I'm doing well. Hello.

Yeah. Thank you. When I reflect on how I got involved in the Resonate project and, its relationship to technology, I think about a couple of other, sort of times that I fell through a magic doorway into different, technological situations or conditions. And, a lot of it goes back to in my late teens and I'm old. So my late teens were occurring pretty much in sync with say the hardcore punk rock tradition, out of the West Coast Of The United States. So in the early 1980s, I happened to, attempt, to be a college student in this town called Olympia, Washington. And there were very interesting, conditions there around nineteen eighty and eighty one, where, the music director of the local, of the community radio station had instituted or helped with the community members that supported that, that radio station, that was, that was, facilitated by the college. There are a lot of these around the country or around the world. But in this particular case, John Foster, got the community members to support a policy of, 80% of their music content would come from independent sources rather than the major labels, the major corporate sources. And it wasn't a 100%, it was 80%. So it was a preponderance. And what that, what was interesting about that in one case was that it was not an aesthetic qualification. It wasn't about being obscurantist or highfalutin in one's taste. All genres were still open to be played, but it was a, it was, it was really a critical, boundary drawn around the social, and economic conditions of the production and distribution of the music that was that was being targeted. So that happened in the mid seventies. And so by the time I got to, Olympia and, like I say, I messed around as a student, for about a year there, before music swept me away and the possibilities of working with my friends to, create a world other than the Ronald Reagan mutually assured destruction that was popular, and mainstream at the time. Looking for other ways to organize socially, and communicate, through art and so forth. Anyway, when, what, what, so what I encountered there after, since that happened, the policy started, I think, in 1976. By the time I got there five years later, what that meant was there was an amazing archive of otherwise difficult to find music in one room. And it's it's hard for people to understand what that meant, pre Internet. But but geographical location and what whether you had access to a room where there was cool stuff and people that knew about it and could communicate about it and help you quickly find what your interest or what work may need to be done. Or, or, Hey, you like, you like this artist, you might like that artist. It happened that there was a community built around this archive of otherwise difficult to find material, that really turned me on to the possibilities of music. And,

Yeah. I got it. Like ten years ten years before the internet. Sure.

Yeah. It was I mean, it was consistent with the you know, really, it was it's as far as I can tell, this, this ethos, this, this kind of critical, analysis of, of culture, you know, was identified as independent. And so, it happened that John Foster, not only did he, you know, instigate this policy, which which then provoked this archive and community, but but it was a it was a it was a tactical decision against, corporate monopoly, in terms of, media culture. It was a it was saying, let's have the smaller rather than the monoliths, which already dominate at that time, it was tossed around that 98% of all music on all broadcast on all radio stations. And again, we had no Internet. We had no other other means of of except, you know, No SoundCloud. The radio. Radio was as as broad a, a distribution of information as was available. Or the mail. Actually, I was gonna key off that the technology that was really fascinating to me and that I got involved with with my friends was cassette tapes because they could be recorded and then mailed all over the world. And there was there were mail networks sending music around the world. Because what was amazing to find when you go into an archive like this is that those sense culture doesn't happen as cause and effect. That's that's one of my theories. Is the cultural change happens as a matter of grammar, of linguistics. Like, as you have a grammatical structure that allows for new conceptions, those conceptions occur independent of geography. So what what we got to see in, this time in the early eighties with with the punk rock culture, and it could have been any genre, any style, just that was something that young people had taken up in their time. So you if you wanted to be connecting with people who were 20 years old in, Moscow and Berlin and, Lawrence, Kansas, all over the world, it was actually through, cassette tapes and, and radio stations that were playing cassette tapes and so on. That was, so that was the decentralized technological innovation coupled with a particular, critical analysis of media culture, that I happened to stumble into as a young person. And it just, it just felt right, it just felt right to me because kind of the how, you know, the family I grew up in was anti Vietnam War and, and all those kinds of things, that we relate to the '60s. And so in general, as a young person, I just, I thought the world was not organized as, as it should be, and so was looking for alternatives. And rather than, you know, you know, at the time the adults elected Ronald Reagan to run our country, and I know around the world we had, you know, Margaret Thatcher was similar, this this, this conservatism, just didn't make any sense. It just seemed like a dead end project. And honestly, now it's almost forty years later, and I've I've I've been convinced and been able you know, I've been working on this idea that there are alternative not only there are alternative ideas, but that the best ideas emerge from decentralized, community and cultural context. That, you know, it's basically it's, it's the intelligence of a swarm, rather than trying to have a particular,

