader in the fight for digital freedom and privacy, amongst other things. We brought you on the show to talk about some of your contributions and to comment on the state of the world.
Cooper:
Yeah, and thanks for the platform. Yeah, the EFF – so I only sold out mildly, I’m working for the non-profit industrial complex now instead of more direct action and legally riskier things. But that’s the state of my life I’m in now, I have a couple of kids now, and I’m smart enough to know that if you have kids, you should probably stop doing illegal shit so you don’t get put in a position like Sabu where you decide to snitch.
Jeremy:
Right, that’s one of the things I wanted to talk to you about, actually. Much respects with how far you’ve come in this matter. Kind of just talking about the hacker narrative, in the United States, generally speaking it seems there’s just a trope, an arc, that is just an accepted part – and maybe it’s United States specific – that when you’re young and dumb, you mess around with hacking, you might be tough enough to break a few laws, get into some systems systems, but you don’t really know what you’re doing, but you’re caught. And then the government, eventually it’s time to mature, or grow up, or whatever, right, then you gotta sell out, then you start working for the man, you start fixing the corporate vulnerabilities that you once hacked,- but it’s bullshit, right? First off, not everybody’s like that. What do you think about that hacker narrative, it ain’t gotta be like that, right?
Cooper:
Yeah, I think it’s a bullshit narrative. I think it’s a really clever piece of capitalist propaganda. Get your rocks off when you’re young, get your illegal fun out, and then you get caught, and then you go work to improve corporate profits or improve government security. It’s total bullshit, right? First off, you can avoid getting caught, lots of people do, right? Phineas Phisher still has not been caught, or whatever group of people were behind that. Lots of good hackers have not been caught. There’s a capitalist incentive to put out bank robber movies where the bank robber always get caught at the end. But the fact is, if you look at statistics, a lot of bank robbers don’t get caught. But in an authoritarian society, you want to build this propaganda that the police always win, the good guys always win, the cowboys always run off into the sunset, and it’s total bullshit. But, there’s also depending on what other risk factors you have, if you’re undocumented, if you have small children – not everyone is suited in their lives to doing illegalist actions, so it’s important so you don’t end up in a situation where you have to compromise your comrades, it’s important to think about whether you’re actually suited to that life. And if, like me, you are no longer suited to that life, but you don’t want to sell out and start fixing vulnerabilities to make Elon Musk richer, an option is to become a public interest technologist.
Jeremy:
Yeah, that’s what’s up. Like you had said, you have to know when to hang up your hat, and to move on, keep em guessing, you can’t be doing the same things over and over again. In your case, like you said, you had kids, so it’s time to move onto a different phase, open a different chapter of your life, and – respects for that. You earned your stripes, you put in the work. I’d like to talk to you more about some of the work you’re doing with the EFF. Just also on the side, fuck Sabu, also, he had kids, and he should have cut and ran when he had the chance.
Cooper:
Boo, fuck Sabu.
Jeremy:
So, hell of a world right now, right? I want to talk about the state of hacktivism, the state of government surveillance, and what the EFF is doing. You’ve written a number of articles, most recently talking about how people are using Tor to help people in Iran undermine internet censorship. Maybe you can talk about that, Snowflake, what’s all this?
Cooper:
Yeah, so Snowflake is a pretty recent improvement to bridges that Tor came out with a couple years ago, that is helping people avoid, get around internet censorship. It’s really cool. The way Snowflake works is it is a bridge to Tor, so it helps you get on Tor, but through a proxy, essentially. But that proxy is a WebRTC connection – which WebRTC is the technology that powers Discord, which we’re using right now, it’s the technology that powers Zoom or Skype or any peer to peer real time communication on the internet. So how Snowflake works is people sign up to be Snowflake proxies. You can install a browser add-on, or you can just open the webpage, or you can run on a server. People who want to get on Tor – they’re in censored countries like Iran or Russia – can make a WebRTC connection directly to your computer, and then use your computer as a proxy to get onto the Tor network. So it’s really cool because it means that for a country to censor Snowflake, they would have to shut down the internet – which is something that countries are willing to do, we’ve seen internet shutdowns increasingly – or, they’d have to block entire US IP blocks, they’d have to really cripple their own internet to shut down Snowflake.
Jeremy:
RIght. So this is a major advancement, actually, cause I remember back in the day they would set up Tor bridges like IP addresses. But that’s kind of a cat and mouse game, because you have to make that IP bridge known to people to get to it, but then the government would also know, and they would just block it and so forth. So Snowflake’s disguising traffic through regular, pluggable…
Cooper:
Yeah, it’s really cool. So the way that it works, it’s disguised as normal WebRTC traffic. It could be two people talking over Discord or Zoom or something else. And you have to have a broker that initiates those connections; this is how WebRTC works, you have to have a server that hands out connections. You as the Snowflake client, the person who wants to get on Tor, connects to this broker and says “hey, give me an IP address of a Snowflake proxy”, and the broker hands you a Snowflake proxy from somebody who’s running Snowflake on a server or on their computer.
And why don’t countries just censor that one broker IP address, that would shut the whole thing down? What they’ve done is use this really interesting technique called domain fronting, which is where they host the broker on a Google Cloud server, and through a quirk of HTTPS, they can make the request to google.com on the wrapper outside of, in the unencrypted part of the HTTPS request, but inside of the TLS wrapper, the Host header is set to broker.snowflake.tor.whatever. And that part isn’t seen by anybody other than Google. To the outside world, it looks like a normal TLS request to Google. So to block it, the country would have to block all of Google, and then they would also have to block the IPs that are acting as Snowflake clients, which you can’t get a list of. How bridges worked before was that you can set up a bridge, but first off, you can only set up a bridge on a VPS or on a server somewhere that was directly connected to the internet. You couldn’t set it up on your home computer for somewhat technologically complicated reasons involving NAT traversal, network address translation, things like that. But also then Tor also had this list.of bridge IP addresses, you have to have a way to distribute those bridge IP addresses to people. But anyway that you have to distribute those bridge IPs ,can also – a government can also request bridge IPs and just block the bridges as they find them. So like you said, it’s a cat and mouse game.
So Snowflake has done two things, it’s made it easier to distribute those bridge IPs but harder for a government entity to get the list and block them. It’s also made it easier, much easier, like magnitudes easier, for people to set up bridges from the comfort of their home.
Jeremy:
Yeah. I did have a chance to try Snowflake, like you said, they had made it really easy for everyday people to support the people in Iran who want to be able to get around internet censorship. All they got to do is install this browser plugin, right? So I got this browser plugin, it’ll tell you the number of people who have connected, that had used to circumvent censorship. That’s pretty cool, and as a browser plugin, pretty powerful, too.
Cooper:
Yeah, it’s super cool. A lot of people have been using it, it’s helped a ton of people in Iran. Talking to the Tor folks, the most connections they get from Snowlake is from Iran and Russia currently, people trying to get on, and get around the blocks, and share information about what’s going on. Especially right now in Iran, but also in Russia, what’s going on there with the anti-war protests, with any sort of – if you’re queer in Russia, it’s not a good place to be queer. And with any sort of internet freedom, Russia is pretty bad when it comes to internet freedom.
Jeremy:
Right. Also major props to the hackers who took down the Russian internet censorship organization, and – all kinds of hacking going on, right? it’s an International crisis, there’s wars going on, people on the internet are rising up and standing in solidarity with folks in both Iran and Russia against their governments. I want to actually ask you – good transition to the state of hacktivism. You had also written an article, in the early days of the war, about xenophobia in hacktivism. Just in general – I know we’re kind of disconnected, definitely not involved in the day to day operations in Anonymous or hacking, we’re just reading public news sources, but maybe you can comment about this whole situation right now, stuff in Iran, stuff in Russia getting hacked like a motherfucker.
