Cover art stolen from https://www.1mposter.com/ - an ASCII artist I learned about this week, whom I absolutely love

1. I’ve been trained to not share my opinion. The consequence for saying the wrong thing as a woman is far greater than it is for a man. Think Andrea Dworkin, whose entire body of work was reduced to her hyperbolic statement that all heterosexual sex is r*pe. JK Rolling is another example that comes to mind, who became a TERF and now Harry Potter is >>motions a finger slicing the neck<<. Meanwhile, people continue to display their amazing ability to hold space for the complexity of human beings by filtering through the fascist and authoritarian ideas of Carl Schmitt, or looking past Heidegger’s involvement in the nazi party. My point here is that, without anyone ever directly saying it out loud, my experiences as a woman and observing women have trained me to be silent for longer, to guard my inner thoughts that lie to near the line of controversy because one strong, overly stated opinion might forever categorize me into a one-line dismissal of “she’s the girl who said X”. I’m learning to unlearn this training.

2. I’ve been at Berlin Blockchain week and attended over 50 lectures, workshops and panels at a handful of conferences including Funding the Commons, Protocol Berg, W3PN hackathon, SheFI, and ZuBerlin. I’ve heard many intelligent people speak on the current state of many bourgeoning technologies that are imminently shaping the future of the internet and the fabric of human connection. Due to over-saturation, I had to be highly selective and I prioritized talks that align with my interests, which include decentralized governance, sovereign identity as a means to autonomy, open source development and principals, and privacy/anonymity as a means of protection from overreaching forms of domination. 

3. I entered this week hoping to develop my understanding of where blockchain and specifically /ethereum are at regarding the line between privacy and transparency, which is to say, how far along is the technology in protecting our digital identity on a network that is open, traceable and publicly verifiable, while at the same time safeguarding against nefarious actors. It’s a complicated problem to solve, but lies at the heart of many of the most intriguing and quixotic ambitions that were dreamt up at the conception and birth of smart contracts on a blockchain. The general consensus is that the technology is here, or nearly all here, enough so that it is time to pull out the old diaries and return to ideation, revisit concepts that were unfeasible 10 years ago and rekindle the spark in those who were once disheartened by daunting technological feats. Those mountains have been nearly conquered, and now is the time to build. 

4. Controversy was not rampant in the spaces, the talks or even in the following Q/As where I found myself, which I take overall as a healthy indication. Even some talks that were intended to be spicy had their teeth pulled by preceding, unprovoked agreement on twitter. A broad array of people can be heard urging the same plea of encouragement to not forget the foundational and congealing ethos that once brought many together to endure this decade-long endeavor, words that everyone got tired of seeing, saying and hearing, but haven’t lost their significance. As ethereum enters into this pivotal moment from high level advancement to the elaboration on a new phase of the internet, and as many new people are sure to join the ecosystem and build products and launch innovative ideas, these 5 values must be reiterated to maintain the integrity of the systemic foundation: decentralization as a means to limit the control of a single entity, transparency as in open access to code and information, permissionlessness to allow open participation and deny gatekeeping, censorship-resistance to ensure freedom of expression and protect societies from hegemonic regimes and privacy as a counterbalance to transparency, empowering participation without compromising safety. 

5. The most challenging question that I heard others actively grappling with on-stage and in the space was - how do we get more woman to participate in this male-dominated space? I heard many unsatisfactory answers, the most of all being an urge to put these highly complex ideas into more simple terms. Simplifying complex topics is an art form that takes a lot of time and effort and is necessary sometimes for some things but “woman” are not avoiding this space because the ideas are too complex to understand, rather the entry points to these complex ideas are tucked away in a room behind a velvet rope. The large turnout of men at Monday’s SheFi event surprised me, prompting me to ask some of them why they came. Many share a desire to solve this very problem, to learn about what can be done to contribute to conditions that feel open to participants of all genders and otherwise marginalized demographics. As a woman, I’m not born with answers, but I do have relevant experience and a lifetime of observations. For example, I designed furniture my entire childhood that my dad would build for me but I didn’t become a carpenter until my neighbor in Sweden opened up his shop to me and told me that I can use his tools. He didn’t explain to me how to use the tools, but he did require that I not cut off my thumb. Eight years later, I run a successful company doing custom interior carpentry. Another personal anecdote: I learned the piano from the age of 5-11 and my dad taught me the guitar as well, but at no point during my deep, high-school involvement in a DIY punk and indie scene did I join a band or play publicly. Fifteen years later, the words still sting when I remember my then-boyfriend telling me that so-and-so asked him to join their band to play bass, and my response was “but you don’t even play the bass??” I hope what you take from this story is a glimpse of understanding into the experience of a girl/woman raised by these societal norms. I’m not advocating for more men to give permission to women to act in their spaces, but to understand that we don’t come from a permissionless society, even if that’s where we want to be. An invitation to share an opinion, an acknowledgment of someone’s attendance, or the pursuance of understanding what brought a person into a space can go a long way in creating the conditions for a person otherwise on the fringes to stay. 

