IPR: My Digital Self

Michael Sacasas has been thinking, writing and talking about the meaning of technology for over 10 years. He is the associate director of the Christian Study Center of Gainesville, Florida and author of The Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and society. In this episode, Michael and I will be talking about his New Atlantis essay, “ The Analog City and the Digital City - How online life breaks the old political order” In the essay, Sacasas contends that civilization at large is in the midst of an interregnum. The dieing hand of the past (analog culture) clings to the present while the future (digital culture) struggles to be born. We are in the place between. Once stable societies have devolved into “hyper-pluralistic” places of ceaseless and irresolvable conflict. In the midst of this strife and confusion, computational algorithms - mysterious to all but a select few - manage the increasingly digital worlds that we inhabit. We revolt in response. We demand to be managed. Is it time for emerging digital societies to revivify analog public and private virtues?

Woe unto the future generations of those who casually demean and cast aside their societal culture. Author, Martin Gurri, delves into the recent and ancient past with host, Matt Foley, to help us understand the current state of societal affairs in our increasingly digital world.

This episode is largely about the groundwork that needs to occur in America in order to have widespread access to remote electronic voting. It’s a prologue, not the story itself. 42% of Estonians vote online. It took Estonia decades to accomplish this. The road to remote electronic voting in America will likely take years to implement as well. It requires changing America’s bureaucratic culture, establishing a secure national digital identity for citizens, providing for personal ownership of data and building a secure, transparent, distributed digital architecture for government services. Join Matt and Marten for a fascinating discussion about how America can transfer the administrative functions of its distributed federalist form of government to a distributed digital architecture that shrinks bureaucratic friction and improves the quality of life for Americans.

Author and former CIA analyst, Martin Gurri, shares his insights into our global state of unrest. Gurri explains that modern institutions, ranging from government and media to academia, are being undermined by digitally networked individuals surfing the Fifth Wave information tsunami of the digital age. Effervescent sectarian groups that he refers to as “the public” tirelessly chip away at the authority of elite gatekeepers of global institutions. The result, Gurri argues, is a stalemate between elite leaders of decaying institutions, who lack the courage and vision to carry “the people” into the future and nihilistic, borderless, sectarian groups that negate authority yet lack cogent alternatives to the status quo.

Zach Wildes, Community Manager of the Celsius Network, shares how Celsius is enabling the 99% to save and invest like the 1%.

Nimit Sawhney, CEO and Co-Founder of Voatz, shares how his company is leveraging biometrics, the blockchain and smartphone technology to enable voting from a mobile device. Since June 2016, Voatz has run more than 66 elections, including 11 targeted, well-designed governmental election pilots across five states for deployed military personnel, overseas voters and voters with disabilities.

CEO, Stephen Hollingshead, talks about the mission of ChangeInEx to empower people to work via special economic zones in the cloud. Stephen maintains that the plumbing of the global banking system is clogged with well intentioned regulations intended to prevent terrorism and money laundering, but which are more effective at stifling millions of people from selling their labor and creativity in the international marketplace. Through state of the art technology and trust relationships with governments in underdeveloped economic zones, ChangeInEx will make it much cheaper for banks to comply with onerous KYC/AML regulations and for people to get paid for their work from anywhere in the world.

Petteri Kivimäki, CTO of the Nordic Institute for Interoperability Solutions (NIIS), shares how X-Road, a free open-source software, is increasingly reducing the costs of governance and allowing for e-governance solutions that better serve people and businesses in the digital age. Currently a partnership between Estonia and Finland, NIIS will soon include Iceland. Bringing other European Union countries under the umbrella of NIIS is a short term goal of the organization. X-Road is used by government agencies in twenty countries worldwide, including Argentina, Kyrgyzstan, Vietnam, Cambodia and Japan.