Cooper:
Yeah. There’s a lot of really cool hacks going on in Iran and Russia. But what I was seeing at the start of the war between Russia and Ukraine was these really, in my opinion, poorly thought out hacktivist actions. Like we saw people just blasting the entire Russian IP space with packets that said “no war” or something like that, people putting code in their open source projects to delete itself or do some other shit if it was running in the Russian IP space, and that to me is just a really shitty idea. You’re discounting any possible allies you might have in Russia. You’re discounting anybody who might be on the border between Russia and Ukraine, who your software will decide is a Russian IP address, because IP geolocation is so bad. You’re punishing everybody in the entire country for the actions of their oligarchs and military bastards. I think that when you’re doing activism, you should try to actually go after the people in power.
Jeremy:
You gotta be specific.
Cooper:
Yeah, and then that’s not always the case. Like freeway shutdowns are really important, right, and I’m obviously very much in favor of freeway shutdowns. That does impact people who are driving who have nothing to do with the thing – there’s something to be said for shutting down the machinery of a country, shutting down the economic functioning.
Jeremy:
Hell yeah there’s something to be said about it.
Cooper:
But this wasn’t that either. The things I was seeing was, shame on all Russians, really kind of slacktivism. It really felt like – this is probably betraying my age, but back when ANSWER was protesting the war in 2003 with these little permitted marches on the sidewalk with signs that you wave, and everybody feels good. It felt like feel-good activism and not actually well-thought out activism to either target those in power or to shut down the economic machinery. I would have loved to see, and eventually we did see, people releasing emails and documents from Gazprom on DDoSSecrets, we saw taking over TV stations, actually attacking the governments. Hell, attack the military infrastructure, or whatever. I think there are so many more well thought out – or actually take a minute to listen to what people in those countries are saying is important. If you’re gonna do hacktivism to support folks in Iran, to support folks in Russia, take a minute, take some time to immerse yourself in that struggle and spend more time listening and less time hacking. Figure out what their actual goals are, what actual good targets are, and then go after that shit, don’t just bam all of Iran with a packet that like three system administrators are gonna read and roll their fucking eyes and move on with their day.
Jeremy:
That’s a very good point. It’s absolutely essential that you understand the international context when you are choosing to lend solidarity to folks because there’s a lot of factors at play here, I’ve always kind of been – being born and raised in the United States, I been a little… maybe we should clean up our own mess first, before we start going around and… But then again, there’s something to be said that a struggle, an injustice anywhere is an injustice everywhere, right? Anonymous and hacktivism in general has lent its hand in the struggles of people all over the world in a positive way, I would say overall. You just gotta be careful not to get duped, of course, into inadvertently supporting US imperialism in some of these countries.
Cooper:
Exactly. Don’t be anybody’s useful idiot. We can all exercise our brain cells and decide – to me, the situation in Iran, the situation seems pretty clearcut, people are tired of living under a theocracy, people are tired of living under this extremely authoritarian regime. I can recognize a freedom struggle I can support. But also, how I think it needs support as somebody in the US and what sort of support they actually need could be two very different things. Let’s say hypothetically, I’m sitting there trying to leak the emails of the regime, and people on the ground are saying, actually what we need is more signal proxies so we can get people on signal, we don’t need the regimes fucking emails, we know they’re corrupt, nobody’s mind is going to change because some emails came out. What we need is ways to communicate with each other on the ground and ways to get videos of police atrocities out to the world. That’s what I’m saying: not, like, don’t support international struggles – absolutely do support international struggles, cause we’re all – this world is completely fucking connected and all of our struggles are the same. But listen to the people in the struggles you’re allied with and listen to what their real needs are.
One of the things I’ve come across a lot with the EFF is that there’s this certain type of person that wants to write an encrypted chat app for activists, or an encrypted chat app for sex workers, or whoever else, and it’s like – we don’t need another encrypted chat app, there are really good encrypted chat apps. And you don’t need an encrypted chat app for activists, because if you have an encrypted chat app for activists, it’s only activists that are on it and that’s a prime target for police, for law enforcement, for whoever. If you have a chat app that’s only for sex workers, you can bet it’s gonna be filled with law enforcement and with snitches. I get that as a hacker you want to do something sexy and something cool, and write some cool cryptography, but if you actually go to the communities you want to support, what you’re going to find they actually need is basic tech support, basic security advice, how do I use a password manager, how do I use two factor authentication, how do I make a secure password, and that type of stuff. It’s not always, the work isn’t always going to be sexy and fun. Your best bet for supporting your local community might be not developing a new chat app, it might be to help them use Signal or whatever thing they’re already using, just like your best bet to support people in Iran might not be to – might not always, and sometimes it might, but might not be to leak emails from the Mullah or whatever, but to go set up Signal proxies so people can talk to each other. It’s important to get rid of your hubris and your desire to do the sexy thing and just listen to folks to do the work that is needed.
Jeremy:
Now, there has also been, of course, a series of high profile spectacular sexy hacks, right!
Cooper:
And those are beautiful, don’t get me wrong!
Jeremy:
Oh yeah, big supporters! Just to go through em real quick, in Russia they hacked the state TV, the radio broadcasting company, the internet censorship agency, the central bank, they released hundreds of thousands of emails and documents. Anonymous, but also other groups, Network Battalion 65. DDoSecrets had been leaking some of the materials that had been submitted to them. And granted, all the flash-in-the-pan hacktivism stuff is cool and all, but a lot of the hard does come down to, like you had said, finding ways to follow the lead of the folks who are actually in the struggle for self-determination. And also the journalist work that is entailed, going through some of these emails. I know you said everybody know that stuff is corrupt, but it seems the work is not just the hacking and leaking, but it’s also the journalists who are taking the time to go through some of the materials that’s been hacked. Cause it’s like almost every time I see one of these leaks, it’s like terabytes of data hacked, terabytes of emails it’s like dude – are people actually going through all these terabytes and identifying some of the controversies, the scandals. Cause otherwise, if no one’s following up on that stuff, it’s just a number. Oh, 100GB leaked, 10 websites defaced.
Cooper:
When you do the hack, you’re giving them a black eye, right, but when you actually go through, and when somebody goes through and does some journalism and actually analyzes that data, and finds actual fucking admissions of crimes in there, that’s when you give them much more than a black eye. And don’t get me wrong, I absolutely, I love to see all these really cool hacks. I love to see the hacked TV stations, I love to see oil companies out on their ass.
Jeremy:
Hell yeah. It’s more than just a defacement, though. It’s more than just the black eye, it’s the followup and the hard work to hold their feet to the fire.
Cooper:
It takes all of it, like – not to sound like a liberal, but diversity of tactics is super important, but diversity of tactics doesn’t just mean doing the boring stuff, it also does mean doing direct action. It’s all important. The direct action is important, the support is important, the analysis and reporting and propaganda and propaganda by deed, it’s all important.
