This argument about Web3 is really exciting. What do you call one of the two main protagonists? Jack Dorsey has an unlimited indoor pass now that he’s no longer from adult surveillance of Twitter through Wall Street, and he’s using it for a subtle purpose. I don’t know the guy well, but I’ve always appreciated his unconventional attitude towards big truths that he doesn’t have time for. Marc Andreessen I don’t know my way around very well either, but I definitely don’t want to be blocked by him. I was listening to a Kara Swisher Twitter Space today and for some reason it has already been banned. She becomes my media personality of choice because she asks all the questions I may have in a format (live audio) that never invites me on stage. As a result, I find her rooms a fantastic endorsement of the new format because when she is there the differences between presenter and speaker and listener are irrelevant.
As Doc Searls reminds me, people in our age group are falling like flies. A couple of weeks ago we were talking about Kim Cameron from the Identity Gang; this week it is Chris Locke famous from Cluetrain. We recorded at the clubhouse and the link is in the newsletter below. As you will hear, he was called Rageboy for all the right reasons, an original voice that showed up when the internet gave a voice to everyone who showed up. According to Doc, he pretty much invented Cluetrain on the wings of the previous generation of Rageboys with names like Vonnegut and the most defined Hunter S. Thompson. Like John Lennon who brought Paul and Paul who brought George and George who brought Ringo in, Locke connected Doc, David Weinberger, and a technologist, Rick Levine, who created the website, which turns into the Ledger has transformed. The final addition reminds me of the guy in Monty Python who did all the surreal animations that tied the tissues of the group together.
Markets are conversations, said Doc and the Cluetrain, and many felt that they understood what Doc now calls the promise of independence. Today’s talk about Web3 feels important and epoch-making, but the last few years of Trumpism and the pandemic leave us more cautious about the impact of technology. My semi-educated guess is that both Jack and Marc represent conversation that depends on both being right, but the media wants a fight and an after-party rope. I don’t hear as much agreement as John and Paul’s dialogues: just getting better, can’t get much worse.
As the warriors of the early internet fade from the scene, I remember the optimism of that earlier time. The battles revolved around things like owning our own data, the ability to move it from platform to platform, and turning the social media moment into something we could act with in the wider media world. The influencer role was a result of this increase, the endorsement model its economic engine. It always felt like a record deal in the 70s and 80s; You raised enough money to fund a recording session and then bought it from a label. The success was radio airplay and the hope for a contract for more recordings and support for touring.
In the beginning, podcasting offered a bootstrap past record companies and their marketing departments to a more flexible environment for target group development. They no longer needed access to the radio funnel with its limitations of expensive reusable recording time, showcase appearances by loss leaders and a scratch-my-back-I-scratch-I-scratch-your-consideration-insider corner. All of these things were still there, but the gamut was compressed.
Recordings could be compiled with inexpensive prosumer equipment, synthesizers and MIDI bridged the gap between home and studio environments, and sometimes hit records appeared that used a mixture of the two domains. The Stones in particular worked on riffs on cassettes and shifted the actual tracks into multitracks for sweetening purposes. At the other end of the pipeline, Stevie Wonder used the same overdubbing and multi-track building of home recording to take complete control of the studio when he went from the Motown music factory to music he wrote, and most if not played all the instruments, and worked with engineers and technologists to produce a generation of tools that worked fairly transparently across the industry.
Today’s smartphones, cloud services and app stores offer a similar transfer of power from labels to makers. Newsletters and live audio networks make it possible to write, record, and distribute material with little or no additional effort. You can effectively create an audience for one post at a time by using social media to nurture and connect with a growing network of hosts, speakers, and audiences who move between roles in a social and ambitious way switch here. On Clubhouse, record / playback tools produce something that is reminiscent of top ten lists of the most popular reruns. Next, it will be most popular with certain groups and metadata on how the members of those groups relate to related shows and artists. This development of the so-called liner notes, until the CD format and streaming destroyed it, drove the market from top-forty radio to deeply cut album-oriented FM and from there to Netflix analyzes, the extensions based on the effects of the shows to determine the retention of valuable subscribers.
As I read this, the choice of words feels forced and arbitrary. I fail to communicate why I like this new platform. Perhaps it’s the excessive ado about the creator economy. Is it an economy when the money to be made is an afterthought at best to attract the same media system that is supposedly being reformed? Maybe it’s the melancholy feeling of seeing the present through the prism of the fading past. I can’t remember the details of that earlier time, just the energy that seemed to pulsate out of the real-time electrical global moment. A live streaming show captures some of that, but not the shared enthusiasm for the possibilities of the era. I got a look at it when I first opened a clubhouse space; The random architecture of the notification and follow-up system has drawn very few people in, but more than enough to see how this will replace full production podcasting when it is absorbed.
Like a similar Twitter Space conversation, you could watch listeners come in, leave, and then come back in over time. I’m assuming the discussion was slightly more interesting or potentially more interesting than other long-tail alternatives. Backing up the recording is a 24 hour plus crapshoot to enable transcription services so Clubhouse wins in the moment. And the story of the early days of Twitter vs. Facebook shows that most early adopters will join them both to drive improvements in production automation and analytics extraction. This is not the economy in the workplace, but rather the environment of early film schools like NYU and USC, which spawned a community of directors and producers like Lucas, Coppola, and Scorsese who dominated the new wave of Hollywood filmmaking.
It is a fragile thing that shapes the market and these players’ commitment to anything other than a winner-take-all strategy is not at all clear. While Twitter’s viral pulls are alluring, its past of saving third-party developers and acquisitions like Vine and Periscope helps keep Clubhouse in the game while Twitter grapples with a post-Dorsey resource battle at its parent company. And it’s not just a Field of Dreams story. Sure if they build it they will come. But “they” won’t stay for that.
Take the cable networks. Please. How much longer will we stare with open mouths at the dismantling of democracy? Or the war with the virus. We long for answers, not growth opportunities. I read a review of the new asteroid movie Don’t Look Up that described it as good but not great. It’s often referred to as an allegory of climate change, but for me it was all about Trump winning re-election. Half the country wouldn’t believe the asteroid until they could see it in the night sky, but what really hurt was how many didn’t believe it when they saw it.
The review was on Medium, another Field of Dreams startup. Another post concerned the trope that Omicron is turning the pandemic into a cold. Wishful thinking, but not backed up with the data that, according to the author, could be milder or more serious. Not comforting, but all the more momentous if we act according to science, not according to our hopes. Technology serves us when we follow the data and take sides. The Beatles’ story isn’t why they split up, but how they got together for so long.
the newest Gillmor Gang newsletter
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The Gillmor Gang – Frank Radice, Michael Markman, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, Brent Leary and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live on Friday, December 10, 2021.
Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor
@fradice, @mickeleh, @denispombriant, @kteare, @brentleary, @stevegillmor, @gillmorgang
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