The Beat

Welcome to The Beat, Decential’s weekly exploration of music, culture and the new Internet.

On the culture-tech byway, things move at breakneck speeds. From web3 to AI, copyright to collective ownership, art to psychedelics, The Beat is an exercise in association. We all contain multitudes, and within them, vast differences. But there is some connective, fundamental essence to be found.

The Beat is dedicated to that essence, and to the people who seek it; the rest, as Alex Ross wrote, is noise.

The Beat Goes On

I want to begin this edition with gratitude – to all of you who have spent time with the Beat these past 2.5 years. 

It’s been a labor of love and discovery, from a narrow focus on the case for decentralized music – a “bi-monthly breakdown of the music-web3 byway” – to a sprawling weekly “exercise in association,” where we expect “some connective, fundamental essence to be found” in the spaces between web3 and AI, copyright and collective ownership, art and psychedelics.

Decential has generously supported this practice across 130 editions, but alas, as is so often the case with mission-driven folk, a congruent business model proved elusive. It, too, became a product of the extractive paradigm of platform capitalism that I spend so much Beat ink berating.

It’s with sadness, then, that this will be the final installment of the Beat – for now. I do expect to carry on, and my sabbatical is not solely due to the end of Decential. In sunnier news, I’m off to Brazil to get married.

It feels fitting, then, to make this provisional goodbye an homage to love, and to some of the characters most prominent in these weekly Beat tales – and also to Brazil, whose conception of the world we’d do well to emulate more often.

The Whispered Lineage

Six years ago, I proposed during a Yann Tiersen soundcheck in New York. I’d interviewed the composer for Vice three years prior, and we stayed in touch via contacts at his label, Mute. 

Most famously, Tiersen scored the film Amelie, an early shared affinity she and I found when we first met. Later, Tiersen’s track “Porz Goret” became “our song.” And as he played it pre-show at the beautiful Beacon Theater, she agreed to marry me.

I share this anecdote to convey how music – when offered space for context – is a means of connection. Emotional exchanges that happen through music remain irreproducible by anyone besides humans: chance conversations at record stores, the sweaty camaraderie of a punk show mosh pit, thanking an artist to her face, and conversely, hearing from a fan that your music means something to them. Add to that the power of human-to-human music discovery — the whispered lineage of “my god, have you heard this yet?”

What’s at stake in our enshittified machinery of convenience-obsessed, scale-at-all-costs, Spotify-colored platforms that axe context and connective tools to buoy the bottom line – and syphon values from music-makers to billionaire founders – is no less than love itself! To learn that a song that speaks to my soul does to yours, too, reveals more than words can express in years.

We need to build systems where our souls can find one another.

Anthropophagy

We got married in a Brooklyn courthouse four months after the show. Our party, we decided, would take place in Brazil, where she’s from, so her community could attend, and so that we could share this beautiful place with everyone we know. But then the pandemic happened. And then more life happened. 

In that time, though, Brazil bestowed her lessons on this small-town Minnesota boy. In retrospect it has informed much of my personal credo, and much of my writing in this space.

At a museum in São Paulo, I discovered the Brazilian philosopher, Oswald de Andrade, who reclaimed as a worldview the term Anthropophagy – the custom of eating human flesh. It became a symbolic devouring and digesting of external influences and information, and their subsequent transformation into something new and entirely Brazilian, where the flesh of one piece becomes the stem cells of another.

All individuals, I realized, cannibalize the information of others for the construction of themselves. Plumbing through the deluge – songs, poems, philosophies, paintings, relationships, news, histories, jokes, fairy tales, hieroglyphs, legends, recipes, dances, religions – we gradually hone in on our music, the stuff that strikes like lightning and catalyzes our own art. We devour the flesh of others to discover what exists in our own.

To acknowledge this is to acknowledge that it makes little sense to claim sole ownership of the stuff that comes out when we put pen to paper. But we’ve been conditioned to believe it is our own, and to celebrate – and pursue – the quality of genius. To whom can we credit this thing, we ask, whose message and truth have found their way to me?

This Machine Kills Copyright

That became the foundation of my perspectives on copyright and AI, and of the largest project I produced at Decential: “This Machine Kills Copyright: Minting a Bob Dylan Song As a Way to Resurrect Folk Traditions.”

The 9,000-word piece was pursued in tandem with FOLK, a collective focused on exploring folk relationships and methodologies to build a new commons infrastructure.

The crux was:

• Copyright helped enable a transformation from music of the folk into music of a folk, incentivizing artists like Bob Dylan to use the folk canon to elevate his own mythos. 

