All Models Are Wrong

We need tech funding without venture capital | Wouter Tebbens (DWeb Camp)

Joshua Dávila — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 20:08:38 GMT

Wouter Tebbens has spent more than 20 years building open source and cooperative alternatives to big tech, including a cooperative cloud service in Barcelona and a member-owned alternative to Zoom. At DWeb Camp he helped launch the Democratic Tech Fund, which wants to pay for community tech through crowdfunding and match funding instead of venture capital.

We recorded this conversation at DWeb Camp 2026 outside Berlin. Wouter explains why he now calls big tech "MAGA" and why he doubts Europe can protect itself by building its own Google. We also go back to the early days of the Free Knowledge Institute and the commons movement in Barcelona after 15M. He's honest about the hard parts too, like how long the teams behind these cooperatives worked on precarious pay before the projects could support them.

Wouter Tebbens is the founder of the Free Knowledge Institute in Amsterdam and one of the partners behind the Democratic Tech Fund. He has helped start several tech cooperatives, including the Commons Cloud and Meet.coop.

Democratic Tech Fund - https://democratictech.fund

0:00 Introduction
1:33 Wouter's Lore
2:49 Why DWeb Camp?
9:59 The Democratic Tech Fund
21:50 Origins of the Free Knowledge Institute
27:25 The Barcelona Cooperative Ecosystem
31:25 Building Cooperative Tech: Tips & Pitfalls
39:57 Network Effects in Cooperative Models

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Running a company like an artist | René Pinnell (DWeb Camp)

Joshua Dávila — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 20:03:24 GMT

Edit: Since the recording of this interview many things have happened to René and the Artizen platform / community. René has suffered two strokes which has put his health at risk and has moved towards closing down Artizen. At the same time, he stated that matching funds that were promised through the application would not be going out and only the donations minus the endowment fee will be paid out. So far it seems that no one has been paid out, including my own project Bread Cooperative which had received donations.

People are currently hurting over these events and legal action is being prepared by those who feel wronged. Meanwhile, my team at Bread Cooperative has been working on an alternative called Pastry. Using our stack, we hope to build something that is auditable, decentralized and learns the lessons of Artizen.

I’m leaving this interview published as it for posterity. I will provide much more context and commentary in a later video.

René Pinnell grew up in a family of artists who always needed a second job to pay for the work they cared about. He's spent his career trying to fix that, and his platform Artizen just closed a funding season with almost $7 million raised for projects in art, science and technology.

We recorded this conversation at DWeb Camp 2026 outside Berlin. René talks about what he learned raising money in film and then in startups, and how Stripe shutting down his last company pushed him into crypto. He also explains Artizen's idea of making art the investable asset for any kind of project, and we get into whether that's the right way to fund culture when public money already pays for so much of it.

René Pinnell is the founder of Artizen, a match funding platform for art, science and technology. He started out as a filmmaker and later ran Kaleidoscope, a company that funded and toured virtual reality projects.

0:00 Introduction
1:36 Background & Origin of Artizen
10:22 Running a Startup as Performance Art
12:27 The ZIRP Era
25:44 Where Does the Funding Come From?
32:19 Public Funding vs. the Investable Model
49:23 A Pluralistic Approach to Funding

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Why experts are worse at predicting the future than you | Daniel Erasmus (DWeb Camp)

Joshua Dávila — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:54:17 GMT

Daniel Erasmus has spent about 25 years doing scenario planning for banks, governments and companies, and his starting point is that experts are bad at predicting the future. In 2006, a scenario he worked on helped one bank prepare for a global financial collapse. When the crisis hit in 2008, it was one of only two banks in the world to grow its assets.

We recorded this conversation at DWeb Camp 2026 outside Berlin. Daniel explains how scenario planning works and how scenario work during COVID flagged a food security risk, which led a bank to start a program that has since given away about 120 million meals. We also talk about ClimateGPT, the open climate model he built, why he thinks climate is a bigger danger than AI, and how he answers the critique that AI uses too much energy.

