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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 Three Body Problem

In the summer of 2018, I was on a beach in Delaware, mouth agape, clinging to the final words of Death’s End as the Atlantic lapped at my feet. The last half of the final book in the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy – popularly referred to as the Three-Body Problem series, in reference to the first book’s title – was mind blowing. There were ideas there I'd never before encountered and won't soon forget.

The book earned Chinese author Liu Cixin a nomination for the vaunted Hugo Award for Best Novel – an honor he’d already won for the English translation (by Ken Liu) of The Three Body Problem in 2015 (nine years after it was first published in China). It became the first Asian novel to earn that recognition. 

The story features humanity’s discovery of – and preparation for – an alien invasion. It’s ripe for film, and many have tried to adapt the tale, but its path to the screen has been an unpredictable journey of failures, false starts and even murder.

In 2015, for example, a sizable budget was allocated to a movie that was indefinitely postponed due to corporate shuffling and rumored poor quality. An animated series released in December 2022 was largely panned. And early last year, a live action series premiered that was celebrated in China, but garnered little interest outside the country, where its telling was likened to “reading a book to a child.” Notably, the project didn’t involve the books’ author.

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Liu Cixin did, however, endorse the forthcoming Netflix adaptation, created by Game of Thrones co-creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss as well as Alexander Woo, best known for his work as a writer for the HBO series True Blood.

The series’ – slated to arrive on March 21 – executive producers include Rian Johnson and Ram Bergman, the duo behind Star Wars: The Last Jedi and Knives Out, as well as reps from the The Three-Body Universe and the Yoozoo Group, the Chinese groups that hold the rights to the franchise.

Yoozoo’s CEO Lin Qi purchased the intellectual property (IP) of the series in 2015 with ambitions of making it the next Star Wars-sized franchise. Netflix worked with Qi to purchase the adaptation rights in 2020, but three months after the deal was announced, he was assassinated – allegedly poisoned by a fellow film executive. 

With Qi’s death – which continues to be shrouded in uncertainty – doubts about the project’s completion arose, and once again the arrival of the series’ long-awaited blockbuster was put in question. I’ll be holding my breath until the first episode airs.

Crypto’s Three Body Problem

The ‘three body problem’ references the physics/classical mechanics challenge of the same name, which seeks to predict the motions of three celestial bodies, each affected by the other’s gravitational influence. To date, there’s no general analytical solution that can be expressed in simple mathematical formulas. The challenge stems from the inherent complexity of the problem, where interactions via gravity yield chaotic behavior. 

Fittingly, the notoriously unpredictable environment that is the cryptosphere has its first can’t-miss piece of the year, bearing the title “Crypto's Three Body Problem.” It’s the latest study conducted by Other Internet, a non-profit “applied research organization.”

In the piece, authors Toby Shorin, Sam Hart and Laura Lotti reckon with crypto’s three-body regulatory problem: “the unruly interaction between the software architecture, markets and norms in the absence of law.”

The study references the landmark 1998 essay by Lawrence Lessig, the Creative Commons co-founder often mentioned in the Beat. In the essay, Lessig’s “New Chicago School” explores the existence of four types of constraint that limit behavior: “law, markets, social norms, and the architecture of the built environment.”

Of those four forces, the authors assert, law reigns supreme within the state, as it can bend the other forces to its will and “regulate through them.” Today, though, they note that state sovereignty – upheld by the law – is being challenged, and although that struggle started before crypto, “blockchains escalate this struggle to an entirely new level.” 

The “regulatory complex composed of state, federal reserve, and ‘too-big-to-fail’ banks,” the authors write, “is precisely what cryptocurrencies undermine. Cryptocurrency protocols are monetary and contractual media without the need or validation of state authorities.”

In short, crypto is naturally “law-resistant,” and “in removing the law,” they say, “crypto protocols are left with a three-body problem. Social norms, markets, and code each have their own regulatory logic, often finding themselves in conflict. In this novel game board, protocol designers’ intentions can be undermined, leading to undesirable institutional behaviors, moral dilemmas, and contradictory governance policies.”

