All Models Are Wrong

Seth Frey studies how communities govern themselves. He’s a cognitive and computational social scientist at UC Davis. His work looks at online communities like subreddits and Minecraft servers as model systems for governing a commons. Before academia he organized cooperative housing in Berkeley where he had his political awakening. We talk about why so many online communities settle into what Nathan Schneider calls “implicit feudalism,” why hierarchy is a cheap way to get accountability when people haven’t learned to govern together and wokeism as reverse dominance. This is the first episode recorded in my new podcast studio at the Foresight Institute Berlin Node.0:00 Introduction3:24 Seth’s Political Awakening8:36 Tocqueville and Consensus15:00 Game Theory and Implicit Feudalism21:03 Fixing Benevolent Dictatorship23:02 Reverse Dominance and Redistribution27:20 Democracy Is a Type of Person Get full access to All Models Are Wrong at allmodelsarewrong.online/subscribe

Wouter Tebbens has spent more than 20 years building open source and cooperative alternatives to big tech, including a cooperative cloud service in Barcelona and a member-owned alternative to Zoom. At DWeb Camp he helped launch the Democratic Tech Fund, which wants to pay for community tech through crowdfunding and match funding instead of venture capital.We recorded this conversation at DWeb Camp 2026 outside Berlin. Wouter explains why he now calls big tech "MAGA" and why he doubts Europe can protect itself by building its own Google. We also go back to the early days of the Free Knowledge Institute and the commons movement in Barcelona after 15M. He's honest about the hard parts too, like how long the teams behind these cooperatives worked on precarious pay before the projects could support them.Wouter Tebbens is the founder of the Free Knowledge Institute in Amsterdam and one of the partners behind the Democratic Tech Fund. He has helped start several tech cooperatives, including the Commons Cloud and Meet.coop.Democratic Tech Fund - https://democratictech.fund0:00 Introduction1:33 Wouter's Lore2:49 Why DWeb Camp?9:59 The Democratic Tech Fund21:50 Origins of the Free Knowledge Institute27:25 The Barcelona Cooperative Ecosystem31:25 Building Cooperative Tech: Tips & Pitfalls39:57 Network Effects in Cooperative Models Get full access to All Models Are Wrong at allmodelsarewrong.online/subscribe

Edit: Since the recording of this interview many things have happened to René and the Artizen platform / community. René has suffered two strokes which has put his health at risk and has moved towards closing down Artizen. At the same time, he stated that matching funds that were promised through the application would not be going out and only the donations minus the endowment fee will be paid out. So far it seems that no one has been paid out, including my own project Bread Cooperative which had received donations. People are currently hurting over these events and legal action is being prepared by those who feel wronged. Meanwhile, my team at Bread Cooperative has been working on an alternative called Pastry. Using our stack, we hope to build something that is auditable, decentralized and learns the lessons of Artizen.I’m leaving this interview published as it for posterity. I will provide much more context and commentary in a later video.René Pinnell grew up in a family of artists who always needed a second job to pay for the work they cared about. He's spent his career trying to fix that, and his platform Artizen just closed a funding season with almost $7 million raised for projects in art, science and technology.We recorded this conversation at DWeb Camp 2026 outside Berlin. René talks about what he learned raising money in film and then in startups, and how Stripe shutting down his last company pushed him into crypto. He also explains Artizen's idea of making art the investable asset for any kind of project, and we get into whether that's the right way to fund culture when public money already pays for so much of it.René Pinnell is the founder of Artizen, a match funding platform for art, science and technology. He started out as a filmmaker and later ran Kaleidoscope, a company that funded and toured virtual reality projects.0:00 Introduction1:36 Background & Origin of Artizen10:22 Running a Startup as Performance Art12:27 The ZIRP Era 25:44 Where Does the Funding Come From?32:19 Public Funding vs. the Investable Model49:23 A Pluralistic Approach to Funding Get full access to All Models Are Wrong at allmodelsarewrong.online/subscribe

