Process Hacks and Possible Worlds (Interview)

Mat Dryhurst Process Hacks and Possible Worlds (Interview) Mat Dryhurst is a thinker and artist who in recent years has made numerous interventions and actively provoked debate on changes in the infrastructure of the music industry brought about by the advent of new business models such as streaming services. In his work with Holly Herndon, most recently employing machine learning technology on the album PROTO, these concerns for solidarity, ‘interdependency’ and the commons are brought to the stage and dramatised through music and performance. ROBIN MACKAY: Could you describe in the broadest terms what your approach would be to the question of scoping out and building new possible worlds for the disciplines and practices within which you work? And do you see this as a political or rather as a practical or technical question? MAT DRYHURST: Beyond the fact that on most political issues I would identify as quite far left, leaning toward the libertarian, generally speaking I come from an analytical background rather than from a politically dogmatic background. If anything, I’m a pragmatist—I think if I have any function whatsoever, it lies exactly in the fact that, while ideals are wonderful, most of my knowledge of anything comes from lived experience and scrutinising first principles. I feel like I approach a lot of topics backwards, in a sense, since my experience is one of working in various industries without too much of a plan, and having to figure things out for myself—I’m a bit neurotic so I do tend to try and figure everything out. You have the grand utopian statement which is, all things being equal in a perfect universe, we could build x. That kind of thinking can be useful in a purely academic setting, but I’m mostly concerned with the wellbeing of my family and other people with whom I share a common story or ambition, and the reality there is that things aren’t going to happen like that. There are a lot of utopian thinkers with very clean shoes, who are going to be disappointed if

a very complicated process isn’t executed perfectly, whereas I’m more interested in smaller steps, minor process hacks. Of course, this approach can be very frustrating too, because at least when you have a utopian thought, you concede to yourself that it’s probably not going to happen, or that it’s out of your hands. The problem with my approach to it is that I think, ‘You could probably do this in the next few weeks’—so then when people don’t do it, it torments me because I’m like, ‘no, no you can actually do this thing’…! My big issue is that a while ago I reached a point where I couldn’t determine whether the people around me believed what they said they believed. Which is not to label anyone a cynic, but more to say that many are so far away from entertaining the possibility of anything changing, or so few options appear available to them, that there’s not much consistency between stated beliefs and actions. RM: You’re saying that there’s a discourse around improving or reforming things, but no real conviction in terms of taking any action to follow it up? MD: Yeah. I mean, of course there are a minority of people who take action, but in areas like music, art, and culture, where in a sense everyone— particularly at this moment when we’re all expected to be activists of some kind—is expected to be contributing positively to the world, often it seems purely gestural. It’s confusing to tell who means it and who is participating in a choreography. When I propose feasible stuff to do, I often feel like I am entertaining, rather than being entertained. It’s weird. RM: Your recent talk on protocols at CTM 20191 attracted a lot of attention, so it seems that it’s not impossible to involve people in thinking through the technical details of how inequitable and potentially culturally corrosive existing systems are—in this case, the systems for music sharing, delivery, and distribution. MD: With that talk, all I was trying to do was to look at the platforms and ask whether they’re doing what they say they’re doing. Because the disparity between what people think Spotify or Facebook are working on, and what they actually appear to be working on, is so vast. It is sometimes useful to literally kick the machine and ask: Is this doing what it says it does? It’s refreshing to pull everything out of the symbolic order and blood sports, and

