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.

Cypherpunk Hum

At this year’s Ethereum Community Conference (EthCC), there was a cypherpunk hum.

Crypto has deep roots in the cypherpunk movement, which is oriented around privacy, decentralization, personal sovereignty and freedom of information. The Bitcoin white paper references various cypherpunk contributions, like Wei Dai’s b-money, “an anonymous, distributed electronic cash system” (the smallest subunit of Ether, a wei, is named after him). And Hal Finney’s “reusable proofs of work” – bedrock for Bitcoin’s proof-of-work mechanism. (Finney is also a leading candidate for Satoshi Nakamoto’s still unknown true identity.)

That narrative has been waylaid, though, felled by the memecoin casino and degen culture.

“What are some things we can do to be more intentional about approaching culture?” asked Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin at ‘afk’ (“away from keyboard”), an EthCC side event.

“Take interest in the cypherpunk movement as the degen movement becomes more powerful,” said Paul Dylan-Ennis – author and assistant professor at University College Dublin.

I took interest. Was the hum I felt at EthCC a harbinger of cypherpunk’s return? And if so, what might that mean for music?

Failure

I’m aware that the ‘cypherpunk hum’ I felt may have been self-fulfilling, a product of my own curation of EthCC’s 400 side events and thousands of talks (i.e. I went to the things that were more likely to explore cypherpunk ideas). But it could also be the maturation of the tech that’s revitalized the topic. 

There was a lot of talk about “fully homomorphic encryption” – a powerful cryptographic technique that allows you to perform computations on encrypted data without ever decrypting it. There was lots of “decentralized identity” chatter, too. During the “Blockchain for Good Unconference” – another EthCC side event – I attended a panel called “Could Decentralized Identity break Surveillance capitalism and restore Privacy?” 

Big question. About 50 people – fittingly, organized in a circle – surrounded the panelists, who represented both government organizations and tech platforms. “If I only know how much money you have, we can only coordinate with money,” said Evan McMullen, CEO and founder of disco.xyz, a web3 platform focused on decentralized identity. “If we want to coordinate outside of that, we need more information.”

Money – at least in the abstract – is a necessary component of society. It’s our means of transaction and value exchange. But it’s a secondary layer to the core principles of the cypherpunk movement – a means for achieving their goals, not the end itself. 

Degen, though, has pushed money to the fore, establishing it as the primary mode of coordination. And even though – as I mentioned in last week’s Beat – folks like Vitalik are less worried and consider degen a “hook” to broader web3 onboarding, I’m not sure the end justifies the means.

My own interest in web3 is rooted in music, and in the principles that could ameliorate a convoluted, top-heavy industry, where the people who create the value – aka the music makers and their champions – are readily pillaged by intermediaries.

In theory, a music NFT is a cypherpunk tool for musicians. It grants individual control over information and assets, reduces reliance on centralized authorities and encourages transparent systems – all cypherpunk ideals.

Of course it’s not easy to apply those ideals to the incumbent industry, but today even the spirit of the attempt feels muddied. Music NFTs, too, have been corrupted by degen culture, prompting recent retrospectives on what’s gone wrong. There have even been eulogies:

Turley is a contentious figure in on-chain music – largely because he regularly uses words like “hype” and “scale” when he talks about music.

Turley has also built a big audience. He was an early advisor for the formative web3 streaming platform Audius, a partner at the web3 VC Variant and a co-founder of Friends with Benefits (FWB) – the seminal culture DAO. He’s also personally invested in many notable organizations in the ecosystem.

Turley – though not a musician himself – is a music fan, and through his crypto clout, he willed music NFTs into crypto’s “main” streams, which brought them to more people but also turned music into an asset explicitly tied to its speculative value.

Last March, I reported that Turley rebranded his weekly Music NFTs newsletter to a series called Invest in Music. The project’s catchphrase is “where fans become collectors.”

I wrote:

I still don’t think his intentions are malicious, but it’s part of a hype-fueled, FOMO-laden history of behavior that’s made bobby hundreds’ words feel prescient.

And channeling the mainstream money appeal – where “the narrative and the marketing is still only appealing to the same demographics,” as the artist Latashá wrote – has had knockdown effects on on-chain music’s culture:

With his statement, Turley unwittingly spurred a gush of commentary. Because to haphazardly say music NFTs “failed” is irresponsible (and untrue), and it itself fails to account for the breadth of experiences people have had – and continue to have:

To his credit, Turley did respond to the backlash more thoughtfully: “I need to be more mindful of what I say. I take a lot of responsibility for being so vocal about Music NFTs in the first place and creating too much hype that made it difficult for expectations to meet over the past few years.”

Unfortunately his comment was couched in volume and money metrics, and any goodwill he might have inspired was undermined when he then immediately shilled his own crypto record label.

It’s another moment in which he’s not wielded his influence with care, and one that speaks to a misalignment in values that, broadly, spans the entirety of on-chain culture.

Cypherpunk itself is inspired by many movements, like cryptography and libertarianism, but also hacktivism, anarchism and other countercultural movements.

There’s a famous anarchist call to begin “building the new society in the shell of the old.” But revolutionary acts – if we do indeed acknowledge the blockchain as a revolutionary act – can be co-opted to serve old power structures unless carefully guided out of that shell.

Crypto is not countercultural or revolutionary when it simply mirrors the “hyper-capitalistic behavior” of the place we’re trying to leave behind. The people shepherding the on-chain music movement must be music heads, with deep understanding and curiosity of not just tokenization and industry machinations but music itself. The appreciation for music has to run bone deep, burrowed deep in the soul, where money is always a secondary layer – a byproduct of value exchange and a validating reminder that music has inherent value.

Coda

I’ll leave you with the most comprehensive response to the “failure” of music NFTs, which came from the artist Iman Europe:

Her text in full:

So yeah, in sum, a lot of what’s happened has been shit, written out of that old shell’s playbook. But there are cypherpunk whispers in the air. The fact that there’s been collective pushback that adds nuance to this “failed” experiment indicates that people care enough to make it better.

In the words of anarchist David Graeber: “The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”

Now 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.