Jeremy:
Hell yeah it is. Kinda brings me to the next question about direct action hacktivism and offensive hacktivism. We’re not the only ones doing this direct action hacktivism, or breaking into computer systems and stuff. Nation states are obviously very much involved in this conflict as well. Kind of brings me to the next thing I wanted to ask you about, the United States law enforcement and military, their role in using – being the largest purchasers of 0day on the market. But also NSO Group, Pegasus been in the news – the FBI actually earlier this month released some info that they had purchased Pegasus from NSO Group for $500,000 or something but they never actually used it, or whatever, right? Course we know the FBI does and legally have the right to use offensive hacking tools in the course of “criminal investigations”, to execute search warrants they use hacking tools. So really like, where is the legal ambiguity, the ethical line here. How are they purporting to be like you said the cowboys, the white hats, but they’re doing the same dirty shit that we are. And this is just stuff we know about, they’re saying that well we haven’t actually used Pegasus? Alright. Alright. I mean, what’s your thoughts on all that.
Cooper:
First of all, that article was absolutely wild. The quote that stuck with me in that article was the FBI director saying “oh, we only bought Pegasus so we can find out how the bad guys can use it”. That’s ridiculous, right, that’s like if I was, I only bought this AR-15 to find out how Nazis are shooting AR-15. I’m never actually going to shoot it, I just want to know how they work, so then I can, I dunno, dodge the bullets better. That’s such obvious bullshit. I mean, I’m never shocked when the New York Times uncritically prints, repeats a piece of government propaganda. But that’s just so lazy, so clearly bullshit.
Hacking isn’t just a hobby thing anymore, it’s not just a nerdy thing, it’s not just a tool taking back power from the state and from corporations. It’s now a central part, a key pillar, of state and corporate power. It’s deeply embedded in the military industrial complex at this point. There’s basically this cyber war industrial complex now. You have cyber defense contractors, and the FBI and NSA, all developing their own hacking capabilities. You have Rob Joyce out there putting a friendly face on the NSA’s hacking activities. And the FBI and NSA, they’re some of the largest buyers of 0days, and they do a lot of work with defense contractors now, who also all have their own cyber capabilities. I can’t remember if it’s either Ratheon or Lockheed Martin, probably both of them, have their own cyber ranges now, which is where they go train people to hack shit, and defend shit on what they call a “range”. So hacking is a weapon now, and it’s being used, it’s having billions of dollars being poured in developing this capability. The fact is they don’t need to buy, like they don’t need use Pegasus because they have their own shit, the CIA had their own shit until it got leaked, and probably has new shit now.
Jeremy:
They were probably really upset when the whole Vault 7 stuff out with the NSA’s toolkit. Like you said, these military industrial complexes be using the vulnerabilities against the people, of course they’re the good guys still, right. Did Saudi Arabia use Pegasus to go after Khashoggi, is that something that had happened?
Cooper:
Yeah. So we don’t have the evidence that Saudi Arabia had put Pegasus on Khashoggi phone itself, but Pegasus was found on the phone of his wife, all of his closest coworkers, pretty much everyone he knew. It seems pretty clear circumstantially. For any listeners who aren’t familiar with this, Pegasus is this somewhat advanced, sort of the cream-of-the-crop malware for phones that’s used to target activists and journalists, human rights defenders, people all over the world. It has capabilities like tracking your location, reading all your text messages including WhatsApp and Signal messages, turning on your microphone and having a hot mic, taking pictures, getting files off your phone, putting files on your phone… It’s the next best thing to just having physical access to your phone, and actually in a way, even better, because the target of the NSO group won’t ever know that they’ve been hacked. It seems pretty clear that Pegasus was an important part of Saudi Arabia’s operation to assassinate Jamal Khashoggi.
Saudi Arabia:
Fucking terrible, man.
Jeremy:
I think we’re seeing more and more malware being used by governments to go after activists, to go after journalists.
Jeremy:
Kind of reminds me, do you remember the Cult of the Dead Cow’s “Hacktivismo” license, where it’s a license they had developed where basically you can use the software for anything but if you’re a human rights violating state, then you are not given the permission to use it. It’s like a license.
Cooper
Yeah, I remember that license. I thought it was really cool at the time. I think there was some criticism that it would basically be unenforceable in court. And of course, that criticism was all from lawyers. I work with a lot of lawyers, so, respects, the lawyers I work with do great work. If you are a lawyer, you kind of have to believe in the inherent legitimacy of laws, and my… I am not a lawyer, I’m an anarchist, I don’t believe in the inherent legitimacy of laws. My pushback against that was like, well it’s a great piece of propaganda, it’s a great reframing, making people think differently about, do I want to put this shit out there and let anybody use it for free, do I want to do free work for fucking Lockheed Martin? Or do I want to put this thing on it that says, no, Lockheed Martin is not allowed to use it. Even if Lockheed Martin still uses it, and even if you can’t enforce that in court, you’re still putting your line in the sand. I wouldn’t think of it as a magic shield: companies break laws all the fucking time, they’re not gonna… if something’s useful to them, they’re not going to avoid using it just because the license says they can’t. They’ll figure out a way. But I think it’s important to still draw that line in the sand. Yeah, the Hacktivismo license was cool as hell.
Jeremy:
Right, like you said, I would like to see more people think about the implications of the technology that they’re releasing into the world, especially if they think it could be used by nation states to violate people’s rights and commit human rights atrocities, war crimes. Drawing that line in the sand, these technologists who are just doing it for the paycheck but they’re working for these companies like Lockheed Martin, or, I want to talk about these prison contractors – Securus, Global Tel-Link. You’ve done quite a bit of research into these companies, the private prison contractors’ new patents and new technologies that they’re developing.
Cooper:
Yeah part of the thing being a technologist, it’s not always writing code. So this is a project that me and my colleague Beryl Lipton did, where we dug into the patent database and looked for patents from Securus and Global Tel-Link, which are two of the biggest private phone companies. I don’t have to explain it to you, Jeremy, but for the people at home, they make their money off nickel and diming prisoners to death for just wanting to communicate with their loved ones.
Jeremy:
For basic phone, which is basically free now anyways, right?
Cooper:
Yeah, and we’ve found some really wild shit that they’re developing. Things from AR for prison guards, so prison guards can get real-time information on every inmate they’re looking at. There were prison guard robots that they were developing that could deploy “less lethal” force, or that could do all the things prison guards can do, but you don’t have to have a human in the loop anymore, right? Actually, I’m a little conflicted on that one, because obviously – again I don’t have to tell you how fucking shitty and corrupt and power trippy prison guards are. At least a robot, probably, isn’t going to do some of the worst things that prison guards do?
Jeremy:
Well I don’t know, the whole thing about this AI stuff is this black box and what people are putting into it. There’s a lot that can be baked in, because it’s mostly these white cis het males developing this technology, and all the biases and prejudices are baked in, if they’re aren’t consciously – and we’re talking about people who have no ethical or moral qualms working for these private prison contractors. They’re building robo kill bots, you know what I’m saying?
Cooper:
Yeah, exactly. Technology – there’s a lot of really crazy stuff we’ve found, that I would encourage people to go read about. Check out the link in the show notes. At the end of the day, technology isn’t neutral, and a lot of programmers, a lot of nerds want to think their work is neutral. I’m just writing this code and it goes out there. I don’t have any political impact, I’m not doing anything. Even security researchers, people who are hackers or whatever, oh my work is neutral, I’m just fiddling around in this thing – and none of it is neutral, none of it is politically neutral, you’re always building towards some sort of future. You’re either building towards this future of capitalist fascism and authoritarian control, or you can build toward a future of fully automated luxury queer space communism.