into the practical domain. RM: A concrete example of that would be your analysis of streaming models. MD: Yes, I think that to properly understand streaming logic, it is worth understanding the fallout of technical decisions that go back to the establishment of the web. We are in this pickle for good reason. I also try and keep my analysis somewhat impersonal, because I could be a puritan and start throwing eggs at individuals and I’d probably get more Twitter followers, but I’m not stupid enough to think much would be accomplished through doing that. RM: The ranks would close against you. MD: Yeah, then it becomes personal. I’ve never been a political zealot, although I have positions I fight for. If you do it right, certain new concepts, or definitions, emerge. Once you identify a problem and propose a well considered fix, it endures longer than any attack or emotional outburst. Like, for example, when I proposed that DJs share their fees with the artists whose music constitutes their set. There are all kinds of ideological positions wrapped into that proposal, but the proposal itself doesn’t need them to gather steam. It’s one of those things that, once brought into the world, will now never go away. I can almost guarantee it. I get a kick out of that. RM: Out of specifying or naming the problem, and indicating this gap between what’s being said and the material reality? MD: Exactly. And also, just to spot opportunities, to be honest. In the realm of music specifically, I’m a nerd for figuring out how people are making money. In music there is one huge blockage in the conversation around streaming. Streaming companies are engaged in a race-to-the-bottom war, raising a tonne of money (unless they already have it, as in the case of Apple) around an idea that as of yet has not turned a profit. So everything they say hinges on a speculative romantic narrative they are asking people to invest in and believe in. On the other hand you have characters who, for good reason, are very wedded to an older time period, or who would love to return to some simpler era, and they are burdened by these very humanistic, kitschy arguments about the value of community and the meaning of music and so on, when in reality

I don’t think that approach is going to cut it either.. If you disenthrall yourself of those two flawed proposals, and also the suggestion that one idea could work equally well for everybody, there are actually thousands of things we could try out in music. I’ve been looking at ways for scenes to fund common resources and distribute equity, for example, which I think is something that only scene music could achieve. Maybe to some that sounds boring, but I think in practice it would be the opposite. RM: Precisely because it’s not utopian in an appealingly dreamlike sense. MD: I need to do a better job at making things dreamy. With the performances with Holly [Herndon], we’ve been trying to fill that gap a little bit—I mean, it’s certainly not dry. I commonly say that we need a TAZ for whatever this new thing is. People fell in love with the poetry of it. Irrespective, I don’t think scene musicians have much choice—we either process-hack our way out of this, or we are stuck in this abject predicament for a while. RM: By ‘process-hacking’, then, do you mean a piecemeal, trial-and-error way of working with and around the tools that are available? MD: Yes, taking advantage of a kink in the way that something currently works. Generally speaking it is almost impossible to gather the momentum and funds necessary to sustain something outside the platform ecosystem, so you have to exit through them somehow. The wealthy do this all the time: they find loopholes, they find ways to move money around, ways to evade tax. And often in order to be able to make that process hack you have to get as close to the processor as possible. You have to get as close to tax law as possible to understand where the opportunity might be for you. Here’s an example. There was a story in the news many years ago when SoundCloud was at the centre of everything, about some clever artist who had figured out that if you put certain keywords in a song, you could be the next recommended song after the latest Kanye West hit. So in a sense it’s a kind of finessing of the system. You’re reading a system and figuring out how to hack that process a little bit so as to find an advantage in it, ideally for the betterment of more people than just yourself. RM: But if you’re saying that the only pragmatic way to create some kind of

opening is to game the systems that are in place, there seems to be some ambivalence as to whether you’re really opening up new possibilities at all, or simply conceding, resigning yourself to working within the environment those large players have put in place. MD: I don’t see where the funds or the human power or the skills would come from to create, let’s say, a separatist internet. Ten years deep into playing around with stuff like this, I’m not holding my breath. And what appears to me to be the opportunity is, I’m not conceding anything, but I just don’t see a scenario in which the FAANG lose their grip on online culture. I’ve been through that process of trying to build something new and know many others who have too; it sounds great but it’s impractical. RM: In 2015 you devised and built the self-hosting publishing framework Saga, designed to give artists some power over how and where their work is displayed online by enabling them to control how embedded content behaves depending on the context within which it’s displayed. How did that project develop, and what did you learn from it? MD: Initially I just saw an opportunity: at the time websites were perhaps more powerful centralised structures than they are now, and were often dependent on embedded content from elsewhere. So I built a tool that allowed you to take control of that content throughout the web, asserting that online, just as in the real world, a piece of art has a different value depending on where it is hosted. So I ought to be able to charge X on a Nike blog, and nothing on a fan blog. This simple mechanism of versioning and permissioning content opens up the possibility for other applications too. Twitter is now working on something very similar with the New York Times and Adobe, as a means of determining the authenticity of content. It’s one of those simple concepts that I have no doubt will become common over time. My experience with it was one of doing it as an art project. I had a bunch of interest from people within what was then the very early crypto community. My challenge at the time was that I found it impossible to raise any money to develop it any further. Myself and the developer friend who was helping me, we put it together for less than a thousand pounds. I had a few people help me to petition arts grants bodies, and basically came to the conclusion that it’s impossible because it falls in between the cracks of all these funding models