Best-selling author and public speaker, Andreas Antonopoulos, shares his views on money for the 21st century. The effect of COVID-19 on financial markets, China's central bank digital currency, the concentration of bitcoin mining in China and other topics are also covered. Andreas leaves us with a parting admonition that only a money that is of, by and for the people can resist authoritarian government control. Andreas has been interviewed by Bloomberg, CNN, CNBC, CBS, NBC, ABC, BBC, and Financial Times for his industry expertise. He has been a repeat guest on The Joe Rogan Experience and London Real. He has been featured in numerous documentary films, and is a permanent host on the Let’s Talk Bitcoin podcast with more than 400 episodes recorded to date. Andreas considers it his mission to educate as many people as possible about Bitcoin and open blockchains. He is a prolific publisher, with several best-selling books, and is the author of The Internet of Money book series, which focus on the social, political and economic importance and implications of Bitcoin.

Alex Gladstein of the Human Rights Foundation makes the case that a necessary condition of universal human rights is a global nongovernmental financial system that gives us the privacy of cash.

Say goodbye to the era of siloed digital identities where we 'rent' identities from websites and apps that we use. Jamie Smith of Evernym shares how it is onboarding universities and students into the open source future of decentralized digital identities. Evernym envisions a world where consumers are in complete control of their digital identity, where privacy is a basic human right, and where consumers and organizations can foster a new relationship rooted in trust. Evernym uses Sovrin, the world’s only global public utility for trusted, self-sovereign identity. Like the Internet, it is not owned by anyone: everyone can use it and anyone can improve it.

Author and thought leader in the field of digital money and identity, David Birch, makes the case that the time has come for societies to begin the conversation about what they want their digital identities and money to be like.

Snorre Lothar von Gohren Edwin, who goes by “Snow”, shares with host, Matt Foley, how Diwala is combatting rampant identity theft and certification fraud in Kampala, Uganda. Built on the Ethereum blockchain, Diwala’s platform enables educational institutions and NGOs in Africa to issue a secure “skill-ID,” digitally verifying the educational and work history of students and young professionals. More generally, Snow shares with Matt how a small but growing movement of individuals and organizations are building new digital infrastructures that shift the prevailing digital paradigm from a dystopian surveillance capitalism to one of self sovereign identities that communicate via zero knowledge proofs and decentralized identifier technologies (used by Diwala for its platform). Be sure to check out the Show Notes, which are packed with links so that you can learn more about Diwala, Snow and the rapidly changing digital ecosystems that we interact with on a daily basis.

Yael Tamar of SolidBlock talks with host, Matt Foley, about her advisory role for Terramaal, a Somaliland company with a mission to create a blockchain-based identity & land registry system. A former British protectorate that declared independence from Somalia in 1991, Somaliland's democratic government has partnered with Terramall to modernize its economy, starting with the creation of transparent and efficient land ownership transfers on the blockchain.

The global revolution of expanding the internet of information and communication to include the internet of value is underway in earnest. Governments and Corporations are jockeying for position to be frontrunners. Facebook's Libra Association has thrown down the gauntlet on digital currencies, triggering China to announce that it will release its central bank digital currency in November of 2019. Whereas precious metals once backed the paper money revolution, the Bitcoin revolution is increasingly backed by the data-gold mined by corporations from our digital selves. Join Matt Foley and returning guest, Ziv Keinan, as they discuss the emerging taxonomy of digital assets, corporate and government competition for the new world order of money and the effects on our digital privacy.

In Episode 3 of My Digital Self, Tobias Koch of the e-Estonia Briefing Centre explains how post-soviet Estonia became a borderless digital nation that fosters a high quality of life for its citizens, allows them to surveil their government and enables them to hold it accountable.

Trailblazing tech attorney, Ziv Keinan, pulls back the curtain on the blockchain and explains how blockchain technologies such as self sovereign identity wallets, digital micropayments and zero knowledge proofs can help us reclaim our digital privacy.

Guest Alex Mashinsky, CEO of Celcius Network, joins Matthew Foley to discuss what banks have done wrong that the blockchain economy gets right.