Speaker 1: Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. He there,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 1: I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio. And how the tech?
Speaker 1: Are you all right? This is going to be an
Speaker 1: epic episode. I'm calling it now. And I got an
Speaker 1: email from a listener named Nathan who was hoping I
Speaker 1: could shed some light on something that he encountered online.
Speaker 1: He was watching a video that was published by the
Speaker 1: activist group Anonymous that directed viewers to something called Sovereign Doo.
Speaker 1: That's DAO, and he said this felt a little out
Speaker 1: of step with the group's philosophy. It felt like he
Speaker 1: was being channeled toward some kind of multi level marketing
Speaker 1: scheme or Ponzi scheme or something, and he wanted to
Speaker 1: know more about it. And there's only so much I
Speaker 1: can say about Sovereign now because I haven't joined it.
Speaker 1: But Anonymous is or has put out a video. At
Speaker 1: least someone in Anonymous has published a video that has
Speaker 1: publicized a dow called Sovereign Dow. So this whole question
Speaker 1: that Nathan has asked opens up multiple cans of worms.
Speaker 1: So in this episode, we're going to cover a ton
Speaker 1: of ground in order to get a full understanding of
Speaker 1: what this all means. That's going to include a quick
Speaker 1: review of what are not so quick review of what
Speaker 1: Anonymous is and what they're all about. We'll also refresh
Speaker 1: our minds on what a decentralized autonomous organization that is
Speaker 1: a dow a d ao, what it is and what
Speaker 1: they can do, which gets pretty broad. Will also quickly
Speaker 1: explore the word sovereign to kind of get a grip
Speaker 1: on why Anonymous would want to promote something called sovereign dow.
Speaker 1: And I think this will start to peel way the
Speaker 1: layers and let us get an understanding as to what's
Speaker 1: actually going on here, how the concept of the tao
Speaker 1: in general or not the doo. I should just say
Speaker 1: doo because there was once upon a time a doo
Speaker 1: called v doo. And also what sovereignty is and why
Speaker 1: this all actually does align with at least the perceived
Speaker 1: motivations behind Anonymous. You can't ever say super firm, definitive
Speaker 1: things about Anonymous because the organization itself defies that is,
Speaker 1: it is too amorphous to ascribe specific descriptors and say
Speaker 1: this universally applies. So let's tackle the hackers who are
Speaker 1: known for wearing Guy Fox masks both online and occasionally
Speaker 1: in public, being called Anonymous. Now, before we get to that,
Speaker 1: I'm going to explain who Guy Fox was first, because
Speaker 1: if Anonymous has adopted this image, this mask, why did
Speaker 1: they do that, Who was Guy Fox, what did Guy
Speaker 1: Fox do? And moreover, what other element in pop culture
Speaker 1: adopted the guys of Guy Fox? Because that's really what's important.
Speaker 1: But we need to understand the whole picture. Context is
Speaker 1: always critical, I say so, we have to actually look
Speaker 1: at the early seventeenth century, the early sixteen hundreds in England.
Speaker 1: Guy Fox was a Catholic living in England under the
Speaker 1: reign of King James, who was Protestant. Now James's predecessor,
Speaker 1: Elizabeth the First She was also a Protestant Church of England,
Speaker 1: which her father established in England in order to be
Speaker 1: able to divorce a woman to marry somebody else. That's
Speaker 1: a whole story we won't go into. But Elizabeth kind
Speaker 1: of walked a middle line between Protestants and catholic She
Speaker 1: did not firmly proclaim Protestantism and oppress the Catholics, at
Speaker 1: least not to huge extent, especially not considering some of
Speaker 1: her predecessors, and she wanted to avoid the chaos and
Speaker 1: violence that would break out when one side would end
Speaker 1: up persecuting the other. Her sister Mary did a really
Speaker 1: great job of illustrating what happens if a hardline Catholic
Speaker 1: decides to persecute the Protestants. Elizabeth wanted to avoid that
Speaker 1: kind of strife within her kingdom. James, he was leaning
Speaker 1: much harder into Protestantism than Elizabeth did, And for the
Speaker 1: Catholics who were living in England, who were really hoping
Speaker 1: to get another Catholic monarch, or at least someone who
Speaker 1: had Catholic sympathies, this did not sit well, particularly among
Speaker 1: the nobility who had seen some of their a lot
Speaker 1: of their wealth stripped away in the guise of religious strife, which, honestly,
Speaker 1: when you look at the history of England, really comes
Speaker 1: down to who thinks they can steal more of the
Speaker 1: other person's stuff and get away with it than anything else.
Speaker 1: That's not Maybe that's considered a controversial view, but honestly
Speaker 1: it's the truth. Likes it largely comes down to I
Speaker 1: want what that guy has. They happen to identify as Catholic.
Speaker 1: I'm a Protestant. I'll use that as the excuse to
Speaker 1: take all their stuff. Anyway, Guy Fox is a Catholic.
Speaker 1: He opposes James the Protestant, and so he joins a
Speaker 1: band of conspirators who ultimately have the goal to assassinate
Speaker 1: King James, to commit regicide and replace him as regent,
Speaker 1: hopefully with his daughter, who they saw as being more
Speaker 1: pliable and perhaps more sympathetic to Catholics. The popular, but
Speaker 1: probably apocryphal version of this story had the conspirators planning
Speaker 1: to tunnel under Parliament with the intent to stack a
Speaker 1: whole bunch of barrel of gunpowder underneath the House of Lords,
Speaker 1: and then they would light up the barrels and blow
Speaker 1: the English government into the afterlife. Do not pass go,
Speaker 1: do not persecute Catholics. Now, in truth, they actually found
Speaker 1: access to a chamber that was underneath the House of Lords,
Speaker 1: sort of like a seller, and so they didn't actually
Speaker 1: have to tunnel anywhere. They just had to get access
Speaker 1: to this chamber and then make sure that nobody else
Speaker 1: found what they were doing before they were able to
Speaker 1: execute their plan, and they secretly began loading in a
Speaker 1: bunch of barrels of gunpowder into this chamber. They hid
Speaker 1: them under piles of coal and wood, and you know,
Speaker 1: because it wasn't winner yet in England, they were hoping
Speaker 1: that no one would go poking around in there until
Speaker 1: Parliament was in session. They were essentially saying, like, this
Speaker 1: is a storage of fuel that will probably be untouched
Speaker 1: until we can get parliament. The problem was there was
Speaker 1: also plague in England at the time, and any large
Speaker 1: gathering of people was seen as a potential way of
Speaker 1: spreading plague, which was you know true, and as a result,
Speaker 1: Parliament wasn't entering into session as part of cautionary measures.