between people like that? You know, it all came together because of the people that happened to be in my town. So so and this archive that it accumulated. So it's easy to find out where the other nodes of the network were because you could just look at a record and see the address of the people that had put it out. And and again, the qualifier was that these weren't these weren't the monopolistic, distribution networks. These were, these were the people handling the other part of the business, which is necessarily I don't know. It's it's it's not necessarily anti capitalist, but it's it's a critical capitalism. It's about small businesses. It's about independent start ups. And and I I really prefer to look at those opportunities and kind of try to disaggregate, you know, what's the real prop when when someone starts a record label and and and as, you know, it's gotten even less likely that you're going to be able to sustain yourself, you know, the question of sustainability can be divorced from the question of ownership of property. Right? We don't need like, we could probably figure out, we don't need to go whole hog enclosure and destroy the commons. You know, there may be intermediate steps where, if I could figure out how to sustain the operation through through, a a crowd, then I could continue to pursue something which is unlikely as a business project, but but valuable as a social and cultural project. Right? And it happens that emergent culture capital I mean, I'm sorry to kind of just jump around here and and go to some of my themes, but, like, capital has no creativity. Capital is just a number, is just a pile of money. It it it doesn't know what's going on. People, as as agents in the culture, human beings are where, the culture emerges from based on their kind of iterative capacity to play with whatever the existing cultural and linguistic field is around them. And so where emerging culture always comes from the relatively less supported, capitalized, regions of culture. That's where because you have to to survive, you have to be creative, and the creativity spills over into other places. And so, what we've seen in the music business is really very much a colonial project where you you've got the fort full of money and and property relations all established, and then you try to send, scouts. They're actually called scouts that go out to try to find out what's, you know, what's going on out there in the world. What are the kids up to? The kids are up to something not to be commercial, but just to have fucking fun in a in a world in crisis. And if you figure out what they're how they're able to sustain themselves and produce something interesting, then you bring that back to the fort and, and then they run out with attorneys to to make property out of it. Now I'm all for trying to figure out how can creative people give most give all of their time just in, you know, confronting the existential crisis of being alive, which is how do we support the people that are working on the next iterations of our culture and those particularly which may be about, you know, supporting the Earth, like, particularly through the crisis of the next 10. How do we support those people so they can just imagine and orient themselves and aggregate in community as best they can? How do we support that? There we you know, that's not necessarily a small business model, you know? But, I've gone off on this this tangent just, you know, to take it back to this historical point in time. So these this is what this is kind of what the benefit was of having this critical framework of we're not going to deal with corporate structures. We're going to deal with everybody that's handling the the the edge cases, the the the 5% of the business that's not under these corporate distribution networks. Is that 5% is the place where emergent culture is is going to be found, and that's what, you know, that's so we started to have fun with that. Now within that particular context, I was very fortunate in this little town, where people a couple of years older than me who, again, the decentralized culture of the time, you know, making your own fanzine. You know, we started to have we had copy machines that we could go to. These the the you didn't have to set type, you know, these so to watch these kinds of, basically, it it permitted new voices to be able to, spread their information over greater geography, because the barrier to entry was reduced. And so then you got then you get to curate among these different voices and sources. And, you know, so I was very lucky to kind of stumble into a really interesting conversation of new people, with new things to say, taking advantage of new technologies. The point I'm really trying to make about this in 1981 February is that is that, you know, I experienced it again when I was, you know, basically running operations for the Sub Pop record label, which, you know, I which which happened because I first encountered Sub Pop ten years previous in 1981 because it was a fanzine that, a fellow named Bruce Pavitt, who happened to be we became friends and, in in the kind of the the social media of of my little region of the world. And and and sub pop, you can tell by the name of being underground pop, was, you know, the people that were behind there's a magazine John Foster was the editor that I mentioned before as the music director at KAOS FM, had a magazine, that that or he he was the publisher of a magazine that was also a fascinating decentralized project called OP Magazine, which was committed to all genres of music, coming out worldwide, through independent distribution means. Bruce Pabot was a person who really liked pop music, but looked at how could you you know, what was the underground pop? What was so he was interested in the tradition of rock and roll or whatever that was. You know, 1982, we you know, you might call it post punk now. At the time, we thought it was we called everything punk. Since then, people have kind of parsed it, you know, whatever. But, but Bruce was very interested in that tradition and, the social organization that could come from, accessible, loud, disruptive music forms. And he was collating them and collecting them for his fanzine, which called Sub Pop, Subterranean Pop, which I think his first edition was in 1979. I met him in '81. And and by '83, that was a he was alternating the print publication with a cassette of curated material. There were other cassettes. You know, he an influence there was a magazine out of Australia called Fast Forward, which also was, I think identified as what they called a cassetteazine. Or it's like a, like cassette was naturally, I don't know if you're familiar with the, I think it's Zammizdat, was a, is kind of like a, was a decentralized fanzine form in Russia, before, you know, in the final stages. So the cassette was was perfectly designed to be a kind of zamistat

Yeah. Yeah. A fanz a fanzine, a fanzine means I mean, they they actually they go back in history, but they were always, they were published well, a fanzine now, a zine, zine culture, for those who don't know, is just, any any, like, independently produced publication. Using maybe using cop copiers. Nowadays, I mean, it's all it's basically like a physical blog. People know what a nowadays, people might know what a website or a blog is. That might be their natural go to. But if you made a physical artifact of, like, just I'm just so and so and here's my idea or here are my friends, you know, again, before the Internet, just doing this kind of physical curation of culture and making the artifact and then because distribution was a problem. So you had to get that effort, make a physical artifact, and then distribute that physical artifact around. And that's not to say that the Internet isn't also physical. It's just, you don't have to think about it as much, because we're just using, electron calls. Well, again, I don't I don't wanna get that's kind of not to say that there aren't electrons in paper, but, I'm trying to be very Slightly different. Yeah. Slice in my in my in my language. The difference is culture. I mean, this is what's interesting. This is this this is I think it's really this is a great time for people to reflect on what culture is and culture because culture, I think culture is the it's about time. Culture is about instantiating a symbol, it a kind of a constellation of of symbols, in such a way that it can be, distributed over time and space. Like

