Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Today is December 12th, 2023. At the end of the day, I have a great shirt on, and I want to talk a little bit about one of my favorite topics: freedom of speech and expression.
One of the reasons we created the Midnight Project a long time ago and worked on it so diligently is this concept called ACE—freedom of Association, Commerce, and Expression—which necessarily requires technology to protect and enforce it. Lately, there’s been a conflict involving three university presidents—one from MIT, another from the University of Pennsylvania, and one from Harvard. They were asked whether calling for the genocide of a race constitutes harassment against the members of that group. They said, “Well, that depends on context.”
The long and short of it is that this is an extraordinary statement in itself. Generally speaking, when one calls for genocide, it’s not really a context-related thing. Systematically murdering a group of people does seem to be about harassment. The broader point is that when you talk about freedom of speech and expression, you have to either take an absolutist view—where you say, at the end of the day, we’re going to let people express their opinions, even if they’re horrifically distasteful—or you end up caught in a system of, “Well, it depends. If we like it, it’s okay; if we disagree with it, it’s not.”
For example, at Harvard, there’s an organization called FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. It’s an amazing organization, and I’ll share the website here for you guys: thefire.org. It’s a nonpartisan organization, so it’s not a Republican organization or a Democrat organization. It actually believes in the First Amendment and discusses it. There’s a lovely interview with one of the people in their hierarchy, Greg Lukianoff, with Lex Fridman, and I highly recommend you take a look at that.
Every year, they do an index of campuses that support free speech and those that do not. Harvard had the lowest possible score of zero out of 100, meaning it is absolutely bereft of freedom of expression. If you hold political views that disagree with the orthodoxy of the mainstream campus, you’re either not invited to speak or shouted down. The faculty often go out of their way to silence or censor you, usually labeling it as hate speech.
What was extraordinary about the statements from the president of Harvard was that something obviously hate speech under any reasonable definition was given a contextual pass. Why? Because politics got in the way. This brings up a broader point about academia and the state of affairs in the United States, in particular, but also the world as a whole. We are starting to move in a direction where we go from an absolutist view of allowing people to express themselves to a point where we start criminalizing, harshly punishing, or deplatforming expression. This is an ongoing trend that has been happening for decades, but it’s accelerating.
What’s happened is that a counterculture is starting to form to push back against this aggressive encroachment that limits expression. Recently, for example, you saw Elon Musk take over Twitter. What he’s doing is re-platforming people who were previously deplatformed and creating a kind of town square. Instead of deplatforming people, he’s investing in constructing new methods and tools to add context to what they’re saying. For example, Community Notes have been used on President Biden and Elon Musk himself. When you tweet something that starts to attract a lot of attention, it’s no longer the case that if a person disagrees with it, we just deplatform them. People actually provide additional information and context that, in some cases, disagrees with the statement or adds more truth to it.
This can be as simple as someone taking a video and only giving you a small snippet or taking a picture and changing it a little to look a certain way. Then the community can say, “Hey, wait a minute. If you watch the full video, they said the opposite,” or “If you broaden the picture, all of a sudden you have a very different perspective on the matter.”
In general, I think this is a very healthy development where you add many different viewpoints and context overall to speech. Freedom of speech does not translate to consequence-free speech. If a person says something, even if they have the right to say it, if that is negatively received, there are consequences. A great example is me. I recently said that I disagree that Bitcoin and Ethereum enjoy an operational test for their security status, whereas everything else in the altcoin space enjoys a historical test. I think it’s categorically wrong as a matter of law and policy. It’s senseless.
Because I said that, many in the Bitcoin space perceived this as an attack on Bitcoin and have gone out of their way to attack and diminish me, attacking my credentials, my honesty, and my business, Cardano, as an ecosystem. There are obviously consequences for having an opinion, and there are perceptions of that opinion which were not intended. I don’t attack Bitcoin; Bitcoin is Bitcoin. It’s a protocol. I don’t think there’s a moral superiority with Cardano over Bitcoin. They’re clearly different ecosystems, different generations, and different use cases. It’s absolutely fair to point out when a regulator has an inconsistent application of the law and contrast the historical reality.
There are consequences to pointing that out; you make enemies, and you have to accept that. Truth is not a free concept; opinions are not free. They carry consequences. Yet in a free society, we do not criminalize or encourage institutions to destroy people if their opinions disagree with an orthodoxy. We do this in totalitarian societies.
A great example would be if any of you watched the Chernobyl miniseries on HBO. It perfectly epitomizes the consequences of living in a totalitarian regime. The entire Chernobyl disaster was exacerbated by the fact that the Soviet government could not admit that it was a disaster. Therefore, everyone working to try to clean up and restore Chernobyl had to work within a structure that forced them not to admit how bad it was, which prolonged the suffering and misery and created horrific scenarios. For example, when they purchased a robot from the Germans to try to clean up the graphite on the roof of the building, they couldn’t give the Germans the right radio ration numbers. This meant that the robot failed, and the only other option was to send actual human beings to a highly radioactive roof, basically signing a death sentence.