Speaker 1: So we get up to late October. Parliament is finally
Speaker 1: gearing up to go into session, having delayed several times
Speaker 1: due to plague outbreaks, and the conspirators had regularly been
Speaker 1: checking on these barrels that they had been storing in
Speaker 1: the cellar over time to make sure they were secure
Speaker 1: and that no one had found them, and no one
Speaker 1: had like the plan was on and they were getting
Speaker 1: closer to the time of attack when Parliament would go
Speaker 1: into session in early November of sixteen oh five, but
Speaker 1: some of the conspirators were a little worried because not
Speaker 1: everyone in Parliament was Protestant. There were some Catholics who
Speaker 1: were also as members of the House of Lords, and
Speaker 1: while it seemed like it was jolly good sport to
Speaker 1: blow up Protestants, it was considered bad form to do
Speaker 1: the same to their fellow Catholics. So someone among the
Speaker 1: conspirators sent an anonymous letter to Lord Monteagal that essentially said, hey,
Speaker 1: call out sick when Parliament opens up, because things are
Speaker 1: gonna get spicy. I am paraphrasing here. So then Lord
Speaker 1: Monteagle goes over to King Jimmy and he says, hey,
Speaker 1: I got some potentially really bad news, And King Jimmy
Speaker 1: commands that a security force sweeps the sellers beneath Parliament
Speaker 1: to find out what the heck is going on. And
Speaker 1: a security detail happened to come across the path of
Speaker 1: one guy Fawks, who had been sent to check in
Speaker 1: on the barrels in the cellar to make sure that
Speaker 1: everything was fine, and he was caught in the middle
Speaker 1: of the night on November fifth, sixteen oh five, and
Speaker 1: he was put to the question that's a very polite
Speaker 1: way of saying that the King's forces tortured the ever
Speaker 1: loven pants off of him, probably literally, and over the
Speaker 1: course of repeated torture sessions that got increasingly brutal, Fox
Speaker 1: gave up his co conspirators and continued to endure really
Speaker 1: brutal torture over the course of his confinement. In late
Speaker 1: January sixteen oh six, so like a couple of months
Speaker 1: after the planned attack, Fox and several of his co
Speaker 1: conspirators were transported to Westminster Hall, forced to mount a scaffold,
Speaker 1: pronounced guilty of high treason, and they were executed. That
Speaker 1: is the polite way to describe what happened to them.
Speaker 1: I will say that if you get into the details,
Speaker 1: it goes beyond the level of cruelty. Then they were
Speaker 1: also chop dup so that their body parts could be
Speaker 1: sent around England to warn other would be traders about
Speaker 1: what could happen if you plot against the crown. To
Speaker 1: this day, November fifth is Guy Fox Day, and tradition
Speaker 1: has people in England lighting bonfires to celebrate not the
Speaker 1: plan to assassinate the king, which is often how it
Speaker 1: gets portrayed, but rather to celebrate how the king escaped assassination.
Speaker 1: And there's a little poem that goes with it. Remember
Speaker 1: remember the fifth of November, Gunpowder, treason and plot, for
Speaker 1: there is a reason why gunpowder and treason should never
Speaker 1: be forgot. It changes a bit depending upon the interpretation.
Speaker 1: You have to keep in mind that the language of
Speaker 1: sixteen o six England was modern English but antiquated, so
Speaker 1: slightly different from the way we would say it today.
Speaker 1: But anyway, that was the whole point of Guy Fox
Speaker 1: Day was to remind yourself, hey, we almost had regicide
Speaker 1: in the Kingdom. It was stopped, and we also need
Speaker 1: to remember what happens if you go against the king.
Speaker 1: That's kind of the purpose of Guy Fox Day. Now
Speaker 1: skip ahead a couple of centuries and get up to
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty two. You had writer Alan Moore and artists
Speaker 1: David Lloyd and Tony Weir who create a comic strip
Speaker 1: titled V for Vendetta, and the comic strips were later
Speaker 1: collected into a graphic novel. Now, in this story, there's
Speaker 1: an anarchist who simply goes by V and he commits
Speaker 1: acts of violence in an attempt to bring down a
Speaker 1: fascist government in England, and he does it while wearing
Speaker 1: a Guy Fox mask. So it's really more this version
Speaker 1: of Guy Fox that Anonymous would draw their iconic look from,
Speaker 1: as opposed to the actual historic figure they were taking
Speaker 1: it from, this pop culture comic book version. And again
Speaker 1: v is not Guy Fox. He's adopted that because he
Speaker 1: is an anarchist. He opposes not just fascism, he's really
Speaker 1: not in favor of any kind of organized government at all.
Speaker 1: He sees government as ultimately an institution that is bound
Speaker 1: for corruption, like there's just no way to avoid it,
Speaker 1: and so he prefers anarchy to any kind of organized government. Moreover,
Speaker 1: V for Vendetta is the story of someone who is
Speaker 1: special in that he is willing to go to whatever
Speaker 1: extreme is necessary to defeat an overreaching, unjust, unfair, corrupt
Speaker 1: status quo. So he's not a superhero, right, He doesn't
Speaker 1: have superpowers. He does display some pretty unbelievable skills and
Speaker 1: physical abilities through the course of v FA Vendetta, but
Speaker 1: he's ostensibly a regular old human being, and the message
Speaker 1: seems to be anyone can change the world. And in
Speaker 1: this graphic novel, the rhyme of remember remember the fifth
Speaker 1: of November is not about remember how this traitor nearly
Speaker 1: committed regiside. It's about remember how the normal person can
Speaker 1: upend an entire government. So the message gets flipped with
Speaker 1: V for vendetta than it did in actual history. Now,
Speaker 1: the decentralized, loose confederation of activists, activists, anarchists, trolls and
Speaker 1: others that would form Anonymous did not immediately adopt the
Speaker 1: guy Fox mass that would come later in their history. Initially,
Speaker 1: if you look at the very earliest kind of emergence
Speaker 1: of anonymous, you have to look at the image based
Speaker 1: message forum for Chan, and this used to be looked
Speaker 1: at as one of the wilders on the wild West.
Speaker 1: That was the web, right, Like the web was this
Speaker 1: place where you had established brands, but you also had
Speaker 1: these kind of pools of anarchy where all sorts of
Speaker 1: shenanigans could happen. And four Chan at the time was
Speaker 1: looked at as like kind of like Moss Eisley, the
Speaker 1: hive of scum and villainy. These days, other forums like
Speaker 1: eight chan and Kiwi Farms have said hold my beer
Speaker 1: and really taken the mantle of home to the worst
Speaker 1: of the worst on the web. But four chan used
Speaker 1: to be the place. Now when we come back, I'll
Speaker 1: talk about how anonymous first began to take shape on
Speaker 1: four Chan. But first these messages okay, we're back. So
Speaker 1: if you were to join four Chan, you could do
Speaker 1: so without creating a handle, right, You didn't have to
Speaker 1: create a handle that would identify you as someone who
Speaker 1: is a participant. You could just join and you would
Speaker 1: get the default user name anonymous. And so you had
Speaker 1: these groups of like minded people trolls on four Chan
Speaker 1: who began to coordinate their efforts to essentially cause grief
Speaker 1: and frustration to other online communities, often to online communities
Speaker 1: that were catering to younger users, because it just seemed
Speaker 1: really funny to them to upset and upend these communities.
Speaker 1: They say, Hey, look at these little kids who are
Speaker 1: trying to have fun online. How about we mess with
Speaker 1: them very much? Not a noble cause, right, is undeniable
Speaker 1: that they were just out to cause trouble and to
Speaker 1: make people upset for their own amusement. So they got
Speaker 1: joy out of making life miserable for other people. A
Speaker 1: quick note just in my own experience, I have found
Speaker 1: that you actually can get way more joy out of
Speaker 1: doing nice things for people than you get from causing
Speaker 1: grief to folks. Although I get it, like there's some
Speaker 1: people out there that just seem like they really need
Speaker 1: to have some misery visited upon them because they are
Speaker 1: causing misery to other people. Right, you might see someone
Speaker 1: and say, this person is disproportionately making life terrible for
Speaker 1: lots of people. I want to see some come upance.