Yeah. And not even yes. Yes. And I would say it's not even a human attribute, but we see, it's about signaling, and signaling meaning. And but but but having your dictionary at this point in time and in this place being readable in another time and place. And that process by which you do that, it's it's materiality is, is the materiality of culture and then the, the content, the the kind of the the symbol meaning that gets transmitted, that's the, oh, what is that? That's that's, that's that's the content of culture, I guess. And both those both those of those things need to be realized. The point is, the reason why this makes matters to me, and I'm I'm sorry that I'm kind of roaming all over the place, is that culture I think you get culture as a byproduct of a high degree of cognitive processing. And so, you you you know, you can see populations of primates, and there are different animals that we see in the wild. Bees. Bees transmit, information about, like, their their dance, they've learned. Their dance back in the hive is the distance and, direction of a pollen source that they they bring back to the hive and they communicate. And so these kinds of, like, what what the advantage might be of extending beyond your body and using information from the world and then conveying it to your community, those things are organic and ancient. They're millions of years old. It just happens that we have the equipment as humans that we have at this time now. So the point of that is that we don't culture is not a commodity. People don't realize that. Culture comes before. The commodity game, you know, how to get how to extract resources through our modern civilization and these these practices that we've evolved, that that that's that can be interesting. It's actually headed toward a very destructive place by all measures. So we need to change the gamification of that economy, but that's a those are legacy economic practices on top of something which is organic and ancient and, and available to us. So my my way of thinking, has been that, you know, if we can turn on this organic cultural capacity to the people that are leading in imaginative ways and support them, that's that's the best way, to try to make it through this extinction gap that we're facing as a on a planetary scale. And it just happens that for me, music has been that like, to me, music is when you take that problem of getting outside your body and taking information to the world, it's when you take that kind of technical problem and add a layer of lyricism to it, add poetry to it, add ambiguities of meaning, but embrace the consonants and the possibilities. Like, that's that's really what that's one of the qualities of music. It's also just an incredibly efficient way for people to, exteriorize their interior interior conditions. So when there's a new way of feeling in the world, music can transmit that very, very, very efficiently. And so that's why music is always tied with new movements and zeitgeist. This thing called, you know, the spirit of the time, is often, transmitted, because music is incredibly, efficient architecture. You're just vibrating. It is architecture. It's spatial. We call it volume. When we turn up the knob, we increase the volume of the vibrations. But we're just vibrating air, so it's it's one of the most efficient architectural, interventions possible. And that's why it's that those efficiencies are what have drawn it to me. And it's been interesting, you know. So I've been able to play around with, navigating through the world now for forty years, and I I owe it to, you know, some of these insights, of critical intervention around culture back back to the eighties. And then, obviously, it happens in my community. I met a guy named Bruce Pavitt who, met up with a guy named John Poneman in Seattle in the late eighties. Started something called a record label, which was a a way a business operation to sustain a community of people doing work around artists that was that was on its own terms. Did, you know, a couple of dollars were put together by some people, but it also was based on subscriptions. It really was a crowdsource format. There was a thing called single of the month club. You know, so all of these you know, I I think it's really helpful. One of the things that somebody who's old like me could offer is that there are, there are social formations that kind of rhyme with other social formations. The world is not entirely new again simply because of a technological intervention. There are there are analogies to be drawn, and antecedents to be seen that have emerged from the culture. And, I do think it's relevant that, you know, as an independent label, you know, Sub Pop did not get grants from any government. I mean, Bruce earned credit back in the early eighties from a public institution as a student, and there's no doubt that there was a lot of, state sponsored resources that helped, the radio state and all those things. But my point is that it was it was, it was, I think I think it's handy to kind of keep a certain distance from these ideological tropes and just get shit done And use ideology as you as it might be useful, to identify different potential allies and, and and and and sometimes when people go deep on ideology, there's baggage that comes along, and you've gotta kinda check up check so you it's a it's a kind of indicator of what baggage other people might be carrying, which depending on your capacity to engage them, maybe you can educate them and they can leave some baggage behind and you can still work together. You know, my point anyway, I'm just kind of I've tried to steer it toward the

No. No. No. No. I no. I respect I respect your courage. No. No. No. I I mean I'm not fair. I I'll tell you what. One of the things that occurred to me, because I've been I've been looking at cooperatives more, you know, I've been I've been researching and and now I'm involved as the executive of a cooperative. And one of the things that I that I find very satisfying about the cooperate, are a number of things about the cooperative form that I that I like. But, one of them is that, you have a membership and you have a project, and your the practice is we're doing this project, and we're going to sustain the project, and you're transparent and open about what you're doing, and what we're going to do when we do the project. So you've got kind of it's a very it's a kind of, it's a small frame. And it's where people are participating in it as much as they wanna participate. Now and and practice itself is the practice itself is independent of ideology that the others might bring. And, you know, one of the things and I and again, since we're we're talking, you know, to people that are interested in the combination you know, some intersection of Blockchain and socialism here. There are many things that are very, like, if I could have a project, like, I've just noticed that the the people that want more state and more more public public, public institutions and so forth, and public guarantees and protections, particularly for, oppressed people and so on, and think that we need something socially to support that, they tend over to the to the socialist side. And then people who think that that in itself is pernicious, and they're very wary of states going out of control, they often look to to a non non statist solution, and some of them end up wanting to talk about themselves as libertarians or whatnot. And they they hang out with libertarian friends. I think that whole discussion is completely beside the point if you're making a a project that is serving all people and is open and transparent. And, but there, you know, there, what it matters is if you're really serving those people or whether, like, are they actually in the room with you doing the project? That's the next level for me. And, you know, that's where my my attention is, right now for our project is, you know, making just finding out what's out there, and then, you know, and so, for example, it's been great to build with, black socialists in The United States. Twitter handle black socialists, who are, you know, taking on, the racist institutional structures that are foundational in The United States, and looking and building cooperative and supporting cooperatives like, Cooperation Jackson out of, Jackson, Mississippi. You know, so cooperative community structures based, you know, in, with a critical stance opposing, some of these legacy structures. To me, like, if if we can be facilitating the members of organizations like that in our work, facilitating and, you know, that they they wanna they wanna work with the project, that to me is an indicator that, we're beginning to have the right community built, that if we sus among ourselves what are the structures to apply from this community, that we'll be heading in a in a interesting direction? To me, those are really interesting questions. Sorry. I've I've gotten way off the field, but but just trying to kind of hopscotch my way through to, give you some sense of context about,

