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.

Otocracy

Every Friday I work from Cafe Oto, an experimental music venue in London’s Dalston neighborhood. During the day it functions as a cafe. Artists and thinkers drift in, chat over coffee, write things on their laptops and flip through the cases of vinyl strewn across the space’s walls. 

Last Friday, the cafe was blasting the Twin Peaks score, commemorating the show’s creator, David Lynch, who died last week. 

Lynch was an auteur, singular enough that his name became a verb, describing his uncanny juxtaposition of the surreal and the mundane. He was protective of the particularity that yielded that verb. In his short book, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity, he said:

That hasn’t been true in my experience with therapy, but it represents a conscious decision to let the weird percolate. Through two daily sessions of transcendental meditation – a spiritual movement for which he became a figurehead — he cultivated his inner curio.

I recently started re-watching Twin Peaks and I’m reveling in the Lynchian mood. No cell phones, no Internet, no multinational corporations or demagogues to reckon with – just odd mundanity, the occasional mysticism and quirky characters to act out the melodramatic tensions of competing forces: good and evil, darkness and light. 

The show feels like an encapsulation of the man himself, who regularly took to Twitter to say, “If you can believe it, it’s Friday once again!”

Tomorrow, once again, that will be true, but alas, we do have those demagogues and corporations to reckon with, and as the Twitters and TikToks and Metas and Amazons supplicate to the Trump regime, it’s worth exploring our own damaged creativity, and tapping the weirdness that lies within.

Make TikTok Weird Again

Last April, President Biden declared TikTok would be banned in the U.S. if its Chinese parent company, Bytedance, didn’t divest. The social media company has been roiled in tumult ever since – and never more so than in the past week.

Last Friday, the Supreme Court backed the law that required the app’s sale or ban. Attorney General Merrick Garland celebrated the decision, contending that “authoritarian regimes should not have unfettered access to millions of Americans’ sensitive data.” 

The app went dark. Then, Trump, a longtime China detractor and advocate of TikTok’s embargo, hinted he may stall the ban. Ultimately, he issued an executive order to give the company 75 more days to find a buyer. Hours before his inauguration, TikTok came back online and credited him as their savior, sending a notification to its vast user base: "As a result of President Trump's efforts, TikTok is back in the U.S."

Since then, Trump’s begun suggesting that the U.S. government could be an owner of the app’s American presence. 

“I would like the United States to have a 50% ownership position in a joint venture,” he wrote on his social platform, Truth Social. “By doing this, we save TikTok, keep it in good hands and allow it to say (sic) up. Without U.S. approval, there is no Tik Tok (sic). With our approval, it is worth hundreds of billions of dollars – maybe trillions.

“Therefore,” he continues, “my initial thought is a joint venture between the current owners and/or new owners whereby the U.S. gets a 50% ownership in a joint venture set up between the U.S. and whichever purchase (sic) we so choose.”

About said purchaser, the rumor mill churns. Some of the buyers thus far suggested are YouTube star Mr. Beast and Elon Musk  (I’m still rooting for The People’s Bid for TikTok). 

Musk, of course, already owns Twitter, and he’s the co-head of the new Department of Government Efficiency – a position that’s likely coming with a West Wing office. At Trump’s inauguration, he ended his speech with what appeared to be two instances of the Roman salute, which a century ago was adopted by the fascist movement and then famously used by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. 

It’s impossible to know if Musk was sincere or playing provocateur; either way, we shouldn’t disregard the act as hogwash. For the past few months, he’s been soliciting far right movements around the world, and neo-Nazi groups are eating it up. “Holy crap,” tweeted Evan Kilgore, a right-wing political commentator, “did Elon Musk just Heil Hitler at the Trump Inauguration Rally in Washington DC … This is incredible.” He later wrote: “We are so back.”

At the inauguration, tech CEOs were given positions of prominence. Alongside Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai and Jeff Bezos – the respective heads of Meta, Google and Amazon – were seated in front of Trump’s cabinet picks. The collective net worth of these four individuals is nearly a trillion dollars. For reference, the bottom half of the entire U.S. population – some 170 million people – is about four trillion.

The juggernaut is taking shape. Twitter is already in tow. In apparent acquiescence, Meta rolled back fact checking. The Washington Post – which is owned by Bezos – abstained from endorsing a presidential candidate for the first time in 36 years. And the prospect of a Musk-owned or state-owned TikTok should give us tremendous pause. 

Attempts to thwart this consolidation of power have failed. Criminal investigations took too long, or didn’t go far enough. Trump name-calling that sought to couch his character in his own behavior – “felon,” “rapist,” “Nazi,” “liar,” “fascist” – was brushed off as radical rhetoric.  

