Looks Like New – Can Blockchains Stop War Crimes?

These days it seems like cryptocurrencies and blockchains are mostly enabling abuses: speculative bubbles, malware attacks, and money laundering for rogue states. But could the same technology also hold powerful governments and corporations accountable?

Jonathan Dotan directs the Starling Lab at Stanford University and USC, which uses emerging cryptographic technology to document human rights abuses, from the Holocaust to the current war in Ukraine. Dotan explains how his lab leverages tools usually associated with money and finance to preempt misinformation in the fog of war.

CU Boulder’s MEDLab’s radio show and podcast, Looks Like New, asks old questions about new tech.

Each month, host Nathan Schneider and the Looks Like New team speaks with people who work with technology in ways that challenge conventional narratives and dominant power structures. The name comes from the phrase “a philosophy so old that it looks like new,” repeated throughout the works of Peter Maurin, the French agrarian poet and co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement.

Looks Like New airs the fourth Thursday of every month at 6 p.m., or by podcast on iTunes

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