In The Embrace Of The Ledger: Art On The Blockchain

We've been hearing that the future of music is streaming. This may be so, it certainly looks that way. A future in which music is streamed and not owned looks to be here, but its current mode of delivery through central services that operate with heavy costs, from licensing to data storage to bandwidth is an animal that feeds off venture capital and music creators with a voracious appetite and has yet to prove profitable. Anyone who doesn't limit their listening habits to the Disney assembly line of future nervous breakdowns has been witness to much hand-wringing, rending of teeth and gnashing of garments or sommat over the economics of culture creation dissipating like a fog in the mid-day sun.

Observing the tense negotiations between indie labels and aggregators with Youtube, Pandora and Spotify many issues were brought up like a bad breakfast and chewed like a bitter, ever-repeating cud that couldn't be spat out. Politicians were lobbied, Youtube has yet to unveil their music subscription service and labels joined the streaming bandwagon, withdrew their releases from streaming and few of us would be surprised to see our finest artists show up as our roofer's apprentice or begging change downtown.

In the current mode of business there is no way artists could ever get a fair share of revenues created through music unless they have a proportionate ownership in all the companies involved. I had thoughts that perhaps what little cash we artists bring in should go directly into stock in Apple and Amazon, or establishing funds that invest in not-yet-public streaming startups to get a cut of the middle man's always disproportionate share of the still enormous amount of capital flow generated by music. Maybe one thing that prevents this is what music careers and startup tech companies have in common: the high early mortality rate of music careers and tech startups. You're taking the small gains from one high-risk endeavor and placing a bet on an uncertain proposition in another. But from the point of view of the middle men, maybe giving artists an equity stake would be a better position to negotiate lower rates. This would be a reversal of capitalist practice, though, for the hands that got dirty making the widgets have always gotten the smallest share of the value generated. And one may ask if what could happen to a successful cabal of small to mid-sized labels with ownership in delivery infrastructure be but another hegemonic gatekeeper.

Occupy Wall Street Update

Things are still unfolding so rather than give a full continued analysis now (I gave a perspective earlier here, which was picked up on Disinfo), I'd like to share a couple videos I've come across in the past few days.


There are many, many more examples of footage like this on YouTube if you look around. Girls getting penned up and maced, a guy getting stomped and dragged off.



Here's my thing: it seems to me that these protests are, relatively speaking few people, and that if they were left alone they could get their message out but it would likely fizzle away without too much incident. But the more the NYPD ratchets up the pressure, the more likely that something is going to snap. Do they not realize how close we are to a flashpoint in many areas in this country? Or do they know it and want that so the "story" can be about violent mobs?

Also, check out this commentary from the Guardian:

Why are people occupying Wall Street? Why has the occupation –despite the latest police crackdown – sent out sparks across America, within days, inspiring hundreds of people to send pizzas, money, equipment and, now, to start their own movements called OccupyChicago, OccupyFlorida, in OccupyDenver or OccupyLA?
There are obvious reasons. We are watching the beginnings of the defiant self-assertion of a new generation of Americans, a generation who are looking forward to finishing their education with no jobs, no future, but still saddled with enormous and unforgivable debt. Most, I found, were of working-class or otherwise modest backgrounds, kids who did exactly what they were told they should: studied, got into college, and are now not just being punished for it, but humiliated – faced with a life of being treated as deadbeats, moral reprobates.
Is it really surprising they would like to have a word with the financial magnates who stole their future?
Just as in Europe, we are seeing the results of colossal social failure. The occupiers are the very sort of people, brimming with ideas, whose energies a healthy society would be marshaling to improve life for everyone. Instead, they are using it to envision ways to bring the whole system down.
But the ultimate failure here is of imagination. What we are witnessing can also be seen as a demand to finally have a conversation we were all supposed to have back in 2008. There was a moment, after the near-collapse of the world's financial architecture, when anything seemed possible.

Vote with your money

The most powerful vote you get in this society is with your $: don't look for "deals", look at sustaining the business models you stand behind.

Though in a less black and white sense you can also vote for one business over another who are equally "conscientious", but where you prefer the methodology or even aesthetic of one over another. My point is we should think less just about the immediate personal benefit (this costs less here) and more about the systems we are sustaining and starving.

