5 Things I Learned in Conversation with Josh Davila, The Blockchain Socialist
On the jagged frontier of AI usefulness, clearly understanding the incentives that shape the tech you use, and exploring the right to compute
It feels pretty great to have welcomed Josh Davila, The Blockchain Socialist, onto Is This The New Internet. His blog and podcast have been a mainstay of my media consumption long before we became colleagues at Bread Cooperative, and he’s kind of why I started a show of my own. I think this format is perfect for long-form discussions about niche topics and Josh tends to agree.
This episode isn’t a theory dump nor a crypto deep dive, but a conversation about what drives him to do what he does. For once he gets to answer questions instead of asking them, and I made sure that we addressed the many ethical quandaries of navigating tech in 2026.
You can listen to the full episode on your platform of choice by clicking the image below.
1: Build communities around things you love, there's probably no idea too unique
Right out the gates we’ve got to address the elephant in the room. Blockchain? Socialism? Together?
But the idea is not as weird as you might think. Thanks to Ethereum we can do more than just the “currency” part of cryptocurrency, we can create resilient decentralised systems that we can self-govern. The narratives of self-enrichment and venture-capital-backed plays to reshape the economy are but one aspect of this industry. Crypto is made up of a diverse array of people all with their own hopes and motivations.
The goal of the cryptoleft is a fairer society; technology and blockchains are just a tool in the shed in order to achieve it. I believe that until people’s needs are met, we shouldn’t be dismissing tools that can put these systems in place. Literally anyone can use it, after all, and this is by design. We won’t know if it’s possible until we try. Josh’s recent article with Platform Cooperativism Consortium provides a glimpse of the larger ideas he presents in his book Blockchain Radicals, both are absolutely worth your time.
Josh acknowledges in the episode that these 2 deep fascinations can only be served because of how the internet brings people together. There are no interests too niche, as long as there’s a passion to be shared and a cause to rally around.
"The internet for all of its flaws is like a decent place and way to find other people with very niche interests like left-wing politics and cryptocurrency."
2: The anger with [insert technology here] is actually about capitalism
The world got a lot more skeptical about tech in the 2010s. Social media shifted from this thing you used to stay in touch with friends to an active erosion of democracy. The ride-sharing apps that started off as welcome competition to expensive and old taxis slowly got more expensive, with both drivers and riders steadily getting squeezed by the services that operated as middlemen.
This phenomenon is known as “enshittification,” a term coined by Canadian author Cory Doctorow and speaks to how tech platforms get worse, and it’s more designed than you might think. Here’s a quick explainer, but Doctorow has a whole book that does a great job of exploring the issue.
Companies offer services at a loss to get customer attention. Lots of promo offers & very sharp customer service help this. Operations are backed by investors who are fine with short-term losses as long as the audience is being built, fast.
Experience gets improved and refined as the users grow. They look at business/enterprise customers for larger deals, with audience trust as a selling point.
Investors see the idea works and create copycat competitors. Customer acquisition costs now rise, with more promos/freebies/product features to poach customers.
The days of running losses to scale audience come to an end, costs are peaking, and price hikes begin. This is often not enough, and the service quality needs to be cut to improve cashflow.
Service quality dwindles, and people start considering competitors. Audience are left reminiscing about how good this product was back in the day.
This isn’t about the left being skeptical of tech as a whole, tech doesn’t have a place on the political spectrum. When incentives are monetary, and cuts need to be made, it’s always people who suffer the cost. We see this with the way AI is being trained on copyrighted work while also being used to threaten entry-level jobs. People are rightly upset. But AI is just a tool. We need to understand who is wielding it, and to what ends.
"The thing that people are angry about when it comes to AI is not AI, but is actually capitalism."
3: Your values are a welcome addition to the things you build
Addressing the ills of broken, enshittified systems is not among our ambitions at Bread Cooperative. What we can do, however, is show that alternative tools built on open systems can meet human need. Use our work to build, scale, and drive the change you wish to see. The Bread Solidarity Fund was our first “show, don’t tell” moment of doing things simply not possible in the traditional finance system.
"We're trying to embed values of solidarity within technological systems, because the normal tech industry does not by and large do that."
Us younger generations aren’t exactly known for being flush with cash, but that shouldn’t stop us from trying to help out. With the Solidarity Fund, you can support causes with the interest that your deposits generate, rather than giving away money you might actually need.
Open networks, free learning resources and now vibe-coding are all providing us with opportunities to put our values in action. The tools are all here, the technical hurdles to getting a working product live are lower than ever.
4: The “jagged frontier” of AI usefulness
"There are some things that are just really good at and other things that's just really, really not."
AI is being simultaneously touted as a shake-up of the world as we know it and also useless. These perceptions can coexist, especially if you look at how people are applying AI.
I hate the way AI writes. But I’m a writer, looking to communicate ideas in a certain way and to a certain audience. AI doesn’t get my tone, and creating multi-page voice guides for Claude projects has diminishing returns. But for things where I have absolutely zero competence, like coding, AI is a godsend and it feels like a superpower. Is this because of my lack of technical expertise, or is the AI actually really good here?
I know technical leads who have barely written a line of code in months. They get a swarm of AI agents to do the work, and they take the role of orchestra conductor. The agents diagnose things that go wrong, and only communicate key decisions that need to be made. So over here, AI seems to be doing a pretty great job.
Coding isn’t like math though, where there’s 1 correct answer. These are complex problems, but the AI just seems to be a lot better at handling things here. Maybe it’s the volume of information it has been trained on. But what I can say is that as these tools get better and more refined, we will have a lot more AI tools for specific use cases, and I hope it gets very granular. Give me a specific product for scheduling podcast discovery calls and recording times based on an actual understanding of my patterns & preferences. Instead I’m stuck with tools that still get dates wrong.
A guy can hope.
5: Who has a right to compute? Governance of AI at scale is an unanswered question
In order for AI to meet the lofty expectations, we’ll need computing power. A LOT more computing power than we currently have. And the facilities that provide them need to be somewhat near population centres where they’ll be used. This leads us to the current controversial topic of data centres.
The largest companies in the world are building data centres to meet future demand. It’s being done at the cost of current demand, with RAM production all being diverted away from consumer devices. We might actually reach a point where, rather than having powerful devices at home for computation-heavy productivity and play, we would rent server time. And to call back to the enshittification argument, we’ve got to be aware of how this will pan out.
We’ll first be told that it’s cheaper to spend $20/month on computing than $2000 on an editing PC. Then the enterprise customers will get preferred bandwidth, and your plan will be bumped down. Or you will make the upgrade to the new, more expensive plan just to match the experience you had at $20. The cycle continues, and it’s not in your favour.
We‘ll argue that it isn’t fair, and the rebuttal will be that the enterprise customers paid for the setup, and are therefore going to be served first. In a world where everyone might need access to the same, limited resources, how do you think this situation will pan out?
The thing is, we sort of know the direction this is heading, so proactive action is needed. Establishing the right to compute will one day be seen alongside the right to privacy and internet access, and ensuring this happens equitably will only get more important.
"At one point we're going to have to probably as a society figure out how do we want to govern our compute — who has a right to compute and how much of it does a person have to compute?"
You can listen to the full episode with Josh Davila, The Blockchain Socialist, wherever you get your podcasts. Click the image below to listen, and do share this with anyone who can’t quite place why they’re displeased with how the tech world is unfurling.