Sure. So, Resonate, is a project, originating in 2016, founded by, Peter Harris, who was, who launched a crowdsource project, to basically build a cooperative, streaming platform. That was successful. Several 100 people, many of whom were involved in music, contributed through the, crowdsource initiative. By 2017, the, organization was registered as a, for profit cooperative business, meeting, the structural obligations required, by, The Republic Of Ireland, which is so we're based in Dublin, and, but which is an EU, territory. Yeah. And, project got underway. And then, along the way, there was a blockchain cooperative project based in Seattle, where I am, called Rchain, that, very interesting project based on, an alternative to lambda calculus, just some really interesting principles at the heart of that project. And it was also interesting that it was organized as a cooperative. And it just happens that because of some friends of mine in the town, I I, I heard about this and, like cassettes in 1981 and like the Internet in 1991 when I was, at Sub Pop and got us on, got us on the Internet, it was like, oh, okay. Well, the nerds have been building something interesting. There there there's some really interesting services and capacities here. And it happened that so I came in and was introduced to Resonate, through, through the the technical, project of of that time, which was, 2018, and then met Peter and so forth, and started to understand that that through, distributed ledger technologies, Some really interesting new services were available for locking in information in a transparent way. And also, identity, self sovereign ID as a service, really began to fascinate me and how that might relate to, trust, and and the the the the individual participants in a community could build, information networks, with their peers, through trust in a in a way that, was was was peer to peer based and symmetrical, not supporting the asymmetries of so many other, projects out there, basically Web two point o. So like I had been earlier, I was kind of inflamed with these, ethical and social possibilities. And, so Resonate is a community, or that has its origin in that crowdsource project. We are a website, we're we're cooperatively managed streaming service. That is to say, we provide a service similar to, say, Spotify. But rather than being, you know, a mask for surveillance capitalism, we're we're building we're intending to build, based on an peer to peer identity platform that's that's entirely opposed to that, framework. And we're democratically managed by our members. We have different stakeholders, where we have artists, listeners, developers, and workers, collaborators on the project or the different membership categories. At present, we are about 1,500 members, and we have, I believe close to, 10,000, artist, artist sources. That's not necessarily all artist members because we have made alliances with distributors and some labels. So they've made their the rights that they have to share through the network is part of where our content is. We have, among all these other ethical things that I find interesting, and are sort of the groundwork of the framework, we have a business proposition which is, basically we pay, we pay about double Spotify's rate to stream. Every play through our network is paid. Bandcamp does amazing work for the community, but they're not based on a streaming model. So, the the the streaming that occurs off of Bandcamp is strictly promotional. They're selling whole units. We're we're trying to, make a sustainable business model out of, out of micropayments. The way it works is, you don't have to be a member, but you, to be a user of the music platform, well, for one, it's it's free to artists. So artists, can, become members simply by uploading, their own content. We can't handle any kind of sample. It has the people represent their own, their own work. And then as listeners, you basically open a open a wallet of, €5 and, you you then spend a really small amount of money for first each listen, and it doubles each time you listen. So as you kind of connect with a piece of music, you end up, pay each each pay to play, or stream to own is what we call it. But, each each doubles until essentially, it's kind of based on the old iTunes model at about, at about €1. You've you've obtained download rights to that content. The, the artist has received, a euro for the content. And like I say, it when we look at since 2007 when we opened our streaming service, if you look at the payment made for every play, there have been, at this point, over a million plays, the the average rate of payout is double the Spotify rate. So Right. Right. There's there's so, anyway, we so, you know, I guess what I've spoken to is sort of my own trajectory and history and enthusiasm for the cooperative model and for this this case. But those those are the basic, basic terms. And, you know, we're we're working with other like minded organizations and, you know, basically I think music is the magic doorway through which, we build a cooperatively a cooperative world economy and, a democratic, economic space, that we all could participate in. Yeah.

and tossing it to the side, maybe? I'm gonna say that that, you know, a, we're not competing with Spotify, because, we've I'm I'm really interested in that active listener. So we're not interested in like, there is a there's a frac there's a small percentage of people for whom music is really important. And we wanna, we wanna be serving that community and amplifying the sort of critical capacity, and the economic impact and, you know, to sustain that critical relation, that active relation to music, you know, that's, that's sort of the segment. That's one area where, you know, Spotify's function and and and many of these mass scale by by going to the mass scale and and, accentuating the quantitative rather than the critical qualitative or, you know, that's that's just a different project. And also the other the other way that I would say we distinguish is that this this relationship to identity, and self sovereign identity and identity control is really important because the business model I mean, for one, Spotify is a, IPO hustle. They all look glamorous because they raised I don't know how many billion on Wall Street. They've rarely been profitable. You know, so people, you know, particularly in difficult economic times, want to figure out how to how to have that casino ticket that wins. And they're, you know, many artists are chasing, you know, the, they're chasing a quantitative they want big numbers. You know, going back through my history, I've seen big numbers follow cultural significance. And so it's it's people that are watching, you know, this my my discussion about the way culture happens. If you can be culturally significant, the market can come or supportive you know, support can come. I mean, that's that's what I witnessed in my local community in the Northwest with with this thing called hashtag grunge or whatever in the nineties, was people just basically building a structure where they could support themselves, outside of the existing media culture, eventually built a a culture over ten years through, meeting each other, sleeping on each other's floors, recognizing, boosting each other as artists without without this, you know there's a certain level of of monetary reward. Like, we all need time to do our work. But beyond that, you know, it it it starts to be it just starts some antisocial attributes almost naturally fall out of that of that of chasing those quantities. So, anyway, those two things. I think I think trying to focus on a community a critical conversation within the community about how to support emerging culture that is here for the long term and what are the conditions for that. And keeping that conversation going is is really essential to us. And that's, you know, and that's different than I think the conversation that naturally is going to occur at Spotify. And then also, you know, being resolutely opposed to, surveillance capitalism as a business model. And and then appealing to people. That that's the thing that I've just been seeing since I've, you know, part of what motivated me to really want to get involved with Resonate and what motivates many of the allies that are coming in and they they there has to be a better way. They're just and so people are looking for alternatives, and if we get all the people that are looking for those alternatives around the table and around the community and building, and it'll like, I I just this is why I'm optimistic. I I can't can't there's no empirical proof. It's just, the kind of faith that has, led me now for decades and at least it's it's made this an interesting time.

Sure. No. That's interesting.

Yes.

