The Blockchain Socialist
A podcast by The Blockchain Socialist (@TBSocialist) giving a platform for those at the intersection of blockchain and Left politics.
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The Blockchain Socialist
Building autonomous infrastructure for tactical media
In this episode I spoke to Geert Lovink, a Dutch media theorist and founder of the Institute of Network Cultures who has been engaged with internet culture since at least the 80s. We were recently together in Cyprus for the latest installment of MoneyLab, which he also co-founded. Talking with him was a great way to gain more understanding and context of venture capital's control of the internet and the influence of that on social movements and alternative economies.
During the interview we discussed his experience and history of the growth of the internet, the rise of crypto, and tactical media as a strategy for the left. One of the things that we noted was that the question of how the left needs to build its own autonomous infrastructure was one already being explored in the 90s by activists.
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Send me your questions or comments about the show and I'll read them out sometime.
ICYMI I've written a book about, no surprise, blockchains through a left political framework! The title is Blockchain Radicals: How Capitalism Ruined Crypto and How to Fix It and is being published through Repeater Books, the publishing house started by Mark Fisher who’s work influenced me a lot in my thinking.
The book is officially published and you use this linktree to find where you can purchase the book based on your region / country.
Alright, hello everyone. You are listening to the Blockchain Socialist podcast and for this interview, I'm speaking to Gerrit Loewink, who is the founder of the Institute of Network Culture and, as well, moneylab, which I am here today in Limassol in Cyprus. Since I presented on the book, and so since I was here with Gerrit, who is a media theorist, I thought would be a great opportunity to talk to you in person.
Speaker 3:Yes, great to finally meet you in person.
Speaker 2:Nice. So, gerrit, I think what is going to be really interesting talking to you for this conversation is that you've been sort of involved in, I guess, kind of like internet culture and the things around it since almost the beginning. Could I say that?
Speaker 3:Second generation. I consider myself late 80s, early 90s yeah yeah.
Speaker 2:So I think it would be really interesting because a lot of people I mean a lot of young people, I think they don't, of course, from not having the experience of being on the internet in those early days, don't really know much about what it was like during that time. Would you want to kind of maybe paint a picture for people? What was the state of the internet like when you were first getting involved in, you know, with it?
Speaker 3:Sure. For me, the story, though, is political and it's also personal, so I'm telling my story, but it's also, you know, a political reading of the times. Hard to say where it starts, beginnings always difficult, but for me it would be early 80s, my involvement in a lot of social movement, and squatting in particular. I was studying political science at the time at the University of Amsterdam, and I graduated in 83 with a thesis on the, let's say, political economy of publishing and the question of how social movements could build sustainable forms of income, of distribution, or what, at the time, was called, you know, alternative economy, and that's, of course, a very broad term. But for us, at the time, it was very concrete because we were running, you know, we had a lot of cafes, restaurants, theaters, printing houses, publishing houses. We had, of course, our own, you know pirate radio stations, a number of them, in fact. We were producing films and videos, a lot of stuff, and so this was a movement.
Speaker 3:At the time, maybe around 10,000 people in Amsterdam alone, you know, were living in, in squats and were actively involved in building and maintaining these infrastructures. So I focused, really, on the question of the maintenance and the financial side of it. How do you? Because we were running a weekly, it was. It had a circulation of 2000, it's called bluff and so, yeah, we had a quite a number of years of experience already how to do that. So after that I kind of switched really and lost my interest in the social sciences and really moved to the arts and humanities. And then, as you said, yeah, around 85 or 87 I became, or decided to become, a European media theorist.
Speaker 3:I had no idea what that, would you know, entail. But yeah, I was unemployed and I lived off the doll, like many, many others of my generation. It was a particularly dark time and no jobs around whatsoever, and so yeah.
