This week we welcome Jesse Walden, who recently announced the launch of Variant Fund, which looks to support what he describes as “The Ownership Economy”. We discuss Jesse’s background as an artist manager, his early experiments with putting tools into artists hands to control the destiny of their work online, the opportunities that decentralised networks offer to help us transition from the centralised platform economy in music and culture more broadly, and how distributing ownership to users and artists can help us transition from atomised and individualist support systems like Patreon towards more ambitious collective, interdependent(!), models online and in real space.

Mat and Jesse get really deep into some of these ideas, and if some of the technical speak is unfamiliar stick with us as we spend a lot of the conversation cycling back to hopefully demystify it. We hope you enjoy it and have a great week!

Links

The Ownership Economy: https://variant.fund/the-ownership-economy-crypto-and-consumer-software/

MediaChain Labs: http://www.mediachain.io/

Saga: https://fallowmedia.com/2015/dec/mat/

Bitcoin: https://bitcoin.org/en/

Ethereum: https://ethereum.org/en/

Passion Economy and The Future of Work: https://a16z.com/2019/10/08/passion-economy/

Media 2020: Rise of the Renaissance Creator: https://medium.com/@jarroddicker/media-2020-rise-of-the-renaissance-creator-459daec4bc6b

Defector: https://defector.com/

Foundation: https://withfoundation.com/

Jonas Lund Token: https://jlt.ltd/

Building the Ownership Economy with Jesse Walden (Variant Fund)