It came as a surprise to many that foreign governments may be influencing U.S. elections by manipulating social media. Yet, cypherpunks and national security experts alike have long warned of the increasing use of cyberspace as an extension of nationstate politics. In parallel, tech startups that that moved fast, broke things, and pledged to "do no evil" have turned into systemically important parts of social, political, and commercial infrastructure that cross global jurisdictions. In this frank discussion, we'll look at how new technologies at the intersection of cryptography and distributed systems are helping us push back against the ongoing aggregation of data in the hands of a few, dissect why prior efforts to check such power accumulation failed, and see how this all intersects with the next generation of enterprise infrastructure.



Programming descriptions are generated by participants and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of SXSW.