Interdependence

Last night we recorded a long and fun conversation with the Hugo award winning author and futurist Bruce Sterling. As you will hear Bruce has a great deal of knowledge about a great deal of stuff, and as well as his early writing helping to establish the cyberpunk movement, he was also among a handful of people who set the countercultural tone in San Francisco at the dawn of WIRED and the dot com boom. He is also a curator and expert on digital art. We discuss his being the first WIRED cover story, new information he uncovered on the relationship between Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, the first science fiction writer; a woman referred to as “mad Madge”, Qanon as Christian fundamentalist Scifi, Amazons beginnings as a sci-fi bookstore, ideas from early dot com times that people didn’t pick up but maybe should have done more with, and to close we have a fiery debate about the merits and pitfalls of the name of this podcast and a conversation with GPT-3.Bruce is a treat to talk to and a fountain of wild knowledge, we hope its fun to listen to. Have a great week. 

This week we are thrilled to bring a conversation with Amy C. Beal from UC Santa Cruz, whose book "New Music New Allies: Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification" not only gives us insight into the role that German state funding has played in American experimental art since the Second World War, but also offers clues as to the unique responsibilities and complications inherent to that continued funding to the present day. We get to discuss how the US State Department funded Jazz concerts throughout Europe, the CIA involvement in cold war soft power art games, and she shares some novel insights as to the level of internal discrimination posed towards female Avant Garde composers of the time. Amy is a deeply researched guest, and we hope that the contemporary implications of this conversation are clear to see.Have a great week!Links:New Music New Allies: https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Amy-C-Beal/dp/0520247558  

It’s a hot one! This afternoon recorded a discussion with Mixcloud CEO and DJ Nico Perez, and our studio was so hot that we had to keep all the windows open for our own health and also to keep the laptop from spontaneously combusting! As a result this recording is resplendent with the occasional child screaming or dog barking, but hopefully that adds to the experience :)Nico joined us to discuss Mixcloud's select feature for directly supporting artists, how their bold move to introduce payment splits between DJ’s and artists could potentially be taken further, club culture under COVID-19 and the new terrain of artist live streaming, and the importance of building strong foundations for strong scenes in opposition to the “one size fits all” model that is fortunately receiving its fair share of criticism online at the moment.Thanks again for supporting us!! We hope you are having a great week and are well hydrated!Links (feel free to request if we missed one!)Mixcloud Select: https://www.mixcloud.com/select/AFEM/Get Played Get Paid: https://www.associationforelectronicmusic.org/initiatives/ 

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!LinksThe 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-459daec4bc6bDefector: https://defector.com/Foundation: https://withfoundation.com/Jonas Lund Token: https://jlt.ltd/ 

For the second part of our conversation series with contemporary fiction writers we are over the moon to have a chat with Elvia Wilk, who released her debut novel “Oval” last year to great acclaim.Oval is a beautiful book that depicts a world at vastly different scales, not least addressing the contemporary role of the artist as embedded in wider economic systems. We discuss how art communities in the shifting economic landscape of Berlin inspired some of the books themes, the increasingly entangled relationships between artists and corporations, the hyperstitional anxiety of seeing gestures from marginal scenes influence wider culture from your bedroom while also simultaneously feeling very little agency over the future, and how some of her writing related to machine learning takes on new dimension in the wake of OpenAI’s release of the GPT3 API.Thanks again for listening and have a great week :)LinksRead Oval - https://softskull.com/dd-product/oval/"My Kid Could Do That" - https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/my-kid-could-do-that/