No. I think I think you're describing something that's very that's very important. And I guess, again, kind of applying and I appreciate your bringing the historical view. And, yes, I think that that is it well, it is fascinating to watch the that graph. Everyone should look at that graph of of, of of global, music industry receipts. It's actually there's a version of it that goes from the seventies to the present. And to look at the change in distribution formats. So from vinyl, see the share that's cassette, see the share that downloads, see the share that's CDs, and then and then watch it plummet in 2,000 when Napster really took off, and then watch it come back with streaming. So when you look at it over time, you kind of see a a give and take between, you know, it's it's an economic measure of what are the people, you know, what are the average people, what are the the masses able, how are they gonna participate in these, institutional forums, in these in these business forums? And, yeah, and so there have been three very different periods. I mean, there's, you know, actually '91 is when the CD really took off from vinyl. And, and then '99 is when the the share really took off from everything else. And so what I and I agree that I think the sentiment that we make maybe where we come full circle and maybe what should we see in that sort of dialectical conversation of of, like, I'm willing to pay $15 for this community. It's you know, I think Matt Dreherst has some really interesting, discourse these days. Someone that, advises Resonate, is a close friend to Resonate, has argued for, you know, I've told you a story about independent music being critical from, corporate music. But he's, like, trying, he, he, some of his rhetoric, he takes on independence as a kind of, you know, kind of romantic, heroic, libertarian, perhaps, trope of individual like, rugged individualism and argued for interdependence in music. And I think the service some maybe what you're describing is a recognition of social interdependence that as, you know, as a listener, I'm you know, I could get that product for free, but if I'm actually having a relationship with this with this creator, I want to help them continue to create and and recognizing recognizing one's complicity in in the community. And I think I I think that's I think that's really important. And to me, also, like, where I, you know, kind of where I imagine it going and where when I first saw what blockchain was, and again, the the primacy of trust and identity, like, that I don't that I could only reveal myself to people I trusted and, like, the idea of hooking that up with like, this is sort of the vision that I that I imagine, and and I hope that, you know, I'd like to see Resonate have the technical capacity to build. But you can liberate by liberate by by disaggregating the commodity from the cultural form and and making and then focusing on the cultural as a social practice, one could start to, let things realize their interdependency of value. Right? Because say I say I'm the heir of a, you know, my my my dad, is on the board of directors and is worth $2,000,000,000. And for whatever reason, I have access to a castle in Spain. I might contribute that to my trust community to have creators come and provide a festival or have people come and have a you know, house an orchestra to record a project that you might contribute your your resource to the community for the benefit of the creation rather than having, you know, as a direct kind of a barter action, as a as a transaction between trust or across cooperative communities. Rather than having to, you know, play a game of converting it to some currency form and then back out is my, you know, my it it could just be an open conversation. And in a world where capitalism has and and commodification of natural, you know, community resource you know, resources, capitalism has by playing the commodity game, one thing that we've done is we've filled the world with unused assets. Like, there's all kind like, it's we really have it's a distribution problem. We have all the wealth we need. We have all the space we need. We have everything we need. It's just it's been it's held up by property contracts, and and it's it's not democratically managed. And if, for example, we could, simply through appreciation of art, music, anything, come up with different forms of transaction to resocialize these surplus assets, instead of pointing guns at people, I would rather see that because the gun like, bombs and guns are really destructive and have a lot of bad, byproducts. And, and I I have to believe that in most cases, it's, you know, it's a kind of miseducation or, you know, some anxiety issues that have people clinging to property contracts rather than, rather than, you know, sharing sharing the the good fortune that they they they may, control?

Well, and I yeah. It's very interesting, you know, because I've I've we didn't talk about it much on this call, but people can see, you know, I I I was introduced to Sub Pop socially in '81 and then started working there in '91 and basically ran the label from a operating perspective, for ten years. And it happens that that was that was exactly bracketed by the CD format. And the the the nineties and the CD, in, I think, a lot of ways, have colored the discourse and expectations for creators. Because what really the CD was a con job that, for ten years, music consumers bought into and then had essentially a violent reaction to with Napster. And then I think, like I say, I think now people, you know, it's just more common the the kind of rent having a a rental relationship with a service for whatever reason is something that, has been normalized and and, you know but these so these these these these normalization periods are really what's what's kind of interesting in terms of economic behavior. But, you know, and so my association at Sub Pop was really the it was the CD era. And it was a very it was an interesting time because what you basically had, and I I think people need to know this when they think about music culture, is and the economics of music culture, is that the LP an LP album cost about $4, $45. Each unit costs about $45. And so when you, when you sold that through a distributor for, say, 9 or $10, you know, the distributor got 15 or something percent and, depending on the contract you had with the label that put the money up to manufacture it, you know, basically, you had you you only there was only, like, a dollar or 2 for the label and the artist to split, you know? The CD only cost a dollar to make. And because of the promise that it supposedly it was like a l vinyl LP that could never when when they came out, it was like, oh, you can leave it in on the on the dashboard of your car and it won't skip. You know? It's basically indestructible, permanent, digital sound was supposedly perfect. You know, all it was like, so for that reason, what you used to pay $10 for, now you're gonna pay $15 for. So on both ends, you had you basically you had enough money that the margin now, you you could make either an artist could eventually, people got to make their own CDs, and they might make $5 off selling it, you know, selling it for $7. Whatever. The point was that the the margins were big enough that's that art artists could sustain themselves and label operators could sustain themselves, small independent operators could sustain themselves on this increased margin, which, of course, was destroyed by Napster. When you when you're downloading it for free, in many ways, people started to react to the fact that, like, why am I charging why why am I pay expected to pay $15 for this work when, you know, is it worth it? It? And I have to say from the inside I mean, I stepped away from Sub Pop in '99. I did I did some other projects. I eventually started my own label. But there was a moment where any label that is like, labels put so much into promotion, they the highest paid people in the nineties in particular I'm sorry to tell old war stories. But in the nineties in particular, the highest paid people on any label's payroll were the radio promoters, whose whose expense account was all about taking these music directors for commercial radio stations out to dinner and flying them around to see the bands play at concerts and so on. And so a huge amount of money was spent on basically getting these gatekeepers and influencers to support it was before the term of influencer, but it was getting these people like, so much of your money was spent on getting these so called very important people, to care about your music, to reach to reach the people they follow. It seemed totally hypocritical to me to be, like, running a campaign against the enthusiast who is spending hours, like, you know, downloading and listening to the content that you were giving these other jerks away for free. Or not for free. You were actually paying you know, your budget was supporting giving them literally hundreds of thousands of dollars. You know, to have a to have a full time radio promotions person on staff with their travel and expense account was $3,400,000, you know, at a typical label. And they and typical labels have had multiples of these people. They'll spend that amount of money and then try to criminalize the kid that loved the music and was trading it and talking it up. Like, to me, that was insane. And I I I always hated the notion that I might, like, sit down on an airplane ride and see a kid with, you know, with Napster open on his laptop or whatever, and then, like, have to be a record label executive. Like, I'd go, oh, go, dude. You know? I just wouldn't be the guy I would not be the cop. I would not defend property under those circumstances. It was you know? And and look, I don't wanna say that people should be ripped off. I'm I'm not I'm absolutely not that way. I think I think and and part of the promise of blockchain is, creating more dynamic, places for creators to and and and people who have provided the original materials for music to participate in, you know, participate materially in material success that follows from their contributions to the community. And, you know, and that's a very interesting area that is, often where a lot of, blockchain energy around music is going.