Jeremy:
Hell yeah! You know what’s interesting, a lot of the reforms being sold to us, specifically with police, are done so in the name of community policing, or of reforms, or the technology is supposedly in the name of helping folks. Specifically, what you had researched, some of these tablets, they’re being sold all across the United States right now, in a trend in “corrections”. They’re doing away with physical mail and they’re replacing things with tablets. And there’s a whole host of problems that go along with that, not to mention the cost, cause it’s a private company, and like you said, they’re nickel and diming people just to send – they charge for like a “stamp” for an electronic postcard or some dumb shit. But also – monitoring, it helps them monitor and create a kind of dragnet of people they’re corresponding with. And of course the danger of it being these private companies in the first place, it’s a black box, not just in the AI algorithms, but you can’t even FOIA some of these companies.
Cooper
Yeah exactly, you can’t FOIA a private company, even if they’re working for a government, even if they’re a government contractor. You can FOIA their communications with government officials, but you can’t FOIA anything else. You can’t FOIA the company directly. As you privatize all these things, you get rid of any transparency. Yeah, the tablet thing is really insidious, what Securus and GTL want to do is monetize and – they want to remove any in person connection. They’re also trying to remove in person visits. They want to monetize and control every second of every prisoner’s life. They want to build alternate revenue streams. They want to show ads to prisoners, right? Showing ads to fucking prisoners, like what the fuck are you… oh shit, I better buy a Snickers in my commissary because I got a fucking ad. What an insane idea!
One of the wildest patents I saw is they had a patent to start mining data from people who have called prisoners. If you called a prisoner, they would start mining data from your Amazon account, like check on your Amazon purchases to make sure you weren’t purchasing anything that might help the prisoner, that you weren’t purchasing anything like weapon or drug paraphernalia related or somehing like that to send to the prisoner. So they not only want to monetize and spy on every aspect and every second of prisoners’ lives, they want to loop into everyone that incarcerated person knows, in this state of carceral control. You also have this switch to electronic monitoring right now: instead of ankle bracelets, you have an app that does all the same things an ankle bracelet does. It does a lot of the same things that Pegasus does. The only difference is that you know it’s on your phone because the state has threatened you violence if you don’t have it on your phone. This also lowers the barrier to carceral control. An ankle monitor costs a lot of money, but it costs almost nothing to deploy this app. You can make everyone install this as soon as they’re pretrial, as soon as they get arrested you can make them install it, you can make anybody who’s under any sort of ICE jurisdiction install this. It’s about expanding the scope of the carceral state, and it’s really fucking terrifying.
Jeremy:
Right. Seems like they’re kinda redrawing the fence and kind of roping in people who are not even directly caught up in the system, but they’re trying to extend that net to cover basically everybody. And then there was the whole Robocop AR glasses thing you were talking about that would facial recognition people, and tell them your charges, detect contraband cellphones, and all this weird… what the hell?
Cooper,
The thing about patents is that companies will patent anything that they think of just in case they might want to actually in the future. Just because they have these patents doesn’t mean that all of these things are going to become products. The thing companies often do is just colonize that intellectual property so nobody else can have that idea without paying them some money. Even if they’re not going to do the thing, they just patent it anyway. But it says a lot about their mental state, what they’re thinking, what their vision of the future is. Even if they don’t make every one of those technologies, their vision of the future involves that level of control, controlling everybody, monetizing every second, controlling every second, mediating every interaction and every experience. Getting rid of any last vestiges, any last scraps of privacy or interpersonal connection, or anything that you might be able to scrape off of the floor in prison.
EFF:
Damn, what a hell of a future we got to look forward to! Whatever happened to the whole promise of the techno liberal future? Was it all just a dream, and we were all just sleeping, and now we woke up in this crypto capitalist hell, what the fuck?
Cooper:
The EFF was founded on this techno utopian vision, thinking of how we can use the internet to really bring everybody together. If everybody talks to each other, everybody, we’ll all just get along, I think that was sort of a cute hippie notion that disregards that some people are just fucking fascists. Disregards that any sufficiently useful tool will quickly become co-opted by capitalists and authoritarians and used for their own ends. I still think that – I still am a firm believer in fully automated space anarchism. I am still definitely a techno-utopian. I think we can have some really awesome shit with technology. But right now, technology is definitely a force multiplier for capitalists and for fascists more than it is for us. But I think it’s important for us to constantly push back against that, to not cede that ground, to not give up that fight, because it is so important.
Jeremy:
Hell yeah. Another technologist is possible.
Cooper:
Another internet is possible, another technology is possible, and another world is possible. We can’t cede any ground to these fuckers.
Jeremy:
We refuse! Now, of course the promise of anonymity and decentralization with crypto has been a flop. It’s just another false promise. But I think the EFF had come out in support of one of the developers of BitTornado, on some “code is a right”, or “code is speech” type of grounds. [Alex Pertsev]
Cooper:
Yeah, that wasn’t something I directly worked on. But our stance there, and our stance always has been, is this free speech stance, that code is speech. You can’t arrest somebody for writing code. The EFF would not argue that you can’t arrest somebody for laundering money, right, there are very clear laws about money laundering. But for writing BitTornado, for just writing the software that’s used in a Bitcoin tumbler, that should not be illegal. I agree with that stance, I think that is a correct stance. I don’t think you should arrest people for writing software. I don’t think you should arrest people for writing malware, that is still a form of speech, and a lot of malware researchers like myself write malware to learn how malware works. I wouldn’t argue that you should arrest the people in NSO group for writing malware, I think you should arrest people in the NSO Group for their complicity in war crimes, and murder, you should arrest them for working with horrible – well, all governments are human rights violating governments. But there’s tons of bad shit they have done, but I think you can’t arrest somebody for writing code, I stand pretty firmly with that. The EFF does have some level of free speech absolutism that I do tend to disagree with, somewhat of an element of “we have to let nazis say nazi things”, and I think that’s complete bullshit. I don’t ever think we have to give nazis free speech because they don’t actually believe in free speech.
Jeremy:
Or the ACLU using time and resources to go out of their way to defend the rights of nazis.
Cooper:
Yeah, when there’s lots of other people that one could defend. At the end of the day, a job is still a job, and I’m still working in the non-profit industrial complex, and I’m not going to agree with everything the EFF does or says. And like, I’m still exhausted at the end of the day after working eight hours, which is still too much for anybody to be working. But still I feel better about it than if I was working for Raytheon or some security company making banks more secure.
Jeremy:
Hell yeah, hell of a difference, right? It’s the line in the sand.
Cooper:
If you’re listening to this, and want to follow me on Twitter before it dies, it’s @cooperq, or if you want to follow me on Mastadon it’s @cooperq@mastodon.lol, hit me up on the DMs and let’s have a chat about whatever.
Pirates at the Bitcoin Conference
Jason:
So the Bitcoin conference, it’s a yearly gathering of grifters & right-wing capitalists masquerading as the freedom movement. Pepes everywhere. Guy Fawkes masks also everywhere. NFT galleries. They also unveiled a bull, as to mark Miami as a crypto capital city on par with the bull of Wall Street. In fact crypto bros were pissed that they scrapped the artist’s original design to include testicles on the bull. They’re also a lot of reports about sexual harassment.
Jeremy:
Thousand-dollar passes to get in, too. so you probably wonder what the hell are we even doing there. It’s not normally our scene. We were invited there to talk with the other people from the FreeRossDAO, who are involved in kind support work. Now Ross, as in Ross Ulbricht, is one of the progenitors of the Silk Road, and for those who don’t know he’s doing double life plus 40 years in federal prison. And me and Ross go way back, first off we were bit by the same beast. We were both busted by this FBI cyber crime officer Chris Tarbell, and we’ll talk about him later. And we briefly crossed paths in jail, in the visiting room strip room of all places, too. So we were there at the Bitcoin conference, just to talk to people about Ross’s case, just get people to sign the petition demanding his clemency, and to talk about prison abolition in general. So we were dressed up like pirates, you know, the DPR theme.