Speaker 3:I was on the doll for nine years, to be honest. So that was a long time, not always, you know, I'm not romanticizing it in any way, but the cost of living, of course, especially housing, was low right. So this is the only reason why, you know, we could essentially do this, but we also kept it low right and we thought about the question of money very carefully. And so this is where, for me, you know, where all this we're going to talk about here is actually, you know, originating. Then, yeah, in 84, I had my first, you know, personal computer, and then I started to, you know, working on it.
Speaker 3:In 87 I purchased a new one, so one that was really my, my own, the first one I shared with others. And, yeah, some years later, I purchased a modem, and of course that was a very important moment because it was not just, you know, for data processing or something for writing or doing other stuff. But, yeah, by 89, 90, yeah, we started to participate in in billet and boards and we started really to connect and build the networks that you know, in way already existed. But before that, of course, we used other things. We use telephone, fax, we used, yeah, of course, meetings in in person, and so on. Right, so the idea of networking was, of course, already quite advanced, and so in the late 80s, we just suddenly got another technical tool to do this, and so to connect computers was something that was something you know was long in the making. I remember very well, the very first time I touched the computer was already in the early 70s, so it really goes back right.
Speaker 3:So we're talking already when the modem arrived we're already talking about you know 20 years basically of computing, but of course, ordinary people, you know they didn't have so much access to it, so it was really a question of you know access and our provider was called access for all right. So this is yeah, and I started to meet you know hackers and programmers and in 89 I was part of a big hacker convention called the galactic galactic hacker convention in.
Speaker 3:Paradiso in Amsterdam.
Speaker 3:So this is where a lot of the, let's say, early players came together and there I also met of a few characters, and in the early 90s, one of them was David Chow.
Speaker 3:So, yeah, and I interviewed him, like we do right now, back in 1992, because some friends of mine worked for, for his company that was part of the University of Amsterdam, based in the Institute for mathematics and information, cve, and this company was called DigiCash, and so, yeah, so, funny enough for those who are interested in, my interview with David Chow is available on the internet archive. And so this was this was the first time when we started to connect, let's say, computing and networking with the question of, of economics and payment systems. Right, and so, because my friends were working at DigiCash, yeah, I was very early on aware of it and also remember, a decade earlier I already wrote my thesis about this. So from the very, very start of the internet, well before the worldwide web, we entered this field with the awareness that, you know, this would have to become financially sustainable for those who would be, who would be involved that is super interesting that you met David Chow back when he was making DigiCash for people, I guess, who don't know much.
Speaker 2:David Chow was is considered, I guess, one of the first people to really bring some sort of prototype, I guess of like digital cash. That was not, you know, I think. I think the the mechanism itself still involved banks for it to work, if I remember correctly. How did you catch? Well, it was not you know a currency.
Speaker 3:But yeah, I want to note here that the employee which was most closely involved is a guy who's still around and who is a member of the moneylap community from day one and his name is Edward De Jong and he is still involved in writing code, in producing, you know, models for for everything you know you and I will talk about here, and you know so he is. He's still around, and so that's in itself interesting. And, by the way, david Chow is also still approachable. He's still alive, although, you know, he eventually moved back to California. Maybe it's interesting to note that he was one of the generation of the of the Americans who fled the US because he didn't want to go into the army. This was during the Vietnam War and that this is how he ended up in in Amsterdam so I mean, yeah, this is not really interesting, that I guess what.
Speaker 2:What I kind of see is that there was already kind of this yeah, social movements around having an alternative currency which you could kind of be somewhat outside of the system while being able to stain yourself with the reality of needing to buy food and buy rent, or to be able to pay for rent in in Amsterdam, which for me is hard to imagine now, just because when I go to Amsterdam I'm like, wow, everything is quite expensive, yeah, I know the city went down hill, yes, and so that is in itself a very unfortunate history.
Speaker 3:I wouldn't say, you know, it's a lost battle, because the the movement around, you know, housing gentrification is strong, since over 10 years squatting is forbidden, but we're still squatting and yeah, my institute is also actively taking part in that. So we're still a part of that struggle, even though, as you say, you know there's an enormous amount of terrain and that has been lost and prices are ridiculously high.
