Samer Hassan & Rufus Pollock on Decentralization, Platform Monopolies and Web3
Channel: Life Itself
Date: 19/07/2022

In the latest episode of our Making Sense of Crypto & Web3 series, we talk with blockchain researcher and expert Samer Hassan. Samer is an academic at Harvard and Universidad Complutense de Madrid in Spain focused on decentralized collaboration. In this episode we talk about decentralization both pre and post blockchain, why platform monopolies like Facebook and Google are so ubiquitous and whether Web3 could help replace them with something fairer, freer and more participatory.

https://web3.lifeitself.us/notes/samer-hassan 

0:00 Introduction
2:31 How did Samer come to this area?
5:04 Examples of efforts to build decentralized social networks that failed
12:21 Why did these early decentralized/open models struggle?
29:40 What’s the illness and what’s the cure?
58:07 Aren’t we going to have the same governance struggles on the blockchain as we do now? 
1:16:44 What makes a Web3 world different from today’s world?

Samer Hassan is an activist, researcher and teacher, Faculty Associate at Harvard University‘s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, and Associate Professor (“Profesor Titular“) at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid in Spain. 

His focus is on decentralized collaboration and how to build free/open source privacy-aware decentralized systems (e.g. blockchain) that facilitate the sustainability of collaborative communities and social movements (from the Commons paradigm).

He was awarded EU’s largest individual research grant, an ERC Grant of 1.5M€, to work on Blockchain-based Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) for bootstrapping a new type of Collaborative Economy. You can find out more at http://p2pmodels.eu 

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Life Itself is a a community of people seeking a wiser world.

Looking around us we can see that neither our society nor our planet are as well as they should be. Greater wisdom is needed both in diagnosis and in finding cures.

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