6. If you were to think back to 2015, or to the first time you heard about smart contracts on a decentralized network, or to whatever it was that brought you into the space, do you remember the coolest use-case you ever heard that sounded totally unfeasible at the time? For me, it was the notion of programming money on a decentralized network as a means to fundamentally shift away from private organization of resources, inventing new ways for people to collectivize and share life.

7. Even in my own reflection, this reportback is incomplete, and I'd love to hear other participant's experiences and takeaways from this dense collection of conferences and lectures that has yet to conclude. I joined my first hackathon this week and failed before I even really began, and it was exhilarating and beautiful and I can't wait to try again. I've been spending circles and I'm still trying to understand what this money means. I've avoided hefty foreign exchange fees by reimbursing people in USDC and ETH directly from the farcaster waIlet and metamask and I've witnessed the exchange of cash money for a private USDC transaction on the Payy app for totally anonymous cryptocurrency possession. I'm attending a lecture on quantum computing later today and who knows how that will change me, open me, and challenge the way I understand reality and possibilities. You're allowed to cringe as I conclude that point is not the destination, but the ever unfolding journey. I'm really, really, really excited for what's to come. Are you?

Cover art stolen from https://www.1mposter.com/ - an ASCII artist I learned about this week, whom I absolutely love

1. I’ve been trained to not share my opinion. The consequence for saying the wrong thing as a woman is far greater than it is for a man. Think Andrea Dworkin, whose entire body of work was reduced to her hyperbolic statement that all heterosexual sex is r*pe. JK Rolling is another example that comes to mind, who became a TERF and now Harry Potter is >>motions a finger slicing the neck<<. Meanwhile, people continue to display their amazing ability to hold space for the complexity of human beings by filtering through the fascist and authoritarian ideas of Carl Schmitt, or looking past Heidegger’s involvement in the nazi party. My point here is that, without anyone ever directly saying it out loud, my experiences as a woman and observing women have trained me to be silent for longer, to guard my inner thoughts that lie to near the line of controversy because one strong, overly stated opinion might forever categorize me into a one-line dismissal of “she’s the girl who said X”. I’m learning to unlearn this training.

2. I’ve been at Berlin Blockchain week and attended over 50 lectures, workshops and panels at a handful of conferences including Funding the Commons, Protocol Berg, W3PN hackathon, SheFI, and ZuBerlin. I’ve heard many intelligent people speak on the current state of many bourgeoning technologies that are imminently shaping the future of the internet and the fabric of human connection. Due to over-saturation, I had to be highly selective and I prioritized talks that align with my interests, which include decentralized governance, sovereign identity as a means to autonomy, open source development and principals, and privacy/anonymity as a means of protection from overreaching forms of domination. 

3. I entered this week hoping to develop my understanding of where blockchain and specifically /ethereum are at regarding the line between privacy and transparency, which is to say, how far along is the technology in protecting our digital identity on a network that is open, traceable and publicly verifiable, while at the same time safeguarding against nefarious actors. It’s a complicated problem to solve, but lies at the heart of many of the most intriguing and quixotic ambitions that were dreamt up at the conception and birth of smart contracts on a blockchain. The general consensus is that the technology is here, or nearly all here, enough so that it is time to pull out the old diaries and return to ideation, revisit concepts that were unfeasible 10 years ago and rekindle the spark in those who were once disheartened by daunting technological feats. Those mountains have been nearly conquered, and now is the time to build. 