• Dylan borrowed and created in the folk tradition, invoking an "everything belongs to everyone" spirit – all while copyright helped him accumulate massive personal wealth. Because outside of folk, everything does not belong to everyone.

• Dylan recently sold his music rights for $600 million. Clearly he's a superlative songwriter, but (especially) in the context of a transmissive music and an “everything belongs to everyone” spirit, it makes no sense for one folk to have all that wealth. 

Wrestling with legacy concepts of ownership – and a memetic Internet culture that's increasingly at odds with them – and the legal murk of web3 technologies, we recorded, distributed, and sold a Bob Dylan cover to challenge the system of copyright and propose a new course that redistributes wealth from one folk to many.

Tropicalizing the Digital World

I wasn’t the only person influenced by Oswald de Andrade, of course. I remember the first time my partner played me her favorite musician, Gilberto Gil. And I remember the first time I was wholly electrified by his music.

There’s a party scene in the Brazilian film Aquarius – which she shared with me very early in our relationship – where everyone sings and dances to Gil’s song, “Toda Menina Baiana.” I got goosebumps, and since then, I’ve noted an exceptional quality amongst Brazilians: they know every single word to every single Brazilian song ever made. Go to a party, play Gil – or a thousand other artists – and watch everyone dance and sing all the words together. Now that’s what music’s capable of.

In October 2023, I saw Gil play at Royal Albert Hall, the historic London venue that’s hosted speeches by Churchill and Einstein and exhibition bouts by Muhammad Ali – and that once banned Pink Floyd for shooting cannons during their performance.

Gil was playing his final show in the English capital – an event titled “Farewell to London, Aquele Abraço” (“that hug,” in Portuguese), referencing another of his most iconic songs.

Gil was one of the key figures of Brazil’s tropicália movement. Musically, tropicália was an amalgamation of Brazilian styles like samba and bossa nova with the avant garde – as well as imports, like American psychedelia and pop rock.

More than that, though, it was a political and cultural statement against the country’s military dictatorship. For that statement, Gil and fellow luminary Caetano Veloso were perceived as threats to the regime, and after imprisoning them for three months, the military expelled them from the country.

They relocated to London, and Gil lived here for three years, from 1969 - 1972, before moving back to Brazil. Through his music and other work, the artist has since devoted his life to activism and broader cultural institutions. From 2003 to 2008, he even served as Brazil's Minister of Culture in the administration of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (who is once again Brazil’s president).

In the middle of that tenure, a group of American online rights activists and scholars – one of whom was Lawrence Lessig, founder of the Creative Commons non-profit – sat down with Gil in a living room in Rio de Janeiro. The then 62-year-old presiding Minister of Culture spoke about how “the fundamentalists of absolute property control” stood in the way of the digital world's promises of cultural democracy.

"A world opened up by communications cannot remain closed up in a feudal vision of property," he said. "No country – not the US, not Europe – can stand in the way of it. It's a global trend. It's part of the very process of civilization. It's the semantic abundance of the modern world – and there's no use resisting it."

Gil summed up his team’s approach to intellectual property in the digital world with one word: “tropicalize.” The goal? "To make the digital world join in the samba.” 

Metalabels & Carnivals

A year ago at this time, I was just returning from Rio and my first Brazilian Carnival. The event is mythic the whole world-round, but for my partner, it was an annual sacrament that she’d been missing dearly since leaving her country. 

For a full week – sometimes longer – the entire country shuts down. Everyone takes to the streets and dances together to music. Now that’s a national holiday! I joined in the samba to the extent that I was loath to do anything else ever again.

Throughout Carnival, hundreds of blocos (block parties) march the city’s streets, gathering around music genres, locales, legends and myriad other themes. Thousands of others assemble in cities across Brazil. And these are not mere street parties with DJ sets, drinks and a few streamers – these are thoughtfully prepared extravaganzas, with mind-boggling floats and rehearsed bands, dancers and stilt walkers, all garbed in colorful costume. 

For most people involved, these projects are labors of love – opportunities to express a belief, dance, dress up and gather around music. And the love is palpable. Everyone shows up with such passion and joy, shared equally across the organizers and the organized – even when it means staying at the Sambódromo until 4am, or waking up before sunrise to race across the city to gather before a bloco departs. 

From a cafe in Leblon, I made the case that Metalabel – an oft touted touchstone in this Beat – is fashioning a digital Carnival of sorts. In its early formation, founder Yancey Strickler observed how certain collectives he admired had some of these traits, and he sought to understand them further.