that were established in the nineties. I could’ve raised more money making a hypothetical video essay about the possibility of the software, as ‘media art’, than I would have been able to raise for actually building the software itself. I did get someone approaching me at UCLA after I first presented it, who was like hey, I want to give you a bunch of money to make this a different kind of ad network for individuals—which is a clever idea. It was a really good use case for the concept: basically you could sell your own ads from your own server using that technique and you could switch them out. So if Rolling Stone hosts a song of ours then, if we were so inclined, we could just switch up new ads all the time. I didn’t really want to do that, because it’s a waste of life. In the venture capital world, I know smart people who play in that universe, but in their world they feel that media distribution is largely ‘solved’. Streaming’s dealing with music, Facebook’s dealing with content, why would we fund a cute activist project? So it ends up just sitting there. I worked on maintaining it for some time, but after a while I just felt like a bit of a sucker. If you go on GitHub there’s a trail of tears there—incredible software projects that no one will ever learn about. The cryptocurrency world changed the funding landscape for those kind of projects with the ICO (Initial Coin Offering) model. In a weird way those crypto projects became the new art world for a while. You want to talk about crazy speculation around utopian gestures? Most crypto projects were/are just badly edited essays—when you look at the white papers, anyone who’s read a few of them can distinguish between people who know what they’re talking about and then just wildly speculative stuff that’s nevertheless raising thirty million dollars overnight, you know….beyond how absurd that is, the ICO as a mechanism for supporting things is actually quite interesting, and there have been a number of projects that endure in that space and actually do interesting work now, where it’s easier to find grants and co-builders to develop those projects. At the time of Saga, though, there wasn’t really that option, so I just kind of let it die. I still found that time really useful though, because that was actually one of my first experiments in this kind of low-level protocol thinking. In a sense, now everything I do is based on what I learned from Saga. RM: Then how about more recently in the case of looking at DJs, what kinds of protocols are in place there, and how that might be different? Again, here

I’m interested in the disparity between a certain story that people are telling themselves and each other, and the reality of what’s going on, and where that disparity comes from: Is it an ideology imposed upon them from elsewhere, or is it a spontaneous product of people’s need to believe that the system they’re a part of isn’t fleecing them? Because some of the data I’ve seen you post on the disparities in income between ‘star’ DJs and the rest is shocking. It reminded me a little of the art world, where you have a huge pool of people at the bottom who are aspiring and striving, spending all of their time trying to meet the right person and say the right thing, and who spend decades of their life doing that while being very poorly paid and displaying their virtue by shouldering a lot of ‘voluntary’ labour. All of that on the basis of an aspirational story—that you have to be in the network, you have to be involved, and one day you’ll have the opportunity to make those leaps up the ladder. So I just wondered where you see that disparity being generated, and why you think people are so ready to propagate a narrative which their own professional life experience doesn’t bear out. MD: I think the parallels with the contemporary art world are really valid. There is a historical factor here, I think: it’s only a very recent development that people expect their hobbies to somehow fully represent them and be a vehicle for social mobility. And you can attribute a lot of that to sixties liberalism, to the explosion of self-expression and so on. I wasn’t there but I can only suppose that at the time it was a legitimate liberation from conservative institutions that needed to be shaken. The challenge we have now, though, is that you have this very hallowed, halcyon period of culture in which we were sold a story that plucky people in their garage could have a big dream, or that the broke musician drug addict could take over the world, and even though that did happen in certain cases, my argument is that, in retrospect, we’re now imprisoned by that narrative. I was talking to Lee Marshall, a sociologist at the University of Bristol. He did some research into vinyl sales, and it turns out that something like forty percent of all vinyl purchased is never played. He apologised to me because, at the time, I was the only musician in the room. But I said no, you saying that is wonderful to me, because that’s closer to my understanding of things, which is that in a sense the greatest product of the music industry is the music industry—the mythology of the music industry is the product, is the lore. You

