careful optimism

written by: janabel

bringing CPR to life

earlier this year, i came back from spending a month in taipei with a group of 43 cryptographers, activists, designers, and artists working on privacy infrastructure for vulnerable communities. the middle months of my gap year have been a wild sprint – my co-organizers riley and ying tong and i conceptualized, fundraised, publicized, selected the residency cohort, and executed logistics all in the span of late november - late february. if you didn’t hear from me in a while, this is why! ><

one of the main things that we wanted to create was a container where all these diverse groups of people could interact, cross-pollinate ideas, and understand each other a little bit more. it was a social experiment to say the least, but one with a purpose — we wanted to ensure that privacy infrastructure was also being built for the people and communities with strong privacy needs.

obviously “privacy infrastructure” is incredibly broad, and this model of technological development does not apply universally, but it was our focus. and for selfish reasons, i personally wanted to create a community in which i could talk seriously about both the math behind cryptography as well as the looming rise of an increasingly authoritarian government entangled in all sorts of messy geopolitics, and understand these as intertwined problems to tackle together.

across our residency, we wanted to make sure there were i) builders who could do the technical work and execute on the the ideas, ii) designers who could ensure that the designs of technologies made sense and achieved their intended goals, as well as iii) community voices that could lead discussions on experienced privacy threats and give honest feedback on the potential risks of certain technological solutions.

while one month was far too short (and many residents felt this as well) to dig super deep, especially across such a diverse cohort, many smaller-scoped projects that came out of it (as already mentioned in blog post 0) — from research on anonymised digital ID systems; to prototypes for anonymous coordination; to tech policy design methodologies and experiments; to co-design frameworks. you can find all the cool work our residents have done here.

from pessimism to some kind of optimism

beyond the project outputs linked above, this residency also led to major shifts in my energy and worldview. while it was no doubt exhausting to Run Stuff, the main thing i’m bringing back with me from our residency in taiwan is a new sense of optimism.

(it also doesn’t hurt that taiwan is quite the model for participatory democracy, with influential ambassadors such as Audrey Tang and thriving civic tech communities like g0v (through which Audrey Tang aided the Sunflower Student Movement through digital broadcasting efforts) or vTaiwan’s Po.lis being used to push real legislation on Uber regulations), but that’s not the focus of this post.)

to be clear, this isn’t the first time i’ve ever felt optimistic. one of the first communities in which i felt a huge amount of optimism was when i attended SPARC in high school and met some of my best friends to this day. but that was a long time ago, and i have (secretly?) become an increasingly pessimistic person. after all, it’s much easier to be optimistic when you don’t know as much or haven’t experienced as much Not-So-Great stuff. it’s the same phenomenon that occurs when seniors laugh sadly at the innocent, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed freshman at MIT’s Campus Preview Weekend (CPW). it’s the same phenomenon when older adults tell students to stop thinking so hard about what kind of impact they want to make on the world, and to just recognize that a job is a job.

as i grew older and learned of more Criticisms that made sense to me — the optimism was even harder to dig up. from the weird incentives of academic institutions (where i would see talented researchers prioritize publication maximization over research motivations), to the dominating power of successful tech CEOs, to criticisms of generalized political views — i began to lose hope in being able to find the “right” spaces in the world. it seemed like most global issues people were talking about were intractable in the spaces i saw around me. time to time i drifted back into optimistic bursts — maybe i saw people working on an intersection of technology and civic society in a way that was energizing (e.g. civic tech communities like Taiwan’s g0v), maybe i saw a novel way to apply X technology for Y cause (e.g. market making strategies to sustain VC-independent clean energy grid optimization). but then they would start to feel far away, i would find new holes to poke at on either their side or mine, and i would feel a new sense of pessimism all over again.

in the context of creating this residency, this pessimism looked like a mild personal disillusionment with the cryptography space at large (which to be clear, has plenty of people i admire). i felt like either i) privacy was being treated as a vague ideology where end goals were not super clear, or ii) privacy technologies were being imagined and prioritized purely for financial incentives, or iii) privacy technologies were being designed without considering the privacy needs of communities who care about it because they need it the most (community and labor organizers, journalists, political activists, etc.).

of course, one must give credit where credit is due — a lot of technological advancements happen “by accident” (e.g. the contribution of the gaming industry to GPU development, now a core technological component of the modern AI revolution), and it is very hard to predict the effects of frontier technology anyways (see The Internet). similarly, these spaces that i became personally disillusioned with were no doubt fundamental to this residency being able to exist in the first place – whether on the technological side, the educational side, or the financial side. i also know plenty of wonderful souls in these cryptography spaces and plenty of souls who have quietly poured their money and hard work into major civic technology efforts for the public good – something that others may not know about from the outside, or sadly assume the contrary based on their external identity. still, i felt that something was missing for me in these spaces, whether it was a personally compelling narrative around why privacy matters and why cryptography helps, or a deeper connection to people with certain privacy needs.

but in the end, it’s far too easy to poke holes, focus on the negative, play the blame game, etc. — especially for someone like me. doing so only pushed me further into a cycle of doom. i’ve learned it’s much harder to poke holes in things and harness energy to do something about those holes. this second option i would call “careful optimism” – having a high affinity for both grounded truth-seeking and fantastic-ideal-reaching. i think some people use “cautious optimism” but that feels different, because the amount of optimism or standard for improvement is not less here. i believe careful optimism is a scarce but valuable resource.

in helping create this residency, i finally felt like i got to tap more into careful optimism. i felt liberated from the cynicism that i had been trapped in, and it was energizing to create what i felt was a missing space to fill the hole – a space bridging both technologists and privacy advocates, a space to collectively ground and develop privacy technology in new directions. it was hard and scary at times, and there are still a lot of unanswered questions, but doing it with other people who believed strongly in the vision made it more possible than i imagined <3.

while i’m celebrating this current optimism, i also remember reading plenty of short tech twitter takes that glorify things like “optimism” and “agency” in a way that historically made me feel worse about not “just being optimistic”. i don’t want this post to be more of that. one thing these short takes misses is a realistic path towards optimism in the first place. for me, the foundation of my experience building this residency was my high-trust friends and communities that heard my wild idea and told me that i should go for it – they helped incubate this wild idea in a safe space. <3. i would be lying if i said being optimistic was some magical switch i just decided to turn on. instead, it was highly environment-dependent and a communal effort. my friend yush sent me this post that sums it up pretty well – i remember reading it and being convinced, but it’s hard to fully understand something like this until you actually experience it.

aside from the exercise of creating the residency itself, i think my newfound optimism and reason to continue working in cryptography derives from i) discovering concrete examples of projects that energize me (like pushing scalable ZK integration for digital ID), ii) working with people who lead by example (hi ying tong and riley!!!) who i feel safe around, and iii) finding a community of people who share a healthy level of skepticism around “technology”-maxiing while continuing to be curious and eager to act and improve it in the ways they want to see.

all in all, i’m feeling re-energized, happy to be back in the US, and ready to get some work done :)

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A huge thank you to all the sponsors of the Community Privacy Residency for making this work possible!