The Truth Machine
The Blockchain and the Future of Everything
If the world is going to transition from a centralized, analog economic system to one of online peer-to-peer markets, it will need a guide. With over three decades in journalism, business, and academia, Michael Casey has a deep understanding of the technological, geopolitical, and economic trends shaping business today. A senior MIT Media Lab advisor, and author of two definitive books on blockchain, Casey offers a comprehensive view of how decentralization and digital transformation are changing the world today.
An expert on digital media, financial innovation and global economics, Casey argues that society’s centrally managed gatekeepers – governments, journalists and corporations – are, in their current form, incapable of imposing order on the chaos of our decentralized, online existence. His talks present an alternative in which software and algorithms, rather than being a threat to our way of life, can supplement and improve these aging, analog institutions. Along the way, he helps people and businesses conceive of new models for economic success that bypass data-controlling middlemen and give them access to markets and audiences on their own terms. It’s a hopeful vision of “digital citizenship” that emphasizes transparency, objectivity and integrity so that human beings can thrive in what should be a golden age of creativity and collaborative innovation.
Casey is a Senior Advisor to the Digital Currency Initiative at the MIT Media Lab and Senior Lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. He’s also Chairman of the Advisory Board at CoinDesk and CEO and founder of Streambed Media, a next-generation video company focused on technology and society. A globetrotter who was born in Australia and has lived and worked on five continents, Casey has published five acclaimed books in ten years. These include, with Paul Vigna, The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money are Challenging the Global Economic Order, now in 15 languages, and its sequel, The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything. He spent more than two decades as a journalist, including 18 years with The Wall Street Journal, where he was a senior columnist covering global finance and economics. In addition to hundreds of bylines at WSJ, Casey has written for The Harvard Business Review, Foreign Affairs, The Washington Post, MIT Technology Review, WIRED, and many other publications.