After the BlockCLoud Apocalypse

In 2038 we have lived though a decade during which the world's global computational infrastructure undermined privacy and trust in virtually every aspect of our lives. The problems were seen far in advance, but it was commonplace belief that a combination of cryptography and more distributed responsibilty in systems---'blockchains for everything, and all hail the cloud'---would together restore what had been lost in the first decades of the 21st century. As it turned out, it was these very technologies that ended up destroying the privacy and trust we had left. In this review, we argue that the mistake collectively made was to think of privacy and trust as technological problems, when in fact they are properties of social and political systems. If we are to recover from what we call the BlockCloud Apocalypse, humans and machines are going to have to figure out how to build systems that support privacy and trust in society, rather than attempt to replace it with trust in technical validations. We propose a return to trust in humanitarian motives rather than technological supremacy.