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This piece originally appreared in McSweeney’s new issue, The End of Trust, a collection featuring over 30 writers investigating surveillance, technology, and privacy, with special advisors the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Over the last five years, Edward Snowden and I have carried on an almost daily conversation, most of it unrelated to his legal troubles. Sometimes we meet in person in Moscow over vodka (me) and milkshakes (him). But our friendship has mostly taken place on secure messaging platforms, a channel that was comfortable and intuitive for him but took some getting used to for me. I learned to type with two thumbs as we discussed politics, law, and literature; family, friends, and foster dogs. Our sensibilities are similar but our worldviews quite different: I sometimes accuse him of technological solutionism; he accuses me of timid incrementalism.
Through it all, I’ve found him to be the clearest, most patient, and least condescending explainer of technology I’ve ever met. I’ve often thought that I wished more people — or perhaps different people — could eavesdrop on our conversations. What follows is a very lightly edited transcript of one of our chats. In it, Ed attempts to explain “blockchain” to me, despite my best efforts to cling to my own ignorance.
"mechanically, we’re discussing a very, very simple concept, and therefore the applications are all variations on a single theme: verifiable accounting." - Brilliant