Happy New Year comrades!

With 2022 coming to a close, I wanted to take this time to go over some of the highlights for me the past year. It’s been an incredibly eventful year, not just for the crypto world, (for better or for worse) but for my weird internet persona as well. So, in case you haven’t achieved the parasocial relationship that I’ve been subliminally cultivating with you over social media that I need to survive in the “Creator Economy”, here’s a recap.

Some pretty big interviews, highlight clips, and the first live show

To be completely honest, I didn’t think the podcast would last for as long as it has so far. I had zero experience with any of this beforehand and I kind of just winged it hoping I wouldn’t get burned too hard for it. I still cringe at myself for some of the first episodes. If you had told me at the beginning of the podcast that I would be interviewing people like Vitalik Buterin and Cory Doctorow in the future I would not have believed you. For me, what is compelling in having both of them on the podcast was less about “wow, I had well-known people on my show”,  and more about how these conversations were able to take place. (Both for very different reasons) I could ask the questions that I thought were necessary in order to get more insight into their perspectives to further the conversation between crypto and left politics.

Since the conversation with Vitalik I’ve also started uploading highlights from some episodes onto YouTube. I’m hoping this can be a nice way for people who don’t want to listen to a full episode to stop asking me to give them a TLDR and instead listen to it firsthand. If you have any specific moments from previous episodes that you think would be good to clip as highlights, feel free to let me know.

Another highlight for me was having the first ever live show in Paris this past summer! It was pretty surreal seeing the podcast's logo printed on the wall like that. At one point I had a conversation with some guy from Dubai who said he was “investing billions into the metaverse”, and then  commented: “The Blockchain Socialist? Pfft, only in Paris.” We didn’t talk for long. Otherwise, it was really nice to see people in person who were interested in listening to my conversation with Penny Rafferty, and Calum Bowden from Black Swan DAO. I enjoyed talking to attendees while drinking a “Marx-a-rita” NFT cocktail. Merci a EBB for the invite!

More than Blogging: Friends With Publications

Although I’ve written a few things this year, two stand out to me the most from what I’ve written in the past. One was the second publication I made on Mirror synthesising Anarcho-Syndicalism and DAOs because of the context around it. When Mirror first started, in order to be able to publish anything on it you had to get past the "$WRITE Race". This meant I needed to pull in some favours from the communist / WEF / illuminati / lizard people group chat to get enough votes in order to publish this piece that I had thought about doing for some time. It was nice to get that support.

Thanks to those underworldly connections I also got the opportunity to publish a piece on the problems of bounty hunting in web3 using Cowboy Bebop as an analogy through Friends With Benefits (I was as surprised as you likely were!). What that experience showed me is that there are people in web3 who are legitimately interested in hearing a socialist POV on what many of the hypemen of web3 take for granted as a net good. I can finally say that watching anime has helped me in a tangible way.

Breadchain: Doing Post-Capitalism on the Blockchain

One of the positive side effects of having a dedicated online community along with a small media outlet has been seeing the network effects of people getting to know and recognize each other enough to want to build things in the vein of the community. Turns out there’s people who want to move beyond dunking over the internet critique and work towards building. This is what we’ve been doing this past year at Breadchain.

ICYMI the Breadchain Cooperative is a federation of blockchain projects working to advance a progressive vision for the technology and its effect on society. Rather than financial primitives, we build solidarity primitives. We define solidarity primitives as a development tool that can help forge solidaristic relationships between individuals and collectives rather than profit maximization. The first solidarity primitive we've built is the Breadchain Crowdstaking Application where users can bake (mint) the $BREAD token - a stablecoin that passively funds the network by staking their $DAI in an Aave lending pool.

While we’ve been going perhaps slower than those building in web3 with venture capital, we’ve found that not having the unwanted pressures of needing to make a profit for shareholders to be an advantage. If we want to build with an alternative framework to capitalism, we also need to be funded and governed alternatively as well. To help push forth the framework we’ve been developing this past year, we’ve been publishing pieces on Mirror which connect relevant left wing concepts to web3 like, Mutual Aid and Dual Power. We have also been using Guild to help us understand who our allies are and to give these individuals special roles.. We have many plans on ways to improve the application and expand the use of $BREAD. So far, however, we have proved that a ragtag group of socialists can absolutely build decentralised applications on Ethereum even without the type of cash and resources that other VC funded groups have.

I have a lot planned for 2023 that I haven’t yet announced so I am excited (and if I’m being honest also a bit nervous) for the coming months. Thanks a lot to everyone - including patrons - for supporting the project in whatever ways you have been. I’m looking forward to getting through the next year with you all.

Big thank you again to @MonolithBrah for helping edit this piece.