They were like a label, he noted, but more collaborative and scene-driven, so Strickler started imagining them as ‘metalabels’ – “groups of people working under a common identity for a common purpose with a focus on releases – distinct public works that reflect and manifest their views.”

Around that time, Metalabel shared its vision for an off-chain tech stack that reflected the decentralized vision upon which the new Internet is built.

I was seeing everything through the lens of Carnival and this was no different. Throughout the event, I was thinking a lot about public access and managing identities, two of the conditions that appear broadly in that stack. Everyone is free to join, and costumes connote a sense of play and participation in the adventure.

The “operating system” is more experiential than release-based – as a metalabel might be – but the essence is there: those “groups of people working under a common identity for a common purpose with a focus…that reflect[s] and manifest[s] their views.”

“Could Metalabel become the Carnival for the new Internet?” I wondered. “Where beneath the umbrella of joy and community and social good, groups can spin out blocos to reflect and manifest unique purpose?”

What feels obvious but worth mentioning is that there’s joy in gathering around something shared, and that’s the kind of magic we should be building around.

Dealing with Control

Recently, the words that have been loudest inside my head came from yet another Brazilian: the dancer and computer artist, Analivia Cordeiro. She was born in 1954 in São Paulo – the same year and place that de Andrade died.

When Cordeiro was 10, Brazil’s military overthrew its democratic government, beginning the same 21-year dictatorship that expelled Gil. “They killed people,” she told me recently. “We were all in danger. So I had this censorship in my mind – you have to be careful, you cannot tell people things, there is always someone watching what you're doing. And this fits very well in our world today.”

Here she mentioned Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos as modern-day representatives of the censorship regime. They control the world’s data, she said, so they can effectively control the world.

 ”My work deals with control,” she continued, “controlling movement, controlling language. But I always leave a space for the dancer to create.”

Cordeiro then recalled her presentation at the new art fair, Digital Art Mile (the fair’s founder, Georg Bak, was the first to introduce Cordeiro to the blockchain). And that’s when those words arrived – the ones echoing inside my head.

“When I was talking, I just got up and I began to move,” she shared, remembering the audience’s surprise as she broke convention. ”People from the companies that propose software don't know the limitations they are imposing. Technology imposes rules. From the very beginning of my life, I never accepted the impositions and the limitations.

“I know there are limitations – I take sometimes years to get a result because the technology is still not there, but the technology will be there,” she continued. “And if [artists] actually begin to propose software, what happens?” 

Indeed, what if artists built software? Surely the tech that emerges would be more embodied. Uncensored. And controlled only to the point to which it can be readily devoured by others, transformed into the flesh of something new.

Coda

Last month, Brazil’s National Data Protection Authority (ANPD) rooted out some of those limitations. They ordered Tools for Humanity (part of World Network, formerly Worldcoin) to halt its eye-scanning project, which offers cryptocurrency as compensation for consent to biometric data collection.

Under Brazilian law, consent for processing sensitive personal data must be free and informed. The ANPD expressed especial concerns about financial incentives influencing vulnerable populations and the irreversible nature of biometric data collection.

The ANPD's action reflects Brazil's complex relationship with control and freedom - the same tensions that have animated its music, art and politics for generations. This balance remains fragile, though, and that protection might not be extended if Jair Bolsonaro were still president.

Brazil's political timeline reads like an echo of the United States, delayed by just two years. On January 8, 2023, Bolsonaro supporters stormed the capitol, protesting his re-election loss. Like Trump, the former president was initially demonized for his involvement, and he’s standing trial for his role in the insurrection. He was even barred from running for office until 2030, but his support has endured.

Emboldened by Trump’s re-election, Bolsonaro is challenging his ineligibility. And in troubling symmetry, prosecutors are racing against time, trying to eke out a final ruling that keeps him out of the 2026 presidential run.

I’ve spent a lot of time condemning the beasts of the world: Bolsonaro, Trump, Musk, Daniel Ek, Lucian Grainge. I think it’s important that they’re held accountable for their gross dereliction of stewardship – and for enabling our worst instincts.

But what I hope has been most resonant in the Beat is the pith of the matter: that we have an extraordinary opportunity to live on this earth, and we owe it to that opportunity to live as well as we can.

Living “well,” though, does not mean hoarding wealth to maximize individual well-being. It means the creation of equitable, tropicalized, artist-made, connective systems of care, so that all of us are empowered to find our lovers, to discover our music, to tell our stories and to bask in the mystery of this planet.

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.