Daniel Erasmus is head of AI at Internet Archive Europe and a member of the Club of Rome. He built ClimateGPT, an open source and open access AI model focused on climate and the social decisions around it.

0:00 Intro
1:42 What is Scenario Planning?
11:25 The Scenario Planning Process & Technology
27:04 What is Climate GPT?
34:37 Why Use AI for Climate? The Degrowth Question
45:06 The Role of Internet Archive
50:03 Climate Economics & Negative Externalities

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What the Internet Archive founder predicted 50 years ago | Brewster Kahle (DWeb Camp)

Joshua Dávila — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 18:46:21 GMT

Brewster Kahle started planning the Internet Archive (creators of the Wayback Machine) in 1980 at the MIT AI lab, when he figured that machines worth talking to would need a library to learn from. Forty-six years later, he says the biggest obstacle to that future is a handful of companies that want to control information instead of selling it.

We recorded this conversation live at DWeb Camp 2026 outside Berlin. We talk about where the early web went wrong and what Europe's copyright carve-out could mean for public AI. Brewster also argues that small-scale capitalism belongs on the list of civilizational infrastructure, and tells the story of the credit union he tried to start after the 2008 crisis.

Brewster Kahle is the founder of the Internet Archive and a longtime advocate for the decentralized web.

0:00 Intro
1:55 The early days of the internet and what they got wrong
11:56 Big Tech vs Big Publishing
15:01 The original vision of The Internet Archive
21:01 What civilizational infrastructure should we be building?
26:03 Internet Archive Credit Union vs Big Banks

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... but some are useful

Joshua Dávila — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 17:29:32 GMT

“All models are wrong, but some are useful.”
- George Box

As some of you may have seen, the blog and podcast I ran for 7 years ended but the rebirth is here.

The short description for All Models Are Wrong is:

“Technology is never just technology. All Models Are Wrong examines who controls and benefits from these systems and how they might be organized differently.”

My thesis is that the continued development and introduction of “frontier technologies” will (as it has already) bisect traditional political camps in ways that will surprise us. The models that we’ve grown up with to make sense of the world have increasingly failed us and do not reflect our current reality.

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Given Box’s aphorism, this is not per se a surprise as no model can encapsulate all the complexities of existence, but the goal of this platform is to figure out which are the useful models we should be looking to, given ongoing technological disruption (knowing they too are wrong). Neoliberalism provides no answers for a world where half of knowledge work is automated and companies are forcing workers to wear video cameras to record how they do their work to train AI models for robots to do it in the future.

We are in a strange interregnum where the contradictions of the system are being made bare for all to see but not easily make sense of. The question of ownership of these technologies was always pertinent, but we’ve reached a new tipping point.

Similar to my last platform, my goal is not to just provide a cathartic critique of the system, but to outline viable alternatives based on the best map of the territory we can possibly make. All Models Are Wrong is for people who truly want to grok the truth, see the world for what it is, and play a part in changing it.

Some of the categories of technologies that I see already here and on the horizon of potentiality for disrupting how we see the world, make a living, fall in love and more:

Various forms of advanced cryptography (ZK, FHE, etc.)
Neurotechnology (surface EMGs, silent speech interfaces, neural wristbands, etc.)
Biotech (synthetic biology, genetic engineering, peptides, life extension, etc.)
Death and rebirth of narrative technologies (platforms, social media, etc.)
Quantum (breaking many cryptographic schemes, next gen computers, etc.)
Robotics (drones, automation, kill chains, etc.)
Continued financialization (real world assets, stablecoins, tokenization, etc.)
Personalized computing (personal UIs, local hosting, surveillance, etc.)
Expansion of open source and decentralized options (blockchains, CRDTs, etc.)
New infrastructure (data centers, energy, compute, etc.)

These are just some of what I have in mind. I don’t feel the need to add AI specifically here because it feels too obvious that one way or another, people will be looking for ways to leverage it as an accelerant for likely all of these categories if not already.

