Hi. Uh my name is Jared. Uh I'm the founder of Status and Logos and the director of the uh Institute of Free Technology. Uh we build privacy preserving technologies to secure your civil liberties. Really privacy is a means to an end, right?
Uh it is about freedom. um things that we um believe in the west uh are true are no longer true today. Uh I've seen them gradually erode over the past 20 years uh post 911. Uh and we need to make a concerted effort to restore uh what we once believed was true of our societies. Um privacy is necessary for functioning democracies or even a high trust society.
Um but I think that uh one thing that comes up with privacy that you know a lot of people say when privacy that they have nothing to hide. The thing is is it's not really about what you have to hide but how the data you produce is used against you. Uh today uh owners of big tech platforms can psychologically manipulate you and move you and sway public opinion. Uh, and so like that's actually what matters is that they actually can change your behavior algorithmically. Um, regardless of whether you have something to hide or not in many ways like I I think that being a cipher punk now is to really be a steward or a torch holder uh and take uh the ideas and values and principles uh that were recognized and held by you know uh the previous generation and carry them forward.
Uh but this means be uh being a guardian of liberty um of resisting tyranny uh and establishing new parallel systems. The thing for the cipher punk today is it's moved beyond just creating technology. We recognize that we can't just fix the money to fix the state. Uh we need to become more people centric. We need to become more focused on uh civic action rather than just pure direct action through cryptography.
I mean, what's great is that there's so many new privacy tools that are coming out now and like a public consciousness that's been raised around privacy tools. So, it's hard for me to like recommend like one or any of them. And of course, I work on on our own privacy tools, so I'm biased towards those. However, I'm incredibly um love like, you know, projects like Monero, uh projects like DarkFi. Um I think, you know, Proton Mail has done a great job at popularizing PGP, for example.
uh projects like Libra wolf that's tried to make a more private browser. Um yeah, the list goes on. Um yeah, I u nim uh the VPN and both the MixNets. Uh yeah, tour of course. Yeah, the list goes on.
So how can we attract more people to to this software? Um I think like one is getting away from like this sort of dark like black and white colors because I think for the average person like uh it is a little intimidating. I think it speaks very uh well to a small niche and it's great to start at that point. Uh but if we need to broaden our horizons, it needs to be more accessible in terms of just like the branding of of things, right? Um I think that or what I hope as uh the as uh the sort of macro events in society change, uh more people become more and more conscious of why they might want to have privacy online.
uh and so they will naturally be looking for these solutions. Um and privacy technologies are just a means to an end. It's really about what they're actually activating or employing. Um and I think with advent of things like central bank digital currencies uh systems of total surveillance uh and total control uh people will naturally see these black swan events and find alternatives. Um so on like how how the web uh how I imagine the web to be um that's a huge topic I'm not sure if I can summarize I've done a talk on this actually uh talking about some older ideas of the web by direct directional links rather than just hyperlinks uh but I I think what really matters is removing the information asymmetries by our neoal tech lords right that are now in conjunction with governments the vast majority of people uh being put through our communication mediums and being manipulated in a variety of different ways.
Um whether it's being memory holds or coerced into thinking certain ideas or changing their behaviors. Uh and so we need to create a web that is much more like what we hoped in the '90s that is more flat and more decentralized that's more closer to the local communities that um and not at um the control of just a small minority. So that in terms of the ideal structure of society, uh that's really really hard to to say, right? In many ways, I think the ideal structure of society is kind of what we have today. It's just that the institutions are captured themselves and it's been uh weighed down by a whole bunch of policies uh and the debasement of fiats, our fiat currencies.
Um so I'm an advocate of the parallel polus strategy. uh this is a strategy that's employed by uh uh charter 77 and the power polish move in Czechoslovakia uh the Hindu nationalist movement RSS um in uh postcolonial India um it was also implemented by postcommunist Hungary uh with civic circles and this was building uh civic society uh back up um away from the atomized liberal uh decay of uh local governing institutions and developing our dem direct direct democratic systems. Um, and if we can build out these kind of support networks, uh, I think that we can actually catch a lot of people when inflation gets, uh, too bad. Um, and what that evolves into, um, I don't know. I think that, um, I view blockchains as a, uh, form of parliamentary sovereignty, even though it seems more automated.
It is an order in of itself and a new sovereign. And so I think that blockchain based communities uh and the governance around them probably represents the successor to nation states.
Automatic transcript — names and jargon may be misspelled.
