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, and to the people who seek it; the rest, as Alex Ross wrote, is noise.

Personal Limits

I’ve been a bit under the weather recently. This weekend, thinking a good schvitz could sort me out, I spent an afternoon at Hackney’s Community Baths, a folksy multi-purpose space in East London. The gathering area has a couple old pianos, board games, a bar and a set of Pioneer decks. In the back garden, there are saunas and cold plunges. It’s more hippie than hipster, and a fine place to spend a day.

Out back, after disrobing, I walked into a sauna that was clocking 110 degrees Celsius (according to what I hope was at least a mildly inaccurate thermometer). Whatever the case, it was hot. Two minutes in the tops of my ears felt like they were on fire, but I held my ground. Ten minutes later I hobbled out, put my legs in a cold plunge and then promptly passed out. 

Aside from a few convulsions and a scraped hand, I was no worse for wear, gratefully, but it felt like a proper metaphor for the state of things. Lovely communal experience that I went and ruined by not respecting my limitations.

Today, nearly everywhere we look – politics, the climate, AI, financial systems – we’re blowing past limits. And at stake is much more than a scrape on the hand.

Systemic Limits

In 2014, Stephen Hawking said:

A lot’s happened in the past 10 years. In 2014, AI was a nascent presence in consumer products. Today it’s embedded in billions of peoples’ lives. Will it be this next decade that the aliens arrive?

OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman has predicted we’ll see AGI – artificial general intelligence, AI that performs most tasks better than humans – by 2027 or 2028. Various existential risks accompany the emergence of AGI.

It’s these predictions of imminence that help explain why 42 percent of the 119 CEOs at Yale’s last CEO Summit – representing places like Walmart, Xerox and Coca Cola – said AI could “destroy humanity” in five to ten years.

OpenAI has speculated that even superintelligence – when AI’s capabilities “greatly” exceed humans’ in virtually every way – is conceivable in the next decade. Risks rise in tandem with these advances. 

Even now, deep fakes challenge our limits of perception. Generative models push the limits of copyright and intellectual property. And autonomous weapons challenge our ethical limits, and exemplify the limitation of nation-states as organizational models (as I explored recently in the Beat). Alas, world powers are always incentivized by deterrence – and that’s the motivation that fuels OpenAI, too.

In 2015, Elon Musk helped co-found OpenAI, spurred by a mission to develop "safe and beneficial" AGI. In other words: build AGI that works with humans before somebody else achieves it in a thoughtless way that kills us all.

While capitalism is useful for incentivizing innovation, we've reached its limits when the pursuit of individual profit can lead to our collective destruction.

Musk’s own behavior is testament to the limitations of our economic systems – to the point of ridiculousness. In 2018, Musk resigned from OpenAI’s board of directors, citing potential future conflicts of interest (Tesla was developing its own AI systems for autonomous driving). As if conflicts of interest ever deterred him — in 2021, when Tesla invested in Bitcoin, he changed his Twitter bio to “Bitcoin,” which pumped the market 20 percent. Later, when he tweeted about Dogecoin, which goes by DOGE, its market jumped eight percent in five minutes.

Today he’s the embodiment of conflicts of interest. He controls a crucial media system (Twitter), holds a government position and acts as the CEO of two companies whose collective market cap is worth well over a trillion dollars.

(For the record, Altman has said Musk resigned from OpenAI because he believed the company had fallen behind competitors, and after the board rejected his proposal to run the company.)

Alas, a sign of systemic failure is that the system rewards this behavior. This fall, Musk invested heavily in Trump, whose victory emboldened his companies’ shareholders, who likely expect Trump to reward Musk’s loyalty with tax breaks and other competitive advantages. He’s now on pace to become a trillionaire by 2027.

And, of course, as if in mockery of us all, Trump let him create and co-lead a new government agency whose acronym is DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency).

