Web3 and communities at risk: Myths and problems with current experiments

thank you for joining us we will begin shortly we're just waiting for attendees to make their way into the zoom main space hello and welcome thank you for joining us today I am Gina Neff and I'm the executive director of the Menders Center for technology and democracy at the University of Cambridge before I introduce our guests I would like you to know that this event is being live captioning and captioned by Sam professional captioner if you'd like to have captioning you can select it possibly in the zoom toolbar we were having problems in the tech check with it but we also have a stream text captioning for the event available this is a fully adjustable live transcription of the event in your browser if you want to open this we're sharing the link to the stream text in the chat at the moment and a transcript will be made available online after our event now before we begin some points of housekeeping the event is being recorded by zoom and streamed to an audience on the platform by attending the event you are giving your consent to be included in the recording our guests tonight will speak to us for about 40 minutes and then we'll open up the discussion for audience questions to participate in that discussion please use the Q a bar that's down at the bottom of your screen um please don't Place questions in chat we won't be able to monitor the chat in the QA function please follow us or tag us on Twitter or other social media platforms that you might be following are hash to our our handle is at mctd Cambridge and we are live tweeting tonight's event so let's get started we're delighted that you can join us for this event this launch of our new report web 3 and communities at risk myths and problems with current experiments by Dr Margie Cheesman an affiliate here at the center the question that motivates this report is really why are the most at-risk people around the world at the Forefront of experiments with untried Technologies like cryptocurrencies refugees low-income populations and other communities with restricted socioeconomic access rights and protections are now absorbing the risks and costs of these experiments and this development in web 3 Technologies we ask is this how we build a just Society this report by Dr Cheesman makes a pressing And Timely intervention by critically analyzing the current state of the evidence on web 3. the report is informed by her extensive ethnographic research on changes in money and identity infrastructures especially in global migration governance and this includes the impact of Novel Payment Systems demonetization Biometrics and decentralized IDs as issues of socioeconomic inequality thanks to Margie's extensive field work with Refugee groups in Jordan and in international in international organizations such as info migrants gsma mobile for development and United Nations agencies this report maps how to advance public conversations about the values that we as a society seek to protect at the mandaru center for technology democracy at the University of Cambridge we study how digital technology is transforming society and we work to ensure Democratic accountability over the increasing power of Technology around the globe and our research is really anchored in ways to build capacity in how we as a society can hold Tech Systems to account to to create just Futures and we hope this report will be useful to a wide range of different stakeholders and audiences in scrutinizing web 3 developments especially for people who are most at risk in our societies so tonight I'm joined by three speakers first Dr Margie Cheesman the author of the report and an affiliate at the mentor Center for technology and democracy Mark is also an assistant editor at the journal big data and Society Dr Cheesman is an anthropologist who works with communities using and making digitization projects in context of international Aid and migration her PhD infrastructure Justice and humanitarianism blockchains promises and practice was at the Oxford internet Institute and funded by the esrc and it was the first ethnography of blockchain technology and humanitarian settings we're also joined tonight by Lana Swartz and Paul mccurion Lana is an associate professor media studies at the University of Virginia her research on topics like Bitcoin mobile wallets and historical money Technologies like Diners Club card has been have has been published in leading journals including information communication and Society Theory culture and society and women's studies quarterly her recent book new money how Payment Systems became social media was released from Yale University press in 2020. and finally I'm joined by Paul curion Paul has worked in the aid industry as an independent consultant his most recent work has been around digital issues including work on developing a basic concept from portable ID for refugees so now I'm going to hand it over to Dr Cheesman to introduce the report and then I'll bring our panelists back on after she's finished working hello everyone thank you very much for joining us today and I'd really like to say a big thanks to Gina Jeremy and the team at the Mind River Center for supporting this work um as Gina said um I'm an affiliate at the center but I'm also a postdoctoral fellow at the war studies Department of King's College London um my work really looks at the relationship between digital technology and inequality in contexts of international Aid and migration as Gina mentioned my PhD was an in-depth ethnographic study of the adoption of Webster's emblematic technology blockchain in humanitarian Aid and this research involved field work in refugee camps with Refugee groups and humanitarian Aid agencies to understand how the promises for blockchain were being made and how they were playing out in practice for real people and for institutions more recently with Andreas Hackle and colleagues I've also worked with Refugee groups in Nairobi who are interacting with cryptocurrency