Welcome to Edition #47. We made it to another Friday, contrary to all earlier indications.
“Next, in our ‘What the Heck is Going On?!’ segment, we go live to an expert—some random person with Internet access.”
Wikimedia
Last week, Recent Reader RENAE—and covert Reader MN, specifically—put me on to a project that has become one of my favorite things on the internet: Listen to Wikipedia, from Hatnote (a design studio that focuses on Wikipedia as a “social and data platform”). This experiment is very much in the spirit of Barrett Lyon’s Opte Project, covered in last week’s edition, and its color-coded data visualization of the growth of the internet over the last three decades.
Listen to Wikipedia is exactly what it sounds like. [Ed.: pun marginally intended.] Soothing bells play to “indicate additions,” while “string plucks” signal subtractions from the Wikipedia corpus. The sounds are pitched based on the size of the edit: “the larger the edit, the deeper the note.” The project uses D3 and HowlerJS and is genuinely entrancing from a sonic standpoint. You can select which Wikipedia corpus you want to “listen to,” with English as the default. While it can get hectic if you combine multiple languages—I recommend English alone for maximum zen—there’s nothing quite like the sheer majesty of throwing Belarusian Wikipedia on the turntable and contemplating absolute silence.
The Merchants of Meme
Per Tech Crunch’s Matthew Panzarino, Chris Torres, the creator of hallowed 2011 viral sensation, the Nyan Cat, “organized an informal collection of meme originators” who then spent two weeks collectively auctioning off some of their most well-known works as NFTs. Predictably, a “remastered” NFT version of Torres’ animation sold for $534,327 in late February. As NFTs have boomed in recent weeks, the general idea of memes as “internet-native art”—now purchasable via internet-native currencies—has experienced significant momentum.
You might find all of this completely ridiculous. I understand. $534,327 would buy you a lot of actual cats! But, it’s interesting to think about how much of internet culture has been shaped by various memes over the past decades, and how little (if at all) the creators of those memes have been compensated financially. The same is true for creators of GIFs and countless other pieces of digital media; this material dominates our collective experience of the internet, but it’s often produced and consumed without any sort of monetization.
This organization of the #memeconomy crew into a commercial collective is interesting, and very much “of a piece” with many current Web3 creator initiatives (and even some Web2 projects, like Stir’s back-office for creator collaborations). In some cases, like Torres & co, the collectives are made up of peer creatives. This is part of the general thesis behind Other Internet’s “Squad Wealth” longform piece, a slightly haphazard but compelling write-up of how communities are evolving online and the implications for shared financial outcomes. Another related text is Nadia Eghbal’s Working in Public, an interesting book that I just finished, and that focuses on the world of open source software communities. [Ed.: Eghbal is currently the Head of Writer Experience at Substack.]
In other cases, these collectives are a mix of creators and fans. Last week, I wrote about social currencies and creators who are using tools like Roll to mint social tokens that reward and incentivize their fan communities. [Ed.: within 24 hours of that post, Roll experienced a hack where $5.7M was stolen, with significant downward price pressure on many of the creator tokens that were generated through the company’s product. So, you know, caveat emptor, etc.] Seed Club, “a social token incubator,” is another good example of an outfit that intends to enable financially-sustainable communities to be built on the basis of social tokens and this new commercial architecture.
For a good analysis of what’s happening at the intersection of social media, content, and commerce, I recommend Toby Shorin’s “Come for the Network, Pay for the Tool.” Shorin, part of Other Internet, writes about the evolution of “paid communities,” often organized around creators, that require a subscription “to join in.” I’ve seen countless examples of this phenomenon in recent months, ranging from paid Whatsapp groups with specific themes to private Discord servers, paid Patreon communities, and more. The “creator token” projects also represent a nascent but intriguing variation on this theme.
