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Cryptoskepticism

Mar 17, 2022 | 2 comments

A colleague of mine is at SXSW right now, and sent me a link to $STREAM, a new tokenised research framework for the music industry.

$STREAM is led by Cherie Hu, whose work I know fairly well, we’ve spoken online on occasion, and I have a lot of respect for her as a writer and thinker about the intersection of new technologies and the music industries. There aren’t very many people doing digital music business analysis well, but she’s by far one of the best. If anything was going to make me think that a project like this deserves to be successful, it’s her involvement.

One thing she has read correctly is the overlap between consumers of music tech news and semi-early adopters of cryptocurrencies and Web3 technologies. I’m afraid I’m not among them, and I have not yet seen a use case that improves things for the cultural and creative sector at a macro level. I’ve seen some good projects and some positive results for individual creators, but if pressed, I would say that on balance they are largely harmful to creators and certainly to consumers in the long term – and that’s without considering the catastrophic climate implications of the technology.

What I’m hearing from SXSW is an absolute mainstreaming and (suspiciously) well-financed promotional push of Web3 hype. This is not a grass roots development. Perhaps if I was there, someone could persuade me that all of this is a good idea, but studying blockchains and related technologies closely have not made me a Web3 enthusiast.

I’m yet to be convinced that DAOs provide a compelling alternative to cooperatives – and I’ve come to regard the word ‘tokenisation’ as a red flag, because of its near-total correlation with unregulated financial speculation. This is the same thinking that gave us all those websites in the early 2010s that thought that you could improve the music industry by making it more like the stock exchange, the casino or both at the same time. It’s what happens when you start from a position of Right-Libertarian philosophy, which almost all of these projects do.

There will of course be early winners in this game, but that is how pyramid schemes work. Not all Web3 projects are scams or opportunistic parasitism, of course – and to be absolutely clear, Cherie’s certainly won’t be – but none of the ‘problems’ addressed by $STREAM actually requires any of these technological solutions.

If the last 50 years of the internet has taught us anything it’s that open contributions to research, citizen science and communities of interest don’t really need to be gamified or incentivised with tokens. If, for instance, Linux, Wikipedia or Zooniverse had been established as DAOs with Wikibucks, Zootokens or Linuxcoins used to bribe contributors, I seriously doubt it would have improved those things.

If I thought it would be of benefit to either of us, I would probably give Cherie a shout once her SXSW commitments are behind her. If anyone could persuade me that Web3, DAOs, cryptocurrencies and NFTs are a net positive for society, it would probably be her. But I suspect we both have other things to focus on, and I wish her the best of luck.

I’m going to return now to being someone who does NOT write blog posts about cryptocurrency on the internet.

The paperless dream

May 16, 2013 | 0 comments

Ft evernote

I’ve been using Evernote, on and off, for over three years now. And while it seems like a terribly clever thing, it just wasn’t that useful in my life. I take lots of notes, and I write a lot of things, but I have a number of different systems for sorting and filing those and it just didn’t make sense to add another one.

After all, which bit of my system would Evernote fit into or replace?

Turns out the answer was ALL OF IT.

I’ve been reading a few things about Evernote over the past few days, and I thought I’d try and make the most of what is actually a very simple and powerful tool.

The best thing is that Evernote will pretty much take whatever you throw at it – from voice memos to photos, PDFs to single lines of text. I’ve even been forwarding certain project-related information emails there, so that I can find them later. I trust Evernote’s search far more than I do Mail app’s.

You can tag, file and sort everything later, and it’s all incredibly searchable (and therefore findable). For someone who does a lot of writing, being able to locate all of the information you’ve ever bookmarked or saved on a particular subject (and likewise being able to clip it from your browser) is utterly invaluable.

I’ve created Notebooks for all of my different projects and have started organising on that basis. It’s a great way to have all of my research, all of my important documents – all of the papers I need for everything all in one cross-platform, OCR-scanning tool.

My ambition for the next month or so is to slowly go through all of the papers that I keep for one reason or another and scan as many of them as seems reasonable into Evernote and then throw them away. Some documents, of course, need to be kept for various reasons – but not nearly as many as I have in the house or at work.

So – the trick is not to dabble in Evernote – but to use it for EVERYTHING.

This Lifehacker article is worth a read if you’re inclined to give it a go.