Daniel Erasmus has spent about 25 years doing scenario planning for banks, governments and companies, and his starting point is that experts are bad at predicting the future. In 2006, a scenario he worked on helped one bank prepare for a global financial collapse. When the crisis hit in 2008, it was one of only two banks in the world to grow its assets.We recorded this conversation at DWeb Camp 2026 outside Berlin. Daniel explains how scenario planning works and how scenario work during COVID flagged a food security risk, which led a bank to start a program that has since given away about 120 million meals. We also talk about ClimateGPT, the open climate model he built, why he thinks climate is a bigger danger than AI, and how he answers the critique that AI uses too much energy.Daniel Erasmus is head of AI at Internet Archive Europe and a member of the Club of Rome. He built ClimateGPT, an open source and open access AI model focused on climate and the social decisions around it.0:00 Intro1:42 What is Scenario Planning?11:25 The Scenario Planning Process & Technology27:04 What is Climate GPT?34:37 Why Use AI for Climate? The Degrowth Question45:06 The Role of Internet Archive50:03 Climate Economics & Negative Externalities Get full access to All Models Are Wrong at allmodelsarewrong.online/subscribe

Brewster Kahle started planning the Internet Archive (creators of the Wayback Machine) in 1980 at the MIT AI lab, when he figured that machines worth talking to would need a library to learn from. Forty-six years later, he says the biggest obstacle to that future is a handful of companies that want to control information instead of selling it.We recorded this conversation live at DWeb Camp 2026 outside Berlin. We talk about where the early web went wrong and what Europe's copyright carve-out could mean for public AI. Brewster also argues that small-scale capitalism belongs on the list of civilizational infrastructure, and tells the story of the credit union he tried to start after the 2008 crisis.Brewster Kahle is the founder of the Internet Archive and a longtime advocate for the decentralized web.0:00 Intro1:55 The early days of the internet and what they got wrong11:56 Big Tech vs Big Publishing15:01 The original vision of The Internet Archive21:01 What civilizational infrastructure should we be building?26:03 Internet Archive Credit Union vs Big Banks Get full access to All Models Are Wrong at allmodelsarewrong.online/subscribe

I spoke to Yanis Varoufakis, economist and former Greek finance minister, at Web3 Summit in Berlin on June 18th, 2026, about why he thinks blockchain is one of the few tools left that can actually pull power away from Big Tech and the banks. Truly a privilege that I had the chance to speak with him on such a stage.We dig into his concept of techno-feudalism and cloud capital, his monetary commons proposal for a transparent monetary system that could undercut private banks, and the digital wallet system he tried to build for Greece during the crisis. Yanis also lays out why he thinks the digital euro is dead in the water. You can read my reflections on the interview here. If you liked the podcast be sure to give it a review on your preferred podcast platform. If you find content like this important consider donating to my Patreon starting at just $3 per month. It takes quite a lot of my time and resources so any amount helps. Follow me on Twitter (@TBSocialist) or Mastodon (@[email protected]) and join the r/CryptoLeftists subreddit. Support the showSubscribe on Substack - https://allmodelsarewrong.online/Buy my book - https://linktr.ee/blockchainradicals Get full access to All Models Are Wrong at allmodelsarewrong.online/subscribe

I spoke to Leo Fan, founder of Cysic, about what zero-knowledge proofs actually are, and why they might be one of the more promising answers to the internet's identity problem.We dig into how a ZK proof lets you prove something is true without handing over any identifying personal information, why that matters as digital identity systems become pushed by governments, and Cysic's model for verifiable compute. Leo also breaks down why the hardware and cost problems around ZK have kept it from mainstream identity use so far, and how Cysic's network lets you use your own hardware to help generate these proofs, rather than leaving that compute in the hands of a few large players.If you liked the podcast be sure to give it a review on your preferred podcast platform. If you find content like this important consider donating to my Patreon starting at just $3 per month. It takes quite a lot of my time and resources so any amount helps. Follow me on Twitter (@TBSocialist) or Mastodon (@[email protected]) and join the r/CryptoLeftists subreddit. Support the showSubscribe on Substack - https://allmodelsarewrong.online/Buy my book - https://linktr.ee/blockchainradicals Get full access to All Models Are Wrong at allmodelsarewrong.online/subscribe

I spoke to Nick Srnicek, author of Platform Capitalism, co-author of Inventing the Future, and most recently Silicon Empires, about why AI is consolidating Big Tech's power rather than disrupting it. We dig into why the AI upstarts remain dependent on the infrastructure of the incumbents, why the gap between open and closed models may widen as frontier training costs spiral upward, and the real biosecurity risks buried under Silicon Valley's safety discourse. Nick also breaks down what AI sovereignty could mean for Europe, and why racing to hoard AI productivity gains for yourself misses the actual task: preventing a permanent underclass from forming at all. If you liked the podcast be sure to give it a review on your preferred podcast platform. If you find content like this important consider donating to my Patreon starting at just $3 per month. It takes quite a lot of my time and resources so any amount helps. Follow me on Twitter (@TBSocialist) or Mastodon (@[email protected]) and join the r/CryptoLeftists subreddit. Support the showSubscribe on Substack - https://allmodelsarewrong.online/Buy my book - https://linktr.ee/blockchainradicals Get full access to All Models Are Wrong at allmodelsarewrong.online/subscribe

I spoke to Sean Geobey, associate professor at the University of Waterloo and Director of Groupthink Labs, about collective intelligence, cooperative economics, and what decentralized technology could actually offer the solidarity economy.We dig into how collective intelligence works at scale, from participatory budgeting experiments in Kitchener to the structural barriers that make setting up a cooperative three times harder than incorporating a business. We also get into the limits of GDP as a measure of anything meaningful, why the left's taboo around finance is a form of unilateral disarmament, and how speculative finance has become the shortest-term thinking industry on the planet while performing the same planning function as the old Soviet Politburo. Sean also looks at Bread Cooperative (a worker cooperative I founded) and where the real bottlenecks are for Web3 to serve collective action rather than undermine it.If you liked the podcast be sure to give it a review on your preferred podcast platform. If you find content like this important consider donating to my Patreon starting at just $3 per month. It takes quite a lot of my time and resources so any amount helps. Follow me on Twitter (@TBSocialist) or Mastodon (@[email protected]) and join the r/CryptoLeftists subreddit. Support the showSubscribe on Substack - https://allmodelsarewrong.online/Buy my book - https://linktr.ee/blockchainradicals Get full access to All Models Are Wrong at allmodelsarewrong.online/subscribe

I spoke to Evan Miyazono, founder of Atlas Computing, about the neglected risks of advanced AI and what it would actually take to govern it.We dig into the threats he thinks aren't getting enough attention, from asymmetrically offensive cyber capabilities and economic disruption to what he calls the "intelligence curse," a dynamic where governments lose any incentive to invest in their populations once labor becomes synthetic. We also get into formal verification as a framework for AI governance, why consensus and agreement become scarcer as intelligence gets cheaper, and where blockchains might actually fit into that picture in ways that have nothing to do with libertarian fantasy.This episode is sponsored by NYM, the world's most private VPN. Unlike traditional VPNs, Nym uses a decentralized mixnet to scramble your internet data — hiding who you're talking to, when, and how often. You can switch between full mixnet mode for maximum anonymity, or a faster VPN mode for everyday use.Use the code blockchainsocialist when signing up and get an extra month!If you liked the podcast be sure to give it a review on your preferred podcast platform. If you find content like this important consider donating to my Patreon starting at just $3 per month. It takes quite a lot of my time and resources so any amount helps. Follow me on Twitter (@TBSocialist) or Mastodon (@[email protected]) and join the r/CryptoLeftists subreddit. Support the showSubscribe on Substack - https://allmodelsarewrong.online/Buy my book - https://linktr.ee/blockchainradicals Get full access to All Models Are Wrong at allmodelsarewrong.online/subscribe