Monthly Archives: December 2021

On Cyberpunk, Sumer, Synagogues and Vending Machine Government

Happy New Year everyone! Please consider supporting Raul Diego’s year-end fundraiser for Silicon Icarus and help keep independent journalism off blockchain! You can donate here. Thanks in advance! While the information that follows about the Spanish Inquisition, early US synagogues, Sumerian tablets, Philadelphia financiers, cyberpunk, and blockchain government may seem out of place in a series […]

An Infrastructure Of Faith-Based Data Colonialism In Brazil

Brazil is the sixth-largest country in the world by population size. Its high percentage of residents living in concentrated urban poverty makes it an attractive target for social entrepreneurs, microfinance peddlers, and impact investors. Data surveillance comes with all of that – it’s a package deal. Data is a commodity, and investors under the guise […]

Pay For Success Finance: How the Dorseys of the World Could Use Wearables to Profit from Poor Kids’ Prescribed “Wellness Behaviors”

In 2019 I gave a presentation with Cheri Honkala and The Poor Peoples Economic Human Rights Campaign at the Left Forum in Brooklyn on pay for success finance, and how it preys upon the poor. If you don’t have time to read the linked post, the steps below outline how it works. This is how […]

Poverty, Identity, and Child Gamers in Rio’s Favelas

I’m working on a longer piece about the social impact investing landscape in Brazil, but I wanted to quickly share my response to a clip I pulled from an interview on Derrick Broze’s “The Conscious Resistance Network” page. It’s short, only 90 seconds. In it Broze touches on what he considers problematic uses of blockchain […]

How Privately Funded Recreation Centers Could Harm Children – Human Capital Finance In Brazil, Part One

In a December 2 tweet, Glenn Greenwald questions how a donation for the construction of a recreation center for poor children in Brazil could possibly enrich the donor. With that door left wide open, how could I resist? This is going to take a while to unpack, but if I were to try and boil […]