can probably say the same for the art world, right? The closer you get to it, the more it reveals itself as a ruse, a trick. Not in some cynical way that implies that somewhere out there is some pure art that is being misrepresented by these nefarious characters who are dragging art through the mud. But in the sense that it’s a kind of meme that play tricks with people’s aspirations—and that mechanism itself is the source of value, that ability to mint, trade, and merchandise around genius. These systems worked better in times of scarcity. You see that in music as in all media: if everyone can make music now, it’s harder to stand out. All scarcity systems of that sort are dissolving. The great liberators of the twentieth century, though, they’re not going anywhere. Their images will loom over culture until the last cent can be drained out of that era. I struggle with that when I see well-meaning people dedicating their lives to career models that haven’t been updated to reflect the new situation—and you can make the same criticism about universities and all kinds of different structures that have been shaken as a result of these shifts. I have a fair amount of insight into how the creative fields operate, and to me the most unethical thing I could possibly do is to perpetuate falsehoods, and not attempt to communicate to people exactly what it is they’re getting into. Not in the classical art teacher way of ‘You’re just not good enough, I’m being cruel to be kind’, nothing like that, but just saying: here is the best, most brutally analytical information I can give you about how this actually works to the best of my knowledge, and with that knowledge in mind, you have a better chance at carving out a niche for yourself in this ecosystem. I joke with my students that, beyond the fact that I love what I do—and Holly and I both inject a lot of meaning into the artwork we do, as everyone does—the place we occupy in the music ecosystem is market testing. It’s so obvious. If I just dissociate it from my own desires, it’s clear that we exist in a pyramidal structure in which it’s cheaper for us to take risks than it is for the people above us, and you can say exactly the same about the art world, right? It’s cheaper for the student or the bohemian knocking about Berlin to take risks than it is for the exhibition-maker who has to spend one million pounds on constructing something. Once you jettison the romance, it’s clear that almost always, people are, in both earnest and cynical ways, contributing to the maintenance of a welloiled infrastructure. I say that with little judgment, it just is. In fact I think

often the people who are most judgmental about the arts tend to be those who are the most entranced by its mythologies, and perhaps do not have enough information to dispel that state. That can also happen at the top though, I guess: often successful people are the most oblivious as to how and why they became successful! RM: Because success doesn’t necessarily grant you any insight into the mechanisms via which you’ve been able to find success. MD: Exactly. Many of the most successful people aren’t going to be the best ones to ask about how things actually work. Firstly because many just don’t know, because they’ve been so graced by that infrastructure that they’ve never had to deal with the particularities of why they’re successful, and secondly because for those that do know, why would they share it?! I think a lot of successful people peddle falsehoods selfishly. RM: This brings me back to my earlier question: if you’re really successful, you don’t necessarily have any reason to look into it too closely—after all, it’s great to believe that you’ve succeeded because you’re the best! But why is it that those stuck at the bottom of the ladder are also not interested in understanding how things are actually working, why are they also buying into some rather disconnected and/or outdated idealism about how this culture industry works? MD: Increasingly among younger people who are starting out, I’ve found that there actually is a lot of interest—I mean, the reason why I’ve been invited to teach is because there’s been a lot of interest in that particular line of exposition. I think younger people, who have grown up in the hell of metrics and gamified expression, are far more aware of the omnipresent circuitry of culture than we ever were. For many older people who are more entrenched, and I don’t know how to say this without it seeming mean, but I think there’s often a kind of power relationship between the time someone has invested into a field and their readiness to concede defeat. Sometimes it‘s just too painful to someone’s personal mythology to look too closely at the circuitry. RM: Of course, that makes sense. So is the current infrastructure for the distribution of music just a statistical competition? MD: The democratisation of tools has made it really easy to make mediocre