Taking my ball and going home

Apr 15, 2013 | 1 comment

Brummie

It turns out that everything I post on both this blog and my music blog gets automatically reposted on a site called The Brummie. Recently, I’ve been a frequent contributor, without even really realising it. I kind of have mixed feelings about that.

First, I think it’s great that there’s a website that brings together news and information from around Birmingham. Really. Potentially, that’s a very useful thing. I also think that having a hub that gives people pointers to a wide range of different bloggers from around the city is a really helpful thing to do and may even contribute to the overall sense of community among local writers and citizen journalists. Cool.

Unfortunately – that’s not actually what’s happening. As far as I can tell, The Brummie is merely scraping people’s web content without permission from their RSS feeds, re-presenting it as if the content was submitted voluntarily to their site.

I have three problems with that:

1) As a site that aggregates content, they have more ‘Google juice’ simply because of the sheer volume of words being published on their site. So if someone goes looking for something and it turns out I’ve written an article that may help, Google is more likely to point them to that article on their site rather than mine. That’s not a major problem, as they’re still going to be getting the same information, and there’s no commercial ramification to that. But it’s not ideal.

2) It looks like I have contributed willingly, which I would only do to a publication that I was very familiar with and felt comfortable submitting to. And that depends on everything else that appears on the site. I’m never going to write for the Daily Mail, and I don’t want to be part of a publication whose other contributors would happily consider it. Context is important to me. And so are things like presentation, layout and design. Simply reposting my words in a different environment imbues them with all sorts of unintended meaning.

3) When people comment on my posts on their site, they erroneously think they’re communicating directly with me. The only reason I know that there had been any discussion at all of a music post (let alone a message from the featured band themselves) was that Mark Blackstock who runs The Brummie was kind enough to let me know in an email.

I’m giving the benefit of the doubt when it comes to intention here. There’s no sense that Mark and his team (if such a team exists) are doing anything designed to be exploitative. And he’s keeping within the rules (strictly speaking) of the Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial Licence that applies to everything on my website. He’s not doing anything wrong.

And all the same, I have asked him if I could please opt out for the reasons cited above. Of course, it would have been nice to be asked, but I probably would have expressed a preference not to be included – while fully admitting that there is nothing to prevent him from going ahead anyway.

The moment there’s a revenue stream derived from that site, then it falls foul of the licensing conditions for my work. But even though it plays within the boundaries of what’s permissible with my writing, it does so in a way that detracts without adding anything, which is more a problem in terms of the spirit of the deal.

I don’t know whether my site will be removed from The Brummie. I’m not going to do anything further about it either way. I’ve asked nicely, and I hope that Mark will respect that and let me bow out. I may be taking my ball and going home, but I’m not going to make a fuss.

If not, and you’re reading this on The Brummie, any of its affiliated websites, or some other website that has simply scraped my content off the RSS feed and presented it as if it had my consent, then I encourage you to head to the actual source of this post: https://andrewdubber.com.

When in doubt, live in the past

Apr 14, 2013 | 0 comments

I’m having an incredibly ‘low mental bandwidth’ evening after quite a demanding few days at an academic conference. I’ve watered the plants, checked my RSS feeds, made a simple meal, and was just sitting around listening to music and distractedly scrolling through my email archive. Don’t ask why. I don’t really know. Boredom, I guess?

Anyway, I accidentally hit the button that sorts my saved mail by ascending chronological order – and all of a sudden, I’m looking at email from five years ago.

Because I’m so easily distracted – now more than usual – I thought I’d have a look and see what sorts of conversations I was having on April 14, 2008 and so I scroll to that particular day.

A few interesting things in there.

I was arranging to go in and do some research at the BBC in London as part of an AHRC-funded project I was involved in (that was a great project, actually). A Birmingham-based technical writer had approached me to adapt my 20 Things e-book into a book more aimed at writers and other creatives (not sure whatever became of that idea, but it didn’t happen). There was discussion about some research my students were doing into a digital DJ device called the Pacemaker, which is now, it turns out, a Blackberry app, rather than a separate piece of equipment.

I also had an email from my friend Nick, back in New Zealand. He was a musician I’d worked with on a number of projects and he was my son Jake’s first drum teacher (what was that – 13 years ago?). Nick was telling me about his work teaching drumming at the jazz school, and this new band he’d started called Cairo Knife Fight, about which he was quite hopeful (though characteristically self-effacing).

