Program

Schedule & Abstracts

 

 

 

 

Michel Bauwens

Which Technology for which transition?

This keynote first contextualizes the current societal transition in the global history of humanity and technology to identify 'When Are We Now'. It offers an interpretation of human history based on the conflict between coordination systems and their respective elites, and argues we have reached a Third Information Barrier in which market and state-based coordination are no longer sufficient to coordinate human social and economic activity within the long term planetary balance. We have also reached a stage of cybernetic capacity which presents three major visions : a vision of state-centric cybernetic management, pioneered by China; a hegemony of private technological surveillance technology, fusing with the state and oligarchic forces, in the West, but also a third alternative: that of a Archipelago of Regenerative Villages, which is betting on the peer to peer and digital-commons based capacity for a new form of translocal coordination. The challenge of the new civilizational order will be to integrate the long history of 'geographic coordination', in an era of ever faster communication, with the noospheric capacity for permanent and instantaneous digital coordination which is relatively independent of that geography. Which technologies are being developed for such a transition, that takes into account the failures and limitations of Web1 (the early internet), Web2 (the private platform internet) and Web3 (the crypto internet)?

Ámbar Tenorio Fornés

Scales of Sustainable Decentralized Governance with Simpler Technologies

How can we scale open and democratic governance? Our lives are sustained by commons infrastructures from the global scale to the smaller communities and their resilience might rely on their diversity and decentralized ways of scaling. Looking at the distribution of power, participation and diversity of online communities such as wikis or DAOs and drawing from the experience of designing and developing decentralized technologies, this talk questions the need of advanced technologies to achieve democratic and sustainable communities. It calls to explore alternatives to the "move fast, break things" ways of innovation, specially when what we are breaking are our communities and ecosystems. What if the answers are in simpler technologies and community cultures?

Clara Schneidewind

How to distribute trust? - A (theoretical) computer scientist’s perspective.

The distribution of trust among several entities is a fundamental principle in the design of democratic societies. This principle has been equally applied to realize computer systems that do not concentrate the trust for the secure execution of the system in a single entity. The resulting systems are also studied under the term `Decentralized Systems', with cryptocurrencies and other blockchain-based applications as their most famous representatives. While decentralization is the guiding principle in the design of decentralized systems, it is not very well studied what it actually means for a system to be "decentralized" or how to systematically compare the degree of decentralization of different systems.

In this talk, we want to make first steps towards addressing this gap from a theoretical perspective. To this end, we will overview different techniques for distributing the trust for the secure execution of a computer system and show approaches to formally characterize and measure the degree of trust distribution in complex decentralized systems that make use of different trust distribution techniques.

Carmela Troncoso

When decentralization, security, and privacy are not friends

Decentralization is often seen as a main tool to achieve security and privacy. It has worked in a number of systems, for which decentralization help protect identities and data of users. Thus, it is normal that fields (like machine learning and anonymous communications) attempt to leverage these advantages. In this talk, we will show how that in these applications, decentralization not only doesn’t improve privacy or robustness, but also increase the surface of attack. We end by asking why this is the case and offering some hypothesis to discuss with the audience.

Javier Blanco