art and to publish it to nobody, that’s the base opportunity they’ve provided. Now, when you start talking about process hacks, there’s a gazillion ways of trying to hack the Instagram feed, trying to hack SoundCloud or the Spotify playlist or whatever. There’s a bunch of people out there trying to do that, and there’s a subset of those people out there who win the lottery because their track gets on an ambient autumn playlist or something that makes them £100,000—that happens. When I look at the services, what I see is a basic promise that you have a chance to build your own business with zero support, and the opportunity to pay for various scams. Maybe this is a separate conversation, but if you look at classic multilevel marketing structures and the new culture industry, it’s hard to see much distance between the two models, honestly. Everyone is an individuated agent who’s given this little bit of space, and then encouraged to pay to advertise and pay to crosspost, and pay and pay and pay…if you pay this weird ad company they’ll get you exposure to this playlist…in the hope that one day that pipe dream will work out. I figured out a couple of years ago that there’s far more money in people willing to pursue a pipe dream indefinitely than there is in people willing to listen to the music that comes out of that process. Now I believe that Spotify has figured that out, and is acquiring all kinds of artist services companies. I feel that is a far more sober angle on that economy. RM: That’s a radical shift in how the industry works, for sure. And as you say, increasingly, this goes down to the level of the ‘content’ itself. Users are bombarded with solicitations that, maybe if you tweak your product like this, use this plugin, or pay someone to help you polish it, then you’ll double your listeners. MD: Absolutely, and it’s all a kind of baiting, a continual carrot on the end of a string. When I talk about the need to form institutions, of course we’re aware of the mistakes or transgressions of previous models, the activities of labels and other older institutions—but at least things were clear. You know, at least there was an understanding of the economics of it, you didn’t need a PhD in data science to understand what the game was. The present moment is a field day for institutions with power and budgets. Everyone in the world is encouraged to publish their ideas freely online, and

that information is only really valuable if you have the means to monetise it. Major labels and brands invest money into tools that allow them to harvest ideas and trends from poor teenagers online, and integrate them into their products before any regular person would have the chance to monetise them. Taco Bell won awards for their social media department in 2014–15, presaging this. They established a kind of Skunkworks-style surveillance unit called ‘The Fishtank’, where basically they were using Twitter as an ideagenerating machine, scanning all of these young people out there trying to make a name for themselves and trying to get attention, finding the best memes, and then devising ways to twist them into something Taco-Bellrelated. The worst thing about all this is that it wasn’t considered predatory, it was considered fun and hip…. You can also see that with where Vine went, with a lot of predominantly African American teenagers fuelling culture with new cool shit, and the only one who benefits from that is, like, Madonna or something…. So that’s today’s power dynamic as I see it, which is very different to the standard narrative. RM: And is it at all possible to exist outside of that? MD: I think yes and no. The problem is, as always, there’s still privileged placement in the culture industry for those who can afford to move to London, New York, increasingly Berlin, increasingly LA. The connections and the freemasonry of those media-heavy cities still exist. It’s the same with certain academic programmes, more so in the art world than in the music world, but it exists in the music world too: if you can afford to, or if you have the good fortune to be in the favour of certain programmes, you are still on an accelerated path. So if you go to Saint Martins, or if you’re at the Stadelschule, you’re closer to the action without necessarily having to participate in the ad platforms, and in some cases I think in the art world it’s almost advantageous not to—that’s the ultimate flex, that you don’t have to promote yourself because you’ve already made those connections. But for everybody else, no. The trade-off is you’re given the tools to do the bare minimum, to have the bare minimum access, and then you’re invited to step on one another and figure out ways to scam and finesse one another, ultimately to figure out a way to provide enough value to the infrastructure in order to be able to leech some of it back for yourself. This is why ‘scenes’, without being too romantic about it, are important.

