EconCS Seminar

 

Lecturer: 

Prof. Ehud Shapiro (Weizmann)

Title: 

Grassroots Digital Democracy: Transferring power and wealth from global platforms to the people

Abstract: 

The digital realm today is dominated by two architectures: Centralized autocratic global platforms that have adopted surveillance-capitalism as their business model; and up-and-coming blockchain-based global platforms that are decentralized but fundamentally plutocratic. Global platforms exacerbate inequality and undermine the fabric of human society by depleting the social, economic, civic, and political capital of local communities, worldwide.

The talk will review the work of my group at Weizmann with colleagues around the world on a third, alternative architecture for the digital realm, termed grassroots digital democracy.  The architecture and its engendered grassroots applications (including social networking; cryptocurrencies; social contracts) aim to provide scalable foundations for grassroots digital economies that can emerge without initial capital or external credit, and for sovereign democratic digital communities, both operating solely on the networked smartphones of their members, independently of any global resources and platforms.

Location: 

Room 130, Feldman Building, Edmond J. Safra Campus.

 

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