People were so enamored and forced to adhere to the lie that they were willing to let people die knowingly to keep that narrative going. That’s the end result of a totalitarian regime. When you suck the freedom of expression, association, commerce, and speech from a society for too long, that’s where you go. Those are the consequences.
You often see this panic in people’s faces when you ask them a question where, if the answer came from first principles or common sense, it would be easy to answer. Instead, they freeze and try to remember what the official position of the government is. You can see a propagandist in Russia or North Korea, and when you ask them a simple question, they have to remember what the answer is. They know what the truth is, but they also know that if they speak the truth, it’s going to have severe and significant consequences.
Unfortunately, in modern academia in America and the media, we seem to be converging towards a more totalitarian view of things. We have lost inclusive accountability and first principles in our thinking. This Harvard example is simply an epitome of that. The correct answer to the question of whether calling for genocide against a particular group is right or wrong, and whether it constitutes harassment of members of that group, is that it’s always wrong. That’s the correct answer. You don’t really have to think too hard about it. No matter how grievous the sins of a group, systematic murder of all of them is something we, as humans, are past. We’re never going to do that again as a free and open society. It’s always wrong; it’s always evil. There’s no excuse for it, and if you believe there is one, you’re on the wrong side of history.
We have to learn how to go beyond that. There’s no context involved in that, but the fact that you add that is because they’ve lived in an environment for so long where everything is so politicized and everything is such a game that they have to think for a moment and say the most careful thing possible.
So how do we get beyond this? We do it through innovation, and this is what the cryptocurrency space, in general, allows us to do. Earlier in prior videos, I mentioned things like veracity bonds, where when somebody says something, you ask yourself if they are willing to put money on the table for how confident they are. For example, if someone says, “What’s the capital of Colorado?” and they say “Colorado Springs,” you might ask, “Are you confident?” They might say, “Oh sure. Would you be willing to put $10,000 on the table for that?” If they say, “Oh, actually, I don’t know. Let me look it up,” and they find out it’s Denver, you could ask, “How confident are you?” They might say, “$10,000? Oh yeah, of course, I’ve been there before. A million dollars? I think it’s Denver, but am I really that sure?”
When you quantify things and put money on the table, you create consequences for being wrong above and beyond the reputational risk and the opinion and discourse. You create marketplaces for truth. Suddenly, people get much more careful and systematic. This is what financial markets do. Think about trading and hedge funds. Think about the price of something. How confident are you that Microsoft is going to be worth more money next quarter than it is today? You have analysts that dig into everything; they really try to understand technology, and they make fortunes being right or wrong. Some of the most sophisticated analysis and mathematical models that humankind has ever conceived happen to exist in the financial industry because there’s an outcome and incentive to pursue a prediction of the future.
The same goes for warfare. If you look at some of the most sophisticated groups of analysis, they exist usually in tier-one nations like the United States and China, where they have very sophisticated apparatuses to predict and war game the consequences of a conflict, a battle, and the pursuit of their strategy, both in a micro and macro sense. What are the consequences? People die, and you lose national prestige when you lose battles. Of course, they can still get it wrong, and they often do. People make bad investments, and obviously, Iraq and Afghanistan happened in the United States. Stuff can happen, but it at least says that it’s better than the baseline, and there are many examples of where it went right.
When we look to the 21st century and talk about freedom of expression, it’s important for us as an industry to think deeply about what tools and systems we need to put together. In some cases, people are so terrified of telling the truth because of the blowback and reputational damage that they don’t do it. But when you introduce a whistleblowing system with anonymity and built-in confidentiality, people are willing to be much more honest. For example, in an organization, you can ask for real-life human identity and say, “What do you think of the CEO? What do you think of the president? What do you think of the leader? What do you think of the decisions that are made?” They’ll have one opinion if you have an anonymous poll, but you can verify that they are indeed a member of that organization. If no one can see how people voted, you’ll get a radically different and much more honest answer because people will share their actual opinions, not the opinions they think you want to hear.
If you put that on a nation-state scale, in your media system, and in your systems of higher learning, you can already get there. Attach that with economic consequences and marketplaces for truth and AI curation, and there are good things that can happen. This is relevant because free societies have a presumption that there are people who are in love with institutions and who are in love with getting to the crucible of truth. Unfortunately, we are moving not only in the opposite direction; we’re accelerating the fact that many institutions have been co-opted. Generative AI is going to create a tsunami of fake news. We are living in an age where audio, video, and pictures can now be manipulated at a scale we’ve never seen in human history. Anyone, including myself or a president, can be made to say or be put in situations that actually didn’t happen.