That’s what I end up telling my students: at the end of the day, your best chance comes from earnestly contributing to creative scenes, working out a way to get involved and be a good person, and participate. This still, I would argue, is statistically more likely to succeed—you’re far more likely to find some success in the culture industry doing that than buying ads and trying to make songs that complement playlists. Most trad scene people in music can’t stand me. It’s funny, as I’m the one trying to vehemently defend them in quarters where no-one spares them a thought. Protecting scenes as fortresses that are somewhat insulated from abject populism is very important though. So this is where I end up: the standard narrative is gatekeepers vs. democratisation and opportunity. I’m in a completely different world, I don’t see that as the battlefield at all. The battlefield is specialists having some say vs. there being one gatekeeper for literally everything, or five gatekeepers for all of culture, you know? I will defend labels. I mean there’s obviously some gross stuff I wouldn’t defend. But the idea of labels, and most likely galleries too, I’d probably fall on the side of defending them, but with the caveat that there are some significant improvements that could be made. RM: Because all of these things can be seen as points around which a wider productive group can coalesce, a microculture that has space to breathe and to develop. That can be something as simple as just affording the suitable time and space to hang out and develop a shared vocabulary, new concepts, inventing new ways to use instruments…just not being an embattled individual for a while. Those microcultures are where new possible worlds develop, aren’t they? MD: Shaun Monahan wrote about a trip through the New York subway where everything in all of the advertisements are shouting about you basically having no commitment to the world around you: it’s all apps for casual anonymous sex, dining at home in your bed, everything is attempting to further individuate you.2 When I talk about interdependent—rather than independent—music,3 I use a slide from an old anime where the quote is, ‘as usual, you’ve confused isolation for independence’. Which I think is beautiful, and very true. I take that microculture point seriously, in the sense that Holly and I have a culture. Okay, it gets confusing because it sounds super-cheesy and corporate, because Google’s very into their ‘Google culture’, companies talk

about company culture, etc., but I don’t revere them enough to let them sour the term! We’re very deliberate about who we work with, how we treat people, how well people get paid. That’s incredibly important. And it actually matters in a way that means that it would also be gross, and it would undermine the beauty of it, to make that a selling point, to make that a public thing. But the idea is basically that we don’t fuck people over, that’s a core principle of the project. It’s simply the idea of commitment. And this gets more interesting when you think of how such things might be implemented in technical ways, if need be—that’s something I’d like to see more of. In decentralised tech one of the things I find really compelling is the idea of an immutable ledger, an immutable transparent protocol that anyone has access to read and that you can’t go back on: it’s a good faith engine. When you have immutable cryptographic protocols that cannot be changed or altered, what you’re talking about is enshrining good faith. And the idea of some kind of consensual adoption of good faith—and you see this in other areas like the effective altruism movement—the idea of being able to track where the money’s going, who said they were going to do something and what, and whether they actually did it—I actually think that’s a very beautiful idea. So this idea of making commitments to one another is so much more powerful and also utopian and gets very dreamy for me, to be honest: I like the idea of making long-term commitments to people—I mean, I’m happily married, I love the idea of marriage: without attributing any kind of religious significance to it, the idea of a couple of people committing their lives to each other I find an incredibly romantic and beautiful thing. RM: And you think there’s a possibility of organising collective commitment through technology, to build cultural worlds other than the one we’re struggling through at the moment? MD: Yeah. The natural or dystopian perspective on that is to imagine a scenario where all human motivations are somehow marketised and surveilled, and of course I’m not advocating for that. But what I am suggesting there’s greater possibility for is the idea of encouraging people to publicly state their intentions and to deliver on them, and being able to tell whether that’s happened. On the societal level, maybe that stuff sounds terrifying, it sounds like the social credit score. But on small-scale levels, in terms of putting together groups of people, this is what is beautiful about