Speaker 1: I get that, but I also think that you know,
Speaker 1: just anonymously trying to cause strife to people who you
Speaker 1: don't know and have no connection to. I think that's
Speaker 1: just lame. I would much prefer to see people do
Speaker 1: nice things. It takes a little more effort, but I
Speaker 1: think it has way more payoff. Anyway, that's getting sidetracked. Okay.
Speaker 1: From two thousand and three to around two thousand and
Speaker 1: six or so, these trolls, which began to collectively identify
Speaker 1: themselves as anonymous because again that's the default anonymous user
Speaker 1: name on four Chan, they started to harass various online
Speaker 1: communities just for fun. Some of these communities were also trollish,
Speaker 1: so in some cases you had trolls attacking other trolls.
Speaker 1: This escalated by two thousand and six to targeting specific
Speaker 1: people rather than an online community. So in other words,
Speaker 1: you might target an actual individual who you think deserves
Speaker 1: to be taken down a peg for whatever reason. So
Speaker 1: typically these people were fairly high profile, They had some
Speaker 1: sort of platform from which they espoused their views, and
Speaker 1: they had come to offend this group of trolls on
Speaker 1: four Chan through saying those views. In some cases, these
Speaker 1: were like far right commentators and media, and they became
Speaker 1: prime targets. But it wasn't just them really, anyone one
Speaker 1: who was seen as being you know, hypocritical or insincere,
Speaker 1: anything like that. If they seem like they were putting
Speaker 1: up a front that hidden motives, they can become a
Speaker 1: target too. Now Anonymous went after them in an effort
Speaker 1: to really humble these folks, but it was mostly again
Speaker 1: for the lulls. It wasn't like a crusade to right wrongs.
Speaker 1: It was more about this person deserves some frustration in
Speaker 1: their life or worse, so we're gonna do it and
Speaker 1: we're gonna laugh about it. Now, you might wonder how
Speaker 1: did this group transition from being this loose collective of
Speaker 1: trolls to turn into a decentralized activist group. A big
Speaker 1: part of that transition actually came from outside the group itself.
Speaker 1: It came due to mainstream media, which kind of just
Speaker 1: got the whole thing wrong. Mainstream media ended up having
Speaker 1: the wrong interpretation of what Anonymous was, and that in
Speaker 1: turn kind of shaped Anonymous. So there was like a
Speaker 1: broadcast in Los Angeles that was on Fox Television. They
Speaker 1: reported about Anonymous and suggested that Anonymous was in fact
Speaker 1: a domestic terrorist group. Now keep in mind, Anonymous had
Speaker 1: been targeting some far right media personalities at this point,
Speaker 1: so perhaps that was part of it. Because Fox often
Speaker 1: kind of, you know, at least leans to that side.
Speaker 1: In some markets, it doesn't lean, it absolutely lays down
Speaker 1: on the far right side. So they were saying that
Speaker 1: Anonymous were domestic terrorists capable of great acts of violence.
Speaker 1: They even included in their broadcast video footage of a
Speaker 1: van exploding. Never Mind, this had no connection to Anonymous, Like,
Speaker 1: Anonymous had not done any kind of acts of violence.
Speaker 1: They were rassing people, but they didn't bomb cars or anything.
Speaker 1: So this was like just it was so absurd. It
Speaker 1: had no connection to the actual group, but the group
Speaker 1: was being portrayed as if they were this incredibly sinister,
Speaker 1: dangerous group of individuals, which, honestly, if you are not
Speaker 1: identified as being part of that group. But you get
Speaker 1: the benefit of feeling like people are looking at you
Speaker 1: and thinking you're important and dangerous. That can really boost
Speaker 1: your ego quite a bit, right, Like it feels good
Speaker 1: to be looked at and thought of as a badass.
Speaker 1: That just it's like an ego boost to that the
Speaker 1: world thought that Anonymous was dangerous, at least the Fox
Speaker 1: broadcast station in Los Angeles did, anyway, and that kind
Speaker 1: of made them feel like they were important. There was
Speaker 1: also the case of a Canadian Security Intelligence Service agent
Speaker 1: who went to a guy named Aubrey call who was
Speaker 1: involved in Anonymous and tapped him as joining a task
Speaker 1: force designed to infiltrate and disrupt online terrorist groups. But
Speaker 1: Caddle was like, I just mess with people to make
Speaker 1: them angry. I don't like this is like James Bond
Speaker 1: level stuff, and I am not James Bond. But again,
Speaker 1: it showed that the outside world was looking at Anonymous
Speaker 1: as being way more powerful and capable than they actually were,
Speaker 1: and it made people who were part of Anonymous feel
Speaker 1: important and more people wanted to join because they wanted
Speaker 1: to feel like they were part of this power group.
Speaker 1: And then we get to Tom Cruise. And you know,
Speaker 1: I think without Tom Cruise, we wouldn't have the Anonymous
Speaker 1: that we have today. In fact, the group Anonymous might
Speaker 1: not even exist without Tom Cruise. This is not hyperbole.
Speaker 1: So by early two thousand and eight, Anonymous was still
Speaker 1: mostly a group of folks who like to harass people,
Speaker 1: and again, mostly they were doing this online, and mostly
Speaker 1: the people they were harassing were people they felt deserved
Speaker 1: to be harassed, although the criteria for what made someone
Speaker 1: deserving varied depending upon who in the group was doing it.
Speaker 1: And Tom Cruise would change things. So on January fourteenth,
Speaker 1: two thousand and eight, someone published a video of Tom
Speaker 1: Cruise talking about Scientology and his participation in the Church
Speaker 1: of Scientology. Now, this episode's already going to be a
Speaker 1: long one, which means I am not going to dive
Speaker 1: into the rat's nest that is Scientology. I will say
Speaker 1: it is an organization that's registered to be a religious organization,
Speaker 1: which means that they enjoy tax exempt status in the
Speaker 1: United States. It's an organization that has a very long
Speaker 1: history of allegations made against it and its leadership that
Speaker 1: range from stuff like the organization encouraging members to surrender
Speaker 1: more and more of their own personal wealth to the church,
Speaker 1: essentially saying that the church siphons money out of its
Speaker 1: members to super scary allegations like the church using the
Speaker 1: US legal system to intimidate or even bankrupt people who
Speaker 1: were identified as threats to the church itself, including people
Speaker 1: who were just trying to leave the organization. It's got
Speaker 1: a really bad reputation, which is putting it lightly. Anyway,
Speaker 1: Tom Cruz's interview did not make him look very good,
Speaker 1: and it made the church look even worse. Cruz was
Speaker 1: not trying to bring down the Church of Scientology, far
Speaker 1: from it. He was an eager participant. However, his descriptions
Speaker 1: and demeanor in this video we're seen as harmful to
Speaker 1: the image of the Church of Scientology, and so the
Speaker 1: church sent YouTube a copyright violation claim that prompted YouTube
Speaker 1: to remove the video, and that is where anonymous would
Speaker 1: jump in. So people with an anonymous saw Scientology's actions
Speaker 1: as leveraging a company's policies, in this case YouTube, in
Speaker 1: order to commit censorship to remove information from the Internet,
Speaker 1: which just kind of goes against the whole ethos of
Speaker 1: the Internet and the Web in general. Like you've probably
Speaker 1: heard like once it goes up on the Internet, that's it.