platforms so all of that's to say that my field work experience informs the questions that I raise in the report that we're launching today this report is is an important mapping exercise it Maps up a range of real life experiments that are already happening around the world under the banner of web 3. it demonstrates that web free experiments raise concerns that are disproportionately affecting low-income and at-risk communities first the case studies discussed involve communities in precarious financial and political situations such as refugees and stateless people who've escaped Civil War and ethnic cleansing natural disaster survivors and recipients of development Aid programs for example in Vanuatu and Jordan Bangladesh Kenya and elsewhere today I'm going to give switch slides today I'm going to give an overview of the report firstly by providing a bit of a critical introduction to web3 um secondly by mapping the terrain of these case studies which we urgently need to learn from and then lastly by pointing to some recommendations for research and policy around web3 innovation so firstly um the term web3 it refers to a whole collection of ideas about the future of our Digital Society these ideas are usually framed in opposition to web 2 the current characterization of the internet which is generally accepted to be a system of surveillance capitalism involving gatekeeping profiteering and abuses of Power by big tech companies data Brokers central banks and governments for web series Advocates and lenders the distributed Ledger technology blockchain gives us the basis for a different and more Equitable web as well as blockchain web3 as a term can cover a range of other Technologies and techniques including cryptocurrencies nfts smart contracts and the report provides a glossary but web3 is conceptually ambiguous it involves many potential technical formats and ideas all surrounded by misleading PR and misunderstanding it would be a mistake to assume that we're seeing a revolutionary transformation from web 2 in the report I evaluate the three key associations of web3 which can be described as decentralization trust and privacy firstly decentralization web 3 systems claim not to rely on a central point of authority instead blockchain database distribute control across a network of nodes blockchains are said to enable Democratic peer production projects but what decentralization actually means and looks like is both unclear and contested in web debates web3 debates the report shows that many projects bearing the label of web 3 do not follow a political commitment to decentralizing authority to say the least secondly trust blockchain has claimed to replace the need for trusted human intermediaries organizations and social processes with algorithmic governance technocratic consensus protocols and Trust in code but ruptures interests and volatility characterize web 3 projects especially cryptocurrency initiatives the report demonstrates that issues of social trust governance and fairness do not disappear with blockchain lastly at the same time as promoting the transparency and distribution of information web3 rhetoric also promotes privacy and security for example blockchain-based projects involve cryptographic techniques like public and private keys but the case studies in the report flag up issues of privacy invasions fraud scamming bankruptcy and legal and Regulatory weakness foreign is being appropriated and adapted to serve a variety of interests well-meaning initiatives by humanitarian agencies and other collectives are gathering around principles of privacy and decentralization they're interested in empowering the excluded redistributing wealth or making international Aid transfers more transparent targeted and effective but at the same time web free is a slogan for business as usual projects that do not shift patterns of authority and profit web 3 is being propagated by familiar Power Players like meta PayPal and governments around the globe web 3 is funneling wealth and influence to Elite Venture capitalists like Anderson Horowitz and self-destructive autocratic power to new players like the leader of recently crashed crypto exchange platform FTX in the tradition of experimental technology testing in the global South on which there's been extensive research especially on the post-colonial trajectories of Science and Technology development web 3 companies and projects are targeting so-called Emerging Markets and hear the rights protections and choices of Technology users are diminished so the case studies that we discuss in the report web3 proponents firstly suggests that blockchain democratizes payment facilitating direct cheap borderless digital transactions This is highly favorable compared with the food settlement costs and inefficiencies of clunky Western Union MoneyGram or local banks and two key examples are in international Aid box fans unblocked cash projects and the un's building blocks project both use blockchain as an alternative system for delivering Aid payments um Ox fund projects which Community is affected by Cyclone Heralds in Vanuatu and building blocks is reached reaching over 1 million refugees in several different humanitarian locations around the world however when blockchain replaces traditional back-end payment and accounting systems we have to inspect the surveillance challenges and Commercial motives despite the talk of decentralization vendor lock-in issues are arising and web 3 companies and also Biometrics companies which do not have humanitarian mandates and neutrality principles are gaining influence in the delivery of essential services blockchain brings intermediary change which can disrupt Aid recipients trusted interactions with established payment providers and recourse mechanisms can be inadequate when payments go wrong despite using secure cryptography and maybe not storing sensitive sensitive data directly on chain many of these payment projects create new sources of datification and they enhance the tracking of user