t its core, effective accelerationism embraces the idea that social problems can be solved purely with advances in technology, rather than by messy human deliberation. “We’re trying to solve culture by engineering,” Verdon said. “When you're an entrepreneur, you engineer ways to incentivize certain behaviors via gradients and reward, and you can program a civilizational system."

For these purposes, magical thinking is the assumption that favored conditions will continue on forever without regard for history. It is the minimizing of constraints and trade-offs in favor of techno-utopianism and the exclusive emphasis on positive outcomes and novelty. It is the conflation of virtue with commerce.

Don't get me wrong. I am not a fan of centralization. I started building a decentralized, permissionless system almost a quarter-century ago. It would be wonderful if we could figure out how to build a Web that would resist centralization. But all the technical and financial cleverness that's been poured into cryptocurrencies hasn't succeeded in doing that. Why? It is because It Isn't About The Technology.

Our challenge to American philanthropy is twofold. First, it must use its power, influence, and money to dismantle“techno-solutionism”—the idea that technological solutions are the key to strengthening American (or any) democracy. Technology is not and never will be the solution to social and political problems, but the fetishism of technology in the public sector has been extremely lucrative for many private companies. All too often we have seen how technology, adopted in the name of progress, actually exacerbates and entrenches society’s problems.

What I learnt from Francesco Nachira and his interest in constructivism and theories of language and cognition is that decentralisation can never be just about decentralising infrastructures. One always needs to have a requisite strategy for decentralising institutions as well.So that’s why we always aimed at the decentralisation of economic and political power as the necessary condition of possibility that was needed to deliver on the true emancipatory potential of decentralising digital infrastructures. When I look at the promises made by the proponents of DAOs and NFTs, they seem to believe that technology itself would somehow do the job: once we code a DAO correctly, it will ensure a new institutional form and that form would have revolutionary effects, etc. This seems to me short-sighted and also very inward-looking.It’s not, of course, only about decentralising power. It’s also about creating new institutions to keep old power – which, by now, has taken on new forms – in check. Where are these new institutions when it comes to crypto and Web3? Everyone seems to believe that big tech platforms and Wall Street and Hollywood will just stand idle as they are being disrupted by “crypto.” Does this really sound plausible to anyone?

Because we can codify the ways in which it is possible to cheat, we can also write executable software rules, with deterministic results, that prevent cheating in the protocols we use to define and transfer value.

But Johnson is completely blind to the virtues of centralization. In discussing 311, he lauds the fact that tipsters calling the hotline help to create a better macro-level view of city problems. But this is a trivial insight compared with the main reason why 311 works: Mayor Bloomberg’s decision to centralize—not decentralize—previous models of reporting tips. Here is how Accenture, the firm that assisted New York in its switch to the 311 system, describes the origins of that project: “[Before 311], customers looking for government assistance were confronted with more than 4,000 entries on 14 pages of the NYC telephone book, and more than 40 resource-intensive call centers were required to direct inquiries to the right city offices. The Mayor’s vision was that of a high-performance, centralized, all-purpose call facility, accessible through the simple-to-remember 3-1-1 phone number.”Johnson’s internet-centric worldview is so biased toward all things decentralized, horizontal, and emancipatory that he completely misses the highly centralized nature of 311. The same criticism applies to his treatment of the Internet. Had Johnson chosen to look closer at any of the projects he is celebrating, he would find plenty of centralization efforts at work.7 Consider Google: when it comes to user data, today Google runs a much more centralized operation than five years ago. Back in 2008, my Google searches were not in any way connected to my favorite YouTube videos or to events on my Google Calendar. Thanks to Google’s new privacy policy, today they are all connected—and Google, having centralized its previously disparate data reservoirs, can show me more precise ads as a result. But don’t count on Internet-centrists to include this trend under that mystical category of “Internet logic.”

First, it must use its power, influence, and money to dismantle“techno-solutionism”—the idea that technological solutions are the key to strengthening American (or any) democracy. Technology is not and never will be the solution to social and political problems, but the fetishism of technology in the public sector has been extremely lucrative for many private companies

ince the 1970s alternative currencies, renewable (energy) technologies, local democracies and sustainable community initiatives started to appear. For long these were small, expensive and often ridiculed as too alternative. But over time and with experience they grew, developed and matured. By now, many of these alternatives are starting to touch mainstream, from urban gardens and farms to energy producing buildings and from renewable energy cooperatives to credit unions and collective health care insur-ances. As I will argue such examples are part of a more fundamental underlying and structural process of transformation in which we shift from the drivers of modernity towards a new set of drivers.