The Beat

Welcome to The Beat, Decential’s weekly exploration of music, culture and the new Internet – featuring all the friends we’ve met along the way.

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; the rest, as Alex Ross wrote, is noise.

Canterbury Tales

This past weekend, for my birthday, a group of us trekked from London to an old country manor in Kent. The property was covered in trees and brambles, nestled amidst a great swathe of farmland.

It was a mulled wine by the fire and board games kind of weekend. We played Settlers of Catan, exploring metaphor in the game mechanics, trying to find a more collectivist path to settlement in a game that wasn't built for it. When we needed supplies, we drove about 20 minutes into nearby Canterbury, a quaint town best known for its impressive Cathedral.

Last week, the Archbishop of Canterbury – a principal leader of the Church of England, and the ceremonial head of the Anglican Communion (an enclave representing 85 million members in more than 165 countries) – resigned. A 251-page report found that he failed to report the heinous conduct of a lawyer who, over five decades volunteering at Christian summer camps, abused more than 100 boys.

According to the independent investigation, the Archbishop neglected to disclose the abuse when he first learned of it in 2013. It’s the type of subterfuge that’s long plagued priest-based churches, and like other such resignations, his is unlikely to affect systemic change.

A couple centuries before the Church of England was created, Geoffrey Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales. The collection of 24 stories is framed as a storytelling contest between pilgrims, who are traveling from London to Canterbury’s Cathedral to visit the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket.

Becket, a former Archbishop of Canterbury, was murdered by the knights of King Henry II. One-time friends, disputes over power and jurisdiction between Church and Crown drove a stake between them. As Archbishop, Becket became a fierce defender of church autonomy, which of course vexed King Hank and led to the former’s offing. (It was Henry's regal namesake – King Henry VIII – who ultimately created the Church of England and “resolved” the dispute).

Following his death, Becket was canonized by the pope and venerated as a martyr. Today he’s a co-patron saint of London (alongside Saint Paul), but he’s not wholly sanctified. In a 2006 BBC History poll to decide the “worst Briton” of the past millennium, he was runner-up to Jack the Ripper. 

It was Professor John Hudson of St Andrews University who put him forth to be the poll’s 12th century representative. Becket, Hudson said, was the "founder of gesture politics" and "master of the soundbite,” guided by greed and hypocrisy. 

Many still see Becket as a valiant actor for standing resolute in his beliefs, but nearly a millennium after his death, who’s to know. It’s a question of interpretation, as always. While the idea that we have him to thank for gesture politics and soundbite chicanery is galling – especially today – what’s worse is that we’re still mired in tug-of-war, subject to the whims of archbishops, despots and blowhards. We’re still stuck in the middle of the road somewhere between London and Canterbury, unsure which direction to turn for truth.

Maybe we should head for the ditch…

The Onion Wars

Chaucer's Tales were regarded for satirizing church corruption and the tension between spiritual and worldly authority. Last week, another champion of satire – The Onion – purchased InfoWars, the media brand built by disgraced conspiracy theorist, Alex Jones.

“We thought this would be a hilarious joke,” Ben Collins, the chief executive of The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, said to The New York Times. “This is going to be our answer to this no-guardrails world where there are no gatekeepers and everything’s kind of insane.”

The move was reportedly sanctioned by the families of the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre, who won a $1.4 billion defamation lawsuit against Jones in 2022. The Onion plans to reintroduce the network as a parody of itself, mocking “weird Internet personalities” like Jones.

They didn’t reveal the terms of the deal – only that it cost “less than one trillion dollars,” as they wrote in a fittingly sardonic essay, “Here’s Why I Decided to Buy Infowars.”

“Founded in 1999 on the heels of the Satanic ‘panic’ and growing steadily ever since, InfoWars has distinguished itself as an invaluable tool for brainwashing and controlling the masses,” wrote fictional Global Tetrahedron CEO, Bryce P. Tetraeder. “With a shrewd mix of delusional paranoia and dubious anti-aging nutrition hacks, they strive to make life both scarier and longer for everyone, a commendable goal.”

The entire stock of vitamins and supplements, Tetraeder noted, would be melted down into “a single candy bar–sized omnivitamin that one executive (I will not name names) may eat in order to increase his power and perhaps become immortal.”

The shameless Jones did not sit idly by. “Everything in this process – just like Trump being targeted by lawfare – has been as phony as a three-dollar bill,” he said after the auction closed, borrowing the same comparative he used to deny the Sandy Hook shooting.

Parody and truth are no longer cousins but scheming, identical twins.

Amidst our abject rejection of sense lies an opportunity for a different kind of reportage. The decentralized social protocol Lens just launched its Version 3, which includes “verifiable information feeds and curated content groups.”

“The election showed that people consume algorithms that are pretty much pushed at them and there's very little user choice,” said Founder, Stani Kulechov. “Whether it's with feeds or some other type of solution, users should be able to choose their algorithm, and be able to shop around and change it knowingly.”

Having agency to choose your truth, I suppose, is better than having it thrust upon you by shock jocks like Jones. Or Elon Musk, whose concurrent roles as Trump cabinet crony and Twitter owner are strewn with conflicts of interest.