communities secondly proponents of crypto and other alternative peer-to-peer currencies suggest they provide a Lifeline to people without reliable access to stable traditional currency or liquidity key examples include the International Red Cross sarafoo Community currency projects in Kenya and the startup World coin which has had a Big Splash in the news media and the project has onboarded half a million users and 24 countries alongside many experts I raised the concern that alternative currencies seriously lack stability and safeguards as well as usefulness and accessibility they do not solve the root problems that marginalized groups face in mainstream Financial systems especially exclusion due to the identity documentation and credit score requirements of banks registering for many digital wallets requires people giving up a lot of personal information and people need to redeem crypto coins into more usable traditional currency and this demands extra Labor's time and resources and exposes people to scams overall most cryptocurrency schemes reinforce inequalities by exposing those with the most to lose to heighten new risks such as scamming volatility and exploitation without adequate recovery mechanisms lastly the concept of decentralized ID which is going mainstream um for example it's being taken up by the European Commission um so decentralized ID in the report I discuss schemes like the rohingya project which provides alternative IDs to persecuted rohingian refugees who in States like Myanmar are denied birth registration and generally lack protection under national law web3 identity schemes claim to allow people to build useful ID profiles to self-own and self-manage identity credentials and to more selectively disclose sensitive information Grand promises are being made here for stateless people persecuted sects LGBT groups and other communities facing challenges with recognition and inclusion however the model of self-management is often not viable it puts the onus on users to hold and manage personal information at their own risk ultimately decentralized ID schemes do not address the political and legal structures that limit certain communities access to safety or inclusion in Financial Health and Social Services and indeed to mobility and recognition across borders so in conclusion first of all it's of great concern that untested technological solutions are being applied in some of the most sensitive Global contexts and among communities that are facing great economic and political disadvantages and in particular I warn against risky cryptocurrency initiatives targeting groups who lack choices and Alternatives and are not in a position to turn down the financial incentives that startups provide secondly web 3 companies are not being systematically scrutinized and the barriers to their experiments are currently too low Aid organizations are not sharing it and collaborating enough around failures and risks and if web3 projects are to continue proliferating we need much stronger standards and safeguards lastly the reports offers a high-level snapshot of issues that demand deep consideration and qualitative research and I hope this report will encourage more work to understand the design and governance of web free Solutions in these kinds of contexts and also to address the problem that the perspectives of user communities are sorely lacking in popular debate right now we need much better multi-stakeholder collaborations to help us apprehend and mitigate the promises and The Perils of web 3. thank you thank you Margie very much for that I would like to bring Paul on to um well you have worked as a practitioner including having worked in helping to build blockchain Technologies and services and humanitarian what's your perspective and and comments so I'm thanks very much Gina and thanks Margie for the for the presentation as as you said Gina my background is as a practitioner both as an aid worker but also as uh the the Chief Operating Officer of financial technology company that used blockchain as a core part of its architecture um but I have to say I I agree with all the conclusions of uh of the report with without any real qualifications the the one that particularly concerns me and has always concerned me is the way in which new technologies are um introduced is as experimentation essentially on marginalized communities with very little oversight I think it's been a big weakness within the sector and I see no difference here from web 3 Technologies and and other technologies that have gone before I think the real question is if web3 if the the challenges we face around web3 technology is a very similar to previous Technologies waves of Technology what makes it different what makes this type of technology different and for me the answer is that decentralized Technologies are what I refer to as feral Technologies they seek to elude regulation they seek to elude the state control that other Technologies are subject to um and we can contrast with them with domesticized or domesticated technologies that uh have much more oversight on them much more control mechanisms around them uh I think the the big ex the big experience for me with trying to develop and Implement these kinds of Technologies in practice was that every technology has the problem that it doesn't survive first contact with reality the promise of any technology is always overstated but unfortunately as companies you can never walk back the height so all the claims that are made for web 3 Technologies may never come to pass but that won't stop people from still making those claims and that I think shows one of the big problems which is that there's a real Clash here between two sets of values or imperatives one is the commercial imperatives of companies which which need clients which need investment which need to show that they're they're actually working um versus the transparency and accountability and oversight that we really need when we're working with marginalized communities I don't think the