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.

Dopamine

I’ve been thinking about what brings us to social platforms. We show up to shill projects, promote creations, buy them, chat shop, network, stay informed, stalk folks, troll them, peep the memes – and, of course, to get that sweet dopamine rush.

It’s the last one that really supplies the lifeblood of the empire. It’s what keeps the eyeballs coming back, which is what pays for those ad slots and data profiles that gird those Big Tech war chests.

Recently, our (my) literary archon of truth, Ted Gioia, went viral when his annual “State of the Culture” demonstrated that the “fastest growing sector of the culture economy is distraction.”

“I find it revealing and disturbing that readers who work on the front lines (in education, therapy, or tech itself) expressed the highest degree of alarm,” he wrote. “They know better than anybody where we’re heading, and want to find an escape path.”

As long as our dopamine remains the fuel – and Big Tech continues to evade any crippling hits from antitrust regulators – it’s tough to envisage a viable escape path. We are the product, after all. But could alternative social platforms be our getaway vehicle? Or perhaps the first domino to fall in the toppling of our culture of distraction? 

DeSo(lation)

On-chain social (affectionately called DeSo) is one such alternative. Decentralized protocols enable content and social graphs to exist ex-platform – software can actually serve our relationships instead of owning them.

Despite my own enthusiasm for DeSo, I’ve been hesitant to commit – mostly because I want to engage with the people I’m writing about and inspired by, many of whom aren’t there.

For all of Twitter’s flaws, amplified in the Elon era dumpster fire – as Gioia wrote: “If you created a community but eliminated all rituals of politeness and sociability, it would look like Twitter” – I still use it. Why? Because we were all already there.

Tangential to that reality is the fact that we’ve got too many damn places to keep track of. This is true for everyone, but it’s an especially important calculus for creators.

Creator labor is one of the key inputs in Vaughn McKenzie-Landell’s “Creator Engine,” the focal point in a recent piece from the newly christened JUICE newsletter.

The engine – which is fueled by capital and produces relationships – is structured as a general framework that observes how technology affects resource flows between creator and consumer. Central to the conversation is the concept of “carrying capacity,” which basically says creators are limited to a fixed number of relationships they can manage at any given time. 

Technology, though, can increase that capacity. YouTube, for instance, enabled creators to “cheaply sustain a vast number of fan relationships anywhere in the world through video,” McKenzie-Landell writes. Zoom out and that key value add helps explain the rise of the creator economy – and the platforms that power it.

The fact that these platforms are ad-powered brings us back to our dopamine distraction Death Star complex – and to our hope that “sufficiently decentralized” social networks can help us defeat the empire.

Frames

“Sufficient decentralization,” entrepreneur Varun Srinivasan says, is achieved “if two users can find each other and communicate, even if the rest of the network wants to prevent it.”

Why would a network want to prevent that? Well, consider that organic reach on traditional social platforms is 2-6 percent – i.e. if you post content, 2-6 percent of your followers are going to see it (unless, of course, you pay handsomely in both time and money).

To accomplish “sufficient decentralization,” Srinivasan writes, you need to empower developers to build multiple clients on a protocol. Otherwise, a single client maintains centralized control and can thus quash communication.

Srinivasan is building Farcaster, a “blockchain network” that offers an alternative to the corporate, centralized Twitters of the world. “You can think of Farcaster as a Twitter that’s extensible by its community and always will be,” says Packy McCormick in his Not Boring newsletter.

Let’s break that down. Twitter and Farcaster are both “protocols” – i.e. sets of rules and conventions that govern the exchange of information between systems – but today Twitter is the only “client” – i.e. the interface through which we communicate with the protocol – that can use the Twitter protocol. 

Last February, Twitter shuttered its free API – i.e. the means through which software apps can communicate – which prevented third parties from accessing Twitter’s protocol data. Lots of clients that were reliant upon that data for their products were suddenly turned off (consider reading “The Bull Case for Owning Your Data” – also via JUICE – from McKenzie-Landell’s co-operater Dan Fowler for more context on this topic).

Farcaster, on the other hand, is not a centralized app. It operates through a network of more than 1000 hubs that work in tandem to verify the Farcaster network – similar to Bittorrent. And importantly, a Farcaster ID is stored on-chain (on Optimism). That ID is immutable and “ex-platform,” and is referenced by all of the clients built atop the Farcaster network.