many of the DAO (Distributed Autonomous Organisation) models, or even some of the grant experiments taking place on Gitcoin. The idea of distributed groups of people who are not necessarily geographically connected to one another making commitments to one another in pursuit of a common goal, I think is a very beautiful idea. That interdependent approach, this idea of saying, what if we were to make a commitment over the course of a couple of years to try and accomplish something, completely flies in the face of what Monahan depicts in his article, the idea that technical systems are ultimately there to individuate us and to extract money from our loneliness. RM: This seems also to connect back to what you were saying about the value of defining something, setting down a marker that can become a shared reference. If you’re participating in a scene, though, don’t those things happen ambiently anyway, if you have a history with a group of people, commitments emerge naturally, without having to be technically supported? I wonder how much this is really a question about time, about our timeperception and the amount of time commitment we feel able to give. In a sense we get the systems we deserve, given the way we inhabit time, and, inversely, people’s sense of what is possible tends to shrink down to what is made available. So the question of possible worlds is also the question of experiencing and using time differently. MD: I think that’s true. Also, with regard to this liberal individualist mindset, the concept of feedback appears very often, and feedback in a sense is a kind of closed loop of time that just keeps repeating, it’s a shortening of time over time: you’re not setting forth with any particular long-term goal, you’re just incrementally making adjustments to things in order to make them succeed at a very narrow task. Which is common currency in the realm of ad networks and so on, that shortening of time: people talk about this colloquially all the time: ‘Can you believe that Fyre festival only happened in January, it feels like January was ten years ago in internet time.’ But if you step outside of that and go for a walk, then you think, What the fuck has really changed since January? Nothing really. Jay Springett talks about this in relation to climate: confronting the idea of the end of time requires a kind of long-term thinking that we are training ourselves out of. Again, this comes back to institutions, right? I’m not going to lionise dusty academic institutions that have been

damagingly conservative to pretty much all of us at some point, but at least there is some kind of economic model for those that need to step outside of the marketplace of ideas and think on a longer timescale. How many people have that luxury? The only people who can actually enjoy the lives of bohemians any longer are the rich. Maybe they always were the rich, but the only people who can any longer render a simulation of counterculture in the highest fidelity are the rich. They can live in the cities, they can be punks during the day and not get a job, and they don’t have to fear for their longterm future because they have inherited assets. RM: We’ve talked about different possibilities within the industry, but how about music itself contributing to wider social change? Your live work with Holly Herndon increasingly seems to involve experimentation in the powers of the gig to effect social connection, collectivity, and participation. Are the two things connected? MD: We try to make our performances reflect the ideals behind how we work. I’m sober about how much of a broader impact that makes, but we try to be consistent and committed for credibility’s sake. Culture works in magical ways, as I’m sure you have experienced, so it is important to be consistent even when it doesn’t immediately feel all that consequential. I’ve experienced multiple instances where a small argument we are having ends up in unexpected places. That is a feature of the culture industry; a reason to still be excited by it. It’s imprecise to track their impact, but ideas do get through. They have to come from somewhere! 1. <https://soundcloud.com/ctm-festival/ctm-2019-protocolsduty-despair-and-decentralisation>; transcript at <https://medium.com/@matdryhurst/protocols-duty-despair-and-decentralisationtranscript-69acac62c8ea>. 2. S. Monahan, ‘The Rise of the Personal Brand: How Selling Out Became Cool in the 2010s’, Dazed Digital, December 2019, <https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/47199/1/the-rise-of-thepersonal-brand-how-selling-out-became-cool-in-the-2010s>. 3. See M. Dryhurst, ‘Band Together: Why Musicians Must Strike a Collective Chord to Survive’, The Guardian, 9 April 2019, <https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/apr/09/experimental-musiciansmust-strike-a-collective-chord-red-bull-music-academy-closing>.