Speaker 1: It's there, Like whether you try and take down the
Speaker 1: original one or not, it's up there. People have shared it,
Speaker 1: people have cloned it. Whatever. Now they were thinking that
Speaker 1: the Church of Scientology was abusing YouTube's policies in an
Speaker 1: attempt to hide information that was not very flattering to
Speaker 1: the church from the general public. Then there were all
Speaker 1: the other alleged misdeeds that the church was said to
Speaker 1: have committed. So on top of that, there's everything else.
Speaker 1: If you really want to go down a rabbit hole,
Speaker 1: search the term fair Game and Scientology and you'll see
Speaker 1: what I'm talking about, a tip of the iceberg really
Speaker 1: of what I'm talking about. So Anonymous thought of Scientology
Speaker 1: as being an organization that was perfect to take down
Speaker 1: a few pegs, like this was an organization that clearly
Speaker 1: had a lot of power and influence, and in the
Speaker 1: opinion of those an Anonymous should not have those things.
Speaker 1: So they wanted to hold an operation. That's what a
Speaker 1: lot of projects within Anonymous end up being called an operation.
Speaker 1: This one was actually called Project Channology, in which Anonymous
Speaker 1: organized protests against the church in the real world. People
Speaker 1: showed up at locations connected to the Church of Scientology,
Speaker 1: many of them wearing guy Fox masks. And meanwhile, the
Speaker 1: online part of Anonymous was using all sorts of tactics
Speaker 1: to disrupt Scientology's Internet based operations. So they were doing
Speaker 1: things they were actually pretty simple in the grand scheme
Speaker 1: of things like denial of service attacks. These are not
Speaker 1: sophisticated online attacks, but they can be effective. Essentially, what
Speaker 1: you're doing is you're targeting a web server and you
Speaker 1: are sending an enormous amount of traffic to that web
Speaker 1: server in order to overwhelm it so that it cannot
Speaker 1: respond to legitimate messages. So like you could target the
Speaker 1: web server that hosts the Church of Scientology's web page,
Speaker 1: and because you have overwhelmed that server, anyone trying to
Speaker 1: go to the Church of Scientology's webpage is going to
Speaker 1: get an error message. Again, this is not a very
Speaker 1: sophisticated attack. There are actually a lot of companies out
Speaker 1: there that you can and work with that specifically look
Speaker 1: for that kind of attack so that they can prevent
Speaker 1: it from affecting your web servers. So it's not something
Speaker 1: that typically gets used a ton against high profile targets.
Speaker 1: Because a lot of high profile targets have moved to
Speaker 1: adopt these measures to protect themselves against that kind of thing.
Speaker 1: But these actions marked a real change for Anonymous. Rather
Speaker 1: than harassing folks and communities just for the lulls, the
Speaker 1: group began to use its base of skills and decentralized
Speaker 1: membership and desire to push back against what they saw
Speaker 1: as overreaching authority to create change both in the real
Speaker 1: and in the online world. The group would target large
Speaker 1: financial institutions, which were seen as foundations of power and
Speaker 1: influence that have a disproportionate amount of control over our lives.
Speaker 1: They would target government organizations that they felt were corrupt
Speaker 1: or that were infringing upon people's freedoms, including issues like
Speaker 1: agencies like the NSA that were found to conduct espionage
Speaker 1: on American citizens. They supported social movements like the Arab
Speaker 1: Spring and Black Lives Matter. They took aim at things
Speaker 1: like child pornography rings to bring those down. They continue
Speaker 1: to provide support to Ukraine in its war against Russia.
Speaker 1: They've used their skills to disrupt Russia's online operations to
Speaker 1: varying degrees of success. But at the heart of things,
Speaker 1: Anonymous is still a decentralized organization. In fact, to call
Speaker 1: it an organization is a bit of a stretch. Anonymous
Speaker 1: consists of lots of people. How many is impossible to say.
Speaker 1: There's no official membership for obvious reasons. If you want
Speaker 1: to be Anonymous, you can't have one, And within the
Speaker 1: group there are a variety of opinions and political philosophies
Speaker 1: and value. So not everything attributed to Anonymous is necessarily
Speaker 1: the result of Anonymous, or at least not of the
Speaker 1: overall collection of people who identify as being part of Anonymous.
Speaker 1: In some cases, it's a splinter group of folks who
Speaker 1: have a common goal, but it's not necessarily a goal
Speaker 1: that's supported by the overall Anonymous community, and they go
Speaker 1: out and do their own operations. Sometimes the media connects
Speaker 1: those operations with Anonymous overall, and on rare occasions, the
Speaker 1: overall organization might even distance itself from some of those activities. Okay,
Speaker 1: we're going to continue talking about Anonymous and then Dows,
Speaker 1: but first let's take another quick break. Okay, we're back.
Speaker 1: So I described earlier how Anonymous works generally, and it's
Speaker 1: mostly through consensus and brainstorm. People within the community start
Speaker 1: to toss back and forth some ideas, including who they
Speaker 1: think is at fault for perhaps oppressing others, and then
Speaker 1: potential ways to address that oppression. Sometimes a small group
Speaker 1: of folks within Anonymous will adopt a cause and gain
Speaker 1: more support from other members as things evolve and it
Speaker 1: becomes the overall group's objective. Sometimes a person, government agency,
Speaker 1: or a company will behave in a way that is
Speaker 1: so counter to anonymous as core values of individual freedom
Speaker 1: and a desire to wrest control away from institutions that
Speaker 1: it really won't take a lot of convincing. The whole
Speaker 1: group will more or less beyond the same page, and
Speaker 1: what needs to happen is consensus on what to do
Speaker 1: about it. So that is Anonymous. Now let's talk about
Speaker 1: decentralized autonomous organizations or doos d aos. This is a
Speaker 1: continuation on our recent episode about Web three and the
Speaker 1: hype cycle which published last week, so it kind of
Speaker 1: builds on that as well. Now, what the heck is
Speaker 1: a decentralized autonomous organization the DAO or DOO. Well, at
Speaker 1: a very high level, it is an organization made up
Speaker 1: of people who share some common goal. Now, the specifics
Speaker 1: of how to achieve that goal, or what conditions need
Speaker 1: to exist in order for each member to consider the
Speaker 1: goal to have been achieved in the first place. That
Speaker 1: can be different from person to person, and it can
Speaker 1: require a consensus among the group to decide on particulars,
Speaker 1: but generally speaking, the group has the same outcome in mind.