Speaker 2:But people are fighting back yeah, yeah, it's a yeah, it's a problem that seems to be a problem in almost every kind of European capital, in major city. That that I can see. I know in the US as well. But yeah, I think because one of the things that's I sometimes often come across as people wanting to build an alternative economy when I talk to people online that we need this alternative economy to help sustain ourselves, and oftentimes it's forgotten that this actually existed and this was done through a lot of different types of selling of media and, as well, squatting and taking these types of actions.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and thinking through it I still am. I'm still very much focused on the German context and already in the late 70s and early 80s the thinking about this was already very well advanced and it somehow coincided with what you know at the time was called the crisis of Marxism.
Speaker 3:But, a lot of people saw the crisis of Marxism at the time also as an opportunity and not just as a loss or something like that. I need to really emphasize this because a lot of the social movements, especially those involved in ecology, in feminism, in anti-nuclear struggles, in squatting, really took up a lot of the notions and I think the notion that for me then stood out in the 90s was our effort to really get a grip on the political economy of the internet. So we started doing that and we pit-shoots and I we started the net-time mailing list in 1994, 1995 and this was one of our explicit aims. I want to say that the net-time mailing list we're very proud of that. It still exists, it's a large community and it continues these conversations, so now over a 30-year period. So because we entered the very early internet with that scope, a few things were very, very striking.
Speaker 3:I myself worked with the people that found that Wired. They lived in Amsterdam. This is not so well known but yes. So Wired is a magazine that comes from Amsterdam and at the time it was called Electric Word. And I was involved at the time in a media or video art magazine called MediaMatic and we were very close. It was the same scene. We shared Office and so on and so on.
Speaker 3:So these were Jane and Louis and they in late in 1992, they moved to San Francisco to start Wired magazine and they took some of us with them and others remained, and at the time we were already quite aware about the circles in which they ended up. And this was the circles. That was a transformation of a very kind of old school venture capital, because there is I want to remind people here, there is old school venture capital which already existed in the 1970s, 70s and 80s. For us, a lot of venture capital really only comes into being around the mid 90s, but there are routes that go back earlier. And so we found out that they started to have access to very strange money. It was not banks, they wouldn't just start a company, because that's not what you do when you are in venture capital circles you don't start just a company.
Speaker 2:It doesn't work like that.
Speaker 3:Because it's all about financing. So you start with the financing model in a way, and the company doesn't really matter. It comes later, because you need to have an idea, you need to have the white paper. We know that by now, but at the time this was something quite esoteric, secret, and especially in 1992 and 1993, especially in California, this was a scene that was kind of in the making and you can now read a little bit more about it. In general, I would say there's not enough historical work yet done by it. The only book is from counterculture to cyber culture, but, by the way, a very interesting one that I want to mention here is also a Polina Borsuk book, because she is one of the early writers of Wired.
Speaker 3:Which then, in late 1999 or 2000s, wrote her memoirs, let's say, of the 90s. And in this book you can read a little bit also about the early time. By 1994, 1995, the way of funding and the way what we then called political economy of the internet started to really take shape, and it's well known and this culminated then in the so-called IPO of Netscape, which is kind of seen as the beginning of the dot com hype.
Speaker 2:Right, and that was started by Mark N Jeeson, who is the head of. Anderson Horowitz, who is also happy to have the investment.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so he was there at the very beginning of all this. Important there was for us that this kind of mysterious or esoteric part remained the core of the operation, because it was all about not money that you would invest in the traditional sense. It was all about what at the time was called funny money. It was money that was somehow there, it was liquid, it was invisible. The numbers were incredible. What were they investing in? There was no business model. There was no idea that if you would invest something you would have a return.
Speaker 3:This whole idea was skipped and that led us then, already in I would say around 97, 98, we started to get a better understanding of this and we formulated this idea of the economy of the free, in which you would basically just create an enormous bubble.
