✘ DAO and the danger of collectivising
And: Misogyny in music; Revisiting "post-royalties"; Shill and be shilled; TikTok's paywall feature and creator fund; Where is the growth going to come from?
There are multiple ways to think about DAOs and what function they could and should fulfil. One way to think about this, is that it allows collectives to organize themselves around a shared initiative, as I argued recently. In the true sense of the concept, it mainly does this by automating decision-making by setting rules into code on the blockchain. Through those sets of rules, which are predetermined, it’s possible for a group of people to operate without the need for centralized authority. Of course, there’s a whole host of different voting mechanisms that allow the group of people involved a say in decision-making. However, that code does not represent human affectiveness or awareness. Just being a DAO, or calling your collective a DAO does not make it one. A lot of what I see around right now, is going headfirst into business as usual. Web3 seems to be revisiting nostalgic brands like Napster and Limewire instead of building daring new visions. It’s not that people don’t have the will to change things, but they fall into the same old, same old traps of the industry. Those traps lie around control and resources.
Control & anthropology
There’s a strand of anthropology that take the lessons of that research field and applies them to global power dynamics. This is not a recent development. For example, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri take this approach in their seminal book Empire from 2001. What you see is that in that first decade of this millenium, anthropologists took aim at anthropology through this focus on the state and various corporations and others’ power plays. This is a meta-level way of saying that when we talk about control, there’s usually only one way to take aim at those in control: by building something else that will ultimately absorb and reflect that same control. A DAO can be an example of this dynamic while at the same time it can feel like the antidote.
Building on the work of Hardt and Negri, Bruce Kapferer argued that in the 2000s,
“One major shift is the breaking away of oligarchic power away from the containing and regulative political order of the state. The development of the modern corporation has been of importance in this, further facilitated by the development of new technologies, especially relating to cyberspace, and new kinds of productive labor use.” (p. 8)
This is about such things as the decentralization of production and the growing impact of multiple factories, for example, creating unfinished products that get assembled elsewhere. It’s also about smaller groups of people and corporations grabbing control and taking power - away from the state in this case.
The collective struggle
Where Kapferer talks about the way oligarchic corporations continue to escape all the ways that states try to control them, he may as well talk about crypto. It’s the ideal example of the oligarchic corporation. Every single transaction, even every single interaction becomes financialized. However, this corporate mimicking, as Legacy Russel calls it so beautifully in his essay in the book Radical Friends, “has come together with the desire to collectivise.” But, he continues, “and then to commercialise as a move toward sustainability.” Even if, then, the initial motives are to collectivise against a current system of power, to create a sustainable future for that collective means to make a hard choice. On the one hand, that sustainability can come through finding ways to tap into that corporate business model yourself - thus becoming what you tried to change. On the other hand, sustainability could come from staying small, disregarding impact proportionally. There isn’t necessarily a right answer here, or a right path to take.
The first path is clear, we’ve seen it happen many times - even some of the historical DAOs of cooperativism shared this path. The second path is less clear. There, it’s all about identity, lifestyle, culture. Moreso than in the first path, there is clear respect for agency and autonomy. But then, you think about impact. And it’s a kind of strategic choice. Do you choose to scale your impact by utilizing some of the forms of financial power that you specifically collectivized against? Or, do you try to make an art out of your collectivizing? This is the collective struggle.
The danger zone
A collective, a DAO, a cooperative, it can all be meaningless if it’s basically a shell for something that doesn’t have a vision and a powerful emotional attachment. Integrate art into your process, but beware the dangers of making collectivising your art as it’s a sure fire way to step into all the traps that you’re trying to get away from. A DAO is a tool, the collective is a tool, but the power is to morph that into something that helps shape that vision, creating that emotional attachment. A DAO should simply support relationships between each part of a collective. Anything outside of that, and you’re in the danger zone.
A short rant from Yash Bagal and myself about the current, boring, state of Web3 music. It’s only 15 minutes, perfect for when you’re hanging up the laundry to dry, for example.
LINKS
Misogyny in music: ‘The imposter syndrome is created by the systems’ (Stuart Dredge)
“At the very start, the environment is set up in a way that is very unwelcoming to women, whether that be the childcare perspective, or just in the nature of sexual harassment, sexualisation and misogyny that’s present. It creates an environment where you don’t want to stay in the industry because it’s just generally unpleasant to be there. Or you’re a token or a novelty or you’re not taken seriously.”
Vanessa Threadgold (Cactus City Studio)
✘ Spread this far and wide, make sure we keep talking about, and - if you’re in the position to do so - make the change.
Revisiting “Post-Royalties”; Open Editions, and New Digital Rights (Dan Fowler)
“NFTs offer the potential of freedom from the incumbent industry, but by linking in copyright you are instantly handing over that freedom and opening yourself up to future liability. You are turning something that could be disruptive into something that is sustaining.”
✘ Definitely an inspiration for the above piece, and we need more people to get with this line of thinking and then act on it.
Shill and be shilled (Joey de Bruin)
“What I’ve noticed is that the biggest inhibitor to more opportunities flowing online is inauthenticity. We’ve been trained by social media to act like infomercial actors, even when we know that those platforms are designed to create noise, not connection.”
✘ In the creator economy, everyone shills. On social media, everyone shills. What are the places where you don’t shill yourself? That’s where you’ll make actual connections.
Where is the growth going to come from? (Geoff Taylor)
“The challenges attached to the three solutions above (increasing streaming prices + licensing new services + capturing more market share) perhaps explain why a fourth potential option to boost growth has now come into sharp focus: increasing the share of the pool of revenues that labels and their artists enjoy from streaming.”
✘As the former boss of the BPI in the UK, Geoff takes a bird’s eye view here. It’s a very worthwhile read which goes into the models mentions in this quote in quite a lot of detail.
TikTok is reportedly working on paywalled videos and a revamped creator fund (Mia Sato)
“The features reportedly in development are meant to incentivize — and expand — the pool of content creators that fueled TikTok’s rise in the first place. The company has gradually introduced more ways for influencers, celebrities, and creators to make money on the platform, including sharing ad revenue, but users so far have expressed disappointment with payouts coming from the company itself.”
✘As with all of the social media platforms, it’s important for TikTok to commit creators to them - as they are the main drivers of traffic. What’s particularly interesting about these new initiatives is that the paywall will allow creators to monetize their audiences through TikTok.
MUSIC
I went on a little Massive Attack binge over the weekend, listening to their albums in order of release. It’s a magic combination of excellent music and fantastic memories for me.