Speaker 1: So a DAO can kind of act like a company,
Speaker 1: or it can act like a charitable organization or a
Speaker 1: community action group. It can have a single purpose. For example,
Speaker 1: one DOO actually had the express purpose of purchasing an
Speaker 1: original copy of an historic document, which we will get
Speaker 1: to in a bit, Or it could have a more
Speaker 1: general purpose, like it exists for the betterment of a
Speaker 1: specific community or maybe the global community, and in the
Speaker 1: process of doing that it could pursue many smaller but
Speaker 1: related goals. However, a DOW is owned and operated by
Speaker 1: the members of that organization, So instead of having a
Speaker 1: single hierarchical leader or even a board of directors who
Speaker 1: ultimately are allowed to approve or deny requests for specific
Speaker 1: business decisions, the overall group gets to vote on these things.
Speaker 1: So instead of having one person decide, well, our goal
Speaker 1: is X, so we're going to do why and that
Speaker 1: will achieve our goal. The whole groups to decide if
Speaker 1: why is the right thing to do or may mean
Speaker 1: there should be some other method to achieve that goal.
Speaker 1: And in fact, with enough support, the organization can actually
Speaker 1: choose to change the goal, so it's not X at all,
Speaker 1: it's something else. They could do that with enough support
Speaker 1: and with a successful vote. Now, the way this thing
Speaker 1: works is through voting, but it's not necessarily a case
Speaker 1: where every member has a single vote. No, that's not
Speaker 1: necessarily the case. It can work to be more like
Speaker 1: shareholders in a publicly traded company. So the more shares
Speaker 1: of the company you own, the more votes you have.
Speaker 1: If you own a high enough percentage of the shares
Speaker 1: that exist, effectively you can actually dictate the direction of
Speaker 1: the company right if you were to own that much.
Speaker 1: Even if all the other shareholders collectively disagreed with you,
Speaker 1: tough for them, because if you hold enough votes to
Speaker 1: decide what you say goes, then that's it. This is
Speaker 1: actually one of the challenges that dows can face, but
Speaker 1: will touch on that leader as well. So basically, a
Speaker 1: DOW is a way for a group of people to
Speaker 1: identify and pursue a common goal through a decentralized democratic process,
Speaker 1: and in that way, I think you could probably see
Speaker 1: how Anonymous would want to adopt a DOW. Anonymous is
Speaker 1: a decentralized organization of people who share some common values
Speaker 1: and beliefs and goals, but not everyone shares every specific
Speaker 1: goal with everyone else. There's a lot of then diagram
Speaker 1: stuff going on. So you've got some groups with an
Speaker 1: anonymous who have an overlap with the overall groups values
Speaker 1: and beliefs, but there's also some outliers. Then you have
Speaker 1: other subgroups that maybe just barely tap into the same
Speaker 1: value system that the overall group of anonymous has, but
Speaker 1: they're all part of Anonymous, at least as far as
Speaker 1: being part of Anonymous goes. Okay, So now let's talk
Speaker 1: about how a DOW actually works, because so far we've
Speaker 1: just been looking at really a high level approach. A
Speaker 1: DOW is built on top of the blockchain, and we're
Speaker 1: usually talking about the Ethereum blockchain here, and so this
Speaker 1: is the blockchain is the thing that cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin
Speaker 1: and ether depend upon. In fact, Bitcoin introduced the concept
Speaker 1: of the blockchain a couple of decades ago at this point,
Speaker 1: or almost a couple of decades ago. A blockchain is
Speaker 1: essentially a record of transactions, and they're grouped into blocks
Speaker 1: that have been verified by the overall community that makes
Speaker 1: up the system, and then each block is added sequentially
Speaker 1: to a chain of earlier blocks of transactions. In the
Speaker 1: case of bitcoin, those transactions are stuff like actual financial transactions,
Speaker 1: but they can pretty much be anything that involves data
Speaker 1: points that track chronologically and that can transition in state
Speaker 1: in some way. One other important factor about the blockchain
Speaker 1: is that its structure makes it very difficult to change
Speaker 1: earlier points of data within the chain, So each block's
Speaker 1: identity depends in part on all the blocks that came
Speaker 1: before it, and everyone in the system who is part
Speaker 1: of this blockchain system. Everyone can view the blockchain. It
Speaker 1: becomes a common ledger, a publicly shared ledger that everyone
Speaker 1: is able to see. And since everyone's able to see it,
Speaker 1: they can see if someone tries to mess with it.
Speaker 1: So if someone were to try and go back and
Speaker 1: change a data point that happened earlier on in this
Speaker 1: chain of blocks of data, that change would be reflected
Speaker 1: in that block's identity, but that would also affect every
Speaker 1: single block that came after it, so let's say that
Speaker 1: your blockchain is twenty blocks long and someone try to
Speaker 1: change the data that was in block fifteen. Well, from
Speaker 1: block fifteen to block twenty, that change perpetuates down the chain.
Speaker 1: Everyone connected to the system would see that something hinky
Speaker 1: was going on. They could clamp down and stop it
Speaker 1: reverse it. By the way, there are some issues with
Speaker 1: this system. For example, if the overall organization, whether it's
Speaker 1: a cryptocurrency community like bitcoin miners or a dow if
Speaker 1: they cannot come to consensus on the direction of the blockchain,
Speaker 1: you can have a fork. So, for simplicity's sake, let's
Speaker 1: say that half of this blockchain community thinks that they
Speaker 1: need to go in one direction, like this happened with
Speaker 1: In fact, it's happened with like all the major cryptocurrencies,
Speaker 1: but this did happen with Bitcoin. Let's say that like
Speaker 1: half of the community thinks, we want to implement some
Speaker 1: improvements to blockchain and bitcoin, but it's going to necessitate
Speaker 1: that you download new software to be able to interact
Speaker 1: with the blockchain system in order to adopt this motion.
Speaker 1: But let's say the other half of the community is like, no,
Speaker 1: I kind of like the way it's working now. I
Speaker 1: don't want to adopt these new approaches and I want
Speaker 1: it to stay the same. And you get to a
Speaker 1: point where half the group chooses to update their software
Speaker 1: to adopt this new direction, the other half doesn't. You
Speaker 1: have two different versions of bitcoin at that point, right,
Speaker 1: You've got the updated version and you have the original version. Eventually,
Speaker 1: what you have there is a fork. Both versions continue
Speaker 1: to build upon the original blockchain, but they branch off
Speaker 1: into different directions because of this change in the community,
Speaker 1: this disagreement within the community. Sometimes both of these branches
Speaker 1: can continue and become healthy and stay solvent the entire time.
Speaker 1: Sometimes one will collapse, maybe both collapse. It can happen.
Speaker 1: That's a risk, and arguably you could say this is
Speaker 1: a risk with any organization. Right, you can get to
Speaker 1: a point where within the organization there's a disagreement about
Speaker 1: how to do stuff, and that disagreement might lead to
Speaker 1: the point where part of the organization splits off to
Speaker 1: become its own thing. Happens all the time, well, the
Speaker 1: same thing is true with blockchain. With cryptocurrencies, some exchanges
Speaker 1: will actually suspend trading in the wake of a hard
Speaker 1: fork or even a soft fork in an effort to
Speaker 1: mitigate risk and volatility, because the value of these cryptocurrencies
Speaker 1: can change even more dramatically than they already do in
Speaker 1: the wake of a fork. Those suspensions usually last long
Speaker 1: enough for the dust to settle before trading commences again.