4. Controversy was not rampant in the spaces, the talks or even in the following Q/As where I found myself, which I take overall as a healthy indication. Even some talks that were intended to be spicy had their teeth pulled by preceding, unprovoked agreement on twitter. A broad array of people can be heard urging the same plea of encouragement to not forget the foundational and congealing ethos that once brought many together to endure this decade-long endeavor, words that everyone got tired of seeing, saying and hearing, but haven’t lost their significance. As ethereum enters into this pivotal moment from high level advancement to the elaboration on a new phase of the internet, and as many new people are sure to join the ecosystem and build products and launch innovative ideas, these 5 values must be reiterated to maintain the integrity of the systemic foundation: decentralization as a means to limit the control of a single entity, transparency as in open access to code and information, permissionlessness to allow open participation and deny gatekeeping, censorship-resistance to ensure freedom of expression and protect societies from hegemonic regimes and privacy as a counterbalance to transparency, empowering participation without compromising safety. 

5. The most challenging question that I heard others actively grappling with on-stage and in the space was - how do we get more woman to participate in this male-dominated space? I heard many unsatisfactory answers, the most of all being an urge to put these highly complex ideas into more simple terms. Simplifying complex topics is an art form that takes a lot of time and effort and is necessary sometimes for some things but “woman” are not avoiding this space because the ideas are too complex to understand, rather the entry points to these complex ideas are tucked away in a room behind a velvet rope. The large turnout of men at Monday’s SheFi event surprised me, prompting me to ask some of them why they came. Many share a desire to solve this very problem, to learn about what can be done to contribute to conditions that feel open to participants of all genders and otherwise marginalized demographics. As a woman, I’m not born with answers, but I do have relevant experience and a lifetime of observations. For example, I designed furniture my entire childhood that my dad would build for me but I didn’t become a carpenter until my neighbor in Sweden opened up his shop to me and told me that I can use his tools. He didn’t explain to me how to use the tools, but he did require that I not cut off my thumb. Eight years later, I run a successful company doing custom interior carpentry. Another personal anecdote: I learned the piano from the age of 5-11 and my dad taught me the guitar as well, but at no point during my deep, high-school involvement in a DIY punk and indie scene did I join a band or play publicly. Fifteen years later, the words still sting when I remember my then-boyfriend telling me that so-and-so asked him to join their band to play bass, and my response was “but you don’t even play the bass??” I hope what you take from this story is a glimpse of understanding into the experience of a girl/woman raised by these societal norms. I’m not advocating for more men to give permission to women to act in their spaces, but to understand that we don’t come from a permissionless society, even if that’s where we want to be. An invitation to share an opinion, an acknowledgment of someone’s attendance, or the pursuance of understanding what brought a person into a space can go a long way in creating the conditions for a person otherwise on the fringes to stay. 

6. If you were to think back to 2015, or to the first time you heard about smart contracts on a decentralized network, or to whatever it was that brought you into the space, do you remember the coolest use-case you ever heard that sounded totally unfeasible at the time? For me, it was the notion of programming money on a decentralized network as a means to fundamentally shift away from private organization of resources, inventing new ways for people to collectivize and share life.

7. Even in my own reflection, this reportback is incomplete, and I'd love to hear other participant's experiences and takeaways from this dense collection of conferences and lectures that has yet to conclude. I joined my first hackathon this week and failed before I even really began, and it was exhilarating and beautiful and I can't wait to try again. I've been spending circles and I'm still trying to understand what this money means. I've avoided hefty foreign exchange fees by reimbursing people in USDC and ETH directly from the farcaster waIlet and metamask and I've witnessed the exchange of cash money for a private USDC transaction on the Payy app for totally anonymous cryptocurrency possession. I'm attending a lecture on quantum computing later today and who knows how that will change me, open me, and challenge the way I understand reality and possibilities. You're allowed to cringe as I conclude that point is not the destination, but the ever unfolding journey. I'm really, really, really excited for what's to come. Are you?