The .club Club

Banning Nazis: A Policy and Technical Primer

How can we ban the Nazis? It seems like a straightforward question. But it's actually really complicated, as anyone that has tried to reason through it from first principles inside of a technology company or Big Sur VC synod can attest. Despite our best efforts Milo appears to still have access to Slack, so clearly there is nothing simple that could be done about this.

Much as with writing a proof demonstrating that P != NP, we need to accept that we may never achieve this goal in our own lifetimes. The best we may be able to hope for is to get a glimpse of what a unified theory of banning the Nazis will one day look like, centuries from now. This talk is my attempt at rendering such a glimpse.

I delivered this talk at the Aspen Forum on Technology and Policy Ideas Jamboree this year.

Hey! My name's Dan McKinley, thanks so much for having me today. #
So how could we ban the Nazis? #
Well, we could proactively remove the accounts of people known to be Nazis. #
Thanks! #