private companies are bad otherwise I wouldn't have founded one so this isn't an argument against partnering with private companies but it is an argument that as the reports States Aid or the sector in general needs to be a lot smarter that most Aid organizations simply lack the expertise to make clear and considered assessments of Technology adoption and management that started to change a little bit in the last four to five years so the very large organizations the UN operational agencies for example the larger International ngos now do have much more capacity um but it's still not enough we are still at a disadvantage I think the the answer to how we deal with that how we navigate and negotiate this this difficult terrain is to really take a human-centered design approach is to really start with marginalized communities where they are with the problems they're actually facing rather than the problems that technology companies tell us that they're facing and so instead of having Solutions looking for problems we need to start by clearly articulating the actual problems that marginalized communities are facing on the ground and then we need to make sure that we um having placed the series metrics for measuring what is success it's still not clear to me what constitutes success in any of these web3 implementations is it simply scale because scale alone doesn't seem to me to be enough to claim success is it impact what is the impact when it comes to things like Financial inclusion or digital identity when you take into account the potential risks that those Technologies also introduce so these these questions I think are are really critical and the final question goes back and encapsulate everything I've just said the question we asked when we started the company do any of these projects actually need blockchain or or other distributed Technologies is decentralizing the decentralization the answer to the problem that we actually face so I just look there and congratulations on the report Lana can I bring you on your ice cream you've written a lot about the power that new kinds of money have over claiming our imagination What kinds of contributions would you like to move and see yeah so first of all thank you so much Margie um for the report and congratulations on it uh this is It's been a treat to read and to hear you talk about it today um so I think with my time I'd like to refer to some of my recent work uh with the MIT digital currency initiative on Central Bank issued or Central Bank digital currencies or cbdc um so CBBC is presently a term with a lot of flexibility so globally many banks are exploring them but we don't know exactly what shape they will ultimately take if they ultimately do come into existence um but I should note that unlike some of the web 3 projects that were discussed here cbdcr by definition to be issued and managed by the Central Bank um and sort of pegged to be one-to-one with state issued currency not a speculative interest like or instrument like many of the decentralized cryptocurrencies we see um when we you know think about when we think about web3 they are not not necessarily decentralized in the way web3 is so instead of a decentralized system of minors producing the blockchain and thus the currency um those you know the computer nodes that support a blockchain if a blockchain is to be used are likely to be run by the central bank or other um you know suppliers mandated by uh the government um but I want to use even this relatively kind of stable version of a kind of web3 inflected future um for money to underscore a point that I see you know really running through the report in the presentation um and that is it does not matter if the underlying Ledger that produces the currency has features that are good for the public interest if the intermediate intermediary ecosystem that allows people to access that currency do not have those public interest features um so and to discuss to kind of demonstrate that I'd like to take you know two examples the first one being privacy if as cbdc might be based on a ledger that could theoretically support pseudonymity or other privacy protecting features however if everyone accessing that cbdc is required to do so through an account that requires extensive identity kyc Etc collects data on every transaction puts that data into conversation with other data sets and makes it available to Brokers law enforcement and other organizations outside the purview of the people using that money and that people cannot meaningfully consent to then it makes no difference if the underlying Ledger has privacy features or not um another that I think is an important consideration is custody so with physical Bare Assets like cash you can physically hold your own money you can self-custody it there are a lot of course many drawbacks to cash it can be lost in a flood you can't transmit it remotely over distance its theft often involves bodily harm but although cash offers no safeguards beyond what people themselves can provide many people globally particularly those marginalized prefer to take this risk especially for those whose earnings and savings are small um you know this is both a practical concern but one type to dignity and self-determination if you don't have to rely upon intermediaries which are frequently unstable costly unpredictable um and surveillance um you know because you don't have to reply a lot rely on those intermediaries to actually hold and exchange your money so it's both a question of dignity and of practicality in many cases so then the question for cbdc is whether it will be designed like cash which you can hold yourself or more like existing accounts where a custodial intermediary like a payment app a bank or mobile money provider holds your funds on your behalf and I think lessons actually from the decentralized as currency space are instructive here in you know in the crypto Community there's this popular saying which is not your keys not your coin and this refers to the idea that unless a