interdependence
patreon
Interdependence 14: Jesse Walden (Variant Fund)
🕑 Added 2020-08-04 21:25:38 +0000 UTCThis 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/
Comments
lalalala bittorrent lalalala piracy lalalala ?napster (ghost of Christmas past)? lalalala ftp lalalala democratized access lalalala p2p lalalala capture value lalalala ;-) attribution has to have a place in this future if can't ensure tracing back to artist/creator. collection societies were and continue to be a problem for musicians - i received pro calls asking me to refuse to cooperate with competing/independent collection organizations. was originally all over a decentralized media blockchain-based payment tool. i agree, it was a heady time 2017 - then came the icos. no one cared about practical applications. crowdsourcing operations? interesting. "passion economy independence fetish" - ha! so early 2000s - yeah - have to get far away from that because it exposed people to extreme creative exploitation and the current gig economy worker abuse. even laid bare in crypto. might want to check out dada.art's Invisible Economy series - https://medium.com/@PowerDada/the-invisible-economy-value-flows-78d4d2d8227c. thank you!
Mat
yeah I mean the devil really is in the details between Proudhonism, Market Socialism, Guild Socialism, state communism etc etc. There are many schools of political philosophy that advocate for worker owned organisations, and it's an interesting debate worth looking into. I (Mat) lean towards pragmatism on these issues, so in a sense I try to separate my ideal political positions from what might in fact be the next best, most feasible, step towards a fairer arrangement, so long as the two aren't aggressively disagreeing with each other. I think that it is a really positive signal that one of the most vaunted recent developments in VC land is talking about community ownership, and a huge step forward from the common 'independent artist/media' arguments that keep being resurrected :)
I wonder how this functions in relation to the worker owner model of anarcho syndicalism and if they can learn from each other in a meaningful way. I just dont know enough about these two things to make an informed judgement.