Speaker 1: But if one of the forks seems particularly unstable, the
Speaker 1: exchanges might just ignore that one and only accept the
Speaker 1: other fork. And it may be that no matter how
Speaker 1: many people believe passionately that they've done the right thing,
Speaker 1: their efforts will be in vain. Okay, back to DOW. Now,
Speaker 1: I haven't really touched on the autonomous part of decentralized
Speaker 1: autonomous organization. A DOW runs by using rules called smart
Speaker 1: contracts to guide specific actions in pursuit of a larger goal.
Speaker 1: So the smart contracts essentially take action when certain criteria
Speaker 1: are met. You can think of it as, let's say
Speaker 1: that you got like a long term goal, and you
Speaker 1: break down that goal into steps, the steps you need
Speaker 1: to take in order to achieve your goal. The smart
Speaker 1: contracts represent the action points of those steps, and if
Speaker 1: you can think of them in very simple programming terms,
Speaker 1: you can think of a smart contract as being kind
Speaker 1: of an if then statement like Let's say a very
Speaker 1: simple one is that you join a dow that's going
Speaker 1: to be investing in bitcoin ultimately and maybe the if
Speaker 1: then stay and as if the value of bitcoin drops
Speaker 1: below twenty thousand US dollars per bitcoin, buy x dollars
Speaker 1: value in bitcoin. Then if the value bitcoin is above
Speaker 1: twenty thousand dollars, the smart contract doesn't take any action.
Speaker 1: But if the value drops bid leath twenty thousand, the
Speaker 1: smart contract comes into play and the doll starts to
Speaker 1: buy a bitcoin, with other smart contracts deciding when it stops.
Speaker 1: Like there could be another if then, like if the
Speaker 1: amount in the doll's treasury drops below x amount of dollars,
Speaker 1: stop all purchasing activities. This is an extremely basic, oversimplified example,
Speaker 1: mind you, but it's one that I thought could be helpful.
Speaker 1: So that's the autonomous part. You have these smart contracts
Speaker 1: that are doing the work so that humans don't have
Speaker 1: to assuming that the conditions are met for the smart
Speaker 1: contract to actually come to play. Otherwise remains dormant and
Speaker 1: all the while it's trying to achieve this shared goal. Now,
Speaker 1: the humans as the part of the DOO, they collectively
Speaker 1: decide what the smart contracts do. So. It might be
Speaker 1: that a DOO exists for a while and someone in
Speaker 1: the organization says, you know, this is not the most
Speaker 1: effective way we could do this. These smart contracts are clumsy.
Speaker 1: They are not achieving our goal efficiently. Let's do it
Speaker 1: this other way, where we'll rework the smart contracts so
Speaker 1: they work under these new conditions. Well, then the group
Speaker 1: would have to decide and come to a consensus about
Speaker 1: whether or not to adopt or reject that proposal, and
Speaker 1: the DOW would just keep on behaving autonomously. It would change, however,
Speaker 1: if the consensus agreed on the change, and then people
Speaker 1: implement a new smart contracts and overhauled the DOO, at
Speaker 1: which point it would now behave under these new rules.
Speaker 1: Now for all of this to work, there's got to
Speaker 1: be money involved, right, Like this stuff like, it doesn't
Speaker 1: matter what your doll is are, what your goals are,
Speaker 1: or anything like that if there's no money behind it,
Speaker 1: because nothing gets done. So your typical doll receives outside investment.
Speaker 1: You typically are seeking capitalists to invest into the DOO,
Speaker 1: and then the members of the doll also have to
Speaker 1: hand over their cold hard cash in return for tokens
Speaker 1: that cold hard cash, maybe in the form of cryptocurrencies
Speaker 1: like ether, but you do this to purchase tokens that
Speaker 1: represents membership and voting power within the organization. So these
Speaker 1: are digital tokens. They're similar to cryptocurrency, except instead of
Speaker 1: behaving like a currency, and don't get me started, because
Speaker 1: cryptocurrency doesn't always behave like a currency. In fact, many
Speaker 1: times it doesn't, but that's a separate topic. They behave
Speaker 1: like a share in the overall organization, and you can
Speaker 1: own more than one token. You can own as many
Speaker 1: tokens as you want to buy that the organization will
Speaker 1: meant anyway. And these collected funds that people have poured
Speaker 1: into the TAO, they become the treasury for this organization.
Speaker 1: The members get to vote on how the organization will
Speaker 1: direct the money in the treasury to be spent in
Speaker 1: its effort to achieve whatever the goals of the organization
Speaker 1: happened to be. All right, let's talk about a couple
Speaker 1: of specific doos for a moment to understand some more
Speaker 1: issues with this approach. Way back in April twenty sixteen,
Speaker 1: a group of investors got together. They pulled a huge
Speaker 1: amount of money into an organization that they called the Tao.
Speaker 1: It was meant to serve as a venture capital fund,
Speaker 1: so in many ways, the idea here was to give
Speaker 1: smaller investors the chance to take part in bigger investment opportunities,
Speaker 1: the kind that you would normally see huge VC firms
Speaker 1: participate in when funding a startup, for example. Unfortunately, the
Speaker 1: group hit a major snag. So the Dow's token also
Speaker 1: called DOO. Dao was listed on cryptocurrency exchanges and it
Speaker 1: was built on top of the Ethereum blockchain. But the
Speaker 1: Dow's security had a really serious vulnerability in it, and
Speaker 1: in June of twenty sixteen, just a couple of months
Speaker 1: after it got started, someone stole oh about a third
Speaker 1: of the money in the organization's treasury. That was around
Speaker 1: fifty million dollars worth of Ether currency that was stolen
Speaker 1: from the DOO and the stolen funds were moved into
Speaker 1: a different Ethereum account. However, thankfully, the dow had some
Speaker 1: smart contracts that put some some limitations on this. The
Speaker 1: money had a twenty eight day holding period on it,
Speaker 1: so the people who who conducted this theft were not
Speaker 1: able to access the money and then withdraw it, So
Speaker 1: there was a ticking clock that was going where there
Speaker 1: was this twenty eight day hold on the money in
Speaker 1: this account, and then the ethereum community had to decide
Speaker 1: want to do about it, and some wanted to reverse
Speaker 1: the transaction and return the funds to the DOW and
Speaker 1: its investors because they had been stolen from even though
Speaker 1: some would say, well, it was due to the fact
Speaker 1: that they had poor security measures in place, Others said, yeah,
Speaker 1: but that you know, you can't blame them for a theft.
Speaker 1: A theft is an action taken by someone else, right,
Speaker 1: It's not like they misplaced the money, It's that someone
Speaker 1: purposefully redirected money. So there was some people who said,
Speaker 1: let's reverse that transaction, but that means we're gonna have
Speaker 1: to go back in the chain and change that, and
Speaker 1: as we've said, that means changes all the way forward
Speaker 1: down the chain from that point, and that can cause
Speaker 1: a headache for anyone else who's done transactions on this chain.
Speaker 1: The people are saying, no, no, no, no no, no no no.
Speaker 1: I don't want that to mess with everything else. We
Speaker 1: don't want to upset the whole apple cart because of
Speaker 1: this one instance. The theft was awful it technically didn't
Speaker 1: violate the rules because the rules were constructed poorly, but
Speaker 1: it's clearly an awful thing. But we don't want everything
Speaker 1: else to suffer because of this one incident, so we
Speaker 1: have to keep it going. Ultimately, Ethereum had a hard fork.