AI is so sophisticated that it can convincingly create fake scenarios. This could be small, like a celebrity having a fake phone call generated of them yelling at their assistant, or a picture could be generated where they’re being aggressive or mean to a fan. These can be big things, like things related to Pizzagate being married with a video of Hillary Clinton doing something horrific. The issue is: how do you know fact from fiction? It’s going to get harder year after year with deep fakes and generative AI to truly understand that.
The naive response to this societal crisis is for the government to construct a Ministry of Truth and decide what’s real and what’s not. Recently, I had some videos taken down by YouTube. YouTube was encouraged by the U.S. government to develop a policy for medical information, stating that only things from the WHO or the CDC are legitimate. Any deviation from that orthodoxy, whether it’s true or not, must be deplatformed and taken down. Is that okay? Not in a free society.
A lot of people say, “Well, they’re a private company; they can do whatever they want.” But is it truly a company deciding if the U.S. government is working hand in glove with that institution? Congressional testimony recently revealed that Twitter had many FBI and CIA employees and that they had a direct line with the FBI, working together to decide what to deplatform and what not to. If Twitter was doing that, it’s almost certain that Meta and Google are as well.
If the U.S. government is directly and indirectly creating institutions to decide what is true, are they going to decide what is true out of the virtue of their hearts or what is politically convenient to the people who rule? There is no decade in American history where we can look to where the U.S. government has not lied about something substantial—from the Gulf of Tonkin to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, to the nature of our foreign policy, to people who were our friends later becoming our enemies. You can see it every year, every decade, and every place. There is a lie somewhere, and if that’s the track record, how can we trust the monopoly of reality and truth to those very same people who are not accountable?
Not too long ago, I remember the Director of National Intelligence telling Congress a lie and then later being asked about it, saying he gave the least untruthful answer possible. There were no consequences for that. If you or I lie to Congress, we suffer consequences. This is the society we are moving towards, and this yet again shows one of the great use cases and utilities of the cryptocurrency industry. There are really three core components: consent, identity, and assets. The extension of that consent is the voting systems, where you approve something and can verify your identity and the data surrounding your assets.
The extension of that is the preservation and protection of freedom of association, commerce, and expression. We have to build as an industry systems to double down on and enhance and protect these things, either to augment existing systems like X, Meta, and YouTube or to build replacement systems for them. There’s a small window of time before those systems become completely co-opted and controlled by a patchwork of transnational agencies that benefit from controlling what is true and what is not.
The things that happened at Harvard and the things we see happening in totalitarian regimes are symptoms of that broader problem. We, as an industry, are the only industry that the human race has to sort all of this out in a way that preserves those things. One of the worst things you can witness is a society that does not have freedom of expression. It is the bedrock of humanity and creativity, and you slowly darken and suck the humanity out of every single person when people are afraid to express themselves. You lose genuineness, you lose luster, and ultimately, you lose everything that makes life special.
I travel to a lot of different countries; I’ve been to 74. I’ve been to very free places and very unfree places. When I go to totalitarian countries, some of them have very impressive infrastructure, beautiful buildings, remarkable monuments, and a lot of wealth to show. But there’s something missing: the people. They’re damaged because they don’t have freedom, and there’s always a subconscious lingering fear that all they have can be taken away.
For example, when you look at Jack Ma, I saw his meteoric rise when I was young. I saw all the articles written and the magazine covers he was on as one of the most powerful and important people in China. Now he’s a non-person because he ran afoul of a dictator. That’s what happens in these types of regimes, and there are no laws of physics that say this can’t happen in a free country like the United States or the European Union, including members like Germany and France, or former members like the UK. It absolutely can, and it is happening in real time. We’re only ever one generation away from living in a totalitarian society.
So just remember, when people talk about these things, it’s not about picking a particular side—supporting Israel or supporting Palestine. Perhaps that was the intention of the congresswoman, but it’s not really my intention, and frankly, it misses the entire broader point. It really is a question of whether you believe in freedom of expression or not. Do you believe we should invest in and promote systems that enhance freedom of expression and allow us to get to a more objective reality that is inclusive? Or do we want to build systems to remove truth and force an agenda?
That’s one of the reasons why I’m in the cryptocurrency space: I would like to do the former. I honestly believe there has never been an invention in human history as liberating as blockchain technology because we can get consent back to the masses. We can be in control of our own identity through self-sovereign identity constructs, and by being our own bank and hosting our own assets, we can preserve and protect the freedom of association, commerce, and expression.
The more we do this, the more you’ll see governments try to crack down. Recently, Elizabeth Warren proposed legislation that would effectively end the entire U.S. cryptocurrency industry as we know it should it pass. We’re lucky that she’s only passed one bill out of 350 that she’s proposed—not a
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