One case study the authors explore is NFT royalties, citing the blockchain’s open-source and permissionless architecture as an enabler of workarounds that operate outside social norms. In this instance, marketplaces like Blur and Sudoswap were able to “wrap” NFTs in smart contracts and – despite creator expectations and traditional practice – eschew royalties, thus increasing their own margins and gaining competitive advantage. So as not to lose purchase, OpenSea – the world’s largest NFT marketplace – followed suit, making royalty collection optional. A race to the bottom ensued.

“In the rise and fall of NFT royalties, smart contracts enforced fee payment only briefly,” the Other Internet researchers writes, “and in the end were no match for the contingencies introduced by a permissionless meta game.”

The default rationale in such instances is “regression to the code,” in which we lean on credible neutrality. “The unbiased nature of a protocol implies the validity of all actions that take place under its purview,” the authors write. “This includes not just contentious governance outcomes, but social violations such as hacks or scams that are technically permissible and yet tolerated in the name of neutrality and permissionless access.

“More than just ‘lawless,’” they continue, “it comes off as a ‘normless’ zone where morality is suspended, even if the prevailing intention is to support the resiliency of all manner of social organizations.”

Basically, without the law, crypto remains an immensely complex problem that has no “integrative force,” no “meta-normative logic…that can be implemented across all domains” and no unifying solution – at least not one that can be expressed with “simple mathematical formulas.”

It’s “still far from producing non-state institutions that are embedded within – and promotive of – social life,” the Other Internet trio write. “Crypto needs to come to the people, not the other way around. This requires a complete change in orientation.”

As ever, the three bodies keep on spinning.

Chaos

French mathematician and theoretical physicist Henri Poincaré is one of the seminal figures in the history of the three-body problem. Through his research on the topic, he became the first person to discover a chaotic deterministic system, laying the groundwork for modern chaos theory.

In chaos theory, the initial conditions set a unique course for a system’s future. In that way it is deterministic and non-random, but that does not make it predictable. The proverbial butterfly effect makes prediction impossible, and tiny changes in initial conditions can yield macro differences in large scale outcomes.

Consider the complexities of The Three Body Problem’s American adaptation, which represented a Hollywood-esque opportunity to disseminate culture but meant ceding creative control to a political adversary. Somewhere within the chaos, the convergence of these forces led to Lin Qi’s murder. Surely, Liu Cixin could not have predicted that writing his novel would result in a future in which a corporate tycoon would be killed, but here we are.

Protocol design is similar. Miniscule disparities will have profound effects when a system reaches relative scale, and though we can try to predict the ways in which humans will behave when using that protocol, we will never really know. 

The conditions upon which our protocols are built include the infinite nuance of human behavior, and it's within that infinity that the protocols are used. We cannot discount human bias in human-built machines, and we will never transcend the state – flawed as it is – without accounting for our social selves.

Coda

First recurrent maps – also called Poincaré maps – are attempts to simplify complex systems. Understanding how every detail affects an outcome in such a system is impossible, so these maps capture the essence by focusing on just a few key moments or points in a system’s evolution.

In crypto, we’ve had the Bitcoin whitepaper, Ethereum’s emergence, the DAO hack, the ICO craze, De-Fi summer, NFTs and DAOs. What can we understand by focusing on these key moments and examining the current state of crypto? Mostly, that the protocols we’ve designed are good for money and speculation and little else, and that humans will – when able – invoke credible neutrality to exercise greed.

In music, avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen once devised a concept called “moment form,” a musical mosaic of “self-contained (quasi-)independent sections, set off from other sections by discontinuities." If a section exhausts a set of possibilities, it’s said to be closed, and if not, it’s open.

For all of crypto’s history, we’ve been “so early,” motivated by an immense potential that never quite manifests. At some point, if we don’t “come to the people,” we’ll exhaust all possibilities, and we’ll regard these moments as interesting but ultimately doomed experiments in the long arc of human history.

Which story will the film ultimately tell? The conditions have already been set.

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

*I composed this piece for amplified piano trio as part of my senior capstone project in college, inspired by Stockhausen’s Moment Form. Please forgive the poor audio quality of the recording.

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.