Speaker 3:You would just invest it didn't really matter in what. You would give away everything for free, with the sole aim, of course which took a while for us to figure out to create new monopolies which would then later on, you know, sort out how they would get the money back and then also how they would make insane amounts of money because they would not have any competition. So it was very early, from very early on, it was clear that this was not about markets, it was about eliminating competition. So the whole venture capital model was incredible money, you know the sheer size of it was for us was really difficult to understand. And that then culminated of course in dotcom mania, which at the time we extensively documented it. So I also wrote my PhD thesis in part about this. So that time from, let's say, from 95, 96 onwards is quite well documented. It's an absolutely crazy time with an insane amount of money invested in hilarious companies Petscom- Petscom is the classic.
Speaker 3:And so, but yeah, it would be very, very interesting to kind of map the time just before that so the time that I'm just referring to now would be from 92 probably to 95, how this system which is now still ruling the world, basically the whole venture capital driven model, how they themselves gained financial hegemony and essentially also they have still have a monopoly over the way we think in, how a company in this context, be it blockchain, AI, big data, it doesn't really matter what, how it should be founded, how it should be financed and governed, right, they set the parameters. And, yeah, I was very unfortunate to see that throughout the blockchain ecosystem, this model was not really a question, nor would people really have an idea where it came from and what its premises were.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm actually curious I mean just jumping off from that how you think about the ICO boom that happened. I think it was like 2016, 17 in the crypto world, when there was, of course, there were many bad parts, people fundraising on projects that didn't end up happening or there was something wrong with it. It was just like a piece of paper that generated millions of dollars. But one of the common kind of arguments is that which I kind of I mean I sympathize with is that the entrance of venture capital in the crypto world happened because of increased regulation in the crypto industry that prevented ICOs from being possible. That, like it was the state regulation that basically allowed for the funnel of venture capital to start coming in a lot more.
Speaker 3:But this is a historical fact for me. Yeah, it is true that ICOs are based on another model. I doubt myself, really that they were created out of a thorough critique of the venture capital model itself. So that is maybe less the case, and also remember at the time or any in the 80s and also in 90s, we were quite focused on long term, sustainable financial models, and so we were, in that sense, quite wary of anything that promised big returns get rich quick schemes.
Speaker 3:So, in that sense, yeah, and that's, of course, a much older and broader debate, which you could say, also centers around the accelerationists, in a way, because the accelerationists have a much more positive approach to certain bursts, let's say, of scaling up. And, yeah, even though we believed that social movements themselves sometimes go through such very turbulent moments of growth, we believed that social movements could and can only survive if they work on long term, sustainable infrastructures to, in a way, to survive exactly these bumps and busts that exist. Of course, it is true. Look at Occupy Wall Street or something like that. It was big in 2011 and early 12, and then, of course, it went down. Movements all have these ups and downs. However, if you've been around long enough, you know that the way to survive that is to build structures underneath. That can also, then, let's say, transfer notions, critical experiences, back to others and, of course, can be transferred to new generations, because this is how, in the infrastructure, you embed experiences, and this is what we'll see now, if there will be a next wave of crypto, blockchain, whatever. All we want is really that the experience from the last 10 or so years will be, of course, transferred to the next generation so that they can at least learn something from the previous experience, and this is what we did.
Speaker 3:And this, for me, then culminated in the first moments of taking stock, let's say, which was probably happening just around the boom and bust of Dotcom Mania, or, how we call it, tulipomania, back in 1999 and 2000. And this is also the moment and I want to refer to this when one of our early members of NetTime presented her PhD thesis at Goldsmith in London. Her name is Corina Patelis, she is from Athens and she wrote one of the first really thorough studies and she called it playing political economy of the internet. She submitted it in 2000 and you can download it and it really gives a very, very good overview of that first decade.