person holds the private Keys associated with their cryptocurrency They Don't Really hold own that cryptocurrency if a you know crypto payment system or an exchange or other intermediary is the one holding the keys to those coins um they can ultimately exert control over it and deny um a user's access to that that cryptocurrency and indeed you know cryptocurrency exchanges and intermediaries have based significant fraud attacks and insolvency so just this week for example Gemini which is the crypto exchange run by the Winklevoss twins announced that clients wouldn't be able to make withdrawals through at least one of their product lines um so yes it's this immutable Ledger but if you don't have the keys you don't have coin um and so the most Savvy users in the crypto space um choose to keep their funds in key wallets in cold storage and in other kinds of you know technical Arrangements that allow them to retain the keys to their own coin and in the decentralized space there have been an array of innovations that enable people to hold and pay with cryptocurrency while retaining control of their assets so the question is will that be the case for cbdc or won't it be will we you know think about what um has been you know are we going to select the uh the features of the decentralized world that are most meaningful uh for human dignity uh infrastructural justice as Margie puts it um in financial inclusion or not so I would argue that you know looking at the um cbdc space in both cases of privacy and custody it shows that the theoretical benefits of you know what we're calling today web 3 are totally negated by the drawbacks of actually the non-web three traditional intermediaries by merely repeating what already exists um web3 is a problem then both because it's experimental but also because in practice when actually implemented it winds up not being Innovative enough not sufficiently different from existing arrangements to offer any meaningful Improvement on existing infrastructures thank you um and I look forward to hearing more from you and maybe we can have a conversation for the next few minutes while our audience thinks of their own questions um please put your audience questions for any of us into the QA toolbar at the bottom of your screen um I want to pick up on this question Lana because this at this point you landed on because it's really interesting right so um you know there is the ideology of web3 Technologies and then there's where the rubber meets the road like what actually gets put into place has um institutional rappers that change that ideology into something that is much more traditional if that's the you know that's that's a really interesting take on this what what positive elements should we be holding on to here right that you know that this report um raises a whole host of concerns makes recommendations on how we need to kind of go forward but you know what are the what and this is both for for for for Lana but also Paul Margie what what what should we be fighting for in web3 Technologies and services [Music] um Lana do you want to start okay oh yeah I wasn't even muted um yeah I mean I think I've been kind of paying attention to this space for a good decade now and I think that there is something to be said for the power that these Technologies have rhetorically um Nancy babe Andrea Alarcon and I wrote a paper about the music industry and and blockchain and uh you know much lower Stakes um but we argued that blockchain offered you know functioned as what we called a convening technology in that it actually brings people together um and and forces them to really take account of what their technological needs are and to really think about how to meaningfully implement a technology that would change um the arrangements and so and it kind of Marshalls resources Marshall's attention brings you know strange bedfellows together um and ultimately you know we we try to be really optimistic and we tried to say this is an opportunity and those who are seeking change should take advantage of it you know this was six years ago that we wrote this paper I think and the music industry has not meaningfully taken advantage of this convening technology um but it does seem like this that this it I I do want to to not um miss the fact that that suddenly things that were previously previously considered very very boring like the mechanics of settlement and clearance and payment systems are interesting and maybe there's some opportunity there um and I I do think that it will require a sustained attention to these boring things to really uncover what could theoretically be useful about um web 3 and similar related Technologies um in order to think about implementing it like I think this question of custody that I mentioned is is important like you know or is a cbdc going to be or other you know similar setups merely going to facilitate the um you know demise of cash and mean that there is no money that we can physically you know not physically but that we can actually hold and control and determine ourselves or are we going to take advantage of the fact that they decentralized space does offer an opportunity for self-custody of funds um and and take it and you know try to take advantage of that as we imagine new systems of course self-custody comes with risks if you're self-custing your funds you are also um required to think about security it involves tremendous responsibilization of the individuals um and and this the risk calculation between physical cash and digital cash are not the same um you know protecting cash in your home is very different from thinking about how how to maintain good cyber security systems to protect your cash um so you know these are not easy questions with easy answers and I think so often and the conversation gets caught up in hype and we don't take the time to have really sustained attention to the details oh what what hold on to here I share the same concern as or there's rather the same tension that Lana feels that there is we we adopted