The introduction of these technologies will force us to ask ourselves difficult questions that we may or may not have much time to come to grips with or come with an appropriate response. It’s not that all the technologies the industry hypes is FOR SURE coming and we all need to completely change how we live our lives RIGHT NOW because of existential risk, but too many times, progressives have been caught on the back foot and working people have been hurt because of it.

It’s been a hectic but fun past couple of months preparing for this launch and I’m VERY excited to kick it off. You can follow along by subscribing here on Substack and on the Youtube channel. Other social media accounts are on Twitter, BlueSky, and Instagram.

I have already recorded 4 interviews from my time at DWeb Camp including:

Brewster Kahle - founder of Internet Archive
Wouter Tebbens - founder of the Free Knowledge Institute and Democratic Tech Fund
Rene Pinnell - founder of Artizen
Daniel Erasmus - founder of Digital Thinking Network

The experience at DWeb Camp was incredible, and not just because my lovely partner was one of the main organizers. To have contact with people who have been fighting the good fight for a decentralized web for so long in order to learn from them was a real privilege.

With this platform I plan to publish podcasts, video essays, and writing just like before. However this time, I have access to my own recording studio and will focus on interviews in-person here in Berlin. So if you know anyone around that you think would be a good candidate then let me know.

Thanks to all of you that have been supporting me throughout this journey and continue to do so (financially or not). First interviews coming soon!

Big thank you to the Foresight Institute Node in Berlin for letting me use their podcast space.

Yanis Varoufakis on blockchain, the digital euro and being a class traitor

Joshua Dávila — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 17:00:00 GMT

I spoke to Yanis Varoufakis, economist and former Greek finance minister, at Web3 Summit in Berlin on June 18th, 2026, about why he thinks blockchain is one of the few tools left that can actually pull power away from Big Tech and the banks. Truly a privilege that I had the chance to speak with him on such a stage.

We dig into his concept of techno-feudalism and cloud capital, his monetary commons proposal for a transparent monetary system that could undercut private banks, and the digital wallet system he tried to build for Greece during the crisis. Yanis also lays out why he thinks the digital euro is dead in the water.

You can read my reflections on the interview here.

If you liked the podcast be sure to give it a review on your preferred podcast platform. If you find content like this important consider donating to my Patreon starting at just $3 per month. It takes quite a lot of my time and resources so any amount helps. Follow me on Twitter (@TBSocialist) or Mastodon (@theblockchainsocialist@social.coop) and join the r/CryptoLeftists subreddit.

All Models Are Wrong

We need tech funding without venture capital | Wouter Tebbens (DWeb Camp)

Running a company like an artist | René Pinnell (DWeb Camp)

Why experts are worse at predicting the future than you | Daniel Erasmus (DWeb Camp)

What the Internet Archive founder predicted 50 years ago | Brewster Kahle (DWeb Camp)

... but some are useful

Yanis Varoufakis on blockchain, the digital euro and being a class traitor

Zero Knowledge: Solution for Digital Identity? w/ Leo Fan

AI, Empire, and the Left's Missing Voice w/ Nick Srnicek

Harnessing Collective Intelligence better than LLMs w/ Sean Geobey

The Intelligence Curse w/ Evan Miyazono

Self-Repaying Loans and the Fight for Crypto's Soul w/ Scoopy Trooples

Sovereignty for Sale w/ Atossa Abrahamian

MEV Is Broken on Ethereum — Can Encrypted Mempools Fix It? w/ Luis Bezzenberger

Crypto and Stablecoins in Tanzania w/ Victor Muhagachi

Why he left crypto for AI w/ Nader Dabit

Collective action strategies in the age of AI w/ Nick Vincent from Data Leverage

Delete Coinbase! Use this instead... w/ UnhappyBen (Peer.xyz)

Public or Perish: Decentralized Municipal Socialism w/ Boris Mamlyuk

What if AI was Cooperative instead? w/ Tan Zhi Xuan

Did we learn anything from Anonymous? w/ Kate Stapleton | Devconnect 2025