Unsurprisingly, the election results have been a boon for crypto markets. In the past six weeks, crypto’s market cap has increased by more than $1 trillion. For the first time ever, Bitcoin surpassed $100,000 (it eclipsed $105,000 this week, while Ether topped $4,000). As usual, with cash comes degens – trading Smowls, buying Fartcoin, etc etc. 

And in South Korea, crypto trading is now bigger than stocks. The South Korean predilection is not just market interest, though. It seems they’re seeking refuge amidst bully politics, both foreign – via impending “Trump tariffs” – and domestic, through the now-impeached President Yoon Suk Yeol, who briefly invoked martial law.

Crypto is a demonstration of excess, but it’s also a response to systemic limitations that we should reconsider. During moments of authoritarianism, decentralized currencies can protect financial access. And in a world where few individuals outside the folks I’ve mentioned in this piece have a say in its form, decentralization is an existential imperative.

The fact that Elon Musk’s $400 billion net worth is not only legal, but lionized, is a sign of failure. A system’s capacity to generate such wealth for individuals is simply not conducive to a communal experience. The vast majority of people are not empowered, but in that limitation, there’s hope, because we’ve got numbers.

Austin Robey’s Subvert project – the “collectively owned Bandcamp successor” I’ve covered here before – may seem trivial when seated next to Musk’s fortune, but it’s the kind of initiative that channels that hope.

Robey’s long been vocal about the fundamental importance of a company’s organizational model, and that we should think beyond the standard VC-backed startup model.

That one of the first questions a VC will ask a founder is “what’s your exit strategy” is another sign of failure. Founders are incentivized to pursue the sale of their company before they even start building it. These are clear limits to sustainability of a collective.

It’s this model that gives you worse case scenarios like Elon Musk and everything above. A much better case scenario here is Bandcamp, which founder Ethan Diamond sold to Epic Games in 2022 with the assurance that it would maintain its ethos and autonomy. Dangle cash in front a founder and they’re likely to grab it.

Bandcamp’s community, though, deserves at least as much credit to the platform’s success as Diamond, and in that moment, everyone besides Diamond was disempowered. That’s a limitation – another company quickly exploited.

Eighteen months later, Bandcamp was sold again to Songtradr (in a sad saga I detailed here), demonstrating that a well-intentioned founder – while important – is not a strong enough safeguard.

To avoid that, Robey says, we need to defend from the outset. And last week, he shared Subvert’s transparent funding process, which will leverage an innovative hybrid model:

• Subvert Inc. PBC - A Public Benefit Corporation that owns the platform's codebase and intangible assets

• Subvert Cooperative LCA - A Cooperative that owns 100 percent of the Subvert Inc.'s founding shares

“Think of this structure as similar to a solo founder who owns 100 percent of their company's founding shares,” Robey writes. “This startup can then flexibly raise investment, including issuing new preferred shares to investors. In our case, that ‘solo founder’ is actually a cooperative with thousands of member-owners.” (Disclaimer: I am one of those member-owners, proudly).

The report documents timelines, investment mechanisms and investor priorities. “Subvert has grown to nearly 2,000 members across 57 countries,” Robey writes. “We’re approaching $40,000 in zine sales, but more importantly, we’ve created a spark.”

A spark indeed. Because now you can ask yourself: What if we lived in a world where we didn’t know the names Musk and Trump, because there was never a system for them to exploit? What if our prevailing organizational model was that of billions of member-owners?

Consider that, dear reader, and furiously fan that spark, because the earth has her limits too, and if we don’t get our shit together soon, we’re not gonna have the chance to find out.

Coda

For anyone looking to explore the limits of their own understanding – from the fundamentals of money to trust to technology – Kernel is accepting applications for its tenth block through tomorrow.

Also, the prison abolition project (Emancipation Impact Network) that I co-operate with the excellent Elise Swopes – and a bevy of other fine folk – is developing a pen pal program. The idea is to connect with people who are currently incarcerated. Consider joining and sending someone some holiday love, because the prison industrial complex is yet another system that long ago exceeded its limits.

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.