Speaker 1: The original version of Ethereum continued as Ethereum Classic, and
Speaker 1: the new version, which returned the funds to the TAO,
Speaker 1: became Ethereum Blockchain. There are other examples of DOO as well,
Speaker 1: including Constitution Dow, which formed to purchase a copy of
Speaker 1: the US Constitution. I referenced that earlier in this episode,
Speaker 1: and that's an interesting story too, and I have a
Speaker 1: little more to say about that, but we're getting super long,
Speaker 1: so we're going to take another quick break. When we
Speaker 1: come back, I will wrap all this up. Okay, I
Speaker 1: know it's an epic episode. I don't usually have that
Speaker 1: many breaks in one, but this one I felt was
Speaker 1: a great question and it was really important. So we're
Speaker 1: getting back to Constitution Dow. We get this DOO where
Speaker 1: you have a group of investors who collectively their goal
Speaker 1: is to purchase an original copy of the United States
Speaker 1: Constitution that was going on auction at Sotheby's. Members of
Speaker 1: the TAO invested heavily into this organization. I want to
Speaker 1: say they raised nearly fifty million dollars. However, not all
Speaker 1: of that money would be available for bidding on the
Speaker 1: copy of the Constitution for reasons I'll get into in
Speaker 1: a second. Ultimately, the DOAO did not have the highest bid.
Speaker 1: The highest bid was for more than forty three million
Speaker 1: dollars and the Constitution dow law this auction. Now, again,
Speaker 1: the only purpose for the existence of this dow was
Speaker 1: to purchase that copy. So once the auction was over,
Speaker 1: the DOW had no purpose anymore and it was going
Speaker 1: to just disband. So you had all these people who
Speaker 1: had poured money into it. They wanted to get their
Speaker 1: money back because the thing that they wanted to have
Speaker 1: happened did not happen. Here's where they started to run
Speaker 1: into problems, and it is an issue with dows that
Speaker 1: are built on top of blockchain. For blockchain transactions to happen,
Speaker 1: you have to cover the costs of the computational power
Speaker 1: needed to process the transactions in question. As part of that,
Speaker 1: there is a transaction fee for every transaction you make.
Speaker 1: It's not that different from transaction fees you encounter when
Speaker 1: you use things like credit cards. Often these transaction fees
Speaker 1: are invisible to the consumer. The vendor is the one
Speaker 1: who has to handle it. That's why you you go
Speaker 1: to some stores you might see a sign that says
Speaker 1: no credit card transactions for below a certain amount of money.
Speaker 1: It's because there are transaction fees which cut into the
Speaker 1: money that the vendor gets in that actual transaction right well.
Speaker 1: With cryptocurrency, the transaction fees also known as gas fees,
Speaker 1: to cover the cost of the computational resources needed to
Speaker 1: handle these transactions. They can be significant, especially for proof
Speaker 1: of work based cryptocurrencies, which Ether was at this point.
Speaker 1: Ethereum has since moved to a proof of stake, which
Speaker 1: is a different approach to cryptocurrency than proof of work.
Speaker 1: The proof of work is what Ethereum worked on at
Speaker 1: the time that this happened. It's also the way bitcoin works.
Speaker 1: This is where you have bitcoin or cryptocurrency mining operations
Speaker 1: that are competing against each other to verify a block
Speaker 1: of transactions. In return, you get awarded a certain number
Speaker 1: of crypto coins, so that is a gas fee. The
Speaker 1: problem is the people who engaged in constitution DAO. The
Speaker 1: people who invested into it, they were investing relatively small
Speaker 1: amounts of money. I mean like like sometimes like one
Speaker 1: hundred bucks, two hundred bucks, something like that, which is
Speaker 1: you know, enough for It's considered a large amount of
Speaker 1: money for a lot of people, but in the grand
Speaker 1: scheme of investments, it's tiny, right. We often talk about
Speaker 1: investors in the tech space who are working on the millions,
Speaker 1: if not billions of dollars scale, But this was something
Speaker 1: that was positioned as a way for the average person
Speaker 1: to be involved in this particular d AO. So you
Speaker 1: had people who are putting in one hundred or two
Speaker 1: hundred bucks. The problem is the gas fees at the time,
Speaker 1: we're ranging at around seventy dollars per transaction. That means
Speaker 1: seventy dollars of your transaction of depositing money into the
Speaker 1: doll is taken out as gas fees, and seventy dollars
Speaker 1: of the transaction has taken out when you withdraw. If
Speaker 1: you put in less than one hundred and forty bucks,
Speaker 1: it meant that the transaction fees were the same amount
Speaker 1: or greater than the money you put in, which means
Speaker 1: you didn't get anything out all that money was gone.
Speaker 1: It got burned away in gas fees. This is an
Speaker 1: issue with the blockchain based organizations. Now the gas fees
Speaker 1: are not always that exorbitant. It's not like we're still
Speaker 1: seeing these crazy fees for all transactions. But it does
Speaker 1: mean that there is risk associated with DAOs. Even if
Speaker 1: you have a DO where you're allowed to withdraw your
Speaker 1: money at any time, you're not going to get the
Speaker 1: same amount of money back as you put in because
Speaker 1: they're going to be these transaction fees that will be
Speaker 1: deducted from those transactions. So you know, if if the
Speaker 1: loss is small, it might be trivial, you might not care.
Speaker 1: But in this particular case with constitution now it was
Speaker 1: one of those things that left a bad taste in
Speaker 1: a lot of people's mouths and made them feel like
Speaker 1: the DOO approach has some real drawbacks. But all that
Speaker 1: being said, we can start to understand why anonymous would
Speaker 1: embrace a DOW because you can participate in a DOO anonymously.
Speaker 1: It's one of the big benefits of blockchain. It's one
Speaker 1: of the foundational concepts of decentralized finance, is this anonymity
Speaker 1: where you are allowed to make these transactions without them
Speaker 1: being tied to your personal identity. So instead of being
Speaker 1: something that is forever associated with you, like every purchase
Speaker 1: on Amazon that you make is associated with you, right,
Speaker 1: and that history of transactions ends up being a portrait
Speaker 1: of who you are as a person that has value. Well,
Speaker 1: these decentralized approaches have anonymity baked into them, so that
Speaker 1: you can purchase whatever you want, it's never tagged with you.
Speaker 1: You can live your life without everyone knowing what it
Speaker 1: is you like or don't like. So that whole market
Speaker 1: of dealing with your information kind of disappears if you're
Speaker 1: doing everything through blockchain, because you can do it through
Speaker 1: this anonymous approach. Obviously that falls right into anonymous's ethos,
Speaker 1: so you understand where that fits with the anonymous approach. Also,
Speaker 1: you participate in the governance of the group, right, because
Speaker 1: you have these tokens that represent your membership, that represents
Speaker 1: your voting power, So you can vote for or against
Speaker 1: measures proposals within the TAO that are designed to achieve
Speaker 1: certain goals or complete certain tasks. You can be an
Speaker 1: active participant in that, and that way you can have
Speaker 1: this group of people who collectively have some simil allure
Speaker 1: beliefs and values, but not necessarily identical ones, and you
Speaker 1: can hash out what the group will and will not do.