blockchain technology um because we thought that it offered something and I was exploring the use of blockchain technology in other areas such as um community housing as well but there is this horrible tension right that um all of the the promise around what this sort of Technology can do simply doesn't materialize um and as with any technology you know the there's another thing which uh proponents of cryptocurrency uh always like to say which is it's early it's early you just have to wait it's early um but I'm a big believer that at some point you have to say it's not early anymore this is not working and we need something different so I I do share that attention um the the other thing I would add though is the report alludes to this a little bit and I think Lana also alludes to it but it's worth facing directly we have a crisis of trust in our institutions there's there's no disputing now particularly in more um post-industrial economies which are moving to service economies which is where you know this transfer this digital digitization is happening quickest um there's a crisis of trust in institutions web three is is held up as an answer to that crisis in trust but the reality is the reason there's a crisis in trust is because people want institutions people do not want to be managing their own cyber security they do not want to be managing their own wallets they want a trusted instant institution to act as an intermediary and to take that burden off them so they can get on Just with living their lives and I think the same has to apply to marginalized communities even more so to communities that have you know lost everything to communities that are under extreme amounts of pressure to communities in which the institutions of the state may be actively working against them they need institutions they don't need more self-sovereignty uh I think that's that's just a fact that we that we have to accept um that doesn't mean that these Technologies don't have anything to offer but I think we need to sort of take their claims about what exactly it is they're offering and whether we want it with a pinch of salt um Paul can I oh yeah yeah I I agree with you that people desperately want and need institutions but I also don't know what those institutions are what form they should take and and what the potential is I think that people have been so desperate to look at web3 because they and then this is kind of what invigorates me about it because they want to reimagine institutions if you talk to like a bunch of you know 25 year old ethereum folks they're actually institutionalists like they're obsessed with like writing and imagining and thinking about what can come next to replace the failing institutions that we have and um and and so I I don't I I'm I'm working right now in cbdc's and I'm imagining the state as a institution that wants to help people but I don't think that's a uh a bet I can reasonably make um nor you know and nor can I make that about traditional financial institutions nor can we make that about traditional Aid institutions so you know if if there isn't hope to be found in some kind of like multitudinous decentralized web3 Neo institution where do we turn so yeah I I agree my so what I wrote a paper about five years ago called Network humanitarianism which was about almost exactly that this Dynamic where everything is moving into networks rather than institution the institution being eroded as a result and that's one of the reasons why we have a crisis of trust crisis of confidence and of course I started a company which was positing itself as a new type of Bank a new type of institution that you have a different type of trust in so I'm very sympathetic to those concerns on the other hand you know I've spoken to those ethereum developers and developed their political critique is woefully underdeveloped and underpowered in my opinion um there are lots of exciting you know Alternatives um being proposed I think they're running parallel to what's happening in the web 3 world though because the interesting alternatives are the ones that are actually Grassroots the ones that are happening closer to where people live are not happening up here in the in the web so yeah I I don't have the answer either I think we're all engaged with this with this question um I just wish that the political critique of the web 3 proponents was resembled a little bit more the world that I see outside my window and I think crucially oh I want to bring Margie into our conversation it's just been so rich that we have so much to say uh absolutely and and I want to give a chance for um audience questions Marty do you want to jump in on on on this or shall we move to audience questions I've got lots of things to jump in on but maybe I'll just pick up on a couple of the points um maybe in a slightly um random way but I think what you're saying is absolutely true that um one of the big problems here as well is that many of these web 3 initiatives even within the UN system are trying to reimagine institutions that as um as many scholars have pointed out as collections of decisions that can be automated and so um you know what does make web 3 very similar to techno solutionists um approaches that have gone before is this logic of automation and in the beginning when I first started researching this this space the the intersection between blockchain stuff and humanitarian work I did kind of think yes maybe there is some rhetorical power here maybe maybe these discussions are surfacing new kinds of um ways of looking at issues of accountability um fairness privacy ethics that really Zooms in on how infrastructures work and the passage of data and money but um having having worked with with organizations implementing these Technologies in reality I think in fact um web 3 might be a convening force but um often the bad fellows that are getting together aren't aren't that surprising and actually we're seeing that when you look at these systems as infrastructural systems they have to be patched