Hello, and welcome to this week’s installment of the Future in Five Questions. Today’s edition features Justin Slaughter, vice president of regulatory affairs at the crypto investment firm Paradigm. As a relatively rare crypto-supporting Democrat (who gamely defended his position during a panel at this year’s Reboot conference ), Slaughter offered his post-election thoughts on why he thinks reflexive hostility to tech is a dead end for the party, his astonishment at the quick growth of crypto as a salient policy issue, and why he thinks Robert Moses still has a lesson or two to teach modern policy entrepreneurs. The following has been edited and condensed for clarity: What’s one underrated big idea? It’s been less than two decades since Satoshi published the nine-page white paper that started an industry. Crypto is now a $3 trillion asset class owned by 20 percent of Americans. Yet crypto’s potential remains underrated because folks don’t realize it’s a software platform that is doing for money, finance, and digital property what the internet did for information and media. Today, you can build a permissionless social media app on Ethereum, like Farcaster. You can create a system of peer-to-peer payments without intermediaries with stablecoins. And you can build trading systems with decentralized finance, or DeFi, without expensive middlemen. My colleagues are often amused how “behind” American policymakers can be on emerging technology. The frontier of tech is sitting right there in front of us. What’s a technology that you think is overhyped? I’m going to fight the premise on this and say Democratic voters’ hostility to tech is overhyped. The burst of vaguely Luddite thinking comes mainly from some astroturfed nonprofit groups and academics that got outsized influence in Democratic circles post 2016. I think that’s about to fade away as this approach is an electoral dead end. The left has traditionally been pro-technology dating back to the French Revolution. What book most shaped your conception of the future? Robert Caro’s “The Power Broker.” The best way to understand the future is to understand the past, so honorable mention to Edward Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” Humanity changes, but humans largely don’t. The struggles we have with adapting to change persist throughout history. “The Power Broker” teaches us that change is highly contingent and that it’s easy for a single person to shift away from being welcoming to change, as well as the danger of ever believing in the idea of being irreplaceable. We all need to know that the time will come when we should not cling to power. What could the government be doing regarding technology that it isn’t? Working with tech as it grows. Too often, D.C. has kept tech at arm’s length to the detriment of both government and progress. We need a more organic and consistent relationship. This is a marriage, not Tinder. What has surprised you the most this year? I’ve closely followed the data, but I was still surprised by the degree to which crypto became a key part of this year’s campaign, in many key races. In our polling , we’ve seen that about 5 percent of voters describe themselves as single-issue crypto voters. Voters care about this issue and we’ve been feeling hopeful from our conversations with policymakers. Even for someone like myself who has been in politics for years, I’ve never experienced anything nearly as promising.
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