If you’re not familiar with that particular two-piece combo, here’s a suitable introduction:

A few years on from that email, they’re selling out shows, supporting Foo Fighters in front of 50,000 people and releasing very good records. Right now, they’re writing new material for their next release. So, not bad going. Good to see that things start somewhere and progress.

Other emails from that day remind me that it was a particularly interesting time for consultancy work (and that maybe I should start doing that sort of thing a bit more again).

I was working with Proper Distribution (the largest independent music distributor in the UK, doncha know); a woman in Switzerland named Kate Michaels who specialises in swing and show tunes; and, by way of contrast, Gilles Peterson’s label Brownswood Recordings.

As it happens, I also started my own online record store that day as an experiment, which I think lasted a year or so before I tired of the concept after selling exactly one product – and that was to me. The service I was using to do that no longer exists as far as I can tell. These things come and go. And sometimes rightly so.

Bruce Warila and I were in the midst of conversations about where we should take this Music Think Tank thing we started. We had a few interesting ideas, none of which really seemed quite right. We ended up walking away from it and leaving it in the hands of the Hypebot people, who are doing a very professional job of stewardship. That was an extremely good decision, in retrospect. Managing what that site ended up becoming is not really how I want to be spending my time. You might spot one or two ads if you visit…

I had a personal assistant back then, because I was taking on far more than I knew what to do with, and so there were emails back and forth about personal assistanty stuff, mostly regarding my own incompetence when it came to matters of record keeping and accounts. My superior organisational skills (or ‘obsessive behaviours’ as some of my colleagues refer to them) are a reasonably recent development. These days, of course, Shelley’s doing far more interesting things. She ran her own arts organisation and manages Alternative Dubstep Orchestra among other things.

It’s fascinating to take a slice like that and just look at what I was doing and the conversations I was having then, because it sort of confirms to me that my overarching method kind of works for me: I start lots of things.

Some of those things stick and become part of my life, some are quietly finished without much fuss, others get handed off to more competent and interested parties, and others lie abandoned on the roadside.

But occasionally a project gets set down for a while, and then later events conspire to remind you of them so that you go back and pick them up, dust them off and re-examine them for potential.

I had one of those happen yesterday. An exciting one at that. If it starts to look promising, then I’ll definitely be blogging about it here. But in five years time, if I go back and look at the conversations I was having today, that will be one that’ll stand out as one of the more interesting threads.

Generally speaking, I think I’m doing better now. Making better decisions, taking on fewer wildly speculative projects and I have a much clearer set of objectives. My filing is certainly in a much better state too. But all of these things have, I think, contributed to where I am and what I’m doing now, so it’s good to be able to go back and trace their origins.

It certainly beats watching re-runs of Mock The Week on iPlayer, which was really the only other thing I had the intellectual capacity for this evening…

Tweaks and so forth

Mar 23, 2013 | 0 comments

I’ve been having a play around with the design of this blog this afternoon, which I do from time to time. I’m not 100% happy with it yet – but I’m more happy with it than I have been for a while, so that’s an improvement. A bit more minimal (even more so than before) and with an eye toward simplicity.

I’ve spent a couple of hours on it and I have it where I kind of like it… but I have things to do now and I’m going to stop playing with it and focus on the task at hand.

If, somehow, I’ve broken the site for you, please drop me a note or leave a comment and I’ll see what I can do to fix it.

If you get this via email or RSS feed, then it probably won’t make a great deal of difference to you – but have a look at the website anyway and see if there’s anything there that appears to be broken or unpleasant.

In the meantime, I’ll keep writing the blog posts. We have lots to talk about…

A message to my readers

Jul 2, 2012 | 0 comments

There are some people that subscribe to this blog via email and in their RSS reader. If that’s you, then the name of this blog is (perhaps inexplicably) ‘The Wireless’.

That might take some explaining to those who only visit the website and aren’t signed up to get these updates automatically.

You see, when I first started blogging a decade ago, I was the degree leader in radio at AUT in Auckland, and that’s what I thought my blog was going to be all about. So that’s how I set it all up. The original Blogger URL I used – long before I migrated to WordPress and then got my own domain – was ‘thewireless’ – and so, as a hangover from that time, messages are still going out via Feedburner under that old name.

But this site is not The Wireless – and that is not really what I talk about – so it’s time for a long overdue update. Unfortunately, that requires you to do something. One of two things, actually. You choose…

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