Speaker 3:Of course, then after that, we came in a completely different dynamic, because first there was the first internet crisis, which coincided also with 9-11 and a couple of other things in 2000, 2001, but then in 2003, silicon Valley really started to restructure itself, venture Capital really had a firm grip at that time, and this is when Web2.0 was born and Facebook and Twitter and all the rest. So I have to say that both Google and Amazon, of course, are companies from the first wave. So Amazon started in 1995, google in 1998, and Google was the only one who was able to grow and really benefit from the dot-com crisis. This is very interesting, and why? Because they were fed by all this venture capital that kept on going and that didn't ask for revenues or let alone profit.
Speaker 2:Hi everyone. If you're enjoying this episode so far, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, share with a friend and join the crypto leftist communities on Discord or Reddit, which you can find links to in the show notes. If you're enjoying the episode or find the content I make important, you can pitch into my efforts, starting at $3 a month on patreoncom slash the blockchain socialist, to help me out and join the newest patrons, like Brooke, michael and Antoine, which really helps, since making this stuff isn't free in terms of money or time. As a patron, you'll get a shout out on an episode, like I just did, and access to bonus content like Q&A episodes where you can submit and vote on questions you'd like me to answer, and I'll give my thoughts in roughly 20 minutes. In the last bonus episode, I gave a reaction to a clip from a recent episode of the deep program when they interviewed Hassan Piker, which had a lot of relevance to left-wing organizing internationally. Of course, I'll still be making free content like this interview to help spread the message that blockchain doesn't need to be used to further entrench capitalist exploitation, if we put our efforts into it.
Speaker 2:So if that message resonates with you, I hope you'll consider helping out and then so maybe we can get to talking a bit about MoneyLab and how that has developed. We just spent the past couple of days in Limassol kind of talking with a bunch of people who here Brett Scott was there, who's also been on the podcast to talk about I think the theme was crypto and art, so I presented as well about the book. But MoneyLab has been something that's been going on for quite some time and it's not just focused on crypto but it is, I think, from my understanding, one of the first kind of like collectives. I guess that has been thinking about in some critical aspect or analysis around cryptocurrency from a more left-wing perspective that I could find it was like one of the first places where some people could come and like share that type of work.
Speaker 3:That's very true, and MoneyLab started as a network exactly 10 years ago, so in late 2013. And it had the first conference event in early 2014, and it was opened which is interesting by Saskia Sassen, who is obviously a person who works, let's say, in the field that Brett Scott operates in. She is really, of course, so much more famous. She wrote her influential book on the role of global finance in New York, london and Tokyo in the 1980s and the way global finance in these three global cities transformed the city, and our interview. We started off with that, and so I was very proud that she would kick off the MoneyLab initiative At the time. It was quite diverse.
Speaker 3:I was involved in the whole crypto scene very early on, with Amir and Jeremy and many others that were in Amsterdam that we met, and so, for us and for them, the whole support of Julian Assange at the time in 2011 and 2012, really coincided with our growing interest in the use of Bitcoin, and so, however, my institute of network cultures that I started in 2004, before I had to deal with completely other, you know, emergencies, and this is in 2011, of course, was also the year of Arab Spring, of Occupy Wall Street and so many, yeah, the movement of the squares, so many turbulence things, and we really wanted to address inside that the growing importance of social media monopolies and the work that already started, believe it or not. But the critique of Facebook, google, instagram you name it Twitter, right, it was already very well articulated back in 2011. Back then, we had a complete and full awareness of what was the situation and also what was ahead of us. So the question of how to look at social media and social networking from a social media movement's perspective was, politically speaking, more important than the money lab issue, even though, you know so, we really had to see how we were doing that. So this is why there was a two year delay, and so only in 2013, we started to focus on and this is, of course, because back then, yeah, the consequences of the global financial crisis of 2008 became very apparent.