Jason:
So there we were: pirates in a sea of crypto bros. Let’s take a look at some of the whales and tycoons on the open seas! Now, I never heard of what the fuck a whale is, but – it’s just rich people who made shitloads in the early days of crypto. These big shots walking around like they are the absolute shit all around the fucking conference.
So who else actually spoke, well, Jordan Peterson spoke, Tucker Carlson and Glenn Greenwald showed up. Even The Wolf of Wall Street Street showed up. Jordan Belfort “Greed Is Good”. The fraud fit right in. Andrew Yang was also at the conference. He later of course formed the Forward Party, which says: we are neither left nor right, but forward, but – everyone knows who says they’re neither left nor right really means they’re really all right. And it is of course a bunch of right-wingers and centrists, but they like to say they’re on both sides are equally extreme type shit. George Bush and Dick Cheney are major financial backers.
Jeremy:
And also Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel was one of the keynote speakers. Famously he ripped up dollar bills and declared the death of money, it really it didn’t land, but nevertheless, Peter Thiel’s actually a darling to some of these people. Which is kind of confusing to me, they think of them as some type of libertarian hero or something like that. Calls himself a Christian Nationalist you know he’s tied up with Palantir, Clearview AI, Bilderberg Group. Very much so with the military industrial complex, he’s got contracts with law enforcement, basically doing all this mass surveillance stuff. So his placement here to me was always kind of at odds with what their stated freedom movement is. Another interesting anecdote, Peter Thiel and Candace Owens, they founded this “GloryFI” bank, some sort of “anti-woke bank”, well it collapsed after three months and everybody lost their money. Hahaha, another grift bites the dust. Thiel is also a major financial backer of right-wing movements internationally, and in the US he’s a heavy donor to the Republican Party, most recently J.D. Vance and Blake Masters.
Now Bitcoin is very much kind of Peter Thiel’s conference. His groups, for example the Human Rights Foundation, is very much involved in Bitcoin, this is part of what gives them their freedom aesthetic. Human Rights Foundation is one of those right-wing capitalist-y think tanks that kind of masquerade themselves in the language of human rights and civil rights and so forth. But in reality, they’re just kind of Chicago Boys free market capitalist coup-plotters. One of the main guys, Thor Halvorssen, his cousin Leopold Lopez apparently was one of the key figures in the Venezuelen Coup in 2002. He was an opposition leader, in incidents described by Amnesty International as “one of the most serious human rights violations perpetuated in the short-lived coup-d’etat” The cousin of the leader of the Human Rights Foundation. And just in general, the Human Rights Foundation is just funded by all these dark money controversial groups such as the Donors Capital Group, a major backer the HRF, they fund a lot of Islamophobic groups. They’ve previously targeted feminist academics with this “Indoctrinate U” thing. They went after the environmentalist movement, and just in general, right wing coup type shit.
Jason:
Also spoke was North Korean defector Yeonmi Park. So she speaks about human trafficking, but when she’s surrounding all these right-wingers, it seems she is only being platformed merely to add to anti-communist propaganda. She never criticizes the abuses of the US or their allies, to note.
Jeremy:
Also was supposed to speak was Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, who had invested much of his country’s reserves into Bitcoin. He was supposed to speak, but he wasn’t able to make it because he was dealing with the suspension of their constitution and the mass arrests of thousands. Anyways his Bitcoin investment has since lost more than half its value and unsurprisingly has not really seemed to generate the hoped widespread usage or the prosperities or the freedoms. There was a ridiculous huge symbolic volcano in the middle of the conference, a hell of a symbol.
Jason:
Shell is sponsoring the 2023 and 2024 conference. Big banks are part of it now, eroding away at decentralization. It’s adopting the aesthetic and language of freedom, but really it’s just repackaging the same old capitalist corruption. Anyone who’s ever bought into the dreams and ideals of the early days of cryptocurrency may be shocked about how completely co-opted and sellout out the scene really is.
Jeremy:
And of course nobody wore masks even though the pandemic still going around, but the whole anti-vax anti-mask thing has just kind of been a pillar, one of the major points of this right-wing crypto so-called freedom movement. Many of them are Trump supporters, of course, but there weren’t a lot of red hats around, many of them preferring the Libertarian Party flavor of right-wing politics. But below the surface, there’s racist chan edgelords defining the movement. For example, one of the most successful NFT projects, the Bored Ape Yacht Club, there’s tons of nazi iconography, and all these fascist dogwhistles, and it was all exposed in a scathing documentary Bored Ape Nazi Club. Yet still, people paid millions for these racist JPEGs, even all these celebrities like Snoop Dogg and Jimmy Fallon, but since then, the NFT market collapsed, images basically worthless now.
Jason:
We won’t be going back. But we did have a good time anyways, it’s Miami. At one point were were chilling on the beach, looked up and saw a plane flying a banner, and it read: “Save the World: Start a DAO” We LOLed and jumped in the water.
Libertarians Unmasked
Jeremy
To understand the politics of the Bitcoin movement, it’s important to look at the Libertarian party, and specifically the fascist pivot that came with the rise of the Mises Caucus. Now could we just say that that Libertarians always sucked, but – we’re not gonna get all into this libertarian or anarchism stuff, there’s plenty of resources out there if you’re interested. But we did want to talk about the Mises Caucus, and how after they took over majority control of the party during the “Reno Reset”, the mask came off.
Jason:
One of the things that happened at the “Reno Reset” was the removal of the “we condemn bigotry as irrational and repugnant”, a plank that was added to the party platform in the aftermath of the deadly Charlottesville nazi rally. Removing this plank is a statement in itself in this current era of increased racism and anti-queer violence. A real leaning in of the trolling anti-”woke” fascist rhetoric.
Jeremy:
And the removal of the abortion plank, which occurred during the devastating Supreme Court overthrow of Roe versus Wade. Personal freedoms against blatant government intrusion, all that was scrapped in favor of “states rights” and “both sides”. Way to be on the freedom side of history.
Jason:
They use language like “national divorce” and “secession”, clear Civil War Confederacy rhetoric. They’re also notably quiet in most actual oppressions people face. These days, they’re mostly just anti-vax anti-mask type of tyranny. Economic Injustices are reduced to “well, in a free market, billionaires have the right to monopolies and sweatshops and be rich parasite assholes”.
Jeremy:
The Libertarian Party was also nowhere to be found during the uprisings in response to police violence. Police were literally murdering people in the streets, and some of them actually sided with the cops and the fascists. For example the New Hampshire party leader Jeremy Kaufman, he got in trouble for claiming “Kyle Rittenhouse did nothing wrong”.
So there’s been an exodus. Two state chapters collapsed in rejection of the Mises Caucus. A lot of people left the party, wrote open letters. Donations are way down. And you know, good for the ones that left. But the ones that stayed, even if you aren’t Mises, even if you don’t think of yourselves as fitting into the alt-right troll mold that has come to define the new Libertarian Party. But if it’s not a deal breaker for you, if you’re not calling it out, if you’re okay with it, well now you got that stain: you can never get it out, and you’re going down with that Libertarian ship to the dustbin of history.
Jason:
Overall, this is indicative of breakdown and factionalization of the right-wing. As Trump is increasingly detested even within his own party, they’ll experiment with different formations to obscure their hateful ideologies: it’s another way of rebranding fascism as some type of freedom. It’s not new, and a matter of fact, the “libertarian” name itself was stolen in the 70s, as the word is understood around the world as synonymous with libertarian socialism and anarchism. It’s a fraud, a complete contradiction. But hey, grifters gonna grift.
