Lecture Series HS22 ——"Cloud Empires and The Cryptographers' Quest to Replace Politics with Technology".

Note: missed the first 5 minutes of recording

Authorities protect us, but who will protect us from the authorities? Crypto-anarchists and cypherpunks have long dreamt of solving this ancient problem of political science with technology. Abusive government authorities were their original concern, but now the leaders of giant platform companies such as Amazon, Apple, and Google have begun to exercise government-like authority over digital markets. In this talk I will use the stories of Bitcoin and The DAO to examine crypto-anarchists' attempts to replace untrustworthy human authorities with incorruptible software code, identifying some fundamental flaws in the vision and proposing a new way forward. The talk is based on my new book Cloud Empires: How Digital Platforms Are Overtaking the State and How We Can Regain Control (MIT Press, September 2022).