For this episode we welcome academic and DJ Larisa Kingston Mann from Temple University in Philadelphia, whose work analyzes the relationship between law, technology, sovereignty and creativity, especially focusing on the ways changing media technologies affect communities’ ability to flourishHer PhD thesis “Rude Citizenship”, soon to be turned into a book, looks at the ways in which Jamaican popular music practices challenge the colonial underpinnings of copyright law and of sovereignty itself. We discuss the economics of Jamaican sound system culture, the sticky topic of copyright as a flawed protection for creators, and proposals for a fairer DJ economy.We had a few sound issues that we tried to clean up for this episode, and Larissa is a generous and fun guest. I hope you enjoy it and are having a great week!Thanks again for the support :)On Larisa's recommendation, we donated to support The Attic Youth Center in Philly. The Attic Youth Center is the only organization in Philadelphia exclusively serving lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) youth. https://www.atticyouthcenter.org/LinksSonic Publics Booming at the Margins: Ethnic Radio, Intimacy, and Nonlinear Innovation in Media: https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/8591White Faces in Intimate Spaces: Jamaican Popular Music in Global Circulation: https://academic.oup.com/ccc/article-abstract/9/2/266/3979315   

Since the idea of this podcast first came to mind, we had imagined starting a thread of conversations with fiction authors and artists that in many ways touch on some of issues that we might be exploring in other conversations.Today we are thrilled to kick off this direction with a conversation with Tim Maughan, the author of Infinite Detail, winner of The Guardians best science fiction and fantasy book of 2019, and a gripping and prescient work that explores the simple question: what would happen if the internet stopped working?In this conversation we discuss sailing on a trade ship to China, the 21st century skills of reading how invisible networks dictate many aspects of our lives, conservatism and relevancy in science fiction, and how the book economy works, and could work better.Tim is a generous and funny guest, we hope you enjoy it! There is also a weird noise that occasionally appears on Tim's side, we tried to pull it out but it made the audio very muffled. Hope it isn't too distracting!Links!Buy Infinite Detail! https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374175412DRONEGOD$ manifesto: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-U7F5X84bj0 

This week we talk to Director at PRS for music and Gomez songwriter Tom Gray, who, through the #brokenrecord hashtag and other advocacy work has been championing the need for reform the way that streaming services work, and reform copyright policy to better protect songwriters and producers.We discuss the case for user centric streaming over the current pro-rata payment model, what is was like to witness the transition from sales to streaming as a successful touring band, and how, at a time when the song is earning the least amount it has ever earned, the expenses to develop the songs are being placed on the songwriter and producer more than ever before by labels and streaming. There are also some stories that border on ASMR, Tom has by far the best microphone we have encountered doing the podcast so far.Links (if we ever mention anything in the pod you want a link to, leave a comment!)Tom on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mrtomgray?lang=enPRS: https://www.prsformusic.com/Ivors Academy: https://ivorsacademy.com/ 

Kate Crawford, founder of the AI Now Institute and a leading voice on the political implications of AI, dives into the hidden complexities of artificial intelligence. She discusses how platforms like Amazon Echo exploit human and ecological resources and critiques the power dynamics of platform capitalism. The conversation also covers data-driven hiring biases, the impact of algorithmic feedback on communication, and the socio-economic disparities amplified by technology. Crawford's insights provide a thought-provoking look at the intersection of AI, society, and political power.

In this episode we welcome David Turner, writer and founder of the Penny Fractions newsletter, which holds a critical and often political lens to the latest developments in the music industry.In this episode we discuss the music industry response to Black Lives Matter, positive infrastructural proposals that could lead to long lasting and meaningful diversification, the meme music economy, lessons from ad hoc protest gatherings and sitting on a small plane with Radiohead and Silento.David is a deeply thoughtful and fun guest, we hope you enjoy this one!LINKS:Penny Fractions newsletter (sign up!): https://www.getrevue.co/profile/pennyfractions/issues/penny-fractions-why-did-we-pause-the-show-255631Black Teens are Breaking the Internet and Seeing None of The Profits by Doreen St.Felix:https://www.thefader.com/2015/12/03/on-fleek-peaches-monroee-meechie-viral-vinesMusic Workers Alliance: https://musicworkersalliance.org/Aziz Mian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eX9SsfK6B24Silentó - Watch Me (Whip/Nae Nae) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjW8wmF5VWc