Anarcolonizers
Jeremy:
Yo, speaking of frauds and grifters, have you seen that bullshit ass show “The Anarchists”?
Jason:
Do yourself a favor – don’t. But let us tell you about this heaping pile of garbage.
Jeremy:
And not the good kind of garbage.
Jason:
Anarchapulco: crypto conspiracy fest made into a really bad “documentary” series on HBO.
Jeremy:
It’s basically just a bunch of colonizing tourists, just partying at their conference in Acapulco. Not really interacting with the local community at all, or doing anything to challenge state or corporate power. Originally called “Stateless”, it seems designed to smear actual anarchists. It opens with a five minute book burning, something fascists are more known for. Overall, it’s actually pretty boring, mostly self-congratulating. A lot of time scrolling through FaceBook posts, nothing really happens. Most of them are just crypto-rich or otherwise pretty well-off. Not really experiencing much struggle or oppression in their lives. Their idea of freedom is mostly mad about COVID lockdown, “unschooling”, and taxes. The worst thing that ever happened to them might have been getting shadow-banned from Twitter for spreading disinformation about election fraud or the “Plandemic”.
Jason:
So who goes to the “largest worldwide anarchist conference”? Well, it’s an endless parade of B-list conspiracists, grifters, and crypto-fascists. It’s a case study of the New-Age to Alt-Right pipeline.
Jeremy:
Mainly centers around this guy Jeff Berwick, their leader, the “dollar vigilante”. Let’s listen to this guy:
Jeff Berwick:
“If you think Hitler wasn’t great… well Max spent hours with me going over all the info, and yeah it looks like Hitler was pretty good! So surprised, right, so surprised.”
Jeremy:
So yeah a lot of a holocaust denialism, misinformation, disinformation, right-wing conspiracism. Anarchapulco did an event last month, actually: prepare yourself for the even cringier name for this fest of right wing mouth shitters: “Anarchovid”.
Jason:
So we checked it out, just tuned in, it was a Zoom call. One speaker named Maryam Henein who produced this new racist conspiracy documentary called “George Floyd: The Real Timeline”. And it’s essentially the defense of the police murder in an effort to discredit the BLM movement. Nobody called out how offensive and absolute bullshit it was. It was co-produced by Sean Hibbeler, a Flat Earther conspiracy theorist from the south suburbs of Chicago, who had also produced a previous fucked up documentary about Floyd.
Jeremy:
Also speaking was Hannah Maria, one of the founders of the “Police for Freedom” movement. If you look at it, it’s all human rights, free-speech, but basically they’re just standing up for cops who refused to get vaccinated. They even did a bunch of marches and stuff. Now, this is actually kind of a phenomenon, Chicago Police for example makes up 40% of the city’s workforce. Almost all of them collectively refused, the Fraternal Order of Police backed it. They were eventually granted an exemption for 1700 officers who refused, not one of them were fired. Cops, they didn’t wear masks. Cook County Jail, as a result was actually for a while the nation’s number one COVID hotspot, and a lot of people died.
Jason:
So there’s a lot of New Age life coach grifters everywhere, crypto wallet salespeople with inspiring speeches like “you have an obligation to become rich!” Just a serious what the absolute fuck is this shit? vibe.
Jeremy:
There’s another upcoming conference, Anarchapulco in February and we’re just going to take a look at some of the speakers, just to give you an idea who has spoken at Anarchapulco, who’s going to be coming up speaking at this one. Course the main one, Ron Paul, that’s like they’re darling of the libertarian movement. The Ron Paul Revolution, right? Remember those racist newsletters from the 90s that he signed off on? Like some really terrible shit. He was also pictured with Don Black from Storm Front. We’re not going to spend a lot of time on Ron Paul. Some of the other people – David Icke, remember that guy? One of the most notorious conspiracists, and also an anti-semite. Lizard people, shapeshifters, all that. Really popular though, still.
Jason:
Stefan Molyneux, who’s a full-fledged white nationalist, a big promoter of scientific racism, eugenics, “Men’s Rights” activism. Close friends with Jeff Berwick and Todd Schramke, the producer of “The Anarchists”.
Jeremy:
Another speaker of Anarchapulco 2022 was Ben Tapper, one of the “Disinformation Dozen”, the 12 responsible for 65% of all COVID anti-vax disinfo.
Jason:
Quoted, “Masks have nothing to do with health but everything to do with compliance with a false tyrannical agenda.” We also have Rashid Buttar, another conspiracist who advanced 5G and chemtrail as well as anti-vax conspiracies. Another Jack Spirko, a “survivalist” podcast: “the pandemic is over, long live the pandemic”. Another speaker in 2022 was Susan Sweetin, sbe claims to be the “most censored person in Ireland”. She’s the CEO of “Freedom to Travel Alliance”, a shady company that supposedly helps anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers travel, despite the “discrimination against those who disbelieve in COVID-19”.
Jeremy:
Some more conspiracists, Dan Dix, Max Igan. Brendan Murphy, the “Freedom Hacker” who runs the “Truthiversity”, writes stuff like “The Grand Illusion: The Synthesis of Science and Spirituality”. Mark Passio, the New Age Satanism. He actually has an “anarchist hardcore punk band”, mostly a bunch of 3% stuff. And it is a whole lot of like We Are Change, Infowars types. Adam Kokesh. You know, use words like “liberty” and “tyranny” a lot, kinda red flags.
Jason:
And of course Milo Yiannopoulos spoke, the darling of the alt-right, everyone knows him.
Jeremy:
So the theme of this whole thing, is just during the documentary, and at the conference, there’s just a deliberate omission of actual anarchists, now throughout history. No mention of anything having to do with the anarchists’ involvement in the labor movement, the anti-corporate globalization movement, the anti-war movement, involvement in actions against police brutality, environmental justice. But we’re supposed to believe these people are “the rebels”, the “great resist”, but they ain’t done shit. You know there’s this intentional co-option of the images of revolution. The libertarian and anarchist co-option of the punk aesthetic: Cyberpunk specifically with Bitcoin. which was originally a critique of late-stage capitalism, now they’re fully embracing it. You know at these things you see Guy Fawkes masks, V for Vendetta masks, to promote cryptocurrency. Anonymous had nothing to do with that shit. But of course, “anarcho-capitalism” is a contradiction. It’s a misnomer, has nothing to do with anarchism, because capitalism is incompatible with anarchism, inherently. Capitalism necessitates hierarchical exploitative relationships between owners and working people. Laissez-faire free-market capitalism doctrine necessitates police and governments because of the concept of “private property ownership”. Owners collude with the state to maintain a monopoly on wealth and power, through police. Despite the whole non-aggression principle, do no violence but somehow, when it comes down to it, they defend the use of police violence as justified in defense of their “property rights”, to the point of siding with the police during the uprisings of 2020, because all actual resistance to state power must be “false flag psyops”.
Smash MAGA! Civil War
Jason:
So we’ve released a new update for our game Smash MAGA! Trump Zombie Apocalypse.
In this timeline, accelerated fascist political violence leads to Civil War. The first release saw the Trump Virus teaming up with Elon Musk to build a “MAGA X” space program to colonize space with red-hatted zombified right wingers. Trump so far has gotten away with all the Jan 6 shit, still technically running for president though, but if you want an idea of how things are going at Team MAGA, did you get a load of his “major announcement”?
Jeremy:
Trump’s digital trading card NFT project?! It had to happen eventually. Just rock bottom, the griftest shit ever. Universal disappointment.