Yeah. We've had a number of relationships with folks that are looking at that attributes attribution layer.

track is going to, another song and they've been remunerated for it? I mean, there have been projects, I think, of, eight STEM was one that I was familiar with that was basically looking at, trading attribution at the, stem level. So, you know, the dip so that bass player or that drummer, could be you could so that, basically, it'd be opened up for remixing, but would give proper attribution, and, a fair fair trade royalty reward back to the originator. You know, and I think I think that those are very, very interesting, I think I think that is the future. I also, you know, I'm interested in, in, you know, a good example, we recently started a collaboration with a, producer named, that goes by Poem Producer, AGF, and we're co hosting, a web project that she's working on called Recon, rec-on.org. And part of my interest in in having her active in the community, and again, I really think right now we're focusing on conversations, is, she is interested in and some other folks that I'm working with are interested in, you know, when when an image, an audio image or other kind of image is derived from a community source, like, I have I have friends that do video production where out of, you know, projects related to, say, civil civil rights monuments in the in the American Southeast. If you are referencing that community, should they benefit in some way? Or, producers that use indigenous sources or or popularly found sources, this is something of great interest to, a poem producer and, figuring out just just trying to ask the questions to lead to, commune a community that can, come up with a set of practices around this area, is very interesting to me. And I and I think I think some of these, blockchain, sourcing, you know, source certification models are are very useful. But, again, right now, my focus is in on the community. How are we aligned with indigenous communities with a long term, solidarity economic framework? You know, the people that the people that are active thinking about those things are the right people to be supporting through whatever economic practices we're able to mobilize, like, and and to be boosting. So right now, some of our alliances are are are related to those specific kinds of projects and finding out how to get the conversation going so that the solutions that work for our community can be translated for other communities. And, you know, the people that have been offering long term economic cultural solutions, who I would say would be the people that have been colonized, by by the property movement that that moved out of out of, Western Europe five hundred years ago. Basically, seeing how those people are imagining long term, community futures and and management of space. I think of there's a, there's an interesting movement called ICCA, which are basically territories of life, which are, like, several dozen very rich locations in the biosphere that are managed by the traditional, people, who have lived for millennia in those spaces. Reinforcing them from, property based encroachments or state encroachments, so that they have a voice at the table in how global society is formed. I think that's absolutely crucial, in this moment. And that's the kind of thing that I really felt was missing from some of the amazing technological circles that I started to join once, you know, I was introduced through Archane, and Resonate, you know, to start to have some of these technical meetings. I just felt like there were people in the world that actually had a lot to bring to the conversation that didn't know about where these tools were going and what their capacities would be, and that these tools, they had to be participating in the conversation because, you know, it's a you know, like I I said, I think, before we started recording, it's we don't want the kind of empirical reinforcement that blockchain offers. We don't want that to be a reactionary reinforcement. We don't wanna lock in the the the property based contracts that basically I mean, if you look at property, it's very interesting, you know, what the papal bull of of 1492 basically gave, you know, the the the pope gave, the Spaniards the license to half of the world. You know, and those that contract, it was you know, when Spain lost to Britain and then in the Treaty of Westphalia, those those are the contracts that are reinforced by Western culture. And they're they're they're basically wholly made out of cloth. They're they're made out of one guy saying that he had a divine relationship, or he had a a a unique relationship to the divine and authenticated this contract that the rest of the world, like, our economies are based on. It's not legitimate. So we need to have conversations now where we go, hey. Maybe we can't even solve this problem, but who's in the world? Who's at the table? How can we work amongst each other as human beings alive in the moment for best equitable situation, for best resolving this next the next ten years of ecological social crisis that we're facing. We're either gonna fuck it up or we're gonna make it work in the next ten years. I think a lot of people get that. And the people that should be involved in the technical solutions are around, but they aren't necessarily at the table where there's where those solutions are being crafted. It's you know? So, anyway, we're dedicated to having music be the frame and the music the people that are around emerging music and creating music, who, by the way, could make a new industry on their own. I mean, that that to me is very interesting. I'm looking forward to hearing about, like, I'm actually interested in contracts where, for example, you know, you might have public performance of our of our content on Resonate, to specific locations, cafes or or universities, who who would then, you know, get involved in in the community's, content, freely, provided by creators who who have the right to engage in such relationships. There's nothing that stops peop which is basically what some of these legacy organizations do, but they take a, you know, they take a cut, you know? And they support the lawyers and administrators that litigate over the property rights, in those contracts. I think there may we may be at a point of being able to imagine different sort of service based, relationships around these things. And it's it's what you control. It's not necessarily a right of property, but it's like, I did do this work. I I and I based based on on, you know, what what what I have, then I should be, you know, whatever its economic benefit is, I should be entitled to a share and a community that respects that, proposition. Basically, if we can use blockchain to take out the cost the overhead costs of administration, and, judicial action legislation, all of these things that that that cost a lot of money and have communities that are are tied to being supported by by those rent renting streams that may have provided a you know, that may that probably provide a very good function for historical intellectual property. But what that means, intellectual service might might be a different, might be a different kind of relationship that, living, creators who have an eye on the future, you know, want to engage. And, so really interested in reaching out to people that are thinking in those ways. So then,

Yeah. No. I think a a lot of cases, communities are willing to have dialogue, but it's when you show up with a writ that says, you have to vacate, and here's our guns to support this, this stuff. That's the problem. But until then until then, the conversation can be very interesting and a lot of, cons con you know, I think I think I think that's where the world is at right now is I think the I think it's the the the the I I I think we can instantiate a decolonial world. I think I I don't think I don't I I think there are people that can have, I think most people are are are are wanna have a conversation, and but they want they want their history to be recognized. They want their trauma to be acknowledged and repaired. Yeah. And that shouldn't be scary. Those processes need not be scary. I mean, there's it's maybe there's some people that, have to go through a shaming process, but you know what? You get to live on the other side of that, and and you can make new friends.