An example that comes to mind... there was this awesome cafe with a mini free library, essentially, hookahs-- an awesome place to hang out in what was otherwise a cultural wasteland. But it died because people would buy one coffee & stay 8 hours, whereas at starbucks people buy & leave, buy & leave. Everything about the business, from architecture on out, is constructed to re-enforce this model. You can say the biz model of #1 was flawed, but put the emphasis on the consumers consciousness of their participation in a system, and the resposibility becomes ours.

In other words, if we live in a corporate cultural wasteland, it's only because we have collectively chosen for it to be so, albeit in a passive, seemingly unintentional way. It is the aggregate of seemingly tiny choices that often determines the large-scale changes. The purpose of marketing is ultimately to fulfill consumer need- biz acts to make all elements of the process homogenized & easily reproducable because then it is easier to predict & strategize-- but that only works when human behavior is predictable. This makes cultural homogenization a benefit from a corporate standpoint-- and this ties into a sub-topic of the marketing takeover of the counterculture but that we will return to on another day...

All of this is toppled if individuals are unique, unpredictable & think for themselves. So those traits are poison from the standpoint of big biz sustainability. But for the sustainability of humanity, & the planet--- see where I'm going?

I'm disinterested in showy protest that accomplishes nothing. real change is accomplished through the cumulative, day-to-day actions of everyone.

This is a topic that comes up in the presently fragmented notes and essays I'm currently calling The Immanence of Myth (PDF).

A quote from a relevant section on the topic:

All products and their associated myths, (people in advertising speak fairly openly about developing the “story” of the brand, which is the brand's myth), have to find a home within the lives and thoughts of the market. If people demand organic products, companies will meet that demand. Though the proliferation of Yoga, organic food, specialty food products, high quality imports, and the like are being supplied to an increasing degree by the “evil empire,” it is also a sign that consumers have much more power in their hands than they realize. In fact, within the market framework, they have all the power. They just don't realize it, and often don't seem to have the willpower or where-with-all to wield it.67

(FN 67 Along with that power, of course, comes a responsibility that most consumers are unwilling to take on. For instance, though it is perhaps easy to complain about the quality of Hollywood movies today, if people stopped going to see them, Hollywood would very quickly work to develop a new formula. If people recognize that, good or bad, within a capitalist society your dollar is possibly an even stronger form of “voting power” than what is exercised in the voting booth. How many “green” Americans complain about Wallmart and then go there the next day?)

Instead, many people live as shills to various corporate myths because they quietly choose to. If your life revolves around how the shoes you wear define you as a person, or which line of body spray is most likely to get you laid, you’ve turned yourself into a patsy. The only way out of this cycle for the consumer is to
take control of their choices. The only way out for the myth-maker is to create, and forget about trying to be original.

Blagojevich Blog-o-bitch

Many have commented that Blagojevich's $4500 bail is something of an outrage, amidst so much financial corruption. However, this misses what I think is really going on here. Society pays lip service to certain moral codes, but often rewards something more akin to barbarism. The fact that we need a government at all is ample proof of that- if any of you are familiar with Hobbes' Leviathan, you know where I'm going with that.

The "oversight" provided by government creates an infinite regress when corruption sets in, as it always does. That is, you have people overseeing that something is done properly, but then you need people to oversee them, and people to oversee those people. You have different groups within the same government listening in on each other, and an inordinate amount of money and energy wasted on these different agencies - all rife with varying amounts of corruption - trying to get a leg up on the other.

From time to time, however, a whipping boy is necessary in the name of those morals that we pay lip service to. This is nothing new- in fact many Pagan societies ritualize this "whipping boy" in various literal ways, or translate it directly into the bloody sacrifice. (Though in most of those cases the sacrifice has to be pure / virginal, not an exemplar of the corruption that embodies business-as-usual within the society.) At the moment, it happens to be that guy whose name I find really painful to pronounce, or even type out. Blog-o-whatever. But if, after eight years under Bush, you think the buck stops there.

Think again.

And if you are thinking to yourself, well that's interesting James, but this has little-or-nothing to do with independent media... well, you're right.
Fuck it.