together onto kind of existing identity Arrangements existing kind of monetary arrangements and in places like refugee camps this means that um blockchain companies are partnering with other vendors and they're gaining kind of undue influence in in public service provision as I mentioned and so I think actually we do need to be um critiquing um the intervention of private companies in Aid to go back to your your comments for I think a lot of these private companies that have having an increasing role in in sensitive contexts aren't responsible intermediaries and what we do know about blockchain ironically is that it invites intermediary change and it invites the intervention of private companies into previously public services so um I think that's an important point I think also I've um picking up on some of the points you made Lana I think there are some comparison points between these blockchain payment systems and cryptocurrencies and and even mobile money and the idea but um as as Kevin Donovan's um paper on mobile money pointed out um the issue of trust and where money is held and the idea that um if you're you're using a mobile money account your money is not with you and for many people who rely on cash which is an anonymous practical um there are lots of uh issues of Suspicion with with digital uh finance and I think that's a really important issue that came up a lot in my field work in Jordan and um something that I I guess all of us are looking at is this um issue of demonetization and in humanitarian context I would say that in an Ideal World beneficiaries would have the choice to weigh up whether to receive Aid as cash or as digital money because I I do think that that should be um one of the kind of ethical principles of Aid um but again that's an Ideal World um those are a couple of points and I also wanted to mention I just I just think that we need to go back also to the donor agendas within Aid and this is something that um doesn't get mentioned enough but one of the things driving these experimental projects is that rich donor countries are um kind of um absorbing the rhetoric um around web 3 and this is one of the starting points that we can go to with our critical discussions but thanks for that that's a good segue into a question by an anonymous attendee um appropriate for a web 3 conversation how do you feel that the introduction of web3 Technologies upholds The north-south Divide in the development sector have you come across any examples of south-based Local web 3 Solutions and I think that could be for any of you but Marty do you want to start and maybe call jump in yeah I mean there are a few um as as we've touched on I think there are web 3 proponents that um follow kind of socialist anarchists um approaches and there's this Palestinian project a question of funding which is all about um kind of open up opening up art markets um to Palestinians um we see a lot of attention on Lebanese cryptocurrency users who who who are developing solutions that support people in serious economic collapse um so you know alongside alongside these projects and the kind of technical developments like um zero knowledge proofs in identity systems which are introducing um exciting possibilities um for people to be able to share identity credentials without revealing personal information there there are some uh promising projects and Concepts but I think um you know that is within this overarching context and framework of techno solutionism um and in fact you know even even well-meaning um collectives uh really are struggling to make a meaningful difference because this overarching ecosystem of web3 promotes quite faulty assumptions like uh trustless trusts or privacy and decentralization which are not guaranteed and The Wider industry as we know from the FTX scandals is um grossly mismanaged so um I think what we're trying to point out in this report is that um we should not be testing these kinds of experimental projects first on people who don't have choice or Alternatives and even these more promising projects for example you know crypto opportunities in Lebanon as I said you know a lot of people aren't in a position to to turn down the opportunities there and um they'll be exposed to more risks including uh you know scams and fraud and volatility yeah I think it's it's worth him it's worth remembering that there is a demographic in the global South that's uh very interested in in these Technologies obviously tends to be better educated more technically aware but there are people in in many African countries who are working on on local Solutions um and there are also more revolutionary approaches the the one that I was reading about earlier this year was the um the alternative currency that the um kind of the name of the uh the opposition government the sac in uh in Myanmar have set up uh an alternative currency to the government currency as an attack that basically is a liberatory technology um which raises all sorts of fascinating questions about uh what that means so it's it's an ex it's it's um it's an explicitly revolutionary cryptocurrency but it's pegged to tether as far as I can remember which of course is definitely not a revolutionary cryptocurrency it's a it's a standard issue stable coin with a huge host of stability issues all of its own um so yeah I think there's no way out of of that um that sort of web three ah the assumptions of web3 reach even to the projects which are explicitly against the assumptions of web3 or trying to take those assumptions and politicize them so I think there there are still interest there's still interesting potential but I don't really see anybody escaping from the the forces that are set out in the report that's a great segue into a question from Victoria bands um they asked how much of an impact Vinnie do you think the collapse of FTX will have on the perception of web 3. I pose that to any of you all of you yeah I mean that that's that's I mean it's it's precipitated a massive crisis within the community um because