> I did not argue that everyone should live in California

Fair enough. I still don't think that "see California" is a great argument to make to people who are suffering at the hands of the state throughout, for example, the rest of the USA. We have 2 million people in prison; nobody thinks that's OK.

> we need the blockchain, as if free speech and democracy were foregone conclusions

If you are sitting in a prison cell because you had a skin color which the state regards as the wrong one to use a particular plant or compound, then you might indeed feel forsaken by democracy.

> So you either live in a place where you can fight for your right at a political and social level, and don't need the blockchain (eg. USA), or you live in a place where you cannot easily affect policy

Do you think it's literally only those two possibilities? If that's true, then I understand and agree with your argument.

If instead, however, much of the world is in some gray area in the middle, then technologies which tend toward subversion of illegitimate state activity seem to me to be a welcome evolution for those who wish to help the political configuration in which they find themselves toward the former and away from the latter.

You've presented a binary choice, but the reality is actually much more nuanced and complex then this. It is not a zero sum game, we can have blockchain solutions that are part of a wider push toward Web3 technologies where data is decoupled from the application layer, and this delivers more control at the user level over their identity and the use of their data. Most people don't/won't care to manage their data permissions and will opt into 3rd party centralized schemes where someone or business does this for them. Blockchain technology is part of a larger shift toward building agency for us as humans within our cyberphysical systems. In order for AI to truly benefit humanity, we have to include all of humanity in the process of training models, and deciding what algorithms we wish to manage various decisions for us on a daily basis. This has been happening for a while (algorithms managing decisions that effect us) but without any meaningful transparency. Most people will only care about the outcome, a la Cambridge Analytica, but in order to solve these problems we need some type of framework to manage our identity and connect that identity to our apps, through a portal that isn't owned by a company. Open source software gives us a lot of the tools and protocols to make this happen, and Blockchain technology, specifically self-sovereign identity, and the ability to link our identity to data and smart contracts, these are essential pieces to building out the web for the next generation. Blockchain tech was overhyped beyond measure, most ICOs were scams or will fail anyway, but the dust is now settling, as regulation reigns in the bad actors. The end result will unfold not in a huge explosion of the one killer blockchain app, but rather slowly, over the next 5 years, as part of a larger shift toward Web3 decentralized architecture, in combination with the existing cloud services that don't need to sell user data to deliver their value.