Twitter, like other web2 social networks, uses centralized servers (i.e. servers that Musk owns and controls), so we’re perpetually at the mercy of his rules and resolutions, which can change without our wherewithal. Should Musk quietly dictate an algorithmic shift toward Trumpian demagoguery, there’s little recourse.

Because the Lens protocol is built atop decentralized, on-chain profiles, and all data is owned by the profile holder, there’s predictable “verification flexibility” in place to keep “AI-driven bias” at bay, the team says. It won't stop people from building their own InfoWars, but maybe it will help curb the spread.

Avara, Lens’s parent company, also just launched Family, a wallet that supports rich-media collectibles. That means that wallet owners can consume videos and listen to music within the wallet itself. Interestingly, Family also includes a messaging function. Imagine a world where we use decentralized messaging platforms instead of those owned by Apple, Google and Meta. Are we then getting ever closer that a sea change where software serves our relationships instead of owning them?

There's certainly a class of emergent tools and platforms that seem to lean in that direction. The startup Grouped just raised $2.5 million to build membership-based artist communities. Levellr, the community management tool, just raised $1.75 million to expand their suite of tools. a16z just led a Series A round in [untitled], a “sacred place for your work-in-progress music.” Medallion, the on-chain “home base for musicians,” just introduced fan listening profiles. And the marketing platform un:hurd announced a partnership with Fiverr to “create a music industry network of designers, videographers and more.” (H/T to Rob Abelow for the aggregation).

Are we headed to that long-awaited Age of Aquarius, the astrological period celebrated by the hippies as one of peace and enlightenment (Woodstock, for example, was touted as “an Aquarian exposition")?

But not everyone agrees that the Age of Aquarius is one of peace and love (you may rationally take no stock in astrology at all). Some folks think we’ve been in the Age of Aquarius since 1447. Others believe we won’t arrive until the year 3597. Some people believe its arrival replaces an era where religion was the “opiate for the masses” with a world ruled by secretive, power-hungry elites who seek absolute power over others (sounds about right). Carl Jung said it would be a “spiritually deficient” age that hearkened the arrival of the Antichrist.

Yet another “middle of the road” between truths.

Pluto’s Age of Aquarius

On Tuesday, Pluto’s orbit moved “permanently” (it will be there until 2043) into the constellation, Aquarius. (It’s been teasing us with retrogrades since last March.)

The culture DAO FWB highlighted the moment in a recent newsletter, writing: “What Pluto’s next placement means for emerging tech.”

Pluto’s most recent full transit through Aquarius (1778-1798) coincided with some fundamental moments in human history: the birth of modern democracy via the American and French Revolutions; the Industrial Revolution; the first major vaccine (smallpox); the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Could it be similarly significant this time?

“During its recent transit through Capricorn (2008-2024),” FWB writes, “Pluto exposed systemic vulnerabilities – from the 2008 financial crisis and growing wealth inequality to the pandemic's revelation of healthcare weaknesses and the unprecedented power of social media companies.

“Now, as Pluto enters Aquarius,” they continue, “we shift from exposing old hierarchies to building new systems. Like its previous transit that transformed our understanding of democracy and human rights, this cycle arrives as we grapple with similar themes through technology and global connectivity.”

At the end of the day, maybe how you interpret these things – revelatory, off-the-mark, meaningless – is all that matters. How does your belief dictate how you live, individually? And how we live, collectively? It’s something to consider as we move ever onward, in whatever age we’re in, in whatever direction we’re going.

See you in Canterbury, maybe.

Coda

In The Canterbury Tales, the winner of the storytelling contest earned a free meal at The Tabard Inn. The Tabard was a real place, established in 1306 (by some estimates, a period in which Pluto would have been in Aquarius). Sitting just outside the jurisdiction of the City of London – where things like prostitution were illegal – the inn would have likely been “filled with pilgrims, drunks, travelers, criminals and prostitutes.” And hey, we’re all in this together.

Over the weekend, we spent one night at The Anchor Inn, a 17th century pub in Wingham, a village just east of Canterbury. It was packed to the gills with every type of person, who had gathered to listen to the Irish musician, Kenan Flannery.

Flannery was thoughtful, charismatic and witty. At the behest of my friends, he sang me “Happy Birthday.” And when he discovered I was American, he said with a wry smile: “Congrats on the recent election. Now that the end of the world is comin’, might as well just keep drinkin’ beer and playing music.”

Unexpectedly, he let me borrow his guitar to play a couple of my own songs. We ended the night with a duet of Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold.” The moment was simple and connective, but the song’s a bit more abstruse. In its lyrics, the narrator is searching for a “heart of gold,” traveling the world in pursuit as he’s “getting old.” That heart – which seems to represent something purer, something we can all agree on as good – keeps him searching. Always, it eludes him.

"This song put me in the middle of the road,” Young wrote in the liner notes of his 1977 compilation album, Decade. “Traveling there soon became a bore so I headed for the ditch. A rougher ride but I saw more interesting people there."

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.