Jason:
But this expansion digs a bit on the neoliberal status quo hellscape “back to normal” mentality that plague this country. It all comes to a head with an election that no one wins. This expansion continues the nightmarish timeline with six new levels: “March Against Dystopia”, “Dualing Protests”, ”Cop Island”, “Bicycle Bomber”, “Civil War”, and “Ancient Future”.
Jeremy:
Here’s a couple new enemies we got in the game. We got the Peace Police – yellow vested self-appointed protest marshalls, who will just as soon turn activists over to the police if they get too confrontational or start damaging property. Ultimately, they serve to protect power instead of challenging it.
Jason:
We’ve also added a robocop Digidog to the fray, and since release of this update, robots are now starting to be permitted to use deadly force, so that’s worrisome.
Jeremy:
We’ve got riot trucks, water cannons, and tanks now. You can hijack them, too.
Jason:
Course we threw in Dark Brandon as a boss now. Kind odd how liberals wanna make Biden based so much, they made him an uber-authoritarian mish-mash parody of far-right memes, Dark Maga and LGB. But in Smash MAGA, Dark Brandon turns on antifascists as soon as they dare challenge his dystopian police state, and he summons legions of Ultra-Liberals to take down the comrades.
Jeremy:
The final showdown is an epic battle between the Trump Virus and Dark Brandon in a post-apocalyptic fascist coliseum. Beat them both back in a three-way fight with an army of antifa supersoldiers!
But don’t just take it from us. Take it from our other, special algorithmic guest!
Snoop Dogg:
With the specter of fascism haunting elections in the so-called United States, imminent system collapse is obvious to all. There is no future left but to fight it out in the chaos of the streets – or in the latest version of Smash MAGA: Trump Zombie Apocalypse! Join the struggle in single-player mode or fight alongside friends online.
An emergency election is held, and both parties lose. Without a majority or plurality, the internal contradictions prove too great for democracy to hold together the diverging realities. Ubiquitous political violence escalates to larger skirmishes, regional conflicts spread to global theaters. MAGA secedes under a familiar banner and makes the first strike… Civil War returns in the age of nuclear fascism.But another end of the world is possible – and while the capitalist ruling parties seek control, anarchy creates liberation! Join the growing networks of antifa supersoldiers and beat back the invading armies of fascism and oppression. See you in the streets, comrades!
Jeremy:
So yeah, if you’re tired of the regular militaristic games scene, you know. Call of Duty – did you seen the new Modern Warfare 2, got all this right-wing shit in it?
Jason:
Well if that wasn’t bad enough, fucking get a load of Kyle Rittenhouse. Yeah this piece of shit made a piece of shit game, some crappy flash game, where you shoot turkeys? That’s supposed to represent the fake news? What the fuck.
Jeremy:
Oh, he released it on Thanksgiving, of course. Hey, listen to this shit:
Kyle Rittenhouse:
They called me a racist, they called me a murder, And I am neither of those things. My reputation was destroyed by these fake news turkeys. Luckily, my good friend in Silicon Valley, the CEO of Mint Studios – MintChip, had a great idea. The Kyle Rittenhouse Turkey Shoot.Mint chip:
That’s right Kyle. When I saw how these fake news turkeys operate, I had to start coding immediately. Gamers get to play as Kyle Rittenhouse, using a highly specialized laser gun, to strike down any turkeys who spreads lies, propaganda, or political bias. Everyone will get to see what Kyle has to go through, each and every day.Kyle Rittenhouse:
Really?Mintchip:
Yeah. We’re not clucking around.Kyle Rittenhouse:
Cluck yeah.
Hacker and the Fraud
Jeremy:
One last set of frauds to address. I’m talking about Hector Monsegur aka Sabu, the biggest rat in hacker history, and his corrupt handler at the FBI, Chris Tarbell, looking like Kyle Rittenhouse. They’re besties, still, hilariously. Course, they’re the reason why I went to prison. Just listen to some of this shit from their new podcast, “Hacker and the Fraud”:
Chris Tarbell:
We ended up arresting Sabu, and I lived with Sabu for the next nine months.Chris Tarbell:
The Keyser Söze of hacking around then. Guy that was mystical on the internet and people feared him, other hackers feared him. He would just get you.Hector Monsegur:
It was kind of the wild west of the internet.Chris Tarbell:
This crazy wild wild west, of the wild wild west, which was the internet. So you’re deep in there, and you want to protect your own IP, so you needed to commit a crime, in order to hide…Chris Tarbell:
Well, so, the word informant here, really isn’t that good? It’s not fitting, technically, I guess that’s what he was?Hector Monsegur:
So there was a feeling of betrayal there, and I felt like, well, fuck it! If that’s the way they’re gonna play, I’m gonna partake, parlay, rather…Chris Tarbell:
You didn’t store logs of conversations, of things going on.Hector Monsegur:
The reality is that that rat bullshit is exactly that – bullshit. You know, you can’t, you can’t be part of a society, where, you know, you want law and order, and you want to fucking talk about, oh my god, the crime is going up. But then in your second breath, you’re like, oh man, these rats, they’re terrible, snitches get stitches, right?Chris Tarbell:
He doesn’t like the negative things said about him online.Hector Monsegur.
Would I do it again, would I go back in time and do it again? Absolutely.Chris Tarbell:
The day you graduate, and walk out the academy with a gun and a badge, and you know, the power to charge somebody with a misdemeanor for flying the United States flag at night. That’s awesome.Chris Tarbell:
I mean I went through a huge funk, when I did those cases, afterwards. I should have talked to somebody, but in the FBI, you have to keep that machismo up, or they’re gonna take your gun away from you.
Jeremy:
I really didn’t want to give these clowns any attention at all, but they crawled out of the slime with this new podcast “Hacker and the Fed”, exploiting the ironic novelty of their sick relationship. Tarbell been on campaign mode these days, shilling his new crypto cyber security firm Naxo. He also appeared on two larger podcasts this month – Lex Fridman and Anthony Pompliano.
First off, these podcasters, these crypto libertarian dweebs, these guys are hacks. Pompliano some ex-military crypto life coach, he was just pumping FTX and BlockFI, both of which just tanked, what a fraud. Lex some intellectual, he brought on Elon Musk twice, Zuckerberg, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, even some UFO stuff, anyways.
So yeah, thanks a lot ya assholes, bringing on the guy who busted us. Both of them were like “I’m interested in both sides”, but you didn’t bother to reach out, or to Ross or any of his people, who is still in prison because of Tarbell. You just let him talk about us, let him lie, which is the same problem with how most corporate media covers the police. They just repeat the official police narrative as truth. They didn’t bother to look into our cases because any half assed attempt into the facts and circumstances you would have thought, maybe these aren’t credible guests, but no, they didn’t even give any pushback, either.
Of course they don’t talk about all the rampant corruption, informant misconduct, entrapment. Sabu and Tarbell don’t talk much about any of the exact specifics of what all went down during his cooperation, even though all the logs out there. We’re not going to get into all the details right here, but if you can check it out at The Sabu Files. It just proves the hypocrisy of their whole cybercrime program – clearly shows how Tarbell and Monsegur were complicit with facilitating and orchestrating hundreds of attacks not just here but against other countries. But no, they’re the good guys, the white hats cleaning up the wild wild west, but they’re doing the same shit that they say any of us did, but way more. And that’s how it played out in our case.