Speaker 3:Also, in the Netherlands, we had a huge wave of austerity, which hit our sector particularly hard. In the Netherlands in 2011 and 2012, the spending government spending on culture and the arts was literally overnight cut in half and so but this was happening, of course, across the board, not just in culture, it was happening everywhere, and so there was the idea that people just had to focus much more on self-organization and on political protests in this field was quite high at the time. And this is the real, let's say, origin of money lab. Originally, as you said in your introduction, the agenda was quite broad. We had an interest in crowdfunding because of the kind of decentralized nature of it. Well, very early on, we worked with Trevor Schultz and with the focus that he was developing out of New York at the time on platform cooperatives and these kinds of other models of what you could call non-profit enterprises or give it a name. So. But Bitcoin was, in fact, one of the six topics that we discussed in money lab one and so, and then, yeah, it developed.
Speaker 3:We organized three big events in Amsterdam in 14, 15 and 16. And then money lab started to travel and again came back to Amsterdam in 19. And unfortunately that was then also the last one to have a physical meeting, because after that COVID kicked in and we organized four money labs online, which was a huge effort and very successful. But then late 21, kind of we didn't really. Maybe we ran out of steam or people didn't want to have yet another Zoom conference.
Speaker 3:You know, so that this was clearly visible. And yeah, now we are here in Limersal and this was, you know, the 13th edition of money lab quite small, and that's just because, you know, we lost a lot of ground, we lost a lot of resources. In particular, as you may have noticed, we did not lose our critical focus and I think that we can be proud that the overall level of the presentations and also of the debates, it was high. So, in that sense, we can be proud and we can also be confident. However, in the last two years yeah, I don't know, something has happened and maybe it's inevitably also connected to a lot of people being very disappointed about you know where the whole crypto thing was going.
Speaker 2:I think there's also maybe Brett Scott mentioned this in his presentation but people becoming almost, like, physically sick of the technology of constantly being either on the computer, on the phone and being just tethered to it, which is ironic because this is kind of like a space for critical analysis and thought about these technologies, but part of the issue is that the encroachment of that technology has reached the point where people have become a bit sick of it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and in my recent book, set by Design and stuck on the platform, I've literally brought these two elements together. But for me, the mental state of the online billions, you know, which is really quite diverse, of course, because it goes from anger to despair, to anxiety, to sadness, melancholy, but even up to, you know, the more clinical problems such as depression, right? So this whole, let's say, scope of problems I have dealt with extensively, but also pointed out always that, you know, forms of self-organization and forms of awareness of more sustainable models should be a way out.
Speaker 3:Here in Europe, we cannot just withdraw on what I call, you know, european offline romanticism, which is kind of a very German idea that if you just over the weekend put your phone aside and go to the forest, etc that you could somehow recover and recuperate.
Speaker 3:This is not the way to go. So for us, the social today is a techno social and should be also a monetary social, you know, should be a form of care in which we think about production, finance, but also about redistribution of wealth and a more, you know, democratic and distributed form of value creation. So, and this is for me part of the solution, right, but I didn't think Brett was suggesting you know that working on the solution would make you sick.
Speaker 2:I don't think so. No, no, no. But for you with MoneyLab in your work you're not kind of, because one of the you know on one side kind of the caricature of like people on the left when it comes to money is to kind of like reject money or to, you know, put it aside, not talk about it, because we don't want money in our utopia, so we shouldn't talk about it, it's not important. So I guess for you in your experience it sounds like you're saying money is actually quite important.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's probably not driving it, but I would turn it around a little bit and I would say the defining thing for a sustainable struggle of social movements is autonomous infrastructure and one that really can continue for years or even decades, because in that way you accumulate experience and maybe, yes, you accumulate money and capital, but maybe not defined just by how much euros there are on the bank, because capital, money and value, as we know, we can really also discuss alternative definitions of them. And this kind of also comes, of course which is a very important source of inspiration from the feminist critique of the political economy back in the 1970s, in which they critiqued the invisible and of the immaterial labor of housework, and this is in itself a very important critique of the classic or dogmatic Marxian political economy that was only focused on the male and on the exploitation of the male worker in the factory. We've moved on from there, luckily, with 50 years later, right, and I think a lot of the ideas of value and money now are based on very different notions.