It's like there are older progressives who are probably baby boom era who who are saying things like, defund is an is an unreasonable proposition. Oh, that's insane. It's crazy, isn't it? And so that's what's interesting, is what who gets to side the boundaries of reasonableness in these social discussions? Because younger people aren't don't have that hang up. Like, younger people are like, actually, younger people already live in the future. I mean, that's the that's that's the thing about it. That's why music is so important, is is is it doesn't take much to make a profound spatial instantiation of the future through music, because you're already thinking the the creator is already in a different geography. They're already bringing back a world that hasn't yet emerged, that they've experienced in their interiority interior that they're exteriorizing. And then the people that wanna be in that world, all they have to do is access that space. And and the young are adept at this. They don't like, the young don't expect to be billionaires. I mean, we we we supposedly I mean, a lot of this, a lot of where capitalists are at, it's very funny because capitalism started as a reaction to aristocracy, to the divine right of of, like, I got born, that was God saying, I get to be the one that bosses everybody around. And capitalism was like, no, by our industry and intuition, we should be able to we should actually organize society. But what's happening, of course, is the capitalists are trying to be the new aristocrats and run everything. And meanwhile, you know, the 99.9% are standing around saying, what the fuck? This is bullshit. And I and that's what I'm saying. And young people already live in the future, and they already are like, yes. The the police are a uncontrolled paramilitary organization reinforcing the original, racism of our society. Turn off the spigot to those people. The problems that nominally they're there to solve, we can probably solve other ways. But but why are we re why are we reinforcing? Why are we doubling down on on that? Defund is the appropriate term. Meanwhile, older people who maybe they bought houses because they grew up in a time that was where that was possible and college was free and, you know, a lot of people my age and older are like, oh, defund. Oh, we don't mean defund. Like, who gets to determine what's reasonable and not? Like, right now, we're watching the path this is what you kind of get, or the passage of generations. And I'm I'm absolutely an intergenerationalist. I absolutely want young people and old people working together in the dialogue about the construction of the world, but we are watching you know, one of the things about cultural tipping points and, you know, I observed this you know, it's crazy to watch in my time out in the Northwest in Seattle, but, you know, grunge was just kids not dressing up. And when, when, when it was crazy when Marc Jacobs came out with a grunge collection in on you know, worldwide, in in Paris, in '92, and you were selling flannel shirts for $400. Like, the the fact of the matter is culture is organic. It is real. Our existential crisis is real. It's about who you include in the conversation and who gets to determine what things are too scary to talk about. And we are witnessing and and the thing about it is is that it when the culture tips, it's always, oh, that's impossible. That's impossible. That's impossible until it tips. And then everybody's like, oh, well, of course, that happened. That was no big deal. And, we're watching that happen again and again and again. And we should give up on those thresholds and just get to what do we need to do, and what are the projects to get it done. And, I like I like the co op model as a way for people to, organize and do that. And I like I do like the technical you know, one of the things that's been beautiful to watch in the blockchain culture is forking. I'm I'm pro forking. Like, forking should be something that more like, that's a that's a block that's a technical culture idea that, and and probably has, you know, anthropological antecedents. It's it's like, without getting into the trauma, I mean, from the Americ from the from the civilizational side, America was a British fork. But we don't have the space to do that kind of forking, but we may have we may have the discursive space to learn how to create structures that we can share, but I I don't wanna talk to you anymore. So you go over there. We're gonna build a different way, but we're gonna share some of these resources on a global level. Those that doesn't seem unsolvable to me.

US is a bit of a fork of, of The UK and the British Empire. Yeah. It is. And we're kind of what it I think we wanna have revolution all the time. I mean, I think I think iteration is scary, but if you could imagine constantly iterating and, and and and and having the discourse through those iterations, that's I mean, that's we're again, I think we've got ten years to figure it out. I think the the the the the, material models are there like a sonic boom or whatever. I mean, there's just these as you get as you get to these boundary states, things get really confusing. But it's it's really the issue is emotion and, and again, who's in the room? Who are you I want more homeless people or or people that are not housed. I mean, I I want them housed. I want I want people to be able to move up from Lois Maslov's level, but I want the work that the co op is doing to be supporting the people that are being oppressed by the world system at this time and being left out. I think, you know, I very much follow, Paulo Friere, pedagogy depressed, as a model for, you know, if you're not actively reducing oppression, or which is to say, giving voice to the oppressed, then you're perpetuating the system by which they are oppressed. These are some of the guide points that I'm following to build a community that exists in this technical space so that we are building, as we approach technical solutions to some of these, community based problems, we are respecting the whole community. You can kind of tell when the community's not in the room. Yeah. Tell when it's a group of people on the team that are all of a particular persuasion and missing out on the skills by which you recognize that people aren't in the room, and then you go get them and bring them into the room. Like, that that's the skill that technical teams need right now comprehensively. And I and I think a lot of people know it, but they don't or they know it, but they don't they don't know how to do it, and they don't and maybe they haven't recognized. They're they they a lot of people think that they can just build the technical solution and then drop it into the world and all all bad things disappear. We have to go out and and and see what the people already on the ground want and and help help them make the solution.

because of our association with the Blockchain project, the in 2018, the organization got to fund itself and get its message out, to a certain degree. That relationship ended, part of the crypto crash of twenty eighteen. The partnership that we had is no longer active. But a community a basic community was achieved, and a basic, sort of position was mapped out. Peter, our founder, who got us got us that far, had a second baby and has stepped back and is now an active, sort of board member. But, out of conversations with him and I, I stepped in to see how what I could do for the community. And your question as to you know, so what we're what we are where we're at now is I think we're very aspirational. I've I've expressed my aspirations, and I've and they are technical, but they're technical within a social framework. Right now, we just need, folks to help with the building. We need you know, right now, it's a it's very much an MVP. There is music to hear. There is new content going up. We've got, we're opening new relationships in our kind of in this sort of communitarian framework, with artists that want to build with those givens. A lot of artists are very concerned about the appearance of success. So there are a lot of artists that are very guarded about working with an aspirational project, which also and because we don't have a lot of features, it's hard for and I've been very careful about ringing the bell for us because I want people who are who do wanna build with us, and wanna be pioneers with us as we add those features and to realize where we are and where we can go. But we're we're getting the message out. So I would say, I think artists love us, but, and we're building great relationships, but, you know, it's hard for listeners to participate. And a lot of my energy right now is in, you know, we're looking for funding sources and messaging, to come out to find people to support us as we are, help build, and also just use. And, you know, I think it's very important to have, I'm really interested in building the curation layer. We're we have some, programs that we'll be rolling out this summer, which are essentially storytelling about, artists and work that's appearing on in the co op, that's already there, and then, dedicated to telling those stories so that that curation layer, by having different curators that come from very different, communities and perspectives on music, but referencing our archive, it basically recreates that radio station that I, that was so instrumental to me in the eighties. So it's like, if our archive is an archive of of the emerging creators that want to facilitate it's it's sort of it it it's we eat our own dog food, and we become that community, that's committed to culture and committed to that bottom up community, and it's the place to hang out in reference for all these ends. And if nothing else, perhaps we inspire other communities to do the same, and, we get we get more of this stuff,

I'd love to host the Blockchain Socialist. We you could argue. If If you want to if you want podcasts, I'm willing to That's actually it. Like, when I say curatorial layer, like, I'm I'm imagining, yeah. Anyway, let's talk. We'll talk after this.

Resonate spelled out with dot I s. Presently, we're that's our our main server. You can get some samples and some information about, what we've, what we're doing. Become a member for €5. You get a a small amount of listening, credits, but you're also a member. You get access to our community. We do have community calls, every Wednesday. It's, let's see, Central European time. I believe it's 5PM, 4PM in Britain, 9AM on the West Coast where I am open to curious folks, or who wanna wanna figure out, it's a time where, you know, somebody with, with a few hours to spare on a regular basis could really make an impact, to the community. If you like the kinds of things I'm talking about here, you wanna get involved in the conversation. To my way of thinking, one of the advantages of co op and what it means to be democratically managed is facilitating that ongoing critical discourse about what where do we as a collectivity go? And our particular intersection, the particular tripod for us is a critical discussion of what is music, what are the technologies, that, that are socially advantageous in this critical time, and then how do we govern that? So it's music technology and governance. And keeping that conversation going, and then and then having a, a position from which to instantiate it as a community, that's our, you know, that's the whole that's that in a nutshell is is the work of the coop.

We have we have some very close friends in common. It I I wanna say before I say anything that, I was so traumatized by his death. I couldn't listen to any of his music for for years. I did meet him on a couple of occasions. I haven't really talked about that in public and I don't feel like doing it. But yeah, he was a little bit younger than me. He was coming up in the milieu that I've described, the Pacific Northwest punk rock area. You know, and that and that and that community of, you know, now, like I say, most of the music I think would be called post punk. But independent music of you know, which has since become indie, which is another whole discussion about that as a marketing commodity or a marketing tag, a hashtag. Indie was, like, certain tropes taken from this this, independent music, which was critical of of production. So the socioeconomic conditions of production, not at all dealing with aesthetics. Indie became an aesthetic trope, which in a lot of ways was about, defining a particular community as opposed to other communities. You know, I would just say, like, look at underground hip hop, look at independent hip hop as an example of, you know, a place to go that kind of runs against the typical connotations of the indie trope. And I think it's really vital. So anyway, the, where was I going? I was saying that that in the particular local independent music, diverse independent music culture, which was like a few thousand people, you know, young people, building their own music economy in the Northwest. Kurt, and, and, and Chris and his friends and the venues in Olympia, Sub Pop, all that stuff, you know, was, was the, the raw material, the raw social material that definitely is, is my heritage and, that he was a product of. And as that, you know, his death was absolutely tragic. It affected all of us enormously, really wish the cat had had had some other friends. I think it would have helped him out. And, yeah, I I really hope that the, you know, whoever, you know, we don't need, you know I encourage people to look at Kurt's, Kurt's, interviews. You kinda get a sense of the personality, And I think that personality is, I just there's a lot of kids in that position, and I just they they shouldn't be as hard on themselves. They should be as ambitious. They should be as open, remaining critical. And honestly, I don't know. I was just up at the, I mean, you one can laugh about these things. It's it's, you know, Don Quixote is this ancient text about tilting at windmills and having these ideals and believing in the world. And it's it's ironic because that's actually kind of the process by which, you know, we imagine where the culture's going first, and then we instantiate it. I say that as a preface to the fact that, like, yesterday, I was up at the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. It was created, three nights ago when after a week of the police at the third at the East Precinct in Seattle, bombarding protesters, supporting themes like defund the police and abolish the police and and black lives matter and remembering the the horrendous chain of atrocities, that have that have, befallen, people of color in The United States at the hands of police. They're being bombarded by tear gas for a week. And finally, the East Precinct I don't know if folks know this, but the the the police chief, they they gave up the precinct. They just abandoned the the the place. And so the barricades are still left up, and now the protesters are organizing an autonomous zone and having public meetings. It's it's it's very familiar. Visitors to occupy might feel it, but it's black youth led, a criticis you know, confronting the institutions of oppression in our town. My point, to bring this back to Kurt Cobain, is when I'm up there, I look around and I see a thousand Kurt Cobain. So it's it's not, you know, you know, one has to be you know, a good reader. Be a good reader. Draw from Kurt Cobain, but don't try to be him. I mean, don't be him thirty years later, but there's something about you can learn from his position in the world and attempt to take things on. And then the degree to which, you know, following your own voice and and keep keep pushing, amazing things can happen. The world can be changed. We can contribute to the to the to the restructuring of the culture in the world. That's a debate. People could say that he got co opted and he's just another, you know, he's the same scene of his era, another another iconic, empty, signal. That's not how I felt after the years he was dead. And, and and and the fact that, you know, I have a daughter now that's 15, and I don't she doesn't listen to Nirvana, but she knows who Kurt is. And, I mean, he still is respected by young people, and I think that's I think that's great. I think there is something to be learned. And, don't go out like him though. Like No. Of course not.

the the inquiry you're bringing. Thank you.