Tarbell was also all proud telling his version of the story working the Silk Road case like it was all cool, like he isn’t some tool in the failed war on drugs. They didn’t talk about how the case was all riddled with corruption, didn’t bother mention that literally two federal agents were caught embezzling millions in Bitcoin from evidence. He wants to talk about “selling baby parts” and “murder for hire”, without mentioning that ridiculous FBI informant staged murder plot was all thrown out. Nobody died, but Ross is doing life without the possibility of parole – cause of him! And when asked whether he thought the sentence was too harsh, take a look:
Chris Tarbell:
I was surprised by the sentence, but – it’s not for me to pass judgment, that wasn’t my job, my job was to bring him to justice, and then the jury or judge comes up with the, uh, the guilty or not, uh, and the sentencing.Pompliano:
Maybe you don’t have an opinion on like is the sentence appropriate or is not?Chris Tarbell
I certainly don’t have a public opinion, I mean I have opinions!Pompliano:
Okay. You want to share it?Tarbell:
No. (laughter)
Jeremy:
Oh it’s funny right? I don’t know why these crypto people would have any respect for this guy, cause Ross is one of their heroes still doing double life, because of this piece of shit cooking the books. Here he is, also talking shit about Snowden:
Lex Fridman:
Good or bad person?Chris Tarbell:
A bad person. There’s ways of being a whistleblower, and there’s rules set up how to do that. He didn’t follow those rules, I mean they – I mean, I’m red white and blue, I’m pretty, uh…. There’s rules in place for a reason. I mean, he put some of our best capabilities, he made them publicly available. It really kind of set us back in the – and this isn’t my world, but the offensive side of cyber security.
Jeremy:
Of course he mad that Snowden exposed that feds were doing all this mass surveillance abuse. It’s believed Tarbell was doing the whole NSA parallel construction thing himself, illegally laundering their evidence in secret. No wonder he’s always complaining how when they catch somebody they got to reveal their methods – ya know, basic due process rights. Lex also asked about open information access champion Aaron Swartz, who was literally prosecuted to death by Tarbell’s colleagues, check this out:
Chris Tarbell:
So it’s it’s a tough case, I mean, the outcome was tragic, obviously. You … unfortunately, when you’re in the law enforcement, you have to – your job is just to enforce the laws. I mean, it’s not as if you are told to do a certain case, there is a violation of, at the time, 18 U.S.C. §1030, computer hacking, you have to press forward with that.
Jeremy:
That’s fucking cold. Some Nuremberg type shit. You really just next level hacker enemy number one, or something. Now there they are, trying to ingratiate themselves back in the scene, representing themselves as security professionals and technologists like they didn’t just betray everybody. Sabu and Tarbell, this is their thing now, going to these little c-rate security conferences, performing this corny bit. This reformed black hat leader now working as a professional, a lifelong friendship with the fed who busted him, and everyone else too, with his help, how inspiring. You can book them for tens of thousands of dollars a gig. But he wouldn’t dare show up at no big thing – he wouldn’t dare try HOPE or DEFCON. It’s hard to imagine anyone with legit hacker credibility would let them hang. No, he does these sad little product launches, a trucking conference. I talked shit on Twitter once and he got kicked off Secure Miami.
Anyways one time he came here to Chicago, to speak at this Amp’d thing, some customer service suit thing I saw advertised on Twitter, I wasn’t going to go, or make a big deal of it. But I just fucking showed up, just walked right in. Not even hiding myself looking obvious as fuck, drinking your coffee, talking to your colleagues, got some promotional Zoom socks and handtowels, til security kicked me out, I guess he didn’t want me to see his little routine?
Jason:
That’s funny as hell.
Jeremy:
So this rat bastard doing this weekly podcast now, “Hacker and the Fed”, calling himself the “leader” of Anonymous, telling fake ass war stories, also doing whole episodes telling lies and excuses why he snitched, but framing it like some redemption story who, he had to accept the consequences, and now made it as this white hat security professional, it’s the most pathetic shit I’ve ever heard. And that you’re doing a podcast with the FBI guy who busted everyone, like that’s some sick shit. Can you believe that apparently they were living together while they were working our case? I just found this out, think that would have been useful to know while I fighting my case.
Anyways, Sabu is like a case study of what not to do when the police come. So first off, he’s not even like a hacker, right? No skill. He clicked a link, to someone else’s backdoor someone dropped in the chat, from his home IP address, and was the first one busted. But the FBI didn’t even have a warrant or anything yet, they had to show up at his door because they were scared that maybe he was going to run, because he had been just been doxxed by somebody else. Anyways, when the feds come, you’re supposed to shut the fuck up. Hell, he wasn’t even under arrest, they didn’t have a warrant or anything. Really they blessed him by giving him a heads up, he could have gotten a lawyer, he could have warned us. No, instead he starts ratting immediately. It’s only after he confesses did they charge him with a dozen counts, which standard for informants, he pleads guilty the first week, knowing he would never get anything remotely close to the maximum consecutive 125 years, he would probably have just gotten a couple years, just like the rest of us, so stop it with this 125 years shit. He only ended up doing a couples months because he fucked up his bail – they told him to be silent online but he couldn’t help running his mouth. But also because he was bragging to some cop outside his spot about how he’s an FBI agent, and they arrested for impersonating an officer – what a fool!
They ended up granting him bail a second time, and eventually he gets time served, Judge Preska thanks him, the prosecutor hugs him. I go to prison, for years. We don’t ever forget or forgive that shit. Look, I got the whole story, but we’re not going to waste any more time on this right now. It’s just funny to see how these fakes fit in with all that we’ve talked about today, now they’re popping up again, probably will continue to embarrass themselves with this show for the foreseeable future.
So the struggle continues. Despite them, Anonymous still doing it’s thing. Hackers and leakers, it’s another golden era, really. There’s been skirmishes: FBI on a warpath, too, always bad faith actors in the tech space. They put a statement urging big tech companies, specifically Apple, to build government backdoors into their cloud encryption. Also last month the FBI made two arrests, and took down Z-Library, the popular book sharing site, but you could still get to it on the darkweb. And as we go to press, someone hacked InfraGuard, the FBI’s flagship cybercrime partnership program, remember we hit them several times ourselves. It never gets old. So they’re selling the membership list of some 80,000 feds on a darkweb market. The lulz are still alive and well.
Conclusions: Ending the Grift Economy
Jeremy:
In the past, the consequences of collapse were not distributed equally amongst all peoples. Presenty, it’s a utopia for some and a dystopia for others. But it’s all borrowed time. Crypto-fascism is most definitely a threat to any future on this planet. Centralization, Monetization. Privatization, Incarceration, Militarization, Automation, Acceleration, Annihilation.
Jason:
The vision of these rich edgelords in control of the wheel puts them in a bunker and you, a number. They are telling you who they are: they want to strip the earth of all life for the resources, and when there is nothing left, they will manifest destiny onto the next planet, bringing with them the same old failed racist sexist classist ideologies, like a plague.
Jeremy:
We say: fuck all that: unplug. Touch grass. We don’t need this fascist crypto thing.
Jason:
Both the political parties are failing, that’s plain to see. With the vacuum of power right now comes the hate grifters, all out there acting fools for your attention, creeping in and preying on the uncertainty of the moment, taking advantage of the dark age of disinfo they created, programming you while eroding the shared sense of collective or consensus reality.
Jeremy:
We’re past the point where you can justify one’s participation in the zeitgeist of rising fascism and apocalyptic capitalism with claims of individual neutrality, excuses of ignorance or the perceived inability to change things.
Jason:
We can stop all this, we can change everything, but only if we are absolutely clear where we stand, and we lay down the line in the sand. Wherever you’re at, stand up against this shit, build something different.