One of the popular clients, Warpcast, was built by Farcaster itself – it will look familiar to those who use Twitter. It’s a similar text-based social network where people “cast” instead of “tweet.” 

The most recent Farcaster feature is called Frames, which are essentially small apps that exist within casts. They’re akin to the inline frames (aka iframes) used by Twitter et al to display content in tweets from third party websites.

These past few weeks, Frames have been getting a lot of attention.

“For web3 to succeed it needs to do two things: enable cool functionality unable through traditional web2, and make the user largely unaware that they’re even on the blockchain,” writes Antonio Garcia Martinez, author of the book Chaos Monkeys. “With Frames, we’re finally doing both.”

Garcia Martinez – who once sold a startup to Twitter and worked as a Product Manager at Facebook – likens Frames to Facebook’s Open Graph Protocol, the “subject-verb-object language of everything you did online,” he remembers in Chaos Monkeys, his memoir. “Rather than merely express some vague approval via Like, Facebook users could now broadcast everything they were doing, with the aid of outside developers who built Facebook’s new grammar into their products.” 

Back then, pre-Facebook IPO, there was interest in tying together “all the consumer experiences together with the social network” in mutually beneficial ways. But in the pre-IPO revenue crisis, Facebook’s ad products were prioritized, Open Graph was “somewhat-forgotten” and “mutually beneficial” was subsequently all but erased from the capitalist lexicon.

Now, though, there’s a bubbling energy about the potential of Frames to resurrect more connective, collaborative behavior. Builders are experimenting and built Frames to enable various one-click actions, like minting a song, subscribing to a newsletter and playing games in-feed.

The web3 venture fund Variant even hosted a Frames hackathon with hundreds of developers. Variant Co-founder Jesse Walden penned an essay that described his excitement for Frames, touting them as a paragon of the “headless marketplace,” “a market leveraging global, on-chain identity, money, and data while distributing locally – wherever a user’s wallet already is.”

“Because decentralized social networks leverage crypto wallets for identity,” Walden writes, “it’s now possible to tap users’ existing identity, money, and data in your application too.”

One of the frequently memed examples – by Walden and others – was this girl scout cookie Frame:

In a music chat I’m part of, someone shared this Frame and suggested an artist could riff on this to build a one-click(-ish) merch shop. And structurally, one could argue that Frames increase carrying capacity by reducing creator labor (e.g. minimizing the number of inputs/platforms a creator needs to manage) and enriching the context of the relationship (e.g. coalescing data, money and identity in one place).

Importantly, Farcaster is able to maintain “sufficient decentralization” by having users pay for their own storage costs (i.e. it’s not serving you ads as a means of paying to store your data, as is the standard web2 practice). And clients are able to add their own monetizable actions – Warpcast charges $0.01 per cast, for example, which can have second order effects like reducing spam. 

So is Farcaster the future? A composable, decentralized network ripe for experimentation, world-building and direct payments?

As hopeful as it is, relatively speaking, we’re still stuck in desolation. As of this writing Farcaster has about 25,000 daily active folks (DAFs). Twitter, for comparison, has more than 200 million.

25,000 isn’t nothing, but its’s worth noting that this number comes with an asterisk. Activity has already halved since the February 7 peak of about 47,000 DAFs, and there’s a sneaking sense of gold rush about Farcaster.

“A common use of Frames is to provide another Farcaster user with an NFT if they follow the original poster’s account and repost their Frame,” writes Tim Copeland for The Block. “The lure of grabbing free NFTs and other potential airdrops attracted much of the crypto community to expand from Twitter and Discord to Farcaster in much larger numbers than ever before.”

Where this is attention in crypto, there are speculators, and one of the more popular aforementioned airdrops is the $DEGEN meme coin. ‘Degen,’ short for degenerate, is a term of endearment for crypto’s high risk traders. While the coin has some interesting tipping mechanisms, its presence still feels emblematic of the fast money philosophy that remains dominant in the crypto space – and of that same dopamine culture we should be trying to leave behind.

Coda

I’ll leave you with a quote from – who else – Ted Gioia, from a piece that responds to the alarm from his “State of the Culture.” In it, he makes 13 observations about ritual – “one bedrock of real world life that is often neglected,” he writes. This is his 13th and final observation:

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.