Speaker 1: So instead of having like a splinter group go off
Speaker 1: and do something and then the whole of that operation
Speaker 1: gets associated with Anonymous, when the whole group may not
Speaker 1: have approved of it, you now have a system where
Speaker 1: ideas can be approved or rejected collectively. So that obviously
Speaker 1: folds in with Anonymous's ethos as well, and I can
Speaker 1: understand that. Now, let's talk about the sovereign part of
Speaker 1: the name of sovereign Dow. Remember that's the name of
Speaker 1: the dow that Anonymous's video was pointing people to. Sovereignty
Speaker 1: relates to authority, So it's who holds authority over an entity,
Speaker 1: whether that's an individual, an organization, a nation. So a
Speaker 1: sovereign nation has ultimate authority over its governance, it has
Speaker 1: authority over its borders. A country that invades a different country,
Speaker 1: like Russia invading Ukraine violates the other nation's sovereignty. Russia
Speaker 1: violated Ukraine's sovereignty by invading it and claiming that it
Speaker 1: had ownership over territories that internationally are thought to belong
Speaker 1: to Ukraine. Sovereignty is something that has to be recognized
Speaker 1: both within and outside of the entity. It's not enough
Speaker 1: for you to declare yourself sovereign. Others have to recognize
Speaker 1: you as sovereign as well, so it becomes a tricky
Speaker 1: thing now. Within blockchain, sovereignty also means partly that the
Speaker 1: organization is independent. It's also resistant to outside interference, so
Speaker 1: it is able to act on its interests without the
Speaker 1: interference of say, regulators or government authorities. Also, sovereignty partly
Speaker 1: first to the fact that the individual members of the
Speaker 1: DAO have the sovereignty to engage in transactions with any
Speaker 1: other members and nothing can stop that. So let's say
Speaker 1: that you and I are both connected to the Ethereum blockchain.
Speaker 1: I could send you ether plus the gas fees needed
Speaker 1: to cover the transaction, and you could accept the ether,
Speaker 1: and no one else in the system would be able
Speaker 1: to stop and say hang on, you can't do that.
Speaker 1: That also plays into the anonymous ethoughts, So you start
Speaker 1: to see where this approach to organization and governance within
Speaker 1: an organization falls in line with the goals of anonymous.
Speaker 1: There are still problems you have to address. You have
Speaker 1: to address how do you handle voting. If someone accumulates
Speaker 1: enough tokens, could they become essentially a bully or banned
Speaker 1: with a few others who also have a lot of tokens,
Speaker 1: and together they become bullies who dictate the moves of
Speaker 1: the organization at the expense of what everyone else wants.
Speaker 1: You have to address that. This can be addressed by
Speaker 1: the way, but it has to be built into the system.
Speaker 1: It can't just be left up chance. Another potential issue
Speaker 1: is if you have lots and lots of members, but
Speaker 1: a lot of them are inactive. If they're inactive, then
Speaker 1: they're not voting. And if you require a certain percentage
Speaker 1: of votes in order to pass particular measures, you may
Speaker 1: never be able to achieve that percentage because of the
Speaker 1: number of inactive accounts that are connected to the system.
Speaker 1: That's also something you can work around, but it's another
Speaker 1: inherent danger with dows. So again, the DOW as a
Speaker 1: concept I think is interesting. I don't think it's a
Speaker 1: cure all solution. It requires a lot of careful thought
Speaker 1: and architecture to make sure that it actually does the
Speaker 1: thing it purports to do, and it doesn't just become
Speaker 1: a way for a single entity or a small group
Speaker 1: to completely take over control of something that's meant to
Speaker 1: be a democratic and decentralized approach. One of the big
Speaker 1: dangers of doos, by the way, is if they are
Speaker 1: not constructed properly, you could potentially enter into a situation where,
Speaker 1: let's say you've got someone who has an enormous number
Speaker 1: of tokens and there are huge contributors, like lots and
Speaker 1: lots of money has been contributed into the treasury. If
Speaker 1: one person has enough power, they could propose a resolution
Speaker 1: to award them the entirety of the treasury, like they
Speaker 1: could just take all the money out of the treasury
Speaker 1: of the Tao, and if they have enough votes to
Speaker 1: make that proposal pass, they could do it. Now. Usually
Speaker 1: you have protections in place where you need to have
Speaker 1: not just a simple majority, but an overwhelming majority for
Speaker 1: something like that to happen, which mitigates that risk. But
Speaker 1: it is a potential risk, and it does say that
Speaker 1: you have to be careful when constructing the tao. As
Speaker 1: for the construction of sovereign Tao, I have no common
Speaker 1: on that. I don't know what they've done, I don't
Speaker 1: know how it's built, I don't know the nature of
Speaker 1: the smart contracts. So I don't know how effective or
Speaker 1: safe or risky it is, but I can say that
Speaker 1: it doesn't surprise me to see Anonymous trying to move
Speaker 1: toward a DOO structure for the purposes of achieving its goals,
Speaker 1: because all of the composite elements of a tao seem
Speaker 1: to fall in line with the core values of Anonymous itself.
Speaker 1: I hope that's there's your question. I know this was
Speaker 1: a super long episode, but I feel like it was
Speaker 1: covering some really important things and again giving us that context.
Speaker 1: We need to understand where stuff comes from and how
Speaker 1: it plays together to really be able to form opinions
Speaker 1: about it. Otherwise our opinion is going to be uninformed,
Speaker 1: and often it means we can make decisions that are
Speaker 1: not necessarily the best for us, simply because we did
Speaker 1: not have a full appreciation of the information that's out there.
Speaker 1: So that was my purpose for going super long with
Speaker 1: this episode, which is funny because typically on Wednesdays I
Speaker 1: aim for tech stuff tidbits that are supposed to be short.
Speaker 1: This is clearly not one of those, all right, If
Speaker 1: you have suggestions for future topics of tech stuff, you
Speaker 1: can reach out to me by tweeting at tech stuff.
Speaker 1: It's tech stuff hsw on Twitter. Send me a message there.
Speaker 1: Or you can download the iHeartRadio app. It's for you
Speaker 1: to download and use. Navigate over to tech Stuff by
Speaker 1: putting it into the little search bar. It'll take it
Speaker 1: to the text page. You can click on the little
Speaker 1: microphone icon and leave me a voice message up to
Speaker 1: thirty seconds in length. Let me know what you would
Speaker 1: like to hear. Or you could be like Nathan and
Speaker 1: do some work, then find an email address for me
Speaker 1: out there in the world and send me an email.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to share my email because I already
Speaker 1: get a ton of stuff and I can't even file
Speaker 1: through all of it. But if it gets through to
Speaker 1: me and it's interesting, yeah, I'll tackle it. Good job, Nathan, Yeah, jerk,
Speaker 1: I don't mean that. I'm just joking because you found
Speaker 1: a way to email me, all right. One way to
Speaker 1: email me, by the way, is if you're a fan
Speaker 1: of Ridiculous History, because occasionally Ben Bolan likes to give
Speaker 1: out my email address as the complaints department. So there
Speaker 1: you go. All right, that's it. I'll talk to you
Speaker 1: again really soon. Text stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For
Speaker 1: more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.