But one thing did bruise his fragile ego. When former VP candidate – and my Minnesotan brethren – Tim Walz went viral for calling him “weird,” that struck a nerve. And on the brink of an oligarchy, perhaps that’s where we should fight back.

Weird Participants

On paper, Trump represents all the blandness of the monoculture – meat and potatoes, no immigrants, two legal genders homogeneity. So what’s “weird” about him is that “weird” – not “fascist” or “rapist” – is what hurt. The way that word was interpreted – as weak, dismissive, different – illuminates the opportunity here. Like Walz said, “The fascists depend on fear … but we’re not afraid of weird people.”

Weird defangs because it humanizes – it’s full of foibles and quirks and Lynchian oddity. And there’s a reason this regime is aligned with the prevailing technocracy. As I’ve written before, in these “dark ages” of “siloed Internet services and digital monopolies,” tech platforms curb niche by incentivizing broad appeal: get more likes, get more attention from the algorithm. When people are the same, it makes them easier to control.

I credit the web3 learning community Kernel – which returns next month with its tenth cohort – for developing my appreciation of technology that empowers our full selves, quirks and all.

The program’s syllabus is grounded in segments on play, trust, money and love. These, for all things, should be fundamental scaffolding. One of Kernel’s stewards, Andy Tudhope – who created the program’s syllabus as a gift called the Kernel book – just added a new module.

In the essay, called “Weird Participants,” Tudhope writes about the “strange” phrase: “architectures of participation.” When paired with Bitcoin – “the first network-centric protocol for money,” he writes, “it gets even weirder, because – for the first time in living memory – the architectures that invite our participation in the phenomenon of money are open and permissionless. They are not owned by anyone.”

Broadly, Tudhope asserts that this environment can enable us to build beautiful things that embody our multitudes:

That ideal form has been elusive, because we’re not encouraged to be weird. But Lynch understood that creativity rests “below your inner horizons and beyond your outer ones.” In both spaces, there’s darkness and light, good and evil, and “beautiful things” in the spectrums between.

Of the many Lynch homages I saw, the most resonant was a simple quote retweeted by Lani Trock:

I first met Lani through the Kernel community. She’s the founder of EcoDAO and co-founder of Leaving Records’ Genre project. In November, 2022 I interviewed her alongside some other Leaving Records folk, and we explored their recent foray into the blockchain:

For Trock, and for many of us, decentralization and immutability seemed like powers that could achieve that “ideal form” – could make us cosmic.

In a later interview, Trock went so far as to say: “The blockchain is a reflection of our emerging unity consciousness and the technological and economic scaffolding of that next journey.”

But look no further than Trump Coin to see that this economic scaffolding is not solely a tool for the world’s Kernels and Leaving Records. Across the web3 space, there’s a tacit sense that two divergent paths lie ahead:

But such is the case of all things. The cosmos is vast. It can be sinister, and mundane, and mystical. It’s many things for many different people, sometimes all at once, and we need stories to help us make sense of it all.

One thing’s for sure, when it comes time to pen this one, it’s going to be weird, and I wish it could be written by Lynch. In his absence, we’ll need others to channel that spirit. As Agent Dale Cooper said: “I have no idea where this will lead us, but I have a definite feeling it will be a place both wonderful and strange.”

Coda

In 2016, I covered a show by the experimental noise group, Xiu Xiu. They’d just released the album Plays the Music of Twin Peaks, which is exactly what it sounds like. In anticipation of Twin Peaks’ exceptionally weird third season, Xiu Xiu performed a special show at The Kitchen, an experimental arts space in the depths of Manhattan’s Meatpacking District.

The band played songs from Angelo Badalamenti’s score, invoking its spirit – its beauty, its violence, its romanticism, its terrifying catharsis. Alongside layers of their own noisy patois, they flung it forcibly throughout the room.

The covers were originally commissioned by the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art for the 2015 exhibition, “David Lynch: Between Two Worlds.” The exhibit was presented as “a rare opportunity to consider his entire creative vision and the relationships between his practice as an artist, filmmaker and musician.”

Writing for The Guardian, journalist Andrew Frost reviewed the show. He described Lynch’s predilection for the uncanny, and for his matchless ability to tell us what’s about to happen without us realizing. In Mulholland Drive, for example, the cowboy explains to the film director Adam Kesher what’s about to occur, “and even offers to reappear a certain number of times if things are going good or bad,” Frost notes.

Frost then wonders if Lynch has been dangling some larger truth in front of our eyes:

Indeed, if we do good, if we open “the way for the creative powers” and encourage a Lynchian embrace of all the weird that bubbles up, I’m certain that we will.

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.