Speaker 2:One of the things that I also read about your work is you had this concept of tactical media. I was wondering if you can talk a bit about that.
Speaker 3:Sure, no, I'm never tired of doing that. It's probably the most well-known of the concepts that we developed, which are never just merely ideas, right? The idea of tactical media goes back to the mid-90s, I would say, when we had really an idea that you had an infrastructure with your own radios and magazines and internet websites and virtual communities and mailing lists, and you name it right. But that kind of solid infrastructure didn't say much about how you would utilize them or how you would combine them in a moment of political struggle or campaigning, or so the idea of tactical media, then, comes from an idea that in some cases, it can be very significant politically speaking, if you want to kick off a campaign, to do graffiti on the streets or spread pamphlets.
Speaker 3:In other cases, you would start online. In the next case, you would emphasize on gatherings, on coming together in real space. So the notion of tactical media is, then, one which emphasizes the flexibility of us, and maybe also it's an invitation to maybe go beyond what we're traditionally good at or focused at. In this case, for young people, that would, of course, be something like Instagram, right? Everything starts and finishes with Instagram these days, right? And so a tactical media notion would just point at the sheer endless possibilities that there are beyond Instagram.
Speaker 2:That's interesting because I'm supposed to be running a panel in a few days in Istanbul for DevConnect and the topic of that one is how to. I was kind of pressuring or suggesting to them that, rather than solely thinking about social through the lens of the digital and whatever social media or things like that, that we should maybe offer an opportunity for people to kind of think critically when do you want, for example, social media or whatever this technology to be used in particular situations versus other ones? Maybe there are times where you don't want to use or rely on social media as a thing that you do and that, in fact, you want to be critical about when you would want to use it and that to focus on the use of the technology as one that facilitates the type of relationships that you want to have. That's a tactical media question and, at the time.
Speaker 3:I would say it was also a critique of a very narrow kind of focus on the left, just on traditional mainstream media.
Speaker 3:It would be, successful if you were seen on television or if you would have a radio coverage or if a mainstream daily newspaper would write about you. In the 90s I already thought this is such an old fashioned idea and it doesn't say anything about the intervention that you did or your appeal on the collective imagination. If you go in that mainstream media direction, you inevitably only talk about representation. Who do you represent? Or were you represented well by this or that radio station or in a TV show? Of course you were not. No, you were fucked over. Right, because this is not.
Speaker 2:Nowadays, people know that. I would say that the media sphere is very much on the. We need to have our own Exactly.
Speaker 3:But that was a very important shift that we have seen, maybe also in the last 10 years, because it was a very painful lesson, but we had to witness that the right-wing populists were ahead of us in this kind of thing In this case, because they were maybe even more so aware that they would never have a fair say in the mainstream media. And these days it's even strange because can I still use a term like mainstream media? We've always done that. I've worked in this field for 40, almost 50 years now, and nowadays I feel a certain shame to talk about mainstream media, because this term has been taken over and monopolized so much by by right-wing populists.
Speaker 2:But this is a term I remember very clearly. When I first came across this term, it was from a left-wing perspective, because there was this lack of left-wing voices in media and it goes back to you know, norm Chomsky, reading the New York Times and so on paper tiger television.
Speaker 3:You know there's numerous, numerous cases. So, yeah, so we need to be, in that sense again, more confident and maybe less ashamed, and we need to strike back in this term. You know, the critique of the mainstream media has been a project that we've been working on for 50 or so years, and this culminated in an acute awareness that it's not enough to critique them, to deconstruct their agendas, to practice you know the ideology criticism but that this can only be done if we also have our own channels that have to be sustainable and have to be maintained, also financially.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 2:Right, and that's one of the things that I would love there to be more maybe understanding or like some sort of research on is like I don't know.
Speaker 2:I think the Patreon and these kind of like the micro payments type of platforms were, I think, a bit of a turning point for left wing media, like Chapo Trap House, for example one of the biggest podcasts on the earlier ones like they are only able to sustain themselves because of these innovations in payments and how payments are able to be done over the internet, and which I think there is like this double thing of like you can question whether did this help destroy more local kind of left media or did it reinvigorate it instead? But I think like this question of like payments is actually extremely important for the left having its own autonomous infrastructure, because right now, if Patreon didn't want to support I don't know left wing media anymore, it could decide to not do that and that would be so. It would reveal kind of that right now, the infrastructure of left media is basically Patreon right now. Yeah, and a problem.
Speaker 3:And then you enter, let's say, the first 10 years of the moneylap debate, because the next question then would be of course, there's Patreon. This is a platform, this is an intermediate, and the promise of the crypto, blockchain, etc. Was, and maybe still is, that it would do away with these platforms and intermediates right Now. The question, then, is what are peer-to-peer payment systems? Can we also think not just only of direct payments, but also of redistribution of wealth, not just on in a neoliberal sense, like this subject pays another subject?
Speaker 3:but, putting it in a societal context which, also from the perspective of culture and the arts, is incredibly important, because it is never just solely about the survival of this or that individual.
Speaker 2:My dream would be that there would be a more robust sort of like infrastructure for left wing media creators to be able to plug into, to have to actually create sort of sustainable collective rather than because what we're I mean right now. What we have is like, as what happens in any industry, is just sort of like high concentration of a few people who gets the most money, which is not to shame them for getting a lot of money, it means they do good work.
Speaker 3:But if you want to have a more resilient kind of like risk diversified kind of media sphere, I guess, then there is the question of, or the question of, redistribution should be at least and this you know can be done and that there's experience with that by setting up larger funds that redistribute this money, right, and so I really hope that in the next round of the crypto blockchain debate, you know, we would just come also to the founding of a number, or a diversity even of initiatives, of non-profits funds that you know. Of course, you know where would the money for the fund come from, right, this is an important one, but equally important is the question of you know how would you democratically like to redistribution, redistribute this newly acquired wealth, which, in my understanding, is always, you know, common wealth in essence. You know it's an extraction of the comments, after all, right, and so we need to focus much more on the creation of these redistribution funds yeah, yeah, and I think I mean for me, it's something that is possible.
Speaker 2:I think what I struggle with is getting other content creators or people to to use the tools is quite a difficult thing yeah, of course, but you know, usually with this kind of stuff we need to just, you know, launch the concept and then discuss it with many, propose it in many different forums and places and then, for sure, because this is a dynamic field, you know, and then this is my experience over the last 40, 50 years that
Speaker 3:if you, if you, you know, have an idea and if you put it out there in the world, and if you don't just let it, go and work on it and and create something around it, that there will definitely be an outcome. So you know, this could really be an optimistic ending of this, of this podcast. So you know the it is really important to understand that there are always beginnings of critical, speculative concepts, but that concepts have consequences and that you know that this, this talk, is not just me at talk. If only we know that. You know, these days, talk can and will be immediately translated into code yeah and then, yeah, because this is how it, how it works.
Speaker 3:Talk has this inevitable machinic, you know, aspect to it these days and if we do that well, you know our concepts, critical concepts that you know want to create sustainable infrastructures and support social movements can and will be successful nice.
Speaker 2:That was a very optimistic ending. Maybe I should also plug at the very end my if you go to my websites, to TBS Dow, I have also sort of as an alternative to Patreon, you are able to, you know, help fund me through cryptocurrency. And then it just uses sort of token gated token gating in order to unlock bonus content, for example, and we split the revenue. Part of it goes to me, part of it goes to the Dow for people to collectively decide how they want to redistribute that money. But yeah, thanks so much kids for coming on.