obviously it came after a very very bad run on on all the cryptocurrency values so a lot of people were getting wiped out um the there's always been a lot of distrust around exchanges and particularly a lot of distrust around Sam bangman freed within the crypto economy but but the reality is the the this has been you know one of the major public faces of this technology for the for the last year and a half or so and so the Wipeout of FTX and and we've only just begun to see The Fallout I think it has a huge impact on what's going to happen the the biggest impact I think is the money is very likely to dry up you know the these technologies have been buoyed up by a huge amount of venture capital money and a huge amount of self-funding from within the community a lot of the people who get rich in this area put the money back into the technology um and that I think that money is just going to disappear like gone uh and then in a few months time we'll start to see the impact of that a lot of a lot of companies starting up will just run out of funds and won't have anywhere else to go to look for them like we did um so yeah huge impact huge impact um I agree that that will likely be the case um you know there's a lot of legitimacy that has been accrued around like this generation of exchanges um you know FTX is not named after Magic the Gathering um as like one of the earliest like spectacular uh busts of cryptocurrency exchanges was um however I personally have gotten out of the business of predicting the death of crypto um because it seems to not die um and so we shall see what the next permutation what form the next permits yeah so I'm just to be clear I don't think crypto web 3 Technologies die I mean you're absolutely right um they can keep surviving with like each each app having 100 users and just doing it for the love but um yeah this question of scale starts to look really really shaky I guess that's that's the big thing which of course is what they all want it's a huge scale Sam Gilbert asks um the ideas of distributive justice are a key part of web3's legitimating story um how do you think this legitimating story will evolve in in the light of what's happening in cryptocurrency right now well bringing it back to the previous question does I think um rebranding is continuous in this space when I first do started doing the research it was blockchain this blockchain that then a lot of projects um start kind of dropping that term and associating with uh Concepts like redistribution um and then we have the term web3 which has come up a bit later on as something positively associated with and contrasted with surveillance capitalism and centralized power um and yeah I think it's um it's kind of it's really difficult to understand how this idea of distributed Justice is still sticking to web3 and how this belief is is being maintained when the evidence really suggests as the report shows that the web 3 Solutions aren't in fact um redistributing uh value or authority um so yeah I think um I'd like to ask the other panelists how do you think that works kind of on a on a social rhetorical level um how does this kind of conviction in the redistributive project persist I mean I think my take on it is that at the heart of the legitimating story around redistribution um surrounding crypto and web3 which more generally has always been it's always been an ambivalent one so there's always there's always been this like idea of risk this idea of Caveat Emptor um this idea that all of capitalism is Casino capitalism so why shouldn't we have the opportunity to take our turn at the roulette reel let you know why should only the very wealthy be able to play the game um and I think that that many who have you know many of many people including most vulnerable who have been involved in the speculative aspects of crypto know that um and I think that the we have to think and they resist some of the more traditional Notions of kind of Progressive Consumer Protection as paternalistic um and regressive and so I think that there's a lot of nuance that we have to kind of really encounter there and understand as we encounter whatever comes next um and then I think that in terms of what comes next you know FTX isn't the only platform that has seems to be spectacularly imploding and if we look at kind of platform economy you know traditional platforms like meta and Twitter um though those two are now facing a reckoning um and many are you know Mastodon is something that could be considered a web three um technology as well so I think I hope that we see Alternatives emerge to both platforms as they have been and web3 um in its most kind of speculative and exploitative dimensions um that that ideally occupy some form some useful Way Forward borrowing from both of those imaginaries but you know time will tell and speaking of time we have reached the top of the hour um I want to thank all of you I want to thank you for joining us I want to thank our panelists and on to thank Marky for the tremendous work that she has done on this report thanks to the work we have a way to change an advanced public conversation about the kinds of values that we want to see um you know we want to see in society and we want to see Society protect certain kinds of values I want to thank all of you for attending today you can download a copy of the report on our website and that is [Music] www.mctd.ac.uk and the link has just

been put in the chat the details of our future events and seminars can be found on our website we have Meredith brassard and Siva badanathan both joining us in the new year we would very much appreciate if you could complete a short feedback survey um that will come after this session the link will be sent via the Eventbrite and please do follow us on Twitter for as long as Twitter lasts and other social media platforms that we are on or may be on in the future and that's at mctd Cambridge thank you all for joining us today foreign

2022-12-16 16:15

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