Interdependence

Hi everyone! This week we welcome Dee and Jacob from Zora, a new organisation that is building tools for artists to issue tokens around their creative practices. We discuss their idea of dynamic pricing of art releases and at the advent of the musician RAC releasing his $RAC token through ZORA, the new space of artists and their audiences owning a stake in the value they interdependently create in...

Back with a conversation with a special person and close friend of the podcast Jay Springett Jay is a writer, theorist and podcaster who falls into a special category of people where we can say with some confidence that whatever they are thinking about will be commonplace in a few years. We discuss a passion of his, Solarpunk, cultural fracking, universe construction, permaculture, Russia’s real j...

This week we are thrilled to welcome the author and critic Huw Lemmey in celebration of his new novel Unknown Language , written in collaboration with Hildegard of Bingen and out now on Ignota books We discuss what it is like to channel the dead and write a novel together, Hildegard's visions and genius, constructed languages, and Bad Gays; Huw’s wonderful podcast with the historian Ben Miller. We...

The second part of our discussion facilitated in collaboration with Sonar +D and Ars Electronica. Particularly excited to share this one, where we reflect upon what foundations of the club economy appear to be most exposed by the current crisis, discuss Richie's work with AFEM to help get producers paid, and speculate on the possibility of new and necessary economic relationships between DJ's and...

Really happy to welcome Other Internet to the podcast, an independent strategy and research squad based between New York and Berlin. Their recent essay “Squad Wealth” looks at the phenomenon of interdependent squads emerging on the internet as a necessary progression from the atomized independence economy. We discuss Squad Wealth and their other incredibly useful conception of Headless Brands, the...

Last night we recorded a long and fun conversation with the Hugo award winning author and futurist Bruce Sterling. As you will hear Bruce has a great deal of knowledge about a great deal of stuff, and as well as his early writing helping to establish the cyberpunk movement, he was also among a handful of people who set the countercultural tone in San Francisco at the dawn of WIRED and the dot com...

This week we are thrilled to bring a conversation with Amy C. Beal from UC Santa Cruz, whose book "New Music New Allies: Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification" not only gives us insight into the role that German state funding has played in American experimental art since the Second World War, but also offers clues as to the unique responsibilities and complications...

It’s a hot one! This afternoon recorded a discussion with Mixcloud CEO and DJ Nico Perez, and our studio was so hot that we had to keep all the windows open for our own health and also to keep the laptop from spontaneously combusting! As a result this recording is resplendent with the occasional child screaming or dog barking, but hopefully that adds to the experience :) Nico joined us to discuss...

This week we welcome Jesse Walden, who recently announced the launch of Variant Fund, which looks to support what he describes as “The Ownership Economy”. We discuss Jesse’s background as an artist manager, his early experiments with putting tools into artists hands to control the destiny of their work online, the opportunities that decentralised networks offer to help us transition from the centr...

For the second part of our conversation series with contemporary fiction writers we are over the moon to have a chat with Elvia Wilk, who released her debut novel “Oval” last year to great acclaim. Oval is a beautiful book that depicts a world at vastly different scales, not least addressing the contemporary role of the artist as embedded in wider economic systems. We discuss how art communities i...

For this episode we welcome academic and DJ Larisa Kingston Mann from Temple University in Philadelphia, whose work analyzes the relationship between law, technology, sovereignty and creativity, especially focusing on the ways changing media technologies affect communities’ ability to flourish Her PhD thesis “Rude Citizenship”, soon to be turned into a book, looks at the ways in which Jamaican pop...

Since the idea of this podcast first came to mind, we had imagined starting a thread of conversations with fiction authors and artists that in many ways touch on some of issues that we might be exploring in other conversations. Today we are thrilled to kick off this direction with a conversation with Tim Maughan, the author of Infinite Detail, winner of The Guardians best science fiction and fanta...

This week we talk to Director at PRS for music and Gomez songwriter Tom Gray, who, through the #brokenrecord hashtag and other advocacy work has been championing the need for reform the way that streaming services work, and reform copyright policy to better protect songwriters and producers. We discuss the case for user centric streaming over the current pro-rata payment model, what is was like to...

In this episode we speak with Kate Crawford, founder of the AI Now Institute and professor who has spent the last decade studying the political implications of data systems, machine learning and artificial intelligence.  We discuss the anatomy of AI systems and full ecosystem of human and material resources behind an Amazon echo, the need to develop an understanding of the exponential accumulation...

In this episode we welcome David Turner, writer and founder of the Penny Fractions newsletter, which holds a critical and often political lens to the latest developments in the music industry. In this episode we discuss the music industry response to Black Lives Matter, positive infrastructural proposals that could lead to long lasting and meaningful diversification, the meme music economy, lesson...

In this episode we speak to Glen Weyl, author, economist and Principal Research at Microsoft Research. His ideas inspired the formation of the RadicalxChange Foundation, who recently held a conference in which we were speaking alongside Audrey Tang, Digital Minister of Taiwan, Vitalik Buterin of Ethereum and others. Head over to RadicalxChange.org and look out for the deep list of archived talks....

In this latest episode we talk with Professor Guy Standing, who has been at the forefront of Basic Income research for 30 years, running pilots all over the world.  We discuss his original concept of “The Precariat”, a new class that might be familiar to many listeners, the moral case for a basic income and its fans in US politics and Silicon Valley, and his vision of a future of a new left built...

In this episode we speak with the writer Liz Pelly, who over the past 5 years has written a series of revelatory critical pieces about the streaming economy for The Baffler. We discuss whether the distinction of Independence is all that useful in music at this point in history, take a look at the ways in which the streaming platforms flatter some kinds of music and have flattered to deceive for ot...

In this episode we talk with Jesse Engel, musician, Senior Research Scientist at Google Brain and creative lead of the Magenta project.  Magenta is an open source research project exploring the role of machine learning as a tool in the creative process, developed by numerous researchers and engineers from the Google brain team, Google’s self directed machine intelligence group.  Amongst many thing...

In this episode we catch up with Trevor McFedries, founder of the meta media studio Brud ( (http://brud.fyi/) ), whose digital avatar artist and influencer Lil Miquela recently caused a stir through signing with one of the worlds premier talent agencies, CAA. We discuss the origins of the project, why he sees Miquela as more of a challenge to Mickey Mouse than human artists, and also some pretty b...

We are joined by research scientist and Director of Spotify's CTRL lab François Pachet and his collaborator, the composer Benoit Carré to discuss how the latest in AI research offers  a new paradigm for both composition and the concept of authorship and ownership. This will be one of many times we pursue conversations with researchers at the cutting edge of Artificial Intelligence and music, not o...

If you are interested in reading Evgeny's new piece in the Guardian, visit: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/15/tech-coronavirus-surveilance-state-digital-disrupt Sign up to Evgeny's Syllabus project to receive a weekly syllabi curated around your interests: https://the-syllabus.com/ If you would like to support this series, please visit: https://www.patreon.com/interdependence