Now, speaking of networks and tools…🥁🥁🥁
Clubhouse’s creator club
This week, Clubhouse’s CEO (Paul Davison) announced a new Clubhouse creator program: Creator First. (Verge) The program sounds like an “accelerator for creatives,” structured with the goal of enabling more people to produce and monetize high-quality audio shows on Clubhouse. There will be 20 creators in the first cohort.
It is notable to see the company’s continuing focus on creators—and particularly creator monetization—given the precedent set by other social media products that often prioritized consumer engagement and un-monetized user generated content in their early days. Clubhouse has benefited from watching its peers launch and scale before it, and, to its credit, seems to be focusing on the supply side of its platform (those producing content). Given the intense competition for creators today, and the numerous programs that large tech companies are deploying (e.g., Snapchat’s Spotlight, with its famed “up to $1m in daily incentives for content creators”), this strategy is necessary.
What remains to be seen is whether Clubhouse can capture enough creator mindshare to stay engaging and relevant, particularly as it grows and as the overall quality of an average Clubhouse show likely degrades. I continue to feel like audio content is a “nice-to-have” for creators, alongside other more easily monetized digital products; as such, I’m more intrigued by Twitter Spaces than by pureplays like Clubhouse (or Mark Cuban’s Fireside, for that matter). Particularly if these live audio platforms build in solid monetization options from the jump, they can carve out serviceable markets for themselves. My view, though, continues to be that it’ll be difficult to build an Instagram or YouTube-scale business, for example, with audio as the foundation.
In other Clubhouse news, the app has been blocked in Oman. (Al Jazeera) The official reason supposedly has to do with the company’s lack of an operating permit. The actual reason is widely understood to be the government’s desire to control dialogue around sensitive topics. This is, of course, reminiscent of the ban enacted by the Chinese government in February. It will be interesting to see if the other Gulf sheikhdoms—and other more autocratic regimes globally—follow a similar path in the near-term.
Deepfakery
The @deeptomcruise deepfakes that went viral earlier this month were a little unsettling & definitely reinforced the sole discernible thesis of Trillium: the end is near. Those videos, which quickly racked up tens of millions of views, were the work of Belgian visual effects expert Chris Ume. According to a recent FT article by Siddharth Venkataramakrishnan, producing something of that quality and general sophistication is still quite difficult for amateurs. This seems cold comfort; it’s only a matter of time until the processes and technologies involved become more accessible. As we always say: what could go wrong?
If you’re curious for a peek behind the curtain, check out this video from Ume himself. The creation process reportedly took two months, starting with training a digital replica on a large collection of images. Each video, even at less than a minute in duration, required 24 hours of post-production each. Not for the faint of heart.
Lest we rapidly go down the anxiety-producing path of speculating about world leader deepfakes issuing declarations of war—or deepfake Elon Musks pumping various cryptocurrencies—allow me to provide a less fraught example of a recent deepfake: a saucy Napoleon, courtesy of Reddit user qqavmbad, lipsyncing in Japanese to the opening theme of an anime classic (Neon Genesis Evangelion). The decades of conquest and destruction notwithstanding, this alone would be grounds for exile.
Oh yeah, and if you want to create distinctly uncomfortable deepfake/animated versions of your ancestors, using old family photos, you can do that too! Check out MyHeritage’s Deep Nostalgia. I will not see you there.
New Cash Money
Like the biodynamic gamay on an average Tuesday evening at the Trillium HQ, the private market cash keeps on flowing.
Last week, Swedish company Epidemic Sound added $450M to its war chest, resulting in a $1.4bn valuation. (MusicBusinessWorldwide) The round was led by Blackstone & EQT Growth. For everyone in the global Trilliuminati except Learned Readers MM & BNH: Epidemic Sound is a marketplace for background music that can be used in a variety of media products. It has a library of 30,000+ songs and 60,000+ sound effects, and a correspondingly grand vision “to soundtrack the internet.” (Tech Crunch) Why not! 5M are already using the platform.
It is a meaningful problem that the company is tackling: finding and licensing music for podcasts, videos, and the like is hard and time-consuming. And, as established in these pages, making a living as a musician is also hard. Providing the market that allows these groups to transact is valuable, particularly as digital content continues to dominate the internet (80%+ of all internet traffic in 2020 was video, per Cisco). For a thought experiment on why Spotify should buy Epidemic Sound, and how the pairing might enable musicians to build careers without music labels, check out this episode of Not Boring by Packy McCormick.
Elsewhere, creator commerce OG Gumroad announced plans to raise a more modest $6M (at a $100M valuation). Not everyone can be Clubhouse. Interestingly, though, only $1M of the round was reserved for “traditional investors.” The remainder is available to “anyone willing to fork over at least $100.” This Robin Hoodian (as in bow & arrow/Sherwood Forest, not as in stock casino) approach to capital raising is possible thanks to a new SEC regulation that raised the cap on equity crowdfunding campaigns.
Gumroad has been around since 2011, and once aimed at unicorn status, before undergoing a metamorphosis into a more controlled, profitable actual business. Its CEO has been explicit about his desire to run a different type of startup, even relocating it to Provo, UT a couple of years ago. [Ed.: having spent more time in Provo, UT than one really should, I find this part questionable.] Board meetings are livestreamed, and financial data is made public on Twitter. Crowdfunding campaigns are discussed as a potential “annual” event.
Nearly 9,000 investors have committed funds to the campaign (which is now “sold out”), resonating with the general trend of financial democratization. This is something that we can see not just in the rise of the (public market) retail investor, enabled by stimulus and Robinhood, but also in private market equity crowdfunding. Judging by Twitter, some of Gumroad’s new investors are creators who make a living on the site; this is reminiscent of Verzuz’s recent sale to Triller, in which every Verzuz artist participated economically in the transaction. And, of course, there’s a throughline to the community-based funding mechanisms that are more native to Web3 projects, going back to the ICO debacle and updated more recently for many of the legitimate project launches in the realm of decentralized finance and social tokens.
Lastly, because it is 2021, Sequoia Capital and other investors deployed $26M in the Series A round for Gather, a company whose product is “interactive virtual spaces.” (Tech Crunch) Here is my reasonable facsimile of the actual Trillium HQ.
Gather has ~4M users and has seen its product used for weddings, office environments, and a host of other uses; virtual HQ seems to be the most resonant application thus far. Having played around with the shockingly customizable product, I can see how this would be “a thing” for distributed teams, although I can’t yet determine how much is a layer of novelty over the standard voice & video paradigm to which we’ve grown accustomed over the past year. Perhaps one day we will host a Trillium event at our co-owned virtual chateau.
For your ears only
It will come as no surprise to the Trilliuminati that I spend a lot of time listening to guitar music as a meditative substitute for the rage-inducing experience that I’ve had every time I’ve attempted to use Headspace and been subjected to the less-than-inspiring opening mantra: “Hi, I’m Andy.”
And so it is that I have found myself listening to Nathan Salsburg throughout the past several months. Salsburg is a guitarist and composer based in Kentucky; he’s also been a guest on numerous projects by acts like Bonnie Prince Billy, William Tyler, and the Weather Station. In case he wasn’t prolific enough, Salsburg is also the curation of the “digital Alan Lomax Archive”; Lomax is one of the most famous American ethnomusicologists, and focused primarily on collecting 20th century folk recordings.
There are two projects from Salsburg’s catalog that I particularly enjoy: Landwerk and the thoughtfully titled Landwerk No. 2. They combine found sounds and archival recordings from the last 100 years or so with original guitar compositions, often in a looping, pleasantly repetitive manner. The songs sound simple at first, but are deceptively layered and well-structured; the material works equally well in the background or as a focused headphones-listening experience. At times, I’m reminded of a guitar-centric Steve Reich/Philip Glass meeting the Red Dead Redemption soundtrack—in the best possible way. I’ve excerpted my favorite tracks from each album below, but recommend delving into the projects in their entirety.
See you all next week.
N