The Beat

Welcome to The Beat, Decential’s weekly breakdown of the music-web3 byway.

Like most things in web3, the music space moves at breakneck speeds, issuing regular bouts of hope, cringe and FOMO. That combination of qualities blur the essence of the movement – the enduring solutions to legacy industry problems and the people building them. Let’s focus on the essence; the rest, as Alex Ross wrote, is noise.

The Avant-Garde Ethos

Last year, via the Kernel community, I connected with Jing Yi Teo, a curator, writer and Co-Initiator of ArtBizTech. At the time, she’d just started collaborating on a music project with composer/improviser Armen Nalbandian and two members of The Bad Plus (Dave King and saxophonist/clarinetist Chris Speed), one of my favorite contemporary jazz bands (not just because they’re from Minnesota). 

The album, titled The Complex Relationship Between Two Machines, is beautiful – the type of improvisatory work that connotes deep, intentional conversation, nearly practiced. It fits squarely into my erstwhile avant-garde beat for Vice, which dealt in the Cages and Coltranes of the world – both of whom Ti Yeo referenced when announcing her new new project Outlyr-e, a distributed strategy practice that aims to bring the avant-garde ethos beyond the arts.

The effort is guided by these principles:

• Resisting the assumption of continuity in the given way of doing

• Seeing and operating beyond siloes

• Creating consciously, not only based on what is technically possible

• And yet, good work is work that pushes the envelope of what is possible

Most releases within the arts domain, Yi Teo notes, were met with controversy, and it’s that framework that we can use to disrupt paradigms – in fact it’s urgent that we do. She roots the rationale in the Palestinian crisis, calling for an “immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza” (this week, the International Court of Justice is hearing a case in which South Africa has accused Israel of committing acts of genocide), reminding us that the courses of action we take become the blueprint for similar crises and communities in the future. 

Put simply, in a challenge to inertia in the arts and elsewhere: “We must resist the idea that things simply have to be the way they are.”

Winnie the Pooh: Murder Bear

What if we apply that sentiment to copyright? Or indeed, to rights altogether?

You may have seen characters like Winnie the Pooh and Steamboat Willie recently re-entering the zeitgeist in unfamiliar contexts. Most memorable, perhaps, is Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, a horror film where Christopher Robin abandons his beloved bear to go to college. The act warps Pooh into a bloodthirsty beast whose new food source – absent his long-time caretaker – is apparently people he murders (it has a whopping 2.9 rating on IMDB).

Steamboat Willie, the iconic cartoon that debuted Mickey Mouse and became Disney’s torchbearer, also just entered the public domain, and already in the works is a “survival horror co-op game that aims to infuse nostalgia with terror.”

Both are a reminder that copyright expires. Now Pooh and Willie can be reimagined in new contexts and stories by other creators, horrifying and otherwise.

Today, and for all works created after January 1, 1978, copyright lasts the duration of the author’s life plus another 70 years (in the US). The rationale is rooted in the idea that creators should have exclusive rights to their works for a certain period, during which they can financially benefit from their creations. This exclusivity is seen as an incentive for individuals to invest time, effort and resources into the creation of “original” works.

I put ‘original’ in quotes because – as I've argued many times – there is no such thing as an original idea. As individuals, we cannibalize the information of others for the construction of ourselves. Disney’s art is largely inspired by folklore, for instance. As Jennifer Jenkins, Director of the Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain, writes in a piece about Disney’s complex relationship with the public domain: the company is a “talented and successful practitioner of building upon the public domain.”

In and of itself, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, but Disney was also an active proponent in extending the copyright term – known “derisively” as the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act” – to ensure that what they built atop the public domain could not be used by others. Bob Dylan’s music is much the same – he built upon the folk canon and then used the institution of copyright to leverage the protection and financial gain of self-ownership.

All rights reserved copyright doesn’t make any sense in these contexts. Our work does not come out of thin air – it is some aggregate of the creations we’ve devoured from countless other beings. To pursue singular ownership of our inspired art is an insult to all those who inspired it. 

Remember, it is this way but it doesn’t have to be. There’s even a good argument that copyright shouldn’t belong to human beings alone.

Tree Authorship and Interspecies Money

Recently, the musician Cosmo Sheldrake recorded music in the Los Cedros cloud forest in northern Ecuador. He mixed field recordings – of trees, birds and other animals – into a song and sought to attribute partial authorship to the forest itself. 

Under a landmark 2021 judgment by the constitutional court of Ecuador, the forest has already been recognized as an entity possessing legal personhood. Now, the organization MOTH (More Than Human Rights) plans to work alongside Sheldrake to seek co-authorship of the song for the forest. In doing so they may create precedence, extending intellectual property rights to other beings we share this world with.

Author and futurist Jonathan Ledgard goes even further, advocating for interspecies money. “It makes no sense that the market economy puts money into ores, promissory notes, and blocks of computer code, but not into the continuance of rare, complex, and ancient biological life (regardless of how difficult this is),” he writes.

Indeed. In a lengthy essay, Ledgard lays the groundwork for the creation of digital identities for nonhuman life. A proposed Bank of Other Species would issue “life marks” as a digital currency, using a distributed ledger with the bank serving as a centralized validator.

It’s reminiscent of an experiment my friend James Beck proposed back in 2021, to use Ethereum “as not only a financial coordination mechanism, but an attempt to confer rights and power to non-humans.” These efforts are part of a growing movement called “Environmental Personhood.”

“Many indigenous communities already recognize nature with personhood, rather than as a commodity over which property rights should be exercised,” Beck wrote in a Mirror post, which includes an on-chain split with a Japanese Zelkova growing in Brooklyn. “It flips the agency of regulating common pool resources on its head: the question of governance shouldn't be ‘how can we save forests,’ but rather, ‘how can we give forests the agency and tools to save themselves.’”

We forget to calculate the immense benefit we receive from other species – probably because we don’t directly pay for those benefits. “In NYC, it will be the 700,000 street trees that eventually capture the smoke blowing in from burning West Coast,” Beck wrote, referencing the 2021 wildfires that ravaged the American West, “and it will be their networks of roots that help mitigate the next flash flood.”

When there isn’t money attached to something, we’re not very good at measuring its value – which is really the bedrock of Ledgard’s advocacy for interspecies currency. “By some calculations,” he writes, “the direct services nature provides to industry are worth US$40 trillion annually and the total value of natural capital may exceed the US$80 trillion value of Earth GDP.”

How might our relationship with the natural world change if it were a more significant part of our economic calculus? As Ledgard admits in his conclusion, his vision will face tremendous criticism. But indeed, the grandest ideas generally do.

So when you feel lonely in your ideals, stand upon the shoulders of Cage and Coltrane, Yi Teo and Sheldrake, Ledgard and Beck – and all the others already united by the avant-garde ethos, resisting the idea that things simply have to be the way they are.

Coda

Just go outside and listen to music – it’s a beautiful day.

My name is MacEagon Voyce. For more music and less noise, consider subscribing to The Beat. And if you already do, consider sharing with a friend. Thanks for being here.