Description: Homepage, blog, bio for Andrew McLaughlin of Higher Ground Labs, Access Now, Yale. Ex-Google, Obama White House, ICANN, Medium, Tumblr, Digg, Instapaper.
As I get older, it seems I’m becoming less a historian and more a fact witness. Confirming that trend, the Congressional Internet Caucus hosted a fun discussion on emerging Web3 policy battles, with Kevin Werbach and me assigned to draw parallels, contrasts, and lessons from the first wave of Web 1.0 fights in the 1990s - the era of the Communications Decency Act, the codification of Section 230, the first skirmishes over cryptography and key escrow, and so on. Sparking the panel, I suspect, was the clumsy
Our moderator was Danny O’Brien of the Filecoin Foundation, and our new-generation co-panelists were Cleve Mesidor of the Blockchain Association and the National Policy Network of Women of Color in Blockchain and Carlos Acevedo of Brave Software — all terrific thinkers and nimble panelists. Great conversation, part of the Caucus’s 2021 rich lineup of events . Thanks to Tim Lordan for the kind invite!
My first big conference post-COVID was the excellent Unfinished Live , held at The Shed in NYC in October 2021. I put together what turned out to be a brisk and (for me, anyway) entertaining discussion on “Governance 3.0” with Kickstarter co-founder, artist and all-around brilliant thinker Perry Chen , Georgetown professor of philosophy and director of its ethics lab Maggie Little , and technologist, decentralization architect